{"id":272096,"date":"2009-06-22T15:45:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T15:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/06\/22\/calling-all-infinite-jest-fans\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:19:49","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:19:49","slug":"calling-all-infinite-jest-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/06\/22\/calling-all-infinite-jest-fans\/","title":{"rendered":"Calling All Infinite Jest Fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Infinite Summer<\/a> officially kicks off this week, with participants reading and discussing the first 63 pages of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Covering approximately 75 pages a week (the entire reading schedule<\/a> can be found here) , this group will read one of the longest novels of our generation by September 21st. For anyone who hasn’t read this book, this looks to be a fantastic way of experiencing the book, with great commentaries by other interesting writers, and a host of other people enjoying it with you . . . <\/p>\n

I’m personally interested in seeing how this plays out. Online reading groups have been a mixed bag, with the Golden Notebook Project<\/a> getting most everything right and representing the most successful model to date.<\/p>\n

Infinite Summer<\/a> is a bit more traditional, with different commentators leading the group through the reading and trying to encourage comments along the way.<\/p>\n

But it’s also one of the first online reading groups I’ve seen that’s incorporating a lot of social media possibilities and allowing for a very de-centered approach to the traditional reading club. For instance, this roundup post<\/a> links to a separate blog<\/a> detailing one reader’s reading of IJ<\/em>, a site where you can download an IJ<\/em> reading schedule bookmark,<\/a> a site called Infinite Zombies<\/a> that is part reading group part Fight Club<\/em>, a Flickr pool,<\/a> a Twittered version of IJ<\/em>,<\/a> and a site archiving the ongoing conversation of two IJ<\/em> readers.<\/a> This is reading group as controlled chaos, or social networking event. <\/p>\n

With the popularity of DFW<\/span> (and his sudden, tragic end), I can imagine that all of these sites will attract a lot of followers, and it will be really interesting to see what sort of long-term effect this has. IJ<\/em> is one of those books that a lot of people own, but haven’t necessarily read, so who knows if this will be a bigger boost to sales or literary awareness. Regardless, it should be an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold, and short of reading all Open Letter books published to date, this is a damn good way to spend your summer.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Infinite Summer officially kicks off this week, with participants reading and discussing the first 63 pages of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Covering approximately 75 pages a week (the entire reading schedule can be found here) , this group will read one of the longest novels of our generation by September 21st. For anyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,14916,25216,25226,25236],"class_list":["post-272096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-infinite-jest","tag-infinite-summer","tag-online-reading-groups"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352146,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272096\/revisions\/352146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}