61: On Dense Work

I'm under deadline and battling the aftershocks of a rare migraine this weekend, so I'll be keeping this newsletter brief. I hope you're all well. I hope you're reading something you enjoy, and that you're reading something you enjoy thinking about when you're not actively reading it. I like sitting down with my copy of Infinite Jest and sinking ears deep into DFW's prose, but the prose is dense enough that I feel like I need to carve out at least an hour at a time to read it properly, and then I'm left feeling insufficient for the first five minutes and the last five minutes I spend actually reading the book. Then I get annoyed remembering that I used to be able to knock out 300-page novels over a weekend, easily. Then I worry about not getting it. Then I wonder, why bother? And then I get stubborn about my goal of reading through this book in the course of a calendar year, and I have to psych myself up again, and the cycle begins anew every week.

This week on Twitter Patricia Lockwood was retweeting pictures of people's messed-up copies of Infinite Jest, in response to the vandalism she mentions doing to her book in her piece on DFW for the London Review of Books. Mine isn't falling apart enough to qualify as a messed-up copy (my favorite from the thread was one whose front and back covers had fallen off; the owner of the book used both covers as the prerequisite double bookmarks needed to read Infinite Jest properly). My copy's in pretty good condition, actually, especially for a book that's been moved halfway across the country once and all the way across the city of Chicago at least three times. We'll chalk that up to the fact that I'm good at packing books into boxes, and to the fact that I'm still only about a third of the way through the book, the furthest I've managed to get so far. It's been sitting unbothered on my shelf for so long.

Lockwood's piece about DFW is great. It touched off a round of ~Discourse~ about DFW across both Twitter and Reddit, probably because she's ambivalent about both the man and his prose and she's able to express both her ambivalence and admiration without being either precious or reverential. It's the kind of criticism that, like simply reading Infinite Jest, makes me wonder, why bother? And then just as quickly it makes me want to dig deeper into the text Lockwood's engaging with, and it makes me want to pick up a pencil and paper, and it makes me want to stop treating my own copy of Infinite Jest like the pristine block of paper it currently is. I think I need to both dig in and loosen up. I'll be going to the beach later this summer; I intend to get a lot of sand in between those pages.

What I wrote:

I wrote an essay about Jafar Panahi's movie No Bears for Bright Wall/Dark Room. Panahi's work grows in my estimation the longer I sit with it, and at this point I think No Bears is one of the best movies from last year.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed James Mangold's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I paired it with Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 movie The Last Picture Show, which is admittedly even more of a galaxy-brained pairing than most of my Watchlist picks. I did my best to make the case for why the pairing works; you'll have to let me know if I managed to pull it off.

What I'm Reading:

Infinite Jest procrastination watch: lol.