IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 36: William Beutler & Bill Lattanzi — mapping Infinite Jest: the Infinite Atlas/Infinite Map genesis and the Boston walking tour (recorded ~early 2018)

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TL;DR

The show's first two-guest episode: the creator of the Infinite Atlas project (Beutler) and the man who runs the IJ walking tour of Boston (Lattanzi), on mapping the novel. Datable to ~Feb 2018 (Laird two weeks into his Dunedin NZ move, NZ summer, having just come from a Canadian January; the Infinite Map described on-air as five years past its release — ASR, paraphrase). Mostly the oral history behind the archive's existing infinite-atlas-boston digest — the 2010 Gchat genesis, the Ollie Ruff page-by-page location trawl, the four-day 2011 Boston photo trip — plus on-the-ground testimony the Atlas itself doesn't carry: the never-whitewashed Granada House brick, the ETA-as-composite case, a claimed discovery of Kenkle & Brandt's actual building, and the Deb-Larson-is-Pat-Montesian identification. Interpretive yield is thin but real: both guests independently reject the hidden-geographic-code reading of Wallace's Boston, and the episode closes with Beutler and Bucher endorsing Aaron Swartz's ending essay as near-canonical — a strong popularity datum. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Infinite Atlas genesis, dated: Beutler first told Bucher he wanted to make an IJ infographic in a Gchat around 11 p.m. on October 6, 2010 (he reread the chat for the show). The geography angle wasn't original — early ideas included an Incandenza family tree and tennis-match results — and the Sam Potts character map was the precedent he "chose not to be intimidated by." Bucher's tip locating Granada House on Google Maps was "the thread" that started the location work.
  • The project's core finding: essentially every location Wallace mentions in IJ is a real place, a fictionalized real place, or identifiable enough to drop an XY coordinate on — ~600 locations compiled in a page-by-page trawl done separately by Beutler and college friend Ollie Ruff (a wallace-l member since the late 90s), in order of first mention; GIS plotting May 2011 (on a University of Oregon computer, the campus where he first read the book); a four-day Boston photo trip late July 2011 (pre-Uber/Airbnb, budget motel in Chelsea, taxis each morning); the Infinite Boston blog July–October 2012 as the poster's promo vehicle; reader Lauren Leija corrected placements via the comments. Map: 250 key locations, 24×36", edition deliberately capped at 1,079 copies, ~700 sold at recording.
  • Wallace's own atlas: Beutler infers Wallace worked from a physical, older — his bet, British — atlas: several place-name spellings (especially Middle East) match older British usage rather than mid-90s American.
  • Ennet House / Enfield Marine ground truth (Lattanzi): the Brighton Marine Health Center — Wallace just swapped "Brighton" for "Enfield"; originally a VA-ish hospital ("Marine" = the military division, which he reportedly liked for being nowhere near the ocean). The "dead planet with seven moons" layout, the rail where the methadone addicts waited, the patch of grass, the bay windows, the then-unpaved road all check out; unit #6 = Granada House (Ennet House); #7 — the building they sneak into — still stands, not crushed. The whitewashed brick is invented: Deb Larson, who ran Granada House then and still runs it, says it was never whitewashed (Lattanzi guesses Urbana's whitewashed brick stuck in Wallace's head). Lattanzi also states Pat Montesian is based on Deb Larson. Security now confronts visitors; in ~2008–2011 you could sit in the parking lot and read the scene against the view.
  • The ravine is seven feet deep — both guests independently note the novel's ravine is a small drop to a brick wall, far below its read size; the subway stop and the forced walk-around (fence) are exactly as written.
