The storm after the storm

Now that I've finished the book my new obsessive entertainment is Googling everything David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest. I need to abandon the computer entirely to escape this addiction, which hasn't been working well. I've found a lot of great things, of which I'll share just a few:


An archive of some of DFW's personal writings, manuscripts, etc. Apparently his posthumous novel The Pale King is scheduled for publication April 2011.

An exhibit called "A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the filmography of James O. Incandenza" which happened early this year at Columbia. I so wish I could have attended! I wonder if we can find the films anywhere. Here's a review from The New Yorker.

A video (Part 1) of some boys playing "Eschatong" (Eschaton ping-pong... in the snow), weird and fascinating to say the least. Part 2 gets pretty complicated.

A brief analysis by Anelise Chen (The Hydra) that argues for Gately as the book's hero. I hadn't quite thought of it this way before but I agree with her points. Here's a little bit:

There is a real moment of transcendence, and I’m not joking, when Gately eventually resorts to thrusting out his bad arm to attack the balls of a doctor to stop him from offering him drugs, which Gately knows he won’t be able to refuse. We feel this immensity of pain, both physically and psychologically, but somehow, suddenly, everything about life is redeemable. Because in the worst of odds against himself, Gately has decided through this one gesture that life is worth not giving up on.

Back to the cold sand, gonna watch the tide come and go and wait out the storm.