Note: I promise not to keep up the “infinite” titles. Annoying as fuck, they are.

Either Infinite Summer is bigger than I think it is, or Borders and B&N are worse than I think they are.

It was a Kafkaesque experience, really, my search for the book. Three Barnes & Nobles and a Borders, three of which listed IJ as in stock.  Three B&Ns with empty shelves where IJ should have been.  Three helpful but mystified clerks who said that their computers listed the book as either out of stock, or in stock but missing, or out of stock but also not sold (not sure what that meant).

Why the shelf gaps?  Why the “available for in-store pick-up” listed on the website?  Why the tease?  For awhile I thought I was one step behind whoever was out there scooping up the IJs until, at the last stop, the info desk person insisted that the book was never in stock and hadn’t been sold, in fact, in weeks.  The website?  Wrong.  That’s not so hard to believe but for the shelf gaps, the taunting blank spaces where IJ should have been.

So.  All of this is to say that I still don’t have the book, and Infinite Summer starts tomorrow.  I’m behind before I’ve begun.

So I mentioned below that I plan to embark on Infinite Summer in a few days.  I’m also planning to take Wizard along for the ride.  We’ve never “co-read” anything, partly because I read for work and partly because our tastes diverge quite a bit (oh, and partly because we’re not really the co-reading type, by which I mean we don’t tend to bathe in the sicksweet vomit of our love).  He’s mainly a space opera sort, though the range of what he reads outside that genre is wide (Plath, Rimbaud [really?], Coupland, etc.).  I’m more narrow-minded because of the whole exams/proposal/dissertation hole I’ve been stuck in the past few years.  This project will actually be the first time I’ve read for “fun”–not for the diss, not for conference work–in a long time.

I’ve taught post-1945 lit, and I spend my days and nights with millennial lit, and yet I’ve read little DFW beyond a few short pieces that were thrust upon me by an enthused officemate awhile back.  I know what I’m in for–the footnotes, the loopdiloopy plots, the heft and weight of 1000 pages–and yet I don’t look at DFW with the same glare I usually direct toward popular young white male authors (though to be fair, I don’t glare at Franzen or Foer either, so maybe I’m getting soft).  The fondness I have for him, I think, stems from the fact that I don’t think he’s a trickster for trickster’s sake.  That is, I don’t think the footnotes, the plot jumps, the confusion, are inserted into the story because he desperately wanted to earn his pomo cred.  Rather, I sense that he felt those things were integral to the story itself (whatever that story is–I haven’t read any of the overviews or reader guides, and I haven’t brushed up on Hamlet, either).

That said, who knows if I’m going to get through it.  I have a lot of excuses:  the baby, the diss, the advisor I’m currently avoiding.  Oh, and there’s also the abhorrent lack of discipline that has characterized me and my work since, like, September.  Maybe if someone made me a set of bookmarks to guide me through the dissertation I’d have a chapter written by now.  Oh, and I don’t actually have a copy of the book yet because I haven’t made it to the bookstore (thanks, baby!).

So.  Here we go.  75 pages a week.  Back in the day, 75 pages a week would have meant I was rapidly failing out of school.  Back in the day, kids.  Now it’s a fair but possibly unreachable goal.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Some people are very good at weekly features.  I’m not one of them.  But I am in favor of keeping this whole posting thing going, so here are some baby feet from back in April:

By the way, I’ve done two work-positive things this week:  I’ve committed to the diss. writing group at school and have decided to go ahead with Infinite Summer.  It has nothing to with the diss, but it is post-1945 lit (my area), so I’m counting it.

Further evidence of my ever-deteriorating writing skills: over-reliance on dashes and dots. I don’t seem to pay attention to the “better” ways of linking phrases.  I just represent thinking with an ellipsis, conclusions with a dash. Perhaps it’s the blog’s fault.  I’m “thinking out loud” here in a way I normally wouldn’t (even my emails are better composed in real life).  Or maybe my brain is just broken.

I wish I were feeling more coherent this morning, because I’d really like to talk about Ciaran Carson.  Carson is an Irish poet who writes about “The Troubles” among other things.  His poems are at my apartment, and I’m not at my apartment, so you’ll have to settle for a quote.  This is Carson thinking about a photograph of a street riot:

No, don’t trust maps, for they avoid the moment…Though if there is an ideal map…it may exist in the eye of the helicopter ratcheting overhead [...]  Or it may exist in photographs [Carson quotes the photo's caption].  But the caption is inaccurate:  The camera has caught only one rioter in the act…. The others, these would-be or has-been or may-be rioters, have momentarily become spectators, as their protagonist does his David-and-Goliath act; some might be talking about the weather, which seems unusually grey for July, or maybe this is a bad print; some others are looking down Bosnia street at what is happening or might happen next.  The left-hand frame of the photograph only allows us the ‘nia of Roumania Street, so I don’t know what’s going on there, but I’m trying to remember-was I there that night, on this street littered with half-bricks, broken glass, a battered saucepan and a bucket?

He is fodder for the dissertation, he is, he is…