Infinite Jest: Pages 258-375: Tennis, the Incandenzas, Gately, Quebec Separatists

Shard-like fragmentation, prisms of reflected light, shafts of it exploding outward into the human reader's consciousness. How can it all cohere? And where do these meanderings lead?

There's tennis. This we know. Gerhardt Schtitt and Aubrey deLint, the clipped-consonant-named coaches at good old E.T.A. (The Enfield Tennis Academy). The kids, a school of them, from near babes to adult wannabes, names that appear and that gradually, over hundreds of pages, become personalities; John Wayne, Michael Pemulis, Teddy Schacht, Postal Weight, Ann Kittenplan, Jim Troeltsch, Ortho "The Darkness" Stice.

This is a jock novel. Sports. Sweat. Aching young bodies. Lyle the sweat-licking guru in the weight room. Locker room musings.

Oh but wait. The simmering weirdness unfolds through returned-to narratives and set pieces. Those not-quite-chapter breaks when one thread of narrative comes to a halt and the next salvo explodes from below. This is not strictly a jock book at all. 

The Incandenzas start to come into view, and that view is Gothic, all blood-colored mist and dysfunction, alcohol-steeped, twisted. They are a deeply unsettling family, each individual damaged in some way, quirky, lonely, gifted but socially-challenged and, in the case of Himself, James Orin Incandenza, the besotted patriarch, avant-garde filmmaker, tennis academy founder, a suicide.

The matriarch, Avril, tall and thin, a grammarian, smokes and holds an administrative position at E.T.A which she co-founded with James O. Mother or Orin and Hal and, possibly (though hinted as not likely) Mario (whose father may actually be C.T. Tavis, Avril's half-brother, possibly explaining Mario's deformities). 

Orin, the eldest son of James O. and Avril (nee Mondragon), an athlete but a failed tennis player and, as we the readers are introduced to him, a football (as in American football) punter in Arizona. Former boyfriend of, wait for it, Joelle van Dynne.

Mario, the second son who may or may not be the biological son of James O., physically deformed, a savant and, like his (maybe) father, a filmmaker. He wobbles but doesn't fall down.

Hal, the youngest, the tennis prodigy, the weed-smoking, precocious polymath who memorizes entries from the OED. An ETA standout but moody with evident addiction issues.

And there's the Gately and the Ennet House recovery facility (in close proximity to E.T.A., the Enfield Tennis Academy). Crime, addiction, recovery, Boston AA meetings, the sordid violent underside of serious addicts' lives, all of which gets explored in horrific scenes of depravity, mayhem, desperation.

This is how these two main themes connect: Tennis/ETA (and its cast of characters all with some particular dysfunction) and the Ennet House/Gately (and it's cast of characters as well - Randy Lenz, Erdedy, Joelle van Dynne, Charlotte Treat, Bruce Green, Kate Gompert, et. al.) have in common addiction & dedication (to tennis or to sobriety) and all the struggles that either entail. And those struggles unfold in dramatic and quirkily observant scenes and set pieces, in descriptions that dazzle, and in sinuous sentences that conjure the grotesque and the banal and often drape them in humor or sadness.  

The third main theme that emerges does so out of the dystopian future in which the novel is set. It seems like current time (circa the 1990s) but the USA has morphed and the geopolitical structure of North America has become O.N.A.N, the Organization of North American Nations. This includes the former sovereign nation of Canada, a contingent of whose population (namely, the Quebecois) are, at the very least, disheartened by the new reality and, to the most extreme, have organized active resistance cells to attack the former-USA and endeavor to separate Quebec from the Great Concavity (a roughly 4 state-sized area of land, formerly Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and some of New York State that has been turned into a gigantic waste disposal area) and, by extension, from O.N.A.N.

Hence, the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, "...pretty much Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N terrorist cell." (endnote#39a pg 994). 

For a deeper dive into the Quebec separatist issue, see endnote #110 beginning on page 1004 and ending on page 122 (a freaking whopper). The endnote presents, among smaller diversions, a long phone conversation between Hal and punter brother Orin, the latter of whom has inquired of his boy genius brother about the Quebec issue and what can he (Hal) tell him (Orin) about it; the ensuing transcript lays out a lot of worthwhile history to the present crisis.

Oh, and here's the tie-in twist. The Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents seek "The Entertainment" i.e. Infinite Jest, the capitvatingly deadly interlace entertainment cartridge, the great weapon (so the Separatists think) with which to wage war on O.N.A.N. Made by Himself, James Orin Incandenza, and featuring (we come to learn) Madame Psychosis herself, the veiled one, Joelle van Dyne. 

