Infinite Jest: What Happened?

WARNING!! HEY! YOU!

This post is entirely about the ending of Infinite Jest, what happens to the main characters, what I think happens in the blanks DFW leaves for the reader, etc. If you're at all interested in reading Infinite Jest blind, i.e. with no prior knowledge, obviously you should skip this one. You should've skipped all the previous posts, too, but this is the Big Daddy of spoilers. Okay. I'll even give you some extra white space to make your decision.

Oh, and all of this might be totally wrong. I'm just throwing ideas out there, seeing what sticks.









The thing about Infinite Jest is that its ending isn't at-all conclusive. The book more stops than ends. The "trick" is that the last pages of the book describe events that occur about 1 year before the chronological finish of the story, which is actually right in the beginning (i.e., page one). To fully understand the plot, I'll have to read it again. That will not happen for a long time. Even on a second pass, I'm going to get hung up on the tennis parts, the long paragraphs about various film theories (anticonfluentialism??), and other annoying bits. I'll discover little Easter eggs, but by and large it'll feel like a necessary re-tread. Infinite Jest isn't a book you try to read unless you really want to, so I don't think I'll be giving it a second look for the sake of completeness for a while.

I re-read the beginning with Hal's breakdown immediately after finishing Gately re-living his Bottom and it sort of cleared some things up, but not really. There were like two little tidbits in there that brought tiny things into the foreground; I may be overestimating their importance. But I guess my advice is that if you're still reading this and you've finished Infinite Jest, go ahead and re-read Hal's breakdown, specifically the bits in the bathroom and when he's being taken to the ER. If you want. I'll be here.

What's Up With The Wraith?

This is one of the weirder parts of the book, and I absolutely think that Himself's ghost is real. He sort of has to be in order for other things to make sense; if he were a figment of Gately's dreams, I'd have to find some other explanation for Stice's behavior, Stice's bed being attached to the ceiling, Hal's breakdown, and other pretty important plot points. So I think he's a real, literal ghost, hanging out, talking with Gately and influencing the plot at various points.

Remember when Mario was in the field and he found an old tripod out in the middle of nowhere? Wraith. How the E.T.A. ceiling tiles are, like, broken and hanging open? Wraith. Stice's bed "bolted" to the ceiling? Wraith. I also think that Stice was almost able to beat Hal in tennis because he (Stice) was being possessed by the Wraith, but I have no real proof of that; I think Himself wanted to spend some time with his kid in the only way he (Hal) could effectively communicate -- i.e., on the court -- but there's no written part of IJ that's like, "Stice was playing as though possessed" or anything along those lines. I don't think. I don't remember the intricacies of that particular however-long section.

What Happened To Hal?

Hal has a huge breakdown right in the beginning of the book -- which, again, is the story's end -- when he's interviewing at the University of Arizona. He tries to talk, but he instead makes a bunch of awful beast noises and he gets subdued and brought to the hospital. He starts to feel a bit weird on the night Stice sticks his head on the frozen window; he's walking around the E.T.A. after finding the janitors to go un-stick Stice and he's hit with an awful panic attack that drives him to lay motionless on the floor of a viewing room for a very long time. His friends are scared, asking him why his face is all contorted and terrifying.

This was triggered by either (A) Marijuana withdrawal, which Hal had been struggling with for 10 days prior to the attack, or (B) that mold Hal ate as a kid. It might've been the weed, but I think it was the mold. The mold is mentioned three times in the book -- maybe twice, but definitely more than once -- and DMZ (the super-drug) is made from a mold. Hear me out.

We know that Himself made The Entertainment aka Infinite Jest aka the Samizdat for Hal. He saw Hal becoming an extra in the movie of life, talking but saying nothing. He was the only one to see it to the point where it may not have been happening at all; Himself may have just been going mad. (Maybe Hal's savant abilities -- the insane memory for words, the overall intelligence -- masked it from everyone other than The Stork?) But Himself made The Entertainment as a sort of cure for ol' Hallie. He wanted to craft a perfect piece of entertainment to draw the boy out. I think that this was to counter the mold; Himself was really smart and maybe he knew something about the mold's effects and how they would ruin Hal. (I'm maybe grasping at straws but I like the story I've crafted for myself so I'm sticking with it.)

Right before Hal's breakdown, DFW mentions that no one at E.T.A. leaves his or her toothbrush unattended. Something about a person who, like, spiked toothbrushes with drugs however long ago and how it caused a big fracas. So Hal grabs his NASA cup from in front of a vent, goes upstairs, and brushes his teeth. Then he lays on the floor for a few hours. I think that Himself dosed Hal's brush with some DMZ to try to cure him of his animal-snarl disease from the mold, but it didn't work and instead sent the kid to the hospital. Or maybe he (Himself) wanted him (Hal) to go to the hospital to meet Gately so they could go and dig up the Entertainment.

