While frantically attempting to write my proposal, reread Underworld and read Infinite Jest I've been obsessing over the role of media in the encyclopedic novel. These novels have all been so conscious of their...novel-ness...and are in such rebellion to it. From GR to U to IJ we've seen books trying to be something other than books, such as movies, or radio, or maybe waste, maybe even dreams or imagination (parts of GR especially).

While I don't have much point in this post, and am not saying anything interesting or new, I've been thinking so much about what they are all trying to say about the future of media and in particular the future of the novel. We are already witnessing the decline of traditional news media and the rise of more independent, readily accessible media. The media in IJ is particularly interesting in the way it plays such a large part in the characters lives and becomes as much an addiction as any of the others in the novel. The prophesies of Delillo and Pynchon were so on in many ways, I wonder what Wallace really sees as the future of media...

Okay, still got quite a bit of reading to do, but as I've been reading, I keep thinking about this: from the moment I read Jim Incandenza's microwave-related death on April Fools (and Hal's reaction about something smelling delicious), I've been wondering if every death in this novel is going to be interlaced with some sort of humor. I remember the man who was robbed in the beginning of the novel, and died from a stuffy nose after the robbers put tape over his mouth.

And now we get the absolutely absurd story of Eric Clipperton, who swears he'll shoot himself if he should ever lose a tennis match, and then blows his head away when he's marked first on the rankings. The people at ETA compare him to the Kid who laced his Nestle Quik with cyanide after winning a tournament, and is discovered by his dad, who tries to give him CPR. Then every single member of his family (including the little medically-trained siblings) proceeded to give CPR to the last person who tried to recessitate someone in the family, and "by the end of the nigth the whole family's lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouth" (437). That moment was tragic, but also sort of amusing to me... very darkly comical.