Infinite Jest: Interlude Over: Pages 127-258

"Mmyellow"

You can almost hear DFW answering the phone, a land line, maybe a rotary phone. But this is Hal's phone answering standard.

Phew! That was quite an interlude. Six years. Actually, 8 years. But who's counting? Let's pick this up again. 

We're reading Infinite Jest, the 20th anniversary paperback from Back Bay Books (2015). We started in 2016 but circumstances intervened and we paused.

In the years since much has happened. #MeToo and the whole revelation of DFW's fucked-up-ness (as if IJ wasn't a crystal ball insight into the man himself). Tales to tell, darts to hurl, judgment to pass. DFW has lost his literary shine. And worse.  

Patricia Lockwood and her London Review of Books 2023 takedown (volume 45 Number 14 July 13 2023), for example.

(PL):

"Infinite Jest - man, I don't know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been 'and then this little kid had a claw.' It's like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn't be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn't be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi." (PL, LRB 2023)

She asks "What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good." 

It seems that PL has come to pronounce judgment. That she is reading to find what she is looking for.

But enough of Patricia Lockwood.

Let's refocus.

This whole  bloggy effort started out as a 3 way "read Infinite Jest" among friends; two friends quickly dropped out leaving me to carry on.

I paused in 2016. I was 127 pages in, my second time reading it.

I have now reread from the beginning, powered through the first 127 pages with a feeling of "ah, it's good to be back" and kept going and here we are 257 pages in. DFW's familiar voice telling me stories, making me laugh.

Light bulbs of understanding going on reading the Hal/Orin phone call (starting on pg 242 (5 NOVEMBER - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT). Incandenza family history.

We will get to summaries and comments on those intervening 100+ pages but the important broad generalization is that the second time around things become much clearer the characters more familiar the plot lines less obscure and more intertwined the whole "what the fuck is going on?!" frustrations and sentiments of a first time reading tempered by the gradual then sudden understanding of what's going on.

Though "what's going on" maybe isn't the best phrase to employ for IJ. More apt might be to say that what was, upon first reading, disparate & obscure & rife with uncertain connections/characters/plot lines become, on the second reading, a gradual cohesion of connectivity and a familiarity with the myriad different characters (most of whom have weird and unlikely names that are often harsh awkward in the mouth [e.g. Troeltsch, deLintt, Schacht]).

Pages 127-258 Madame Psychosis aka Joelle van Dyne; Michael Pemulis; James Incandenza aka Himself; the Incandenzas as a twisted family of oddities; Hal the stoner tennis prodigy; his deformed brother Mario; Gately the criminal; Poor Tony and addiction. Junkie crime, horrific scenes you cringe reading.

Addiction. Shot through the book like glacial layers of deposited desperation. This is the sadness that juxtaposes the hilarity.

A comfortable clarity now reading this for a second time. Open attention to the actual writing, the tale-telling, the descriptive power.

NOTE: Helpful additional sources consulted since first attempt at second reading IJ; Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (D.T. Max), essays, the interviews with Michael Silverblatt, The Pale King, Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University Press of Mississippi Stephen J. Burn, editor), Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself  (David Lipsky), In the Land of Men: A Memoir (Adrienne Miller). 

Bedlam

And then there was Bedlam.

Amorphous

Accidental Image

I see a variation of the laughing face that adorned the credits of some early Three Stooges shorts. Something funny, but also a hint diabolical. Sometimes it's impossible to discern meaning from the quivering and ever-changing Semiotics of the day-to-day; this is where your creative mojo kicks in. 

The ability to see unique wonder in the banal detritus of our industrial nation lives. The eye twitch of brain synapse that distills a glance into a Zen-like zap of beauty or symmetry or conundrum; the visceral perception of something fleeting or ephemeral that nevertheless makes the heart hum or entrances the eyes in delightful vision; the sudden apprehension of a building's detail that causes you to smile wanly.

Rubbing a cat's belly

You don't have to go to any trouble to notice things; you just have to look around with interest and curiosity. And allow yourself the luxury of unfiltered observation, allow yourself the pleasure of creating your own visual enjoyment by noticing the weird or enigmatic detail somewhere on the vast sheet of your Total Daily Landscape. It is there, that odd juxtaposition, that elegantly spontaneous composition that jumps out at you from the plastic surround, you can ascertain it, you can etch it into your gravitational spin, but you have to be open to it.

You have to have your head up, your eyes surveying the landscape. You cannot be staring at the screen in the palm of your hand. Living and noticing combats staring and clicking.

Out of nothing

Eclipse

Lescaret and a partial eclipse of the sun
August 21, 2017

With No Time Left to Fool Around

Tour de France 2017

They said it was something else   

but when the truth came out

many people were left chagrined,

wondering how they'd been so

easily deceived.

