IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 32: Shazia Ramji — guiding three IJ group reads (Poor Yorick Summer, Sacred Jest, Ennet House), poetry and Wallace, and Gravity's Rainbow parallels (recorded ~fall 2017)

source

TL;DR

A Vancouver poet who has guided three online IJ group reads (Poor Yorick Summer with Phil Miletic, Sacred Jest with Emily Hoffman, and the then-concluding Ennet House read) on the sociology and craft of guiding, plus a poet's-eye view of Wallace. The interview's archive value is threefold: a first-hand history of the post-Infinite-Summer group-read lineage (dates, guides, methods, attrition patterns); Bucher's dense Ransom Center draft testimony (Wallace as a five-draft writer, the professional-conversationalist opening, the David Wallace/James Wallace early-draft names); and one genuinely new theory sighting — a dysmorphia reading of Joelle's veil that questions whether the acid incident happened at all. Datable to fall 2017 (the Kroetsch Award and Johnson's death both placed in 2017 on-air, the Ennet House read ending the coming Monday). ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Guest bio: Vancouver poet/reviewer; Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry 2017; chapbook Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017; ASR "Anne Struther"); debut Port of Being (Insomniac Press, forthcoming 2018); poetry editor at PRISM international; UBC MFA student then taking a postmodern US fiction class with past guest Jeff Severs (ASR "Seavers"). Has read IJ ~3.5 times [00:02–00:04].
  • First Wallace was "Good Old Neon," read at ~20–21 just after getting out of rehab, knowing nothing of Wallace's biography; it prompted buying everything else, and she credits IJ with helping her through that period [00:05–00:06].
  • Group-read lineage (first-hand): the genre starts with Infinite Summer 2009, in the wake of Wallace's death, then Infinite Winter (2016, Laird co-guiding; she read along and blogged until a Pale King group pulled her away), Summer of Jest, Poor Yorick Summer (2016, guided by Phil Miletic of Ontario — part of his PhD project on online communities; she joined as one of several guides via wallace-l, with Joe DeLuca whose posts would, as she puts it, bring clarity to hers the next day), Sacred Jest (with Emily Hoffman), and Ennet House (Vancouver, ending that Monday) [00:04–00:09, 00:28–00:29].
  • Ennet House numbers: planned as an in-person Vancouver group (Twitter handle Infinite Jest YVR); the in-person side never panned out (seven/eight interested, scheduling failed) but the Reddit group drew ~250 participants against an expected 10–20. The earlier Poor Yorick Summer in-person meetups did happen (three or four nervous attendees, passage-by-passage) [00:28–00:31].
  • Why reads recur instead of people reading the archives: readers want simultaneity — the right-now-ness of others reading alongside you, as-aired; her explanation is that the people IJ tends to claim skew lonely and depressed (her as-aired characterization) and the group gives friendship and nerding-out without in-person social awkwardness — the hosts note this is itself thematic to the novel [00:09–00:11].
  • Guide craft: the hardest part is saying something new across multiple tours; conversations renew the material (the dysmorphia exchange below); Sacred Jest used Emily Hoffman's Lectio Divina method (Benedictine four-part reading: random line → immediate context → whole → application to one's life) as a group-read frame; Laird's Infinite Winter method was explaining Canada to non-Canadians; her Ennet House schedule was the Infinite Winter schedule plus 10-day break weeks every ~300 pages [00:12–00:15, 00:54].
  • Her most-commented Poor Yorick Summer post sympathized with Randy Lenz — as (with Hal and Pemulis) one of the novel's active users; Lenz reliably made in-person attendees uncomfortable [00:30–00:31].
  • Bucher's Ransom Center draft testimony: Wallace called himself a "five draft man" (Amherst alumni magazine interview) and the archive bears it out — most IJ material shows 4–5 drafts, some Pale King passages 8–11; for roughly four whole-book drafts IJ opened with the professional-conversationalist scene (handwritten multiple times); in an early draft the Hal-figure is named David Wallace and the father James Wallace — Wallace wrote himself out but kept "James," then put himself back in for The Pale King. The dot-dot-dot conversational pause he took from Manuel Puig (and Pynchon) [00:36–00:41].
  • Framing consequence (Ramji): opening with the conversationalist scene would have set IJ up as a father-son narrative; the published opening sets up a solipsistic lonely-guy book. Bucher ties the father-son frame to Hamlet (see gc-ep040's hamlet-frame material) [00:40–00:41].
