Infinite Summer 2009 — guest essays, guide posts, and roundtables (collection)
TL;DR
The full substantive run of Infinite Summer (June–Sept 2009), the internet-wide group read of IJ: 70 posts preserved in this archive — 21 guest essays, 9 roundtable installments, and 40 weekly essays by the four Guides (Matthew Baldwin, Kevin Guilfoile, Eden M. Kennedy, Avery Edison). Together with the 3 posts archived earlier (how-to-read, Pietsch, Fitzpatrick) this is the complete editorial record of the project; only link-roundups, weekly plot summaries, and admin posts were skipped (38 posts). It's the best surviving record of smart first-readers hitting the book's puzzles in real time — including the moment Aaron Swartz's ending theory entered the mainstream — and the seedbed of a lot of now-standard IJ talking points (irony detox, IJ-as-attention-training, WoW-as-Entertainment).
Provenance warning (important)
infinitesummer.org is still online and still serves the 2009 posts, but the
site has been taken over by an SEO content farm and the original post bodies
have been tampered with: spam links and whole LLM-written paragraphs are
spliced into the 2009 texts (e.g. "bitcoin sportsbooks" inside John Green's
essay, an "online casino ελλαδα" paragraph inside Guilfoile's irony post,
"Fire Watch Guards in Atlanta" inside Maniatis's, a fake "Thirty years on..."
paragraph inside Bucher's). Some injected passages are written convincingly in
the authors' voices. Do not cite the live site. All 70 files here were
archived from 2009–2010 Wayback Machine snapshots (each file's source_url is
the snapshot used), which also preserve the original reader comments. The
earlier-archived Pietsch/Fitzpatrick/how-to-read files were already
Wayback-sourced.
Also, correcting a common mis-memory ("guest essays by Eggers, Moody, et al."): neither wrote for Infinite Summer. Dave Eggers's contribution to IJ lore is his foreword to the 2006 paperback (referenced by several IS posts); Rick Moody is present only as the interlocutor behind the Pietsch Q&A that became "Editing Infinite Jest."
Inventory
Guest essays (21 archived; 3 more archived previously)
| file | author | date | gist |
|---|---|---|---|
| mimi-smartypants-why-read-infinite-jest | Mimi Smartypants | 06-08 | Why-read pitch; lost her hardcover on a bus in 1996 and rebought it with beer money |
| matt-bucher-why-read-infinite-jest | Matt Bucher | 06-11 | His reading history; "no magic key" — mysteries aren't there to be solved; Hal in his 20s, Gately in his 30s |
| colin-meloy-why-i-am-reading-infinite-jest | Colin Meloy (Decemberists) | 06-19 | Bought it broke in Missoula 1997, stalled at p. 100, carried it across the country for 12 years |
| jason-kottke-forward | Jason Kottke | 06-21 | The kickoff: you need no expertise; reading IJ costs less attention than your TV/WoW habit |
| marcus-sakey-decoding-infinite-jest-or-dont | Marcus Sakey | 06-26 | "There is no secret"; every important assertion is contradicted somewhere; third read done right = trusting, not decoding |
| nick-maniatis-the-howling-fantods | Nick Maniatis | 07-10 | THF origin story (geocities "SCREAMING FANTODS"); wallace-l history; "It gets better" + p. 37–210 crib notes |
| brittney-gilbert-you-have-chosen-to-be-in-here | Brittney Gilbert | 07-20 | Professional blog-skimmer whose attention span was destroyed by the feed and rebuilt by IJ |
| nick-douglas-skim-is-for-wimps | Nick Douglas | 07-21 | Anti-skimming manifesto; the "satisfying click"; Hal's passive-hero essay as the book's chilling thesis |
| infinitedetox-waving-the-white-flag | infinitedetox | 07-22 | Opiate addict who kicked pills via IJ; reading as active surrender (vs. passive Entertainment) |
| andrew-womack-love | Andrew Womack (The Morning News) | 07-23 | Grew up in a tennis household; tennis-as-love, practice and devotion in IJ |
| michael-wendling-good-old-wireless | Michael Wendling (BBC) | 07-24 | Every medium in IJ is lethal except radio — Madame Psychosis's show as the book's one "strangely and hopefully connective" medium |