Sometimes there's nothing to say. There is only the blurry horizon line

sinking into evening.

On the off chance

that ale falls from the sky

and roast lambs sprout

from barren fields, do not

stop to question your 

good fortune.

Eat and drink like

someone with no time

left to fool around.

Vermeer in the Tour

Two riders

"... two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl."

Geometry of the Tour de France

Tour de France 2017, Stage 11

Tour de France 2017

GINSBERG : GREEN

Gordon Ball reading from "East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg"

The GINSBERG : GREEN night at the Sprinkler Factory in Worcester, Massachusetts on April 7, 2017 brought together Beat fans, poets, artists, writers, publishers, and a melange of interested and curious citizens to celebrate and acknowledge Allen Ginsberg's longstanding contributions to the environmental movement and the movement to legalize marijuana. 

Headlining the evening were Ann Charters and Gordon Ball, both groundbreaking Beat scholars; unfortunately, at the last minute Ann Charters was unable to participate. Nicole DiCello, artist, activist and poet read in Ann's stead.

Of note were the virtuoso soundscapes of Jordan Hoffman and Steve Benson, two audio alchemists with alarming vision and the ability to create other worldly sound installations; Patrick Warner's reading of a Ginsbergian textual collage with the accompanying soundscapes offered a unique portrayal of the poet's work, one not gratuitous or ponderous but bardic and oracularly honest.

Audio alchemists Jordan Hoffman and Steve Benson

Gordon Ball offered a captivating reading from East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, his reading style soft of touch with tender playfulness and pragmatic confidence. Both professorial and eccentric, a little like a Gregory Corso lite, Gordon Ball related poignant and insightful anecdotes from the years he spent at Allen Ginsberg's upstate New York farm, roughly 1969-1972. 

After Gordon, Kevin Keady, Massachusetts musician and songwriter, performed, with guitar and vocals, Ginsberg's "Father Death Blues" (from "Don't Grow Old"), "Gospel Noble Truths," and "Do the Meditation Rock." Kevin Keady, himself a disciple of Allen, also lived at East Hill Farm, or as he and friends referred to it, "the Committee" (as indeed technically the farm was held under a non-profit entity founded by Ginsberg, the Committee on Poetry). His lively and sensitive performance seemed channeled in part through sacred memory, recollections of Allen Ginsberg, teacher and American hero.

To end the night, a spirited take of Ginsberg's classic "Hum Bom."

Patrick Warner, Nicole DiCello, Kevin Keady, Gordon Ball
reading "Hum Bom"
at the GINSBERG : GREEN celebration
April 7, 2017

New Books of Note, Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Schumacher

Gordon Ball has a new book out, a collection of stories set in Post WWII Tokyo called On Tokyo's Edge: Gaijin Tales from Postwar Japan. Published by Red Mountain Press, this slender paperback is handsome, the printing crisp and clean. Simple, sometimes quirky, sometimes achingly innocent, the stories, like the book's design, are elegant and unadorned. Their spare sentences belie richly textured snapshots of the emerging life of a boy named Robert. Gordon Ball is a renown experimental filmmaker and these stories almost feel like scenes from a reflective cinematic movie. 

Michael Schumacher, Ginsberg biographer (Dharma Lion), edited First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, new from the University of Minnesota Press. Among the uncollected interviews included in this timely release is "Ginsberg in Washington: Lobbying for Tenderness," not so much an interview but an article by Don McNeil originally published in the Village Voice in 1966 describing Ginsberg's testimony before a Senate subcommittee investigating LSD.

 "Whatever prejudgment you have about me, or my bearded image, I hope you will suspend it so that we can talk together as fellow human beings in the same room of Now, trying to come to some harmony and peacefulness between us." (AG)

Finally, Grove Atlantic has released The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beat Generation, a volume of Ginsberg's lectures given during the course he devised and taught first at Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College.

"Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries."

The 20th anniversary of Allen's death comes next week on April 5, 2017. That books by and about him continue to appear reinforces the notion that his voice is one still to be heard, that his words and ideas remain germane in a world that, in some ways, has manifestly changed since he was alive, but that in other ways, in the ways of war and police state violence and planetary peril and political corruption and Moloch-esque greed, heartlessness and abuse of power, are much the same. 

Allen Ginsberg would surely be active and vocal in resisting the toxic political madness burbling in the un-drained swamp of today's Washington D.C. I asked Anne Waldman how she thought Allen would be dealing with the current times, and she replied:

Allen would be in the resistance struggle and trying to communicate with the other side! The 2018 mid term election important need ! to act now-

I'm trying to rise to all the occasions I can, not stop and be loving and encouraging to others... and keep travelling..

I'm curating a festival at Casa Del Lago in Mexico City next week ..