What About Gately?

Gately lives, I think. Remember, the bit where he wakes up on the beach after a huge overdose (the very last scene on the very last page) happens before Hal's breakdown in Arizona. When Hal is losing it, trying to explain himself to the three Deans but instead snarling, foaming from the mouth, etc., he mentions how he, John Wayne (gimme a second) and Don Gately were digging up Hal's father's grave. This coincides with the Wraith-induced dream Gately has in the hospital, where Gately's the strongest digger but he's really hungry and he's eating with both hands and the "sad kid" (Hal, presumably) tries to shout but can't and he instead mouths the words "Too Late." So Gately makes it out of the hospital to (unsuccessfully) dig up J.O.I's grave.

Why was he digging? The A.F.R. has kidnapped Joelle and they're probably threatening her if Don G. doesn't help find the cartridge. We know they've got her because she's being interviewed by (I think) Fortier or Mlle. P----- about her involvement in the cartridge. She explains how it's just her, Joelle, apologizing to a camera rigged to have the perspective of a baby in a stroller. This is the whole Death-is-your-next-life's-Mother thing, the bit where your Mom loves you because she's apologizing for a murder neither of you quite remember. So Gately's digging because he loves Joelle and he wants to get her out of the A.F.R.'s hands. He knows where to go because he meets Hal in the hospital after his first mental meltdown.

John Wayne?

John Wayne is with Gately and Hal when they're digging up Himself's grave, looking for the cartridge. Why? What in the world is he doing there? I think he works for the Assassins. He's from Quebec, he's really mysterious, and he hated Mario's puppet show about the creation of O.N.A.N, so maybe he's some sort of separatist. I think that the Wraith poisoned Wayne that one time as revenge for banging his widow.

John Wayne also "would have" won the WhataBurger tournament, but he didn't. Hal seems to imply that he's dead or otherwise incapacitated. Maybe the A.F.R. took him out when they didn't find the cartridge? After all, they were going to kill Marathe, knowing about his quadruple-cross. Maybe Himself possessed him and triggered a Hal-like breakdown? Dunno. I think it was the A.F.R. idea, though, since it gives him a reason to be at J.O.I.'s grave.

Orin?

Orin winds up in a huge inverted tumbler, trapped like one of the roaches in his hotel room. It's part of a Technical Interview by the A.F.R., and Mlle. P---- asks him, "Where is the Master?" before unleashing a bunch of sewer roaches into his glass cage. Orin tries to kick his way out, seriously injuring his punting foot, but can't. "Do it to her!" he yells, just like Winston at the end of 1984. I think "her" refers to Joelle, since Winston was begging for his love to be tortured in his stead.

Orin lives, though. During Hal's Arizona trip, one of the Deans mentions that he (Hal) "has a brother in the NFL." Has. Not "had." For whatever reason, Orin got out of that tumbler. How, though? The A.F.R. won't just let him go, even if they do kill Joelle first. So maybe Orin has the master copy. I think Orin tells the A.F.R. they can find the cartridge in Himself's grave to buy some time. The AFR sends Wayne to watch over Hal (who can find the grave) and Gately (who offers to physically dig to save Joelle) out in the field.

They're "too late," though, so the A.F.R. comes back empty-handed and kills Joelle to try to get Orin to cave. Maybe they kill Gately, too -- this is all conjecture. (They leave Hal alive because they know about his DMZ condition; the kid's useless anyway.) But Orin gives in and tells them where he's taken the master copy. That would mean that Orin was responsible for sending the Entertainment to the Medical Attaché -- with whom the Moms had some "cavortings," which affair maybe drove Himself to suicide, not to mention the whole Avril / Orin oedipal thing -- and various film critics who pooped on The Mad Stork's work. It sort of fits, given how Orin was always trying to get Himself's approval and would do anything to avenge him.

As Hal is being taken to the hospital, there's a big war plane flying overhead that drowns out some dialogue -- has O.N.A.N. started to crumble in a war against the Entertainment-equipped separatists?

The E.T.A.?

They're all dead, probably. Les Assassins are waiting on the top of the hills near the Academy, having successfully overtaken the Quebecois tennis team's bus. They raid the school to Interview Hal, Mario, Avril, and everyone else who's ever met them -- so, everyone. Hal's not there, though, having been taken to the hospital (apparently by C.T. and deLint, who are alive for Arizona) after his DMZ-induced meltdown. I think it's safe to say that everyone else was killed, though.