| matt-earp-standing-witness | Matt Earp | 07-31 | Staged IJ as a play ("Standing Witness", Wesleyan 2001) with Nadell's one-night-only permission; Eschaton on stage; DFW: "Let me know how it turns out" |
| amanda-french-infinity-over-2 | Amanda French | 08-02 | How to run an IJ meetup: hold it in a bar, AA rules (no one can be kicked out), keep it "just uncomfortable enough" |
| john-green-why-im-behind | John Green | 08-21 | Read IJ 3× in summer 1996 understanding nothing; argues DFW invented the contemporary YA novel (ETA scenes) |
| matt-bucher-the-anxiety-of-influence | Matt Bucher | 08-26 | Source-hunting: Karr's Liar's Club (Tommy Doocey), DeLillo's End Zone (Eschaton, the biggest influence on the ETA half), Red Dragon (Gately's Bulldog .44 near-verbatim), Super Mario Bros (Mario + flagpole) |
| maria-bustillos-the-wonder-of-wallace-l | Maria Bustillos | 09-01 | wallace-l memoir; DFW's letters to her: "I am just about the world's worst source of info on [Infinite Jest] …" |
| colin-meloy-thoughts-at-pg-750 | Colin Meloy | 09-02 | Defense of keeping pace; "¾ of the way through this 1000 page book and I think I'm still getting exposition" — then the storylines collide |
| john-warner-my-own-infinite-summer | John Warner | 09-03 | Girl with Curious Hair in an empty 1988 dorm; IJ post-MFA "cracked the world back open" |
| nick-maniatis-in-search-of-firm-ground | Nick Maniatis | 09-04 | End-of-book vertigo; what 13 years with the novel does ("I no longer laugh at AA") |
| john-moe-i-did-not-read-ij-this-summer | John Moe | 09-11 | The hardest piece: his brother's 2007 suicide; "Their lives read like a suicide note"; rage at Wallace-as-thief |
| greg-carlisle-reading-ij-changed-my-life | Greg Carlisle | 09-18 | Origin of Elegant Complexity (numbers written into the shadowed circles of a $4 remaindered hardcover); "the depth of the last sentence [is] unparalleled in literature" |
Previously archived (kept where they were, in `[local source]): infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij.txt (Avery Edison, 06-17), infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij.txt (07-03), infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij.txt (07-17).
Roundtables (9)
| file | date | topics |
|---|---|---|
| midsummer-roundtable-part-i | 08-10 | Verdicts at p. 500; the endnotes debate (device vs. tic) |
| midsummer-roundtable-part-ii | 08-11 | Schedule confessions; Wardine/yrstruly styles and the race question; visualizing Boston |
| midsummer-roundtable-part-iii | 08-12 | Favorite characters (Erdedy); Steeply, Orin, and trans representation (Edison); Clipperton and tonal imbalance |
| midsummer-roundtable-part-iv | 08-13 | Wallace's style infecting the Guides ("demap" in conversation); ETA vs Ennet vs Marathe/Steeply |
| midsummer-roundtable-part-v | 08-14 | Predictions: Baldwin predicts no climax; Guilfoile reading "like a dream" |
| summers-end-roundtable-part-i | 09-22 | THE ENDING: Baldwin's stages of grief → acceptance; Kennedy's "A Day in the Life" E-chord analogy; Gately as the book's surprise hero; Edison unmoved |
| summers-end-roundtable-part-ii | 09-23 | What happened to Hal (Guilfoile links Swartz's ijend post!); Orin's fate; wraith real or not; Joelle's deformity |
| summers-end-roundtable-part-iii | 09-24 | Do the "superfluous" parts justify themselves (Mona Lisa defense); bricklayer story called "almost entirely gratuitous"; no regrets |
| summers-end-roundtable-part-iv | 09-25 | "Did Infinite Jest change your life?" — attention spans rebuilt, Edison quits caffeine via One Day at a Time, Baldwin recants his eye-roll at sincerity |
Guide essays (40)
| file | date | gist |
|---|---|---|
| baldwin-mountaineering | 06-22 | Intro: "I don't know why I own Infinite Jest" — a lover of broken narrative who never managed to start it |
| kennedy-how-did-i-get-here | 06-23 | Intro: the reluctant guide ("HELL NO") |
