Using the three plots of Infinite Jest as the vertices doesn't really work, there is nothing fractal like about the plot itself and plot is not the structure. How I see it is that the vertices would be family, education, and society, which are all deeply interrelated. For the majority of the characters we learn their relation to these three things, in Hal and Gately we get a very well developed view of it, not so much for Marathe and Steeply where the family and education aspect is abbreviated and I think this is where the mentioned mercy cuts happened.
I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.
Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.
Ah, maybe I made my claim unclear. So my claim is that the 3 vertices are the institutions (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins), not plots. I agree that IJ is kind of plotless, and that to me is what the voids in the Sierpinski Gasket could represent, but this article was more about the two-ways-to-construct-the-triangle thing.
But I like your vertices (family, education, and society).
You're making me think that there's something to the fact that you could 'seed' the Gasket with different vertices as well. Something I learn when re-reading is that you can bring so many interpretations and perspectives to this novel and still come out with an entertaining and valid experience of it. In that respect, I like the idea that you can use different triplets to seed the Gasket!
You're correct that we can't lean fully on the Sierpinski idea. Wallace mentions in his interview that after those edits, the book became more like a 'lopsided' Sierpinski Gasket "it looks basically like a pyramid on acid" (https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...).
Separate from the Gasket thing, but I like your point about the footnotes. I wish people spent more time on those. I've heard commentary on the structure of those. Some folks talk about the 'self referentiality', as text (obviously) references footnotes, and there are even instances of footnotes referencing the main text! I've also heard that the back-and-forth emulates the back-and-forth in a tennis match, although that one seems less interesting.
Edits: fixed spelling mistakes
Edit: I added your 3 vertices idea and the fact you can invert the 3 vertices to the post, thank you! I attributed back to this thread.
"rambling stoner conversation". Lol, you've clearly made it to Ken Erdedy's section, which is literally that. That's a brief passage in the book, and honestly one of the hardest parts to read.
I'd say there's a lot of groundwork laid in the first 60 - 100 pages or so. After that, I honestly don't think it would be harmful to cherry pick interesting passages from the book. You could research interesting sections of the novel and target those for a first pass read through, then maybe later read it sequentially. There aren't really plot spoilers as the book is somewhat plotless.
Even still, I'd recommend the first read through be sequential. My first read through was, but I also skipped around a little bit. My favourite thing about DFW is his writing style. Also might help to whet your appetite for his voice by reading something like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which is a hilarious anecdote and commentary about his trip aboard a cruise liner.
In general, I'd say the best advice is to free yourself from the burden of 'understanding' the novel on your first read through and just enjoy the chaos. Besides, there is so much ambiguity in the novel that, even if you do crystallize some understanding, there's likely many alternative interpretations. That's where the re-reads get really fun.
I think the order in which the different elements of the book are introduced is crucial, as it leads to a lot of "aha!" moments.
> What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
Yeah well, that book may not be your cup of tea then. The book _is_ rambling, plus a lot of the characters _are_ actual stoners/addicts/recovering addicts. But keep in mind that most of the book is in the third person, not in the first (as the first few pages would make you assume).
I enjoyed this article, i still never finished infinite jest as much as id like to. but this idea of burn-in is really interesting as a way to present ideas. I guess ill try again ha
As a rule-of-thumb, I'd say if you've made it past the introduction of each vertex I describe in the article (Ennet, ETA, Wheelchair assassins), you're good to bounce around and play the chaos game in that way. Put another way, if you know Hal, Gately, and Marathe/Steeply; then I'd say you're good to hop around.
Even still, I strongly recommend reading it sequentially. But my first read through, I did skip ahead to some interesting passages other folks had written about, and that re-invigorated my interest in the novel. DFW's voice is so idiosyncratic and interesting. That's what kept me coming back.
This feels very LLM. It has the shape of sense but doesn't actually make any coherent points, other than "how to draw the Sierpiński triangle". It even has some non-sensical AI diagrams to finish it off.
I wrote this. If you ask an LLM what to make of IJ as a Sierpinski Gasket, it doesn't yield anything too interesting (it mainly talks about the voids representing the absence of plot points / missing characters). As far as I know the two-ways angle is novel.
The only AI piece is the banner image, because I can't draw. All other images are attributed (Wikipedia, YouTube).
I got the idea for this post after listening to Wallace's interview with bookworm (linked in the post), and subsequently researching Sierpinski Gaskets on YouTube (where I saw the Numberphile and ViralHog videos).
