Towards a post about reading "Infinite Jest"

I haven't been doing enough of this since getting back to Germany (in fact, not really since leaving Germany, I fell far behind schedule while at the wedding and elsewhere this summer), so this will not be that post. However, I want to state for the record that I am still reading "Infinite Jest" and am still enjoying almost all of it greatly.

Are there dull bits? Hell yes. Oddly enough, the bits that people complain most about in the forums are the among the parts that I most enjoyed. I am a sucker for arcana and apparently-trivial-but-well-written detail: I have read Proust twice, and every sentence of "The name of the rose" (yes, even the church-history bits).

But there is dissent in the ranks. In her latest post at Infinite Summer, Avery Edison said

I am not enjoying "Infinite Jest."

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun experience, right?

The forums immediately filled with people saying "Not liking it? so quit."

Wrong — in this context and community. Infinitedetox posted an excellent reply:

[H]ere’s the thing — is it ever really enough to dismiss a work of art on the grounds of taste-incompatibility? I’m going to say no, because look — there are certain things in life that transcend personal taste, and yes, goddamn it, art is one of them.

Let me give an example. I kind of hate Thomas Pynchon. I find his writing glib and moronic, and I can’t make heads or tails of "Gravity’s Rainbow." But I’ve come to recognize that this is my failure, not Pynchon’s. That there is a large group of reasonably intelligent people out there who have the highest opinion of Pynchon’s writing, and that rather than convincing myself that these people are all full of shit, my position is that I am somehow failing to do the work necessary to arrive at a robust understanding of Pynchon’s work. […]

The crowning irony of this entire discussion is that this notion of personal taste — personal happiness, if you will — elevated above all else is pretty much the intellectual crux of "Infinite Jest." And so we have people using personal happiness as the primary criterium for deciding whether or not to read a book about the dangers of using personal happiness as a primary criterium for deciding things.

Exactly.