{"id":3499,"date":"2020-06-30T09:27:39","date_gmt":"2020-06-30T01:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/?p=3499"},"modified":"2020-06-30T09:27:41","modified_gmt":"2020-06-30T01:27:41","slug":"the-david-foster-wallace-philosophy-on-paragraphs-the-longer-the-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/2020\/06\/the-david-foster-wallace-philosophy-on-paragraphs-the-longer-the-better\/","title":{"rendered":"The David Foster Wallace Philosophy On Paragraphs: The Longer The Better"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/infnite-jest.jpg\" alt=\"This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is infnite-jest.jpg\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pages Read: 166<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pages To Go: 812<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Footnotes: 55 of 388<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since progress has been slow, it&#8217;s quite possibly I&#8217;ve already written something along these lines, but the secret to writing a novel is that it&#8217;s really just a series of short stories, it just happens that the stories are serialized. Any chapter or episode needs to stand alone. Not in the sense that you shouldn&#8217;t need to read what came before, but in the sense that there is a conflict presented at the beginning that gets resolved or at least is closer to being resolved by the end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think about this a lot reading Infinite Jest. Because it really is a series of short stories, except so far they only tangentially appear to be related to each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the latest episode, the father of James Incandenza (Hal, Mario, and Orin&#8217;s grandfather) is giving a long-winded monologue that is ostensibly directed towards James, who&#8217;s ten years old at this stage, which starts out as a lecture on how to properly open up a garage door and goes on to include many topics, including his future as a tennis prodigy and a particularly gruesome knee injury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only thing that could make this a more DFWian chapter is if it included a long footnote on the chemical composition of Dexedrene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Vocab Word: <strong>Veldt<\/strong> open, uncultivated country or grassland in southern Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>You are reading my live blog of Infinite Jest. Start at the <a href=\"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/2020\/04\/this-might-be-an-infinite-jest-all-right\/\">beginning<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pages Read: 166 Pages To Go: 812 Footnotes: 55 of 388 Since progress has been slow, it&#8217;s quite possibly I&#8217;ve already written something along these lines, but the secret to writing a novel is that it&#8217;s really just a series of short stories, it just happens that the stories are serialized. Any chapter or episode [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,648],"tags":[3002,3001],"class_list":["post-3499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-novel","category-short_stories","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-infinite-jest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3500,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499\/revisions\/3500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/chaosfactory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}