  • Pale King / poetry: the TPK opening and one other section were published in TriQuarterly as prose poems ("Peoria (4)" and "Peoria (9)"); Ramji's gripe: TPK's acknowledgements page never credits the TriQuarterly publication, and those two passages rank for her as the most poetic writing of his career; Bucher adds it's debatable the opener was even intended for TPK — Pietsch's choice of it as opening is itself a literary judgment. Ramji reads it as (good) language poetry — refusing closure, meaning by juxtaposition; the earthworm-eaten clot of dirt as an allegory of sense-making [00:17–00:20]. (In passing, guest and host assent to the title deriving from a Tennyson line — commonly attributed to Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci"; recorded as said, ASR-uncertain [00:17].)
  • Wallace and poetry: no evidence in the Ransom archive that Wallace wrote poetry beyond juvenilia (Bucher); but he reviewed The Best American Prose Poems, singled out John Davis's The Scrimmage of Appetite as the rare successful third-thing between poem and prose, and personally paid for an ad for the book [00:20–00:22].
  • Arizona MFA context: poets and fiction writers were institutionally split at Arizona in Wallace's day though he befriended poets; Ramji confirms the same split persists at UBC (multidisciplinary on paper); segue into Bolaño's poetry-supremacy digs [00:22–00:25].
  • Wallace mining recovery material: he transcribed stories at open AA/NA meetings and used them in IJ; Big Craig at Granada House said it was obvious he was mining residents for material; the hosts and guest chew on the tension with Wallace's own quote disparaging recovering writers who use recovery as material — he wouldn't use his own story (AA anonymity code) but used others' [01:02–01:03].
  • Denis Johnson: Wallace loved and recommended Angels and Johnson's first poetry book The Incognito Lounge; Bucher's read is an unacknowledged competitiveness/resentment (Johnson had the National Book Award, a Jesus' Son film, recognition Wallace lacked in his lifetime); Johnson had died earlier that year [01:01–01:04].
  • Read-aloud: in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself Wallace says his stuff doesn't read aloud well; Ramji's counter-testimony — she read the "Good Old Neon" speed-of-consciousness passage at poetry readings to recruit Ennet House readers and had to train her breathing to deliver the sentences; Bucher notes Wallace toured with self-contained set pieces (the videophony section) which skewed first perceptions of the book as comedy [00:52–00:56]. Wallace's line that nobody who spent under ~two months on IJ has read it well maps neatly onto the standard ~3-month / 75-pages-a-week group-read schedule (Bucher/Laird) [00:53–00:54].
  • Her Wallace-adjacent poetics: collects self-conscious/metafictional narration in books by writers who died by suicide (Edouard Levé's Suicide alongside Wallace); a poem of hers clicked together around Karen Green's remark (via Bough Down) about wishing she could have set a chair under him to spare his knees [00:41–00:43].
  • Recommendation for IJ readers: Franz Wright's prose-poem collection Kindertotenwald (recovery, addiction, religious themes) [00:59–01:00]; and Greg Jackson's Prodigals — the tennis story "Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy" (ASR, approximate title): a retired French tennis star films his guests unknowingly replaying his signature moves and mails them the VHS — Wallace-y and Infinite-Jest-y all over, in her as-aired verdict [01:08–01:10].
  • Ransom access datum (Bucher): a fair amount of Pale King material is viewable online, little from IJ; tens of thousands of pages remain unscanned and literary archives don't typically digitize wholesale [01:07–01:08].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Joelle's veil conceals dysmorphia, not disfigurement — the acid incident may never have happened

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Body dysmorphia (an OCD-adjacent disorder: an exaggerated self-image of deformity that prevents interaction despite no actual disfigurement) maps onto the veil's function; the reading arose in an Ennet House group conversation. [00:12]
    • [text] The acid story rests on Molly Notkin's account — and whether Molly counts as reliable is exactly her as-aired question; questioning that reliability unseats the incident itself. [00:12]
  • Notes: Presented as the genuinely new thing her third guiding tour gave her (a Joelle's-veil angle new to her, by her own account); offered as a possibility among the existing expectations (disfigured-or-not), not argued to a conclusion. Group-read provenance — the theory is community-generated, a popularity datum for the no-disfigurement camp.

THEORY: The abandoned professional-conversationalist opening would have made IJ a father-son (Hamlet) novel; the published opening makes it a solipsism novel

  • Crux: hamlet-frame
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] Bucher (from the Ransom Center): the conversationalist scene stood as the book's opening through roughly four whole-book drafts, its pages handwritten multiple times. [00:37–00:38]
    • [draft] In an early draft the protagonist is named David Wallace and the father James Wallace; "James" survives into the published book (Bucher, citing the Hering discussion). [00:40]
    • [inference] Ramji: openings frame — conversationalist-first reads as a father-son narrative, "I am in here"-first reads as a solipsistic, lonely-guy narrative. Bucher: the father-son frame squares with Hamlet, a play he reads as centrally about Hamlet and his father (as-aired, indirect). [00:40–00:41]
  • Notes: Extends the draft testimony already in the archive (Hering ep. 12, Moore) with a framing-effect argument rather than new facts.

THEORY: IJ is substantially indebted to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow — Wallace's claim never to have read it is not credible

  • Crux: pynchon-influence
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Structural parallel: both novels run on a monolithic corporate superstructure conditioning all action — GR's film company / chemicals cartel / rocket plastics vs. IJ's InterLace tele-entertainment and syndication streams. [00:46–00:47]
    • [inference] Persona multiplication in both: Slothrop's Ian Scuffling / Max Schleipzig identities vs. IJ's stacked personas (Joelle / Lucille Duquette; Marathe/Steeply's role-play — ASR garbles the names). [00:47]
    • [text] "Fantods" appears in GR — she reads the "urban fantods" passage on-air (the urban fantods as what comes to get you when lost or isolated — GR wording via tape, rendering unverified) in a usage close to Wallace's. [00:48–00:49]
    • [secondary] Bucher (complicating): his own research traced fantods to Mark Twain, not Pynchon. [00:48]
    • [author] Wallace reportedly said he never read Gravity's Rainbow; Bucher flatly declines to believe it; Ramji hears an obvious large debt to Pynchon (both as-aired, indirect). [00:45–00:46]
  • Notes: Ramji was reading GR for the first time (Severs's class) and frames this as a prospective MA-thesis topic, alongside mediated experience / McLuhan (mentioned in the McCaffery interview). The author-denial is reported secondhand and disbelieved by both.

THEORY: The 1960 Tucson scene enacts JOI's stepwise dissociation from his father, completed at the annulation digression

  • Crux: joi-father-scene
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Her reading of the scene's pacing: Jim's consciousness detaches from his father by degrees as the alcohol takes effect, and by the time the monologue reaches annulation he has stopped caring — passing, in her phrase, through various degrees of separation from his dad (ASR, paraphrase). [00:50–00:51]
    • [inference] The annulation material itself echoes Pynchon's chemistry/splitting preoccupations (tying to her GR argument). [00:51]
  • Notes: Offered in passing while planning a first chronological read of the novel (start: Tucson 1960); both hosts endorse the scene as among the book's best. Minor crux — a single-scene reading, slugged for theory record completeness.

Themes

Communication-and-solipsism (group reads as the novel's loneliness thematics enacted; the opening-frame argument); addiction-and-recovery (her rehab provenance with "Good Old Neon"; Lenz sympathy; Wallace mining AA/NA stories); disability-deformity (the veil/dysmorphia reading); structure and composition (draft history, opening frames, chronological-read plan); entertainment-and-the-self (InterLace as corporate superstructure, the GR parallel).

Cross-references

Advances