| guilfoile-fictions-dirty-little-secret | 06-24 | Intro: humiliated at the podium by a novelist he'd over-read; on what's "in" a book |
| edison-poochie | 06-25 | Intro: first encounters with DFW's nonfiction |
| baldwin-dead-sea-diving | 06-29 | First 75 pp: the prose so dense it pops you back to the surface like the Dead Sea |
| kennedy-breathing-into-a-paper-bag | 06-30 | Panic of falling behind; underqualification anxiety |
| guilfoile-through-all-the-dead-ends-and-bad-scenes | 07-01 | Trusting the author through the hard early going |
| edison-not-the-best-student | 07-02 | Returns to endnote 24 (the filmography) — opens on JOI's Death/Life sideshow film of spectators becoming giant eyeballs |
| baldwin-letters-of-acceptance | 07-06 | Peace Corps acceptance-odds anecdote; ego, elite self-selection, and joining the IJ-finishers club |
| kennedy-the-trick-is-keeping-the-truth-up-front | 07-07 | AA's up-front truths; how readers fit IJ into their lives |
| guilfoile-were-together-everybody-knows | 07-08 | The bricklayer story (p. 139): recognizes it as a pre-existing comic chestnut; on Wallace's borrowing and what counts as theft |
| edison-post-of-the-pop-tart | 07-09 | Procrastination, Sunday-evening homework dread, endnote 24 |
| baldwin-missed-connections | 07-13 | Early connection-spotting: assembles page-by-page evidence to date JOI's suicide and the chronology |
| kennedy-zac-ephron-as-mario-incandenza | 07-14 | Casting the unfilmable movie; Wes/P.T. Anderson |
| guilfoile-i-pushed-my-soul-in-a-deep-dark-hole | 07-15 | "Twitter" on an early page; the anxiety of the manuscript-to-publication gap; how the Tarantino reference dates the text |
| edison-arent-i-meant-to-be-the-funny-one | 07-15 | Suicide in IJ, written against the shadow of DFW's own; Kate Gompert |
| baldwin-the-bully-pulpit | 07-27 | Explaining IJ's revered/off-putting double reputation to a journalist |
| kennedy-ps-allston-rules | 07-28 | Finally loving it; Eschaton; ETA scenes as favorites |
| guilfoile-real-love | 07-29 | The Sierpinski Gasket quote (Bookworm); structure as seduction — reveal/withhold |
| edison-i-am-not-enjoying-this-book | 07-30 | The honest dissent: "I am not enjoying Infinite Jest" (but won't quit) |
| baldwin-thats-entertainment | 08-03 | LaMont Chu/Lyle fame dialogue ⇄ video-game design "illusion of accomplishment"; World of Warcraft as the real Entertainment |
| kennedy-something-smells-delicious | 08-04 | Lugging the Giant Book in public; pool-side evangelism |
| guilfoile-i-love-you-though-you-hurt-me-so | 08-05 | Audience reception vs. intent (his steakhouse ad anecdote) |
| edison-humble-pie | 08-06 | The convert: ahead of the spoiler line, skipping family plans to read |
| baldwin-the-peril-of-ap | 08-17 | Analysis Paralysis: AA term ⇄ board-gamer term; addiction to thinking; Hal as Analysis-Paralysis case |
| kennedy-thanks-but-i-dont-particularly-like-to-hug | 08-18 | The Lenz sections vs. the warmth under the book's Kubrickian surface |
| guilfoile-ive-seen-the-future-brother-it-is-murder | 08-19 | Idiocracy vs. IJ as predictive satire; what Wallace got right about where entertainment is headed |
| edison-everybody-hurts-except-mario | 08-20 | "Not one normal character"; deformity catalog; Mario as the book's one whole person |
| baldwin-else-default | 08-24 | This Is Water as the bridge from IJ to The Pale King; choice and default settings |
| kennedy-it-didnt-make-me-happy | 08-25 | DFW interview-mining; the Newsweek tennis Q&A |
| guilfoile-irony-it-has-happened-to-me | 08-27 | Generation irony (Letterman/Simpsons); Wallace & Eggers put the ironic reflex "in the service of sincerity" |
| edison-the-biblical-experience-of-reading-ij | 08-28 | IJ as Bible: weak stuttering heroes (Moses ⇄ opening-scene Hal), Marathe as called judge, Marathe/Steeply as temptation-on-the-mountain dialogues |
| baldwin-hollow-man | 09-08 | "Anticonfluential" cinema (Altman/Magnolia) as the expected model — then Wallace punks him with convergence; Hal's anhedonia passage (p. 693) as the book's biggest revelation |
