Infinite Jerks

Last Thursday, I went to a book reading in SoHo celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of the novel Infinite Jest. The organizers probably didn't even bother inviting the author, David Foster Wallace, because it's clear to anyone who knows or even feels like they know him that he would never come to something like this.

Instead, the bill featured some of Wallace's former editors, a couple of critics, the head writer from The Onion, and John Krasinski, the handsome-in-a-clumsy-sort-of-way co-star of NBC's The Office. The implication being that the head writer from The Onion and John Krasinski are big fans of Infinite Jest.

And but so the event wasn't much of a book reading at all. Three people read short passages from IJ, while the critics sat around and critiqued stuff for a while. The Onion guy brought his ex-editor-in-chief (and ex-girlfriend) along, and rather than talk about IJ, they decided to read, in tandem, the painfully unfunny article one of them wrote a few years ago about a breakup letter David Foster Wallace wrote to his girlfriend.

(Curmudgeonly aside about The Onion: the aforelinked article is a prime example of one of those articles that takes one funny idea, distills it into a mildly amusing headline, then spends the rest of the article retelling the same joke in different and progressively worse ways. Making matters worse, the article is one of those where if it's funny at all, it's only funny to someone who's familiar with David Foster Wallace. But the thing is, anyone who's read any Wallace will recognize that the article is nothing but a flaccid, meritless imitation.

And yet the attendees at Thursday's "Jest Fest" loved the article. Why? Because they were familiar with D.F.W., they felt a surge of pride in being part of the tiny audience at which the article was aimed. Group identification: they laughed because they got the joke, not because the joke was funny. Like that little fish Christians used to draw in the dirt, the article serves merely as a password, an identifying label, which fellow club members can read and remind themselves that they're members of that particular club. It's completely artless.)

In short, the Onion guy was only there to promote his stupid newspaper.

And John Krasinski was even worse. He hung out in the back so he could walk, star-like, down the aisle to the lectern while everyone looked in awe at his messy hair. So he shows up and admits right off the bat that he "can't remember" if he ever finished reading Infinite Jest. Then after making a couple of completely incoherent jokes, he says he'd feel stupid talking about IJ in front of so many smart people, so he's going to read a passage from another of Wallace's books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, instead. This is frustrating enough by itself- this was an Infinite Jest party, not a Wallace party. But then Krasinski casually mentions that he's currently adapting this latter book into a film.

I suppose I was always aware that stars go to these events to promote themselves. And that's fine. But I didn't expect the self-promotion to be so...naked. It was enough to make me wish I kept a bullshit diary.