The View from the Road

ND and I drove from Woo City to Baltimore, MD where we stayed overnight before driving on into the heart of D.C. Saturday morning. 

NJ Turpike
January 20, 2017

If you drive along the northeast corridor on a Friday afternoon at any time of the year you are likely to encounter a traffic nightmare at some point. Doing so while hundreds of thousands of other people like yourself are also driving toward the capital means that, collectively, you overburden the infrastructure. 

Particularly the bridges. Getting to and getting across both the George Washington Bridge and the Delaware Memorial Bridge was insane. Semi-organized chaos. Everyone's rage and frustration is constrained by sheer helplessness. Once you enter that fray, belted inside your car, you are completely contained by the crush of vehicles on all sides and in all directions. You literally go with the flow.

The GW Bridge is truly terrifying, an engineering miracle that's the architectural equivalent of a gargantuan iron dragon, a beast so hideous and frightening, so noisy, tense and simmering with coiled violence, that you grind your teeth and grip the steering wheel tightly with both hands while crossing it. 

In fact, just getting to it puckers the sphincter. You speed along on RT 95's battered pavement and cross that majestically wretched yet somehow captivating sprawl of the Bronx, and everyone is in a hurry and the energy is RELENTLESS and AGGRESSIVE and, not wanting to jinx your passage, you desperately try to avoid thinking about what you would do if you got a flat tire.

NJ Turnpike

The folly at the Delaware Memorial Bridge was the funneling of four jammed lanes of traffic through toll booths and then forcing them to merge down to two lanes. Kafkaesque absurdity. It took 30 minutes to inch our way about three miles before finally getting onto the bridge itself.

Despite those choke points, our spirits soared periodically when we saw other cars full of people that were obviously heading toward the Women's March like us. We fed on that portent, that fleeting connection to strangers, and we comforted ourselves with the thought that something positive was coalescing across the land. For the first time in a very long time we began to sense the awakening of a common purpose. 

The Women's March on Washington the following day was an gigantic expression of common purpose; you didn't have to sense it, you heard it in the roar of solidarity of 500,000 people, and you saw it in the packed city streets around you, and around the country.

American highways are harsh, unforgiving landscapes fraught with danger. You'd be advised to adopt a survivalist mentality when venturing onto them. 

To survive, you must know what is going on around you at all times. You must anticipate the unexpected and take nothing for granted. You must always know your escape options. 

You must always expect that someone will do something incredibly stupid that could jeopardize your life. 

Hope and Despair 2017

Where do we go from here? On Friday, January 20, the nation swore in the 45th president of the United States, a serial liar and raging narcissist. To put it in locker room talk (a vernacular the president-elect admittedly understands well), we swore in a real dickhead. 

Washington D.C.
January 21, 2017

A day later, more than half a million people, the majority women, thronged the very same national mall where the inauguration was held, and manifested a profound demonstration of opposition to the new administration. And not only in Washington D.C. People took to the streets in massive displays of principled resistance around the nation - Boston 200,000 people, NYC 250,000, Philadelphia 50,000, L.A. 750,000, Chicago 200,000, Denver 100,000 - and around the world.

History provides plenty of examples of societies slipping into authoritarianism, fascism, or simply devolving into corrupt and/or incompetent oligarchies. It's naive to comfort ourselves with "it can't happen here" smugness. We are not an "exceptional" nation as politicians of all stripes aver. We are as susceptible as any nation state to dissolution, chaos, and violence. 

So it seems quite apt, even necessary, that on the day following the installation of such a crass and unpredictable president, the People gather in the nation's public spaces to remind the new administration that women's rights matter and that we, as a vigilant and passionate body politic, are watching. 

Infitnite Jest: Interlude

Like the growth of the Giant Sequoia, reading Infinite Jest takes time ... though ideally not three thousand years.

The President Tree
Sequoia National Park, California
September 21, 2016

Infinite Jest: Pages 67-128: Kate Gompert suicide watch, surprised blue eyes, Steeply and Marathe, Gerhardt Schtitt and E.T.A.

We are moving slowly. This is hyperbolic understatement. "We" meaning the initial trio of readers, the three Jest-a-teers, each of us in Life's full embrace. 75 pages a week? More than a month has passed and even I, the docent, have only gotten to page 128 (though that does include thirteen pages of footnotes, wink) (but still).

I will say this. It's fucking awesome the second time.

This time around I'm savoring everything. Circling whole sentences with admiration and awe. Making notes in the margins. HFS. WTF. WOW.