Performed at Jaipur festival in India

And did Keynote there. 

Naropa New Weathers theme will be

Strong this summer June 11 til July 3...

Trungpa warned about fascist 

Takeover and here it is

Pathological sociopaths!

Why a lot of folks went to Halifax...

Onward and best.. remember your wisdom even if we don't make it

We just have to try

Very best

Anne 

Troubling Times

City Hall, Worcester, January 31, 2017

Troubling times come to all nations eventually, even "exceptional" ones like the United States. 

Unfortunately, what is exceptional about the United States is not what politicians and the ruling class would have us believe, that we're a welcoming, tolerant country founded on principles of liberty and equality, that we alone among the world's nations have the moral authority to script the planetary moral code.

All it takes is intellectual courage and the willingness to examine History through a lens wiped clean of nationalism to discern that America as a moral beacon is an obvious falsehood. Though the national myth suggests a nation of toleration & freedom made steadfast by the rule of law, the truth is something else.

A careful and honest appraisal of the nation's past - from slavery to Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the Native Americans, from Jim Crow to Joseph McCarthy, from Selma to Saigon - reveals a history stained with violence, xenophobia, venality, and cruelty. This is simply true.

History continues. History , in fact, is not the past, it is the Present. We lurch forward now into the era of the Ignorant Beast. Ban the immigrants. Restrict the vote. Deport the Other. Make America White Again.

Yet there is another story within the story, an aspect of the National Narrative that cannot be denied or erased - Resistance. At every step of the bloody way, the Beast has been confronted by the people. The underground railroad. Geronimo. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Suffragists. SDS. The Black Panthers. AIM. The levitation of the Pentagon. The Women's March on Washington. The list is long, prestigious, awash in sadness and punctuated with triumph.

Today our turn has come to continue writing the story line of Resistance. We must take strength from the examples of our predecessors, we must incorporate the lessons of their movements into our own, and we must decide, each one of us, what our role is to play in the gathering struggle.

Responding to the anti-immigrant actions of the Beast
Worcester City Hall, January 31, 2017

Observed

Whole Foods parking lot, Hadley, MA
February 19, 2017

"... dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom."

The bumper sticker on the far right reads "Howl if you (heart) City Lights Books." 

I'm always happy and surprised to see one of those but it's pretty cheesy & cliched, a bumper sticker no where near creative enough to represent either the great poem or the famed book shop & publisher.

But still, I take heart in seeing it on a car in America. 

"America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

And slapping my Ginsbergian politics & my organic gardening enthusiasms on my tail gate, too.

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

Rereading Infinite Jest: The Beginning

In my last Lescaret post way back in February, referring to Infinite Jest, I wrote:

"There is so much in this book, so much extraordinary writing, so many vivid descriptive phrases, that reading it only a single time seems inadequate."

Today I set out to remedy the inadequacy of having read it only once.

Two close accomplices, ND and LL, and I have agreed to take on this enigmatic and confounding masterpiece, reading it concurrently and sharing thoughts & comments via email. We're reading the paperback 20th anniversary edition from Back Bay Books (February 2016). All pagination references pertain to this edition and the novel itself will be referred to subsequently as IJ.

Neither ND and nor LL have read IJ before but both are familiar with DFW and have read some of the non-fiction.

I read IJ more than four years ago (see Infinite Vocab 101 and 1,079 Pages, in Paperback). Fascinated with the enormity of the novel, I wanted to know more about its author. Some would argue for the separation of art from artist, that great art stands alone, irrespective of its creator, and should be approached that way. Less ideologically committed, I always want to know the memoiristic details of my author heroes and mentors. I want to understand the Artist in relation to her Art; therefore, I want to know both - the art and the artist.

So for more on DFW, I read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (2010, David Lipsky) and Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012, D.T. Max). And dipped into The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa, 2012, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou), and Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University of Mississippi, 2012, edited by Stephen J. Burn).

All are worth investigating, the first two in particular: The Lipsky book for its intimacy and its day-in-the-life-of qualities (in this case, week-in-the-life-of), and Max's biography for the DFW's years at Amherst College. As a note of personal connection once removed - the years DFW spent at Amherst (1980-1984) roughly coincided with my years at UMass-Amherst (1981-1985). It's not inconceivable that we passed each other more than once browsing the bookshelves of the then numerous independent bookshops in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Of course, whether you know the biographical details of David Foster Wallace or not when approaching Infinite Jest is irrelevant. In this instance, the art speaks for itself.

In the coming posts I'll visit our reading progress, list vocab words that sent me to the dictionary, cite sentences or passages of extraordinary composition, and offer general comments and insights that emerge from ND, LL, and myself as we go.