Infinite Atlas / Infinite Boston (Infinite Atlas Project)

TL;DR

The Infinite Atlas Project is William Beutler's effort "to identify, place and describe every possible location" in Infinite Jest. Three parts: Infinite Atlas (a living Google-Maps database of 600+ locations — use online, too big to archive), Infinite Map (a printed poster of 250 locations), and Infinite Boston (a 2012 daily essay/photo series on the real Boston-area sites). Atlas is still live at infiniteatlas.com; the Infinite Boston essay series is no longer served live (infiniteboston.com now 403s).

Key claims

• Infinite Atlas: interactive map of 600+ global locations from the novel; each entry records status, first page of appearance, associated stories/characters, and links to its Infinite Boston essay where one exists. Built with editorial advisers and cartographer Derek Watkins; epigraph is Otis P. Lord's Eschaton protest, "The real world's what the map here stands for!" (p. 334).
• Infinite Boston: ~60 short essays (July-September 2012), one location per day, pairing the fictional place with its real-world counterpart and a photograph. Key identifications from the series list (archived):
  • Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital = Brighton Marine Health Center
  • Ennet House = Granada House (the halfway house where Wallace himself lived, 1989-90)
  • Enfield Tennis Academy = Fidelis Way Park site (Brighton)
  • Enfield itself = the Allston-Brighton neighborhoods
  • St. Elizabeth's Hospital, St. Columbkille's, St. John's Seminary, Blanchard's Liquors, the Warren Street T-stop, Commonwealth Ave, the "Unexamined Life" club, Riley's Roast Beef = Kelly's Roast Beef, Cheap-O Records = Cheapo Records, etc.
• Useful for grounding the novel's geography: Wallace's Enfield is a fictional neighborhood spliced into real Allston-Brighton, and most Ennet House/ETA settings have specific real models within a mile of each other.
• Project is independent/fair-use; no affiliation with Little, Brown or the DFW Literary Trust.

Themes

Geography as theme-carrier: addiction (Ennet House/Granada House), institutions on hilltops (ETA), Boston AA's concrete world; also Eschaton's map-vs-territory problem, which the project pointedly adopts as its motto.

Cross-references

• Series archive list: `[local source]
• Supersedes the older Boston Globe memorial tour and Flickr photo sets cataloged on howling-fantods-ij.
• Eschaton scene (pp. 321-342) for the map/territory epigraph; Ennet House and ETA scene geography throughout.
• Granada House identification matters for biography-adjacent readings of Gately — but see Fitzpatrick's caution in infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij.

Notable passages

"'The real world's what the map here stands for!' —Otis P. Lord, page 334" — used as the project's epigraph

"The Infinite Atlas Project is an independent research and art project seeking to identify, place and describe every possible location in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest."