IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 7: Chris Ayers on the Incandenza filmography posters and the IJ20 cover contest (Jan 2016)

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TL;DR

Early-January 2016 interview with Chris Ayers, the Phoenix graphic artist behind Poor Yorick Entertainment — illustrated movie posters for J.O. Incandenza's entire filmography, plus the O.N.A.N. seal, the WhataBurger poster, and an Eschaton game map. Half the episode is the just-decided 20th-anniversary cover-redesign contest (Ayers collected and published the losing entries), which detours into the best publication-history material in the GC run so far: who designed the 1996 cloud cover, the Biz Stone / Vollmann-typo first-printing point, and a tour of the foreign editions. One genuine textual catch (the cloud wallpaper at E.T.A.) and one new influence claim (McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid behind Marathe/Steeply). ASR transcript: paraphrase only; names corrected where identifiable.

Key claims

  • The project: Ayers read IJ in spring 2011 and, ~90% through, began illustrating every film poster in the Incandenza filmography (endnote 24), then expanded to other described artifacts — the O.N.A.N. seal, the WhataBurger tennis poster, an Eschaton map. Posters take ~2–3+ hours each; some Photoshop, some hand-drawn, some photographed. He admits he initially skipped the filmography endnote, and on returning to it read it as "a coded message from James Incandenza about what his life was, trying to communicate to his family" (ASR, approximate) — the filmography as the key he then spent years illustrating. He was the featured lunchtime speaker at the 2nd annual DFW Conference (ISU, 2015) and designed the conference logos for 2014 and 2015.
  • 1996 cover provenance: the original cloud cover was designed by Steve Snyder, then art director at Little, Brown — sourced from Snyder's own Instagram caption and replies to Ayers (he fought, unsuccessfully, to keep the cloud design iconic "like Catcher in the Rye," and commissioned the first paperback). Bucher adds the pre-internet marketing: Little, Brown teased the launch with a series of postcards mailed to bookstores ("infinite possibilities… infinite reading opportunities…"), title revealed on the last card.
  • Bibliographic point: Biz Stone, later Twitter co-founder, was a production assistant on the 1996 cover and claims responsibility for misspelling William T. Vollmann's name (one "n") in the back-cover blurb — corrected after the first printing, so the Vollmann typo is the tell that a first-edition copy is a genuine first printing.
  • Textual anchor for the cloud motif: the hosts locate clouds-on-blue-sky inside the book — the wallpaper of the waiting room outside the Headmaster's House/Tavis's office at E.T.A., Lateral Alice Moore's station (the ex-helicopter-reporter who moves only laterally). So the recurring cloud covers do have a textual hook, whether or not Snyder knew it.
  • IJ20 contest: Ayers solicited and posted ~10–12 of the submitted redesigns (his, Corrie Baldauf's tennis/flag entries, Aggie Toppins's all-type design, Matt Zaccaro's Cantor's-diagonal number-field) because the losing work would otherwise never be seen; he and the hosts judge the contest ethically dubious by design-industry norms (crowdsourced spec work, $1,000 prize, barely promoted). The winning Joe Walsh cover (white field, red title, crayon-ish TV with a large eye) leaves all three ambivalent — it reads '70s–'80s, not modern; Bucher notes the white-cover drift across the Wallace shelf (first UK edition, German, French, Brazilian editions, The Pale King, the DFW Reader) and, from his publishing days, that sales teams dislike white covers because they ship dirty and generate returns.
  • Foreign-edition survey: the Italian IJ went to Fandango (not Wallace's usual Italian publishers; minimum fax/Mondadori missed it), which launched it with a ~4-day continuous public reading capped by Wallace reading the novel's last line in Italian over the telephone, held up to the microphone (Bucher anecdote). The Spanish La broma infinita's 1940s/50s-style nuclear-family cover is mocked as unrelated to the book, and a host repeats the (unverified) claim that the fast-turnaround Spanish translation omitted a large portion, possibly the endnotes. The French translation (just out, all-type cover) churned through two translators over ~20 years over how to handle Wallace's intentionally mangled Québécois French. Brazilian Portuguese (translator Caetano Galindo) is the consensus favorite cover; Hebrew (in progress, per Laird's Tel Aviv bookstore conversation) and Greek translations are underway.
  • Influence claims (Bucher, speculative): the Marathe–Steeply mountainside-outside-Tucson frame may crib from John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid — two ideological arch-enemies (David Brower vs. dam commissioner Floyd Dominy) debating on an Arizona mountainside over the landscape below — plus desert color from Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang; ASR garbles him as "Edward Albee"), a visiting lecturer during Wallace's U. of Arizona MFA years. Separately, the Brockengespenst phenomenon in that same Marathe/Steeply material is asserted to be lifted from Gravity's Rainbow (where the Brocken-specter scene is famous) — offered as a deliberate Pynchon echo, not a coincidence.
  • Filmography-on-film: Ayers's brother and he shot the parody shampoo commercial (the Cage entry, first in the filmography) for a 2011 University of Virginia exhibition that invited remakes of the Incandenza films; Columbia University staged a similar dozen-film program (Medusa v. the Odalisque, the tea ceremony). Bucher helped produce a 2009 Austin staging of Mario's O.N.A.N.tiad as a finger-puppet show (Trouble Puppet Theater, Connor Hopkins) — filmed, never released. The real experimental film behind Cage (convex mirrors, Stan Brakhage-ish) is on YouTube — continuous with ep. 4's Sidney Peterson identification. A motion-graphics This Is Water video hit ~4M views before the estate's takedown notice; the hosts read the takedown as self-defeating (Streisand effect, free marketing destroyed).
  • Eschaton read: Ayers calls the Eschaton chapter a self-contained comic set piece — "no point… other than to be entertaining" — and his green Eschaton game map (his own favorite piece) required actually diagramming the game's moves; he and Laird have batted around an Eschaton board game (Laird the rules, Ayers the art). Ayers is also doing the album art for Toronto jazz musician Brad Cheeseman's forthcoming IJ-based EP.
  • WhataBurger is real: Laird (Canadian) only learned in 2015 that the chain exists (Texas/Arizona; Bucher: first store Corpus Christi, 1951); Ayers rates it the worst fast food he's had, to Bucher's outrage. Two WhataBurger props appear in The End of the Tour (fridge magnet; the "Yours, I presume" post-it on the returned shoe).
  • Housekeeping with archive relevance: Infinite Winter announced — a community read, Jan 31–May 2, 2016, ~75 pp/week at infinitewinter.org (Twitter @EnnetHouse), with Laird guest-blogging weekly and Bucher writing the how-to-read material.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Incandenza filmography (endnote 24) is JOI's coded message — an account of his life aimed at communicating with his family