| kennedy-often-he-reckons-in-the-dawn | 09-08 | Berryman's Dream Song 29 ("Nobody is ever missing") and IJ's grief |
| guilfoile-where-everything-was-as-fresh | 09-09 | Children as efficient pleasure-seekers; Kenkle's Christmas-morning speech; the adult inversion of the happy-sad axis |
| edison-grapes-of-wraith | 09-10 | The atheist's fury at the wraith: DFW "put ghosts in his book"; concedes no other way Gately gets those words |
| baldwin-sincerely-yours-david-foster-wallace | 09-14 | IJ is "about" sincerity; the reverse Mary Poppins; Mario-at-lunch passage; "a 13 week irony detox program" |
| kennedy-the-floor-dodged-his-foot | 09-15 | McCarthy threads in IJ (Blood Meridian, Suttree); Gately's prose register |
| guilfoile-i-got-this-fire-in-my-heart | 09-16 | Defense of the ending: Wallace deliberately violates "you have to tell the best part" (no Hal-Gately payoff) because paying off bliss would betray the book's argument |
| edison-mission-improbable | 09-17 | Wrapping up; the impossibility of the Guide mission |
Skipped (38)
Countdown/admin posts (The List, Rules, Guides, Community, Schedule, Warming Up, The Book Before), 10 "Roundup" link posts, 11 "Infinite Summary/Summery" weekly plot recaps, and thin misc. (Odds and Ends, Oops, Announcements, halftime links post, Tunnel Club forum admin, The End, Acknowledgements, Infinite Index, two embed-only posts); nothing analytical in them.
Highlights (best insights)
- The ending roundtable is the single best artifact. Kennedy: Gately on the beach = the sustained E-chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," fading until "you hear the piano bench creak"; and giving Gately the last word "made Gately seem like the hero of the whole book." Baldwin: "the jest is that the book is infinite, in that it has no end" — and, presciently, that solving Hal would be "like opening the box and finding the cat dead." Guilfoile: ending this way "shows a startling amount of confidence... when the novel's over the work isn't over."
- Swartz's theory canonized in real time. In Summer's End Pt. II (23 Sept 2009), Guilfoile links Swartz's week-old ijend post as "this thorough attempt to explain it" — the earliest mainstream endorsement; Baldwin immediately articulates the standard counter-position (preferring non-resolution, noting the recursion of chasing ending-theories like Entertainment). Both poles of the later debate (swartz-ij-ending vs. general online discussion) are present here at birth.
- The wraith split. Edison ("Grapes of Wraith") and Baldwin are genuinely angry at the supernatural intrusion — Baldwin: "'bed on the ceiling' ended that hope" that it was all in Gately's head; Kennedy and Guilfoile take the wraith as real and consistent with the book's absurdist register. Notable that none of them knew what moore-first-draft-ij later confirms (Stice's Darkness was literally "the Wraith" in the 1993 MS) — the guides' "you have to go through a lot of machinations to try to come with a scenario in which the wraith isn’t real" instinct (Guilfoile) was right.
- Bucher's "Anxiety of Influence" is the most citable single guest essay: the Liar's Club harelipped-dealer parallel (Karr), End Zone as "the biggest literary influence... (at least the E.T.A. half)," the Red Dragon Bulldog .44 passage Wallace all but transcribed (RD p. 137 ⇄ IJ pp. 609–10), and the half-joking Super Mario Bros. reading of Mario + the flagpole.
- The irony-to-sincerity arc, lived. Guilfoile's "Irony, It Has Happened To Me" (the ironic reflex "in the service of sincerity") and Baldwin's "Sincerely Yours" (IJ as "reverse Mary Poppins" and "13 week irony detox program," keyed to the Mario-at-lunch passage) independently arrive at what the archive's irony-and-sincerity notes treat as the Kelly/"New Sincerity" academic thesis — in blog form, 2009, from first-readers. Baldwin's Roundtable IV finale enacts it: he cringes at having inwardly mocked a friend's earnest "That book, it kind of changed my life man".