For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't have commented without the AI image. I just tend to assume that articles with AI graphics also have AI text. That assumption is almost never wrong.
This is a good point. The banner image is something I've been doing on all my articles, and it's creating the wrong perception. I'm probably going to stop adding these. All my other content is software engineering related, and I've started adding more visual content like diagrams, screenshots, and YouTube videos. So I probably don't need to lean on the banner images anymore, and it seems like they're doing more harm than good!
Edit: I actually went ahead and removed the banner image from this post. Thank you for pointing out this signal!
Yeah agreed - Just as a future context I tend to close out of articles quickly if they have an AI generated image. Highly reccomend something like Unsplash or Comsos.so - They both have some brilliant visuals, especially public.work - cosmos.so/public-work
Even old archives are great to search for visuals and shows the passion that you've put in to the writing.
This is really helpful, thank you! This post was one of my first with relevant, 'real' images, and I really like how it came out relative to the generated stuff. Besides, I feel like image generation has lost its way since DALL-E got deprecated. I've bookmarked these resources!
So in general, I'd say there's maybe 1-2 spoilers, but nothing major. If you want truly 0 spoilage, I wouldn't read it, but if you can tolerate some very minor stuff, you're likely safe.
If you're on page 600 though, there's no spoilers.
Edit: and yes, DFW presaged a lot with this book! Especially around how entertainment has evolved and the negative impact it has. The 'doom scroll' feature is literally called 'infinite scroll' in the software industry. Scary stuff :-/
"David Foster Wallace (DFW) designed Infinite Jest as a Sierpinski Gasket using the classical top-down construction, placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins) and subdividing the structure at many scales below. Readers, on each reread, fill in the same Gasket using the chaos game, a non-sequential sampling that converges on the Sierpinski Gasket over many iterations. This explains why first readings feel like noise (burn-in), why the entry point doesn't matter, and why the book rewards near-infinite rereading. Although the book is naturally finite, the Gasket built over it by the reader is infinite."
Using the three plots of Infinite Jest as the vertices doesn't really work, there is nothing fractal like about the plot itself and plot is not the structure. How I see it is that the vertices would be family, education, and society, which are all deeply interrelated. For the majority of the characters we learn their relation to these three things, in Hal and Gately we get a very well developed view of it, not so much for Marathe and Steeply where the family and education aspect is abbreviated and I think this is where the mentioned mercy cuts happened.
I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.
Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.
Ah, maybe I made my claim unclear. So my claim is that the 3 vertices are the institutions (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins), not plots. I agree that IJ is kind of plotless, and that to me is what the voids in the Sierpinski Gasket could represent, but this article was more about the two-ways-to-construct-the-triangle thing.
But I like your vertices (family, education, and society).
You're making me think that there's something to the fact that you could 'seed' the Gasket with different vertices as well. Something I learn when re-reading is that you can bring so many interpretations and perspectives to this novel and still come out with an entertaining and valid experience of it. In that respect, I like the idea that you can use different triplets to seed the Gasket!
You're correct that we can't lean fully on the Sierpinski idea. Wallace mentions in his interview that after those edits, the book became more like a 'lopsided' Sierpinski Gasket "it looks basically like a pyramid on acid" (https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...).
Separate from the Gasket thing, but I like your point about the footnotes. I wish people spent more time on those. I've heard commentary on the structure of those. Some folks talk about the 'self referentiality', as text (obviously) references footnotes, and there are even instances of footnotes referencing the main text! I've also heard that the back-and-forth emulates the back-and-forth in a tennis match, although that one seems less interesting.
Edits: fixed spelling mistakes Edit: I added your 3 vertices idea and the fact you can invert the 3 vertices to the post, thank you! I attributed back to this thread.
I've tried three times to read it and got a few pages in before giving up on it.
Would it make more sense to just dive into the middle and see what converges out then?
What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
"rambling stoner conversation". Lol, you've clearly made it to Ken Erdedy's section, which is literally that. That's a brief passage in the book, and honestly one of the hardest parts to read.
I'd say there's a lot of groundwork laid in the first 60 - 100 pages or so. After that, I honestly don't think it would be harmful to cherry pick interesting passages from the book. You could research interesting sections of the novel and target those for a first pass read through, then maybe later read it sequentially. There aren't really plot spoilers as the book is somewhat plotless.