Poor Kate Gompert.

There are dark halls and sad places

... the sour odor of medical waste awaiting collection ... (p69) Kate Gompert in the psych ward

... sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. (p71)

On a single page, we get circumorals, thigmotactic, dentate, and synclinal. (pg75)

The Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) and Gerhardt Schtitt, the Head Coach and Athletic Director who ... has the creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. (p80)

Surprised blue eyes.

We also get a hefty dose of the tennis student-players themselves, teenage boys mostly, but also some girl players, and we start to form a picture of the culture at E.T.A. (which, I should say, is an abbreviation I find jarring and unpleasant to behold; it makes me think of the Basque separatist group ETA).

Hmm, but maybe that's DFW's point, to subtly insert the acronym of a famous international separatist group so that the fictional Quebecois separatist group in IJ seems completely plausible.

Note (from Google):

ETA (Basque: [eta], Spanish: [ˈeta]), an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna(Basque pronunciation: [eus̺kaði ta as̺katas̺una]; "Basque Country and Freedom") is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Perfect entry for Marathe and Steeply (Marathe p87, Steeply p88) ... though not before the Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge strikes! (p87)

The first time I read this section, I had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was surreal and disconnected to anything that came before it. Who ARE these people and are we really talking about a guy in a wheelchair and a guy in drag way the fuck up on some cliff overlooking a city in Arizona?

Actually, yes. and - SPOILER ALERT - Marathe is a member of the A.F.R, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, the Wheelchair Assassins, ... pretty much Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell; and  Steeply is an Unspecified Service's field operative. (We'll have to deal with what "O.N.A.N" is later on).

Marathe to Steeply (a LOL margin note), commenting on Steeply's woman's disguise:

And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you, Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently. (p92)

Steeply is described as some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. Priceless.

Hal at E.T.A. The Halster. Halorama. Halation. (p97). I've written in the margin "Hal is the young, troubled, genius".

Hal Brushed

Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unbearable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. (p101)

Hal is a stoner. This is DFW knowing what that means and describing Hal as if he, the author, were stoned and noticing Hal. There's a scene in the boys locker room, a bunch of kids are sitting around tired after a huge practice. In the margin I have written next to this "This is deep noticing!"

Hal's face's reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical tang in the next tile. (p104)

Are you fucking kidding me?

And then, 16 pages later, Mario, Hal's weirdly deformed (elephant head, claws for hands) younger brother, gets sexually molested by U.S.S. Millicent in the thicket on the perimeter of the grounds. I know. WTF.

Infinite Jest: Pages 49-66: Hal in the Lung Tunnels, Gately! Dr. James O. Incandenza, Filmmaker

It's like mining a hermetic text for clues to the Great Mystery, or like exploring the crevices and fissures of reality with an accomplished and garrulous guide. You need to read slowly, paragraph by paragraph, a notating implement in hand. I use a mechanical pencil.

The team's pace has slowed to a crawl, to a stop really. I have lost both ND and LL. The fabled 75 pages a week was a pipe dream; at current rate, we will finish (rather, I will finish) in approximately 15 months. Absurd!

Of course the question, from the docent's point of view, is - should I go on alone? Right now the answer is yes, albeit slowly. I am like a cat at a screen door sniffing airborne temptations wafting in from outside.

How can it be that every measly span of pages (less than 20 for this entry) delivers brilliance and amazement? The margins in my copy are well-scrawled-in, almost every page. How can a mere 20 pages of a 1000+ page novel deliver plot hints and directional foreshadowing? Maybe it takes a second reading to recognize how much is going on in every passage, in every sketch and interlude, in every endnote.

Hal with "his little brass one-hitter" getting stoned by himself in the Lung Room deep under the Enfield Tennis Academy, in the tunnels. Every preppy stoner past & present relates immediately to this chapter:

A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth - the brass ones especially - but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled; there's none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl's big load, and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling. (p49)

HFS, absolutely. He nailed it.

Endnote madness! Page 53, in one paragraph come endnotes 5 - 9, all drug-explications.

Gately's first appearance! (p55). Autumn - Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland. An utterly horrifying vignette that introduces one of the central characters of the ensuing thousand pages and suggests future passages of cringe-inducing stories and imagery.

... ferocious jolliness... (p55)

The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. (p56)

Then there's the passage (beginning on p63) on James O. Incandenza, Hal's father (deceased), founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy but, more importantly, the noted avant garde filmmaker and creator (one learns if one reads endnote #24) of the eponymous cartridge/entertainment, Infinite Jest.

