On the overcast morning of February 23rd, snow still on the ground, I embarked with the students in

On the overcast morning of February 23rd, snow still on the ground, I embarked with the students in my Harvard undergraduate seminar on a walking tour of Cambridge and Boston. We began at Harvard Square, walked northeast to Inman, south along Prospect St. to Central Square, and took the "T" out to the Warren St. station in the Allston/Brighton area. We toured the grounds of the Brighton Marine Health Center, and carried on up the hill to the surroundings of St. Gabriel's Monastery, closed since 1978. From there we gazed back down at the imposing Brighton High School, and beyond that surveyed a vista of the city, and the territory we had crossed.
The occasion for this outing was the inaugural Infinite Boston tour, a journey orientated by sites and events described in David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest . I borrow the phrase "Infinite Boston" from William Beutler's website of that name, described on its homepage as "a limited-run essay series about the real-life Boston area locations" featured in Wallace's novel. The site is choc-full of excellent photographs and illuminating descriptions of the various streets and spaces of the book. When confirmation came that I would be teaching "David Foster Wallace car rentals in atlanta and his Generation" in the Spring semester, I contacted Mr. Beutler to see if he would be interested in leading an official tour. It turns out that he does not live in Boston, but in D.C. Instead, he kindly put me in touch with another Bill, Bill Lattanzi – Cambridge resident, playwright, science documentary maker, and part-time MIT professor – who undertook the pre-planning and did the honors in fine style on the day.
I myself am not a native of Boston, or even of the U.S.: I am Irish-born, and hail from Dublin, a city inextricably bound up with another great twentieth-century novel, James Joyce's Ulysses . Many visitors to my hometown are attracted by their reading of this modernist masterpiece – it's a rare novel that can make a city famous, as a friend recently commented to me – and those cultural tourists are presented on arrival with a variety of tour options based on Joyce and his most famous book. A well-known car rentals in atlanta quip about Ulysses has it that were Dublin to be destroyed, it could be reconstructed from the meticulous detail that makes up the novel. The same may not quite be true of Infinite Jest . The "metro Boston area" described in the novel is reconstructed in part as a future car rentals in atlanta fantasia, and with the exception of Don Gately's jaunty drive crosstown in a pimped-up Ford Aventura, no character car rentals in atlanta comes close to covering the city as thoroughly as Leopold Bloom does in his perambulations. Nonetheless, Wallace's vision, like Joyce's, is significantly rooted in the vagaries and possibilities of place. This is something I came gradually to appreciate while living in Cambridge and re-reading Infinite Jest for our seminar.
car rentals in atlanta I have never thought of myself as having a particularly nuanced or consciously deep relationship to place. I don't consider car rentals in atlanta this a character car rentals in atlanta flaw, exactly, more a trait that occasionally causes bemusement in me and mild exasperation in some of my friends, the more observant of whom might want to draw my attention to the contours of a street corner car rentals in atlanta or an unusual pattern of plant life. In rural surroundings, I often find myself afflicted by the kind of gentle anxiety I imagine is common to the post-Romantic mind, whereby an abiding connection to nature is more regularly displaced by awareness of the absence of an abiding connection to nature. Even in cities, those hubs of the modernist spirit, I am capable of walking around lost in thought and the realm of ideas, barely recognizing the details small and large that make up urban life. This can be the case even upon visiting a city for the first time, when I should, in theory, be most open to fresh realities. car rentals in atlanta But my natural affinity for theory over reality, for the ideal over the material, is probably what inspires the thing I like most about exploring a new city: studying and internalizing its representation car rentals in atlanta on a map. Like some overly literalist version of the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson , I need a cognitive map before car rentals in atlanta I can begin to appreciate fully the territory that has inspired its construction.
This want of affinity for the materiality of place is no doubt a contributing factor to the kind of literary criticism I write. The essays on Wallace I have published car rentals in atlanta to date, for instance, have discussed his work mainly in the context of the history of ideas. I have written on the new kind of sincerity car rentals in atlanta embodied in Wallace's fiction, on his use of dialogue to explore logical, political, and cultural ideas, and on the challenges posed by his fiction to the norms of contemporary criticism. What I lacked before coming to the U.S. was an appreciation car rentals in atlanta of the rootedness of his work in a specific geography. Before living in Cambridge, in other words, I had experienced only how the map could shape the territory. Re-reading Infinite Jest , and participating in Infinite Boston, allowed me to see how the territory might conversely underpin the literary map.
