Why not try to read Infinite Jest again? I remembered that the book opens with several color references. Well, three colors. I started listing the colors in my notes: Brown “I am in here” (Wallace 3). yellow White White White White yellow Yellow seemed less of an innocent color sitting in a list and more of an overt throw up in your mouth dose of racism. No matter how small, it is an exciting moment when an object of interest to me is matched with a purpose. I really thought that noting the color references would be the impetus that would keep me focused on reading Infinite Jest. It worked. It was a realization that may have saved me a great deal of pain when I was struggling through western education. I have an unfortunate number of books whose marginalia ends in the first pages. You know—the pages that you have to work carefully to hold open because they haven't amassed enough weight to hold themselves down. I fondly joke with students about this in classes I teach. I purposely show
22
them copies of my undergrad texts so that they see where my notes started and ended. No one has an attention span for everything, and this attention shifts and changes with experience. I think I proved this to myself with the Infinite Jest color tab project. I read the book through, enjoying more than cringing, tracking each reference to color. Then, I decided to read it again. This time I had room (mentally) to track each reference to color along with the subject each described. I kept track of the colors, their subjects, and the real time aspect of my recording in email drafts. As I read, every hundred pages, I sent an email to myself— as a digital method of stamping each section of color and subject references with a date and time. I began to refer to the color-tabbed paperbacks as the Infinite Jest Project. It became evident that I was transforming one of my deficits—a frequent inability to focus— into art. I started posting to Twitter what I could gather as a brief overview of the stories and people in Infinite Jest as short lists of specific colors and subjects (figure 2). As I was pretty brand-spanking new to all things David Foster Wallace and all things Twitter, I was surprised by the responsiveness Wallace