- Attention-economy prophecy claims. Baldwin's "That's Entertainment" (LaMont Chu/Lyle ⇄ game-design "Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop?"; WoW as the Entertainment) and Gilbert's "You Have Chosen To Be In Here" (professional skimmer's attention span rebuilt by the book) are early statements of the now-ubiquitous "IJ predicted the feed" reading — cf. entertainment-and-the-self.
- infinitedetox supplies the strongest addiction-side piece: reading-as-active-surrender (White Flag group, "Give It Away To Keep It") opposed to the Entertainment's passive surrender; the author literally kicked opiates via the re-read. Cf. addiction-and-recovery.
- John Moe's essay is the collection's emotional outlier: his brother's suicide 17 months before Wallace's; "when someone decides not to go to work one day and instead puts a bullet in their head, everything else they do is a prologue to that act. … Their lives read like a suicide note."
- Sakey vs. the decoders: "There is no secret... I'd be willing to bet that there are no assertions of importance in the text that aren't contradicted somewhere else" — the strongest early statement of the anti-solution camp, directly opposed to the Swartz mode of reading.
Recurring debates among the 2009 readers
- Endnotes: essential device (Guilfoile: about mediated communication; Kennedy: delayed punchlines) vs. "gratuitous pain in the ass"/authorial tic (Baldwin: "Wallace couldn't even sign a credit card slip without bolting on an addendum").
- The wraith / supernatural (see above).
- Joelle: deformed or too beautiful? Guilfoile's resolution — actually disfigured, but "you don't have to choose. The possibility exists" — is close to the current consensus reading.
- Wardine/yrstruly: discomfort about race and voice, mostly waved off in 2009 (the voice defended as a specific person's, not a race's) — reads differently now; Edison's trans-representation critique of Steeply/"P.G.O.A.T."-era gender jokes is the earliest sustained one I've seen.
- Tonal imbalance: realist Ennet vs. cartoon Clipperton/ONAN material; Guilfoile's maxim "for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible."
- Schedule discipline & spoiler-line ethics — the social technology of the group read (75 pp/week, Amanda French's AA-style meetup rules), which is itself a working demonstration of the book's community/discipline themes.
- Hal's catastrophe: Bob Hope withdrawal vs. DMZ vs. Entertainment exposure — all three positions held around one table (Summer's End II), none resolved.
Cross-references
- swartz-ij-ending + swartz-on-finishing-ij: Swartz wrote both during Infinite Summer and the project amplified him.
- infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij, infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij, infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij — the rest of the same season.
- bucher-fantods-wallace-l-fandom — the community history these essays sit inside; Bustillos's essay is cited there.
- moore-first-draft-ij — settles (in the guides' favor) the wraith-reality argument; also note Guilfoile's bricklayer complaint targets a passage Moore shows was added post-1993.
- Theme notes: the-ending, irony-and-sincerity, entertainment-and-the-self, addiction-and-recovery.
- howling-fantods-ij and lipsky-becoming-yourself for Maniatis's and the Lipsky-adjacent material.
Notable passages
"You know what the ending made me think of? That E-chord at the end of the Beatles' 'A Day In the Life' — that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the piano bench creak under John's butt. That's what reading Gately on the Beach felt like." — Eden M. Kennedy
"The hidden meaning of the title is now clear: the jest is that the book is infinite, in that it has no end." — Matthew Baldwin
"Were someone to make an ironclad argument for a specific hypothesis... my reaction would likely be disappointment. It would be like opening the box and finding the cat dead." — Matthew Baldwin, on Hal theories
"There is no secret." — Marcus Sakey
"Their lives read like a suicide note." — John Moe
"What Infinite Jest provides is a 13 week irony detox program." — Matthew Baldwin
"I didn't roll my eyes, or laugh in a way that wasn't happy. But only because I suppressed the urge. I mean, come on. It's a book.... I think I owe that guy a beer. Honestly, I think I owe the entire Internet a beer." — Matthew Baldwin, recanting