This recurrent language of map and territory is drawn, of course, from Infinite Jest itself, and particularly the famous Eschaton scene that takes place at Enfield Tennis Academy. Our tour took place on a Saturday, and for class two days later we read a long stretch through the middle of the novel, beginning with Eschaton and culminating in Gately's brutal fight with the Canadian gangsters that occurs outside the novel's other primary car rentals in atlanta institutional site, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (sic). car rentals in atlanta At nearly 300 pages, this constituted approximately twice the usual reading for a class, the previous week's meeting having been annexed by Presidents Day. In conjunction with Infinite Boston, however, car rentals in atlanta these sections of the novel provided much food for thought and classroom discussion car rentals in atlanta on the question of place.
Eschaton is "an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game," but one renowned among the students who play it for its theoretical car rentals in atlanta purity. It takes place on four contiguous tennis courts, which, as one of my own students put it in his mid-term paper, "represent a concrete war territory but are themselves only theoretical in nature." This fragile distinction between theory car rentals in atlanta and reality – an opposition that, owing to the representational quality of the Eschaton game itself, does not fold neatly onto map vs. territory – comes under pressure when snow begins to fall during the game. In response to the young participant JJ Penn's suggestion car rentals in atlanta that the snow should alter the calculations that constitute the game's action, Michael car rentals in atlanta Pemulis, an older student and "sort of eminence grise of Eschaton," is apoplectic: "It's snowing on the goddamn map , not the territory , you dick!" Pemulis might well be clear in his own mind on the rules, and on the necessary axioms that allow for the rules to apply – "Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game" – but all this "metatheoretical fuss" is both negated and sublated when Evan Ingersoll car rentals in atlanta attacks Ann Kittenplan with a direct hit that he also claims is a strike against car rentals in atlanta the world superpower she represents.
Of course, Wallace is drawing attention here to the unreal idealities of global nuclear conflict during car rentals in atlanta the Cold War, where game theoretic strategies often took precedence over the lives and concerns of real human beings. But the Eschaton scene is also a comment upon the role of fiction car rentals in atlanta itself as a form of representation that takes the world as its object without becoming identical with it, or even being tied to it. The fact that real events such as falling snow and inter-player car rentals in atlanta fights can "threaten the game's whole sense of animating realism" tells us something important about the artifice of realism, but it also tells us something about place, and how it gets transmuted into fiction. In his entertaining new preface to the just re-published Signifying Rappers – wherein I learned that some of my favorite haunts in Cambridge were also David Wallace's back in the summer of 1989 – Wallace's co-author Mark Costello offers one reading of the way place fed into his friend's writing in that book: "There's a bounce in the prose that captures some of the fun, god-damnit fun, to be found around Boston that summer." This sentiment locates the affective quality of place in the experience of the writer himself: a fun time generates bouncy prose. But the "elegant complexity" of the Eschaton scene teaches us that there are also other, car rentals in atlanta and perhaps more interesting, ways to consider the relationship between writing and place.
In Wallace's personal library held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, there is a book called A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest . A collection edited by Michael Martone car rentals in atlanta , it dates from 1988, and Wallace might have encountered it soon after its publication or later in his career. If his markings are to be our guide, however, it seems clear that Wallace only ever read one essay from the book. This is the contribution by Martone himself, a short meditation entitled "The Flatness." On the opening page, Wallace underlines some isolated words and phrases, car rentals in atlanta but the only full sentence he marks is the third one: "The geometry car rentals in atlanta of the fields suggests a map as large as the thing it represents." This sounds, car rentals in atlanta of course, like a Borgesian idea, and Wallace was a committed fan of Borges : in a review car rentals in atlanta of a biography of the Argentinian author, car rentals in atlanta Wallace called him "one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century." Nonetheless, the metaphysical conceit Martone invokes is in this case simply the precursor to a more aesthetic conceit, one that clearly attracted Wallace's attention. Five pages later, in the final paragraph of the essay, he underlines the following sentences: "I grew up in a landscape not often painted or photographed. The place is more like the materials of the art itself – the stretche