  • ETA as composite (both guests): the flattened hilltop above Ennet House is St. Gabriel's Monastery (open when Lattanzi first scouted ~2008–09, since closed; Harvard's spires visible across the river — the place Wallace had been weeks before Granada House); mix in Brighton High School (kids of ETA age; conspicuously absent from the novel), Fidelis Way Park's court-like basketball courts, Franciscan Children's Hospital across the street, St. Elizabeth's on the hill's backside — "all the elements of ETA." Plus the D.T. Max datum: Wallace spent part of summer 1976 at John Newcombe's Tennis Academy in Texas, whose promo videos still sound like ETA in 2018 ("tennis is a battle with yourself" — ASR, approximate).
  • Father & Son Market is real — where Avril buys her Benson & Hedges, Hal candy, Mario tea; Beutler walked in and bought bottled water, 2011.
  • Claimed discovery — Kenkle & Brandt's building: Beutler believes he found the actual model near the Roxbury Crossing T-stop: a four-story building whose top floor is clearly an attic with exterior stairs, overlooking Madison Park High School with a playground right next to it — "all of the elements... very slightly modified"; to his knowledge nobody had matched it since Wallace conceived it.
  • Universal Bleacher Company: listed in the novel as an Enfield business; it was a real company in Urbana, Illinois — a childhood-environment name transplanted whole (Lattanzi's find).
  • The discalced Carmelite nuns' home is real, a couple of doors from the "quarterway house" Wallace lived in after Granada House (~half a mile away); a tennis court sits diagonally across that street. Lattanzi's larger method claim: Wallace, a walker, transformed what he passed daily — nothing in his Boston life went unused in the novel (ASR, paraphrased).
  • Walking-tour history: Adam Kelly (then at Harvard, ~2013) asked Beutler to lead a tour off the Atlas; Beutler, a Washingtonian, deferred to Lattanzi, who has since done it for a Boston radio station, the first DFW conference, a Paris presentation, and Oz Wallace (tailored "for the Bogans"); he also teaches IJ at Cambridge adult ed and with Chris Boucher's BC class. His LARB piece "Messing with Maps: Walking David Foster Wallace's Boston" (commissioned by Lee Konstantinou) is the print version. Lattanzi corrects the intro: he plays an academic — he's a video editor/writer/producer and former playwright.
  • The estate and the legacy-tourism debate: Beutler's "Wallace's America" coffee-table-book proposal got an agent and was reportedly put in front of Michael Pietsch; Hachette passed. The guests read the estate as protective past the point of self-interest (Lattanzi: the tours spread the work, which is what the estate wants); Bucher's counter-examples: Philip Larkin's statue in Hull, the Updike Society buying Updike's childhood home, Bloomington-Normal's official city-produced DFW tour, and the missed chance to buy Wallace's Urbana childhood home when it was for sale (~$150k) during the first conference.
  • Granada House still operates (granadahouse.org, takes donations; Wallace's own anonymous ex-resident testimonial is on the site), and the Madras Press pay-what-you-want Pale King excerpt (the Chris Fogle story) benefits it — the guests' suggested way to "pay tribute."
  • Beutler's Aaron Swartz anecdote: his only interaction with Swartz was Swartz writing in to Infinite Boston to correct that the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square was still operational; Beutler fixed it and credited him. (See Theories for the ending-essay endorsement this leads into.)
  • Color: Wallace lived in Boston only about three years yet knew the city, in Lattanzi's phrase, with back-of-the-hand intimacy; the Costello-and-Wallace summer-1989 Somerville house is unreconstructed; both guests describe the skeevy-tourist feeling at lived-in sites (Beutler was politely ejected from the Marine Center on his second visit).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: There is no hidden geographic code in IJ's Boston — the street patterns are working aids, not a cipher to decode

  • Crux: boston-geography-code
  • Stance: rejects
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Lattanzi's own 2008-onward attempt to "discover the real hidden code" by tracing routes like Lenz's walk failed: at a certain point it comes really close but "it's just not there," and isn't intended to be (ASR paraphrase). [00:35–00:36]
    • [author] Wallace's Bookworm remark likening his structural devices to a mountain climber's pitons — aids for the climb, not a buried message. [00:36]
    • [secondary] Hering's triangle/Sierpinski-gasket analysis of the streets (in Consider David Foster Wallace, 2010) — accepted by both guests as genuinely locating Antitoi Entertainment, but demoted to "a rule of thumb you go by," not a code. [00:33–00:34, 00:36]
    • [inference] Beutler, concurring: his Infinite Boston tracing of Joelle's walk to the final party mostly works off the text but breaks down in the Back Bay. [00:38]
  • Notes: The rejected reading is the City of Glass-style hidden-writing idea, which the hosts float by name and Lattanzi declines. Both guests arrived as would-be code-breakers and report converging on the same negative independently — a two-witness datum.

THEORY: Aaron Swartz's reconstruction of the missing year is the canonical answer to IJ's ending

  • Crux: ending-missing-year
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Beutler: Swartz's 2009 essay puts forth, in under a thousand words, an "extremely persuasive" (ASR, approximate) argument about what happens between the AFR descending on ETA and Hal's Year of Glad interview — for Beutler it ranks among the book's essential essays. [01:18–01:19]
    • [secondary] Bucher: he has sent many people to it; for anyone who wants the weeds of what happened at the end, it is "in the running as one of the canonical answers" (ASR, approximate). [01:19–01:20]
  • Notes: Endorsement only — no mechanics (toothbrush, DMZ, wraith, Orin) are argued on-air, and Laird appears unfamiliar with the essay. Counted as a 2018 popularity sighting for the Swartz reconstruction from the Atlas creator and the wallace-l/Fantods side of the fandom.

THEORY: Wallace sited Antitoi Entertainment near Cultural Survival's office deliberately — IJ is "in some sense a book about cultural survival"

  • Crux: antitoi-location
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Hering's street-triangle analysis places the shop near Prospect Street / Central Square; Lattanzi re-sites it across the street from Hering's spot. [00:33–00:34]
    • [inference] Cultural Survival — the Harvard-anthropologist nonprofit that kept studied tribes alive by hooking them up with corporations — had its office there; living in Inman Square, Wallace must have walked past it dozens of times on the fastest route to Boston. Lattanzi: Infinite Jest is in some sense a book about cultural survival, "so he said, this is where I'm going to put it" (ASR, approximate). [00:34–00:35]
  • Notes: Offered explicitly as Lattanzi's own intuition about authorial intent ("that's kind of the way I think about it"), immediately followed by his no-hidden-code caveat above — he advances the thematic siting while rejecting systematic coding.

THEORY: Lyle is a discalced Carmelite nun (the serial-comma reading)

  • Crux: lyle-nun
  • Stance: rejects
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The sentence in question (pp. 437-38) reads "Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who [p. 438] works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack" — misread as an appositive, it makes Lyle the Carmelite; read as a list it means an actual religious worked at ETA alongside Lyle, which Beutler takes as the correct parse. [00:29–00:31]
  • Notes: Recorded because Beutler says the comma caused a long discussion with Greg Carlisle during the writing of Elegant Complexity over whether Lyle was a nun — a genuine (if small) crux with a documented adjudication history. The real discalced Carmelite nuns' home near Wallace's post-Granada residence is the source of the word.

THEORY: IJ's graveyard scene reworks the graveyard finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

  • Crux: graveyard-intertext
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Bucher name-checks a wallace-l post by Jason Preston (now Coston) comparing the two graveyard scenes — the triangle standoff, the ghost, the race (ASR garbled here) — appraising it in the moment as possibly the best undergraduate-type reading of IJ he had seen; no argument reproduced on-air. [01:20–01:21]
  • Notes: Counted as a popularity sighting only; hosts promise a show-notes link.

Themes

Geography and map-vs-territory (the master theme: the Eschaton problem lived out by the mappers themselves — Beutler: visiting the real sites, "it wasn't the same place," a spot whose moment had already vanished); addiction-and-recovery (Granada House as working institution, not just referent); fandom-and-community (legacy tourism, the estate, single-author societies, the Bloomsday/Faulkner precedent Beutler claims for IJ pilgrimage); structure (the no-code ruling as a limit on Sierpinski-style readings).

Cross-references

Advances