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Apr. 8th, 2013 10:03 amThis past week's Parks and Recreation featured an early appearance by the law firm of Gately, Wayne, Kittenplan and Troeltsch, a magnificent warning that the episode would be full of Infinite Jest in-jokes. We saw Doctor Van Dyne, the C.T. Tavis Medical Center, the Incandenza-Pemulis compatibility test, and Mayor Stice.
I'm not really convinced the homage went any deeper than the name homages, but it still made me smile. Infinite Jest is a remarkable book and at this point a remarkable community of readers. It's a book full of intense loneliness and self-doubt, with no conviction whatsoever that there are answers at the end of one's journey. It's a book that you can read with the retrospective knowledge of DFW's fate and clearly see parts of his struggle. But it's also a book of great joy and humor, and it pleases me that Parks and Rec is choosing to honor that part of the book's legacy.
Reading about the homage online after the fact also led me to the amazing music video that Parks and Rec showrunner Mike Schur made to the Decemberists' "Calamity Song", a gorgeous reenactment of the Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest. If I could complain, it would be that the video does not make Eschaton seem sufficiently dull. Foster Wallace's genius in that chapter was to report all of its events in a dispassive, half-asleep murmur, as if nothing could be less important than the game. It's barely atomic war parody, more parody of atomic war parody: The people who are constantly freaking out about the end of the world are like a bunch of children playacting, their worries no more serious than those of Jim Troeltsch. And yet at the same time Foster Wallace takes Jim Troeltsch seriously for dozens of pages. Just because people are not fundamentally serious, just because they are stupid or shortsighted or inane, doesn't mean that they don't matter. Just because we are weak and foolish and doomed to die, doesn't mean we don't deserve to be remembered afterward.
The "Calamity Song" video strips a layer or two out of that, inevitably, so that fear of atomic calamity actually seems to be a legitimate part of the story, but it is still gorgeous and scary and hilarious.
Calamity Song by the Decemberists
Today is the thirteenth day of the Omer
I'm not really convinced the homage went any deeper than the name homages, but it still made me smile. Infinite Jest is a remarkable book and at this point a remarkable community of readers. It's a book full of intense loneliness and self-doubt, with no conviction whatsoever that there are answers at the end of one's journey. It's a book that you can read with the retrospective knowledge of DFW's fate and clearly see parts of his struggle. But it's also a book of great joy and humor, and it pleases me that Parks and Rec is choosing to honor that part of the book's legacy.
Reading about the homage online after the fact also led me to the amazing music video that Parks and Rec showrunner Mike Schur made to the Decemberists' "Calamity Song", a gorgeous reenactment of the Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest. If I could complain, it would be that the video does not make Eschaton seem sufficiently dull. Foster Wallace's genius in that chapter was to report all of its events in a dispassive, half-asleep murmur, as if nothing could be less important than the game. It's barely atomic war parody, more parody of atomic war parody: The people who are constantly freaking out about the end of the world are like a bunch of children playacting, their worries no more serious than those of Jim Troeltsch. And yet at the same time Foster Wallace takes Jim Troeltsch seriously for dozens of pages. Just because people are not fundamentally serious, just because they are stupid or shortsighted or inane, doesn't mean that they don't matter. Just because we are weak and foolish and doomed to die, doesn't mean we don't deserve to be remembered afterward.
The "Calamity Song" video strips a layer or two out of that, inevitably, so that fear of atomic calamity actually seems to be a legitimate part of the story, but it is still gorgeous and scary and hilarious.
Calamity Song by the Decemberists
Today is the thirteenth day of the Omer