Even still, I'd recommend the first read through be sequential. My first read through was, but I also skipped around a little bit. My favourite thing about DFW is his writing style. Also might help to whet your appetite for his voice by reading something like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which is a hilarious anecdote and commentary about his trip aboard a cruise liner.
In general, I'd say the best advice is to free yourself from the burden of 'understanding' the novel on your first read through and just enjoy the chaos. Besides, there is so much ambiguity in the novel that, even if you do crystallize some understanding, there's likely many alternative interpretations. That's where the re-reads get really fun.
I think the order in which the different elements of the book are introduced is crucial, as it leads to a lot of "aha!" moments.
> What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
Yeah well, that book may not be your cup of tea then. The book _is_ rambling, plus a lot of the characters _are_ actual stoners/addicts/recovering addicts. But keep in mind that most of the book is in the third person, not in the first (as the first few pages would make you assume).
I enjoyed this article, i still never finished infinite jest as much as id like to. but this idea of burn-in is really interesting as a way to present ideas. I guess ill try again ha
As a rule-of-thumb, I'd say if you've made it past the introduction of each vertex I describe in the article (Ennet, ETA, Wheelchair assassins), you're good to bounce around and play the chaos game in that way. Put another way, if you know Hal, Gately, and Marathe/Steeply; then I'd say you're good to hop around.
Even still, I strongly recommend reading it sequentially. But my first read through, I did skip ahead to some interesting passages other folks had written about, and that re-invigorated my interest in the novel. DFW's voice is so idiosyncratic and interesting. That's what kept me coming back.
Apparently, Infinite Jest is a book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest
Apparently, a book is a bunch of text on pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
This feels very LLM. It has the shape of sense but doesn't actually make any coherent points, other than "how to draw the Sierpiński triangle". It even has some non-sensical AI diagrams to finish it off.
I wrote this. If you ask an LLM what to make of IJ as a Sierpinski Gasket, it doesn't yield anything too interesting (it mainly talks about the voids representing the absence of plot points / missing characters). As far as I know the two-ways angle is novel.
The only AI piece is the banner image, because I can't draw. All other images are attributed (Wikipedia, YouTube).
I got the idea for this post after listening to Wallace's interview with bookworm (linked in the post), and subsequently researching Sierpinski Gaskets on YouTube (where I saw the Numberphile and ViralHog videos).
For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't have commented without the AI image. I just tend to assume that articles with AI graphics also have AI text. That assumption is almost never wrong.
This is a good point. The banner image is something I've been doing on all my articles, and it's creating the wrong perception. I'm probably going to stop adding these. All my other content is software engineering related, and I've started adding more visual content like diagrams, screenshots, and YouTube videos. So I probably don't need to lean on the banner images anymore, and it seems like they're doing more harm than good!
Edit: I actually went ahead and removed the banner image from this post. Thank you for pointing out this signal!
Yeah agreed - Just as a future context I tend to close out of articles quickly if they have an AI generated image. Highly reccomend something like Unsplash or Comsos.so - They both have some brilliant visuals, especially public.work - cosmos.so/public-work
Even old archives are great to search for visuals and shows the passion that you've put in to the writing.
This is really helpful, thank you! This post was one of my first with relevant, 'real' images, and I really like how it came out relative to the generated stuff. Besides, I feel like image generation has lost its way since DALL-E got deprecated. I've bookmarked these resources!
The hunt for LLM writing is almost as boring as LLM writing itself.
I wish to read this but I'm on page 600 of my first pass of the book and worry it'll spoil it for me.
At risk of marking myself a "lit-bro" I think the book is proving solidly prophetic.
So in general, I'd say there's maybe 1-2 spoilers, but nothing major. If you want truly 0 spoilage, I wouldn't read it, but if you can tolerate some very minor stuff, you're likely safe.
If you're on page 600 though, there's no spoilers.
Edit: and yes, DFW presaged a lot with this book! Especially around how entertainment has evolved and the negative impact it has. The 'doom scroll' feature is literally called 'infinite scroll' in the software industry. Scary stuff :-/
"David Foster Wallace (DFW) designed Infinite Jest as a Sierpinski Gasket using the classical top-down construction, placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins) and subdividing the structure at many scales below. Readers, on each reread, fill in the same Gasket using the chaos game, a non-sequential sampling that converges on the Sierpinski Gasket over many iterations. This explains why first readings feel like noise (burn-in), why the entry point doesn't matter, and why the book rewards near-infinite rereading. Although the book is naturally finite, the Gasket built over it by the reader is infinite."