  • Crux: filmography-coded-message
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Ayers skipped the endnote on first read; returning to it he found much of it "key to understanding a lot of the book" (ASR, approximate) — the entries decoding into what JOI's life was and his attempt to communicate it to his family. [00:34]
  • Notes: The interpretive premise of the whole poster project. The hosts add the play-within-the-play frame (nested fictional works as the appeal) without contesting the coded-message reading. [00:35]

THEORY: The Marathe–Steeply mountainside frame draws on McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid (with desert color from Edward Abbey)

  • Crux: marathe-steeply-sources
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Archdruid's central setpiece: ideological arch-enemies (environmentalist David Brower vs. dam commissioner Floyd Dominy) debating on the side of an Arizona mountain, looking down over the contested land — matched to Marathe and Steeply on the outcropping above Tucson. [00:28–00:29]
    • [inference] "He's got to have read this book" (ASR, approximate) — a big 1970s environmental-movement book. [00:29]
    • [inference] Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang) was a visiting lecturer at U. of Arizona during Wallace's MFA years; the desert material read as cribbed from him. [00:28]
  • Notes: Bucher, offered explicitly as speculation. ASR garbles: Abbey rendered "Edward Albee", the title first rendered "Enemies with the Arch Druid".

THEORY: The Brockengespenst detail in the Marathe–Steeply chapter is lifted directly from Gravity's Rainbow

  • Crux: marathe-steeply-sources
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] GR's famous Brocken-specter material; the speaker read GR shortly after IJ and recognized the detail — "pretty sure Wallace just lifted that directly" (ASR, approximate). [00:29–00:30]
    • [inference] The phenomenon is named for a German mountain, so it sits natively in GR's German setting — its IJ appearance reads as a borrowed flourish, a deliberate Pynchon echo. [00:30]
  • Notes: Speaker attribution uncertain in the ASR (first pass credited the host side; the GR-just-after-IJ timeline could also fit Ayers). On-air aside that Pynchon himself likely took it from elsewhere ("Probably so") — a chain of borrowing, not a dispute of the IJ-from-GR link.

THEORY: The Eschaton chapter is a self-contained comic set piece with no point beyond entertainment

  • Crux: eschaton-function
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] It "doesn't make a lot of narrative sense the first time" (ASR, approximate); diagramming the game's actual moves for his map proved unnecessary to enjoying it — it's just comedy, ridiculous and funny for its own sake. [00:32]
  • Notes: Ayers; no host pushback on-air. Contradicts the archive's maps-territory reading of Eschaton; recorded here as stated.

Themes

Mostly meta: fan production and reception history, the book-as-object. Glancing contact with film-optics (the filmography as JOI's coded communication to his family — communication/solipsism via the lethal medium), entertainment-self (the TV-eye cover, the estate vs. the Entertainment's own virality), maps-territory (diagramming Eschaton), nationalism-onan (the O.N.A.N. seal, Québécois French in translation).

Cross-references

Advances