I presented this paper at the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference back in 2015. The paper was NOT well received by some members of the audience, mainly because I was suggesting that reading a digital edition of Infinite Jest wasn’t the end of the world. During the Q&A, one person said something like “If David Foster Wallace were here today, he’d say you were wrong.” It was amazing. There were some nice people there as well, but I’ll always remember that comment and the glares some people in the audience gave me. All in all this conference was not my particular cup of tea, but a good friend asked me to tag along with him on a panel and I’d never been to a conference dedicated to a single author before, so it was worth the experience. After our panel was done, we spent most of the remainder of the conference down the block, playing darts at an Irish bar. Thanks again for the good times, Ben. I’ve always liked this piece so I’m posting it here.
I finished reading Infinite Jest for the first time on Thursday, December 29 2011, somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 feet above sea level. I did not expect to finish the book on Spirit Airlines Flight 126 from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Boston, Massachusetts, wedged in the sky, returning to my Allston apartment after a long Christmas vacation with my retired parents and my occasionally employed brothers. Though I had spent many reading sessions flipping back and forth between the hyperlinked “Notes and Errata” and the book’s main text on my second-generation Amazon Kindle, I had misjudged how much space the novel’s “appendix” took up, and felt there was more to read. The ending, its image of Gately “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand,” seemed abrupt, a quiet moment following one of the more grotesque sequences in the novel. I was not prepared to conclude on this particularly off-putting note, trapped in the sky in an uncomfortable seat aboard one of the worst airlines in the history of airlines, unable to talk, or text, or tweet about how it felt to finish a book that had held my attention over most of the last seven months.
This paper uses my particular experiences reading Infinite Jest to examine the public and social dimensions of reading and the ways digital media – specifically, ebooks – color those dimensions. My decision to read an ebook version of Infinite Jest was in part determined by my sense of where and how I planned to read it: primarily in transit, mainly in and around a Boston both familiar and removed from the city described in the novel. I was conscious of a variety of factors while reading Infinite Jest: the logistics of reading such a large book in close quarters on overcrowded rush hour Green Line trains, the clichéd image of young, white men reading Serious Literature in public spaces, the desire to remain anonymous while inhabiting two Allstons at once.