Endnote 24 is staggering. The James O. Incandenza Filmography, nine pages long. There are footnotes within the endnote!

And there are crucial details and clues to the whole novel contained within the film descriptions. Each film listed in the filmography warrants a close read because the details and synopsis are so fucking rich and wacky and make you write in the endnote margin HFS. To wit:

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/ uncredited voices; 35 mm; 59 minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa." PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS. (p988, endnote #24)

I mean, the whole filmography is a creative achievement in its own right. Hilarious, twisted, really Out There in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. Not to mention that the last entry cited in the filmography is Infinite Jest, the film. Essential to read this. Anyone skipping the endnotes is automatically disqualified from the club of Infinite Jest Totalists.

Sentence Alert! On page 64, the middle paragraph is comprised of two sentences, the first one a 145 word gem (the word count disputable depending on whether you treat hyphenated words as one or two words, i.e., hard-drinking or U.S.-spoused). Regardless, the paragraph is not to be missed.

Infinite Vocab

parget(ed) (p51) - plaster or any similar wall covering.

apocopes (p57) - the cutting off or dropping of the last sound or sounds of a word.

bolection (p62) - a molding that projects beyond the surface of a panel

reglets (p62) - (architecture) a flat, narrow molding, used to separate panels.

Infinite Jest: Pages 17-49: Erdedy, the Howling Fantods, and the Infinite Jest Entertainment Cartridge

A lot happening. Very little overt connection. Erdedy. Wardine. The Medical Attache. Mario. Orin. The professional conversationalist. The Appropriation Artist. Oh my.

The Erdedy chapter is priceless. Erdedy is someone completely alone with his anxieties. We can all (most of us anyway) relate, if not to the anxious waiting to score weed then to the very condition however it arises of being extraordinarily anxious about something.

It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else. (p22)

I have a new acronym to write in the margins when I encounter some phrase or passage that blows me away: HFS. It stands for Holy Fucking Shit!

The bottom half of page 22 earned an HFS, as did the sentence: The last woman had been sexy but not pretty, as the woman he now didn't want to see but was waiting anxiously for was pretty in a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. (p23)  HFS.

Endnote #3 earned a loud HFS.

At Random

Is Hal mute? Is the scene with the professional conversationalist (who turns out to be his own father) actually dialog that goes on in Hal's mind but that he doesn't actually say? Remember, the opening scenes of Hal's meltdown occurs when the administrators insist that Hal speak for himself - and he can't. Or doesn't. And freaks out.

What's with Wardine and the Black vernacular? (p37)

Hal, Orin, and Mario are brothers. Orin is an NFL punter. Hal a tennis prodigy. Mario the youngest, apparently disfigured or handicapped with an over-sized head.

The Medical Attache is succumbing to the Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge.

fantod (by Edward Gorey)

The howling fantods first referenced on page 45. Roaches gave him the howling fantods.

Hobbesian Sewers (p45)

Who starts a sentence like this?! And so but since the old CBC documentary's thesis ... "And so but since..." that is really ballsy. (p47)

Infinite Vocab

phylacteryish - a phylactery is a small leather box that contains Hebrew texts and that is worn by Jewish men at prayer as a reminder to keep the law. (p47)

Infinite Jest: Pages 3-17: Hal's Meltdown

Infinite Jest: Notes from Pages 3-17 

Hal's meltdown. Told in Hal's first person narrative.

Note that page 3 in the 20th anniversary paperback is actually the first page of the novel. The first phrase that grabbed my attention occurs on the first page.

"... the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material ..." (p3)

I love the idea of "uncooperative material," as if "material" had a will, as if inanimate objects have preferences or manifest purposeful resistance. And then there are these gems:

The familiar panic at feeling misrepresented ... (p8)

Jet contrail

... the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest ... (p9)

The blue sky is glassy and fat with heat ... (p15)

The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were being exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. (p16)

Infinite Vocab

IJ is a vast trove of quirky words and curious references. Keeping a dictionary handy helps the reading experience.

Kekulean Knot (p6) - a sideways reference to Friedrich August Kekule.

Brewster's Angle (p10)

presybyopic (p11) - a vision condition that develops around the age of 40 when people experience blurred near vision when reading, sewing, using the computer, etc.

creatus (p12)

enfilade (p13) - a volley of gunfire directed a long a line from one end to the other; or, architecturally, a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other.

hypophalangial (p16) - missing one or more phalanges from fingers or toes