Maybe not the Moms, since she's Quebecois and attached to John Wayne, who may have asked her to be spared. Himself is buried on Moms's property, too, which may have given her some bargaining rights. But she's probably also dead.

Infinite Jest: The Aftermath

I finished it! It's over: I'm done with Infinite Jest. It was very, very good, but it isn't my favorite book. There was just too much of it, man. The parts I enjoyed -- Eschaton; Gately's fight; anything at all involving Michael Pemulis, even remotely; the fact that a guy's nickname was "The Darkness" -- remain some of my favorite passages / scenes from any piece of literature I've ever read. It's just that there were too many . . . erm . . . boring parts. Maybe "boring" is the wrong word. But there were a lot of dry, academic portions that I thought would pay off in some way by illuminating an area of the plot that just didn't deliver at all. I also acknowledge that these "boring" scenes are kind of what make Infinite Jest the hulking challenge that it is, so imagining an abridged version with nothing but high points kind of robs the thing of its spirit.

Gately's big fight scene, though. Sweet baby Jesus that was so cool. He's all, "This is my house; these are my people," and he fights those dudes! Oh, man. Sure, he gets shot and generally has a very bad time of it afterwards, but during? Whew, boy.

Big "Fuck you" to Lenz, the bastard. I don't know what happens to him at the end but I hope it's something terrible.

Gately gets the Most Improved Character award, too. Or maybe the Guy Who's Done The Worst Shit But You Don't Care Because He's Generally Honorable Now That He's Clean award. Dude's a murderer (though neither was intentional) and a crook but he seems like he's really tried to get straight and I felt very, very bad for him towards the end. If I were reading this for a class I'd call him a Herculean figure on account of his re-living "trials" before he can be redeemed. I'm not, though, so instead I can use words like "badass" and "pretty dope."

Was the Flaxster the one with the pickup lines? The guy who steals from Sorkin with the bet fracas. Was that him? Because I'll remember that line maybe forever: "You're the second-most attractive woman I have ever seen in my life, the first most-attractive woman I've ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher." Was that him or the other one, the one who successfully runs away before C comes in and truly ruins everything? Eh. Idiot Flax. Not that he deserved to have his eyes sewed open, but c'mon, man.

I was upset when Pemulis got expelled. Objectively he's like not a great dude -- selling the little kids' urine to doped-up players, stealing (I think; I honestly cannot remember) a truck, the whole DMZ fiasco -- but he was hilarious and his expulsion wasn't very fair. He didn't poison Wayne! Sure, he roofied his Port Washington opponent, but that was the one time. Why would anyone poison John "No Relation" Wayne? (I have a lot of ideas about why someone would do that, actually.)

I'm going to save the Super-Spoilers for the next post -- this one's long enough already and the last one with all the plot points / theories is only going to be longer -- but I do think everyone should read Infinite Jest. If I could read it for the first time again, I would definitely stick to a better schedule: It took me three months to read it, which is just way too much time. Reading it in six weeks or even two months would've been much better for the sake of remembering important plot points from the beginning pages -- so, chronological ending -- of the book.

But, yeah. Read it. You can't be a Learned Person With Thoughts unless you've at least skimmed half of it. It's a big deal. Pick it up from the library, read the opening, think about how awesome it is. Then slog through to page 200. If you're still on board, buy it.

I'm Twitter-Famous

Something pretty cool/terrifying happened yesterday; it doesn't have anything at all to do with books, but it was pretty neat and frankly I can write whatever I want on this thing -- this is not a democracy,^[1] is what I'm saying -- so I'm going to go ahead and write it all out now. If nothing else, the True Story will be revealed.

I'm gonna start at the beginning. Paul Ryan is a health nut frat bro with an expenditure-slashing addiction^[2] and Mitt Romney decided he wanted to have him as his Vice President. For the longest time, Mr. Ryan's Twitter handle was @PaulRyanVP. After he lost, he kept it for a while; too long, really. Joe Biden's^[3] Twitter handle is @JoeBiden. Do you see the problem?

Shortly after the election, I changed my Twitter name to @IanDonovanVP in mockery of Ryan. Hell, if we're all appointing ourselves titles, I may as well do the same. I'm no less the Vice President than he is! How could I not mock him? Look at him. Dude needs to be knocked down a peg.^[4]

RUN, GRANDMA, HE'S GOT A BOW

He's listening to Kenny Loggins 

So on Saturday, I went to check if Mr. Ryan had changed his name back. On my phone, I searched for "Paul Ryan" and saw that the Verified Account at the top was named @RepPaulRyan. I figured, "Oh, he changed his name back," and looked at his Tweets. Weirdly, he only follows one account -- The National Debt, which has a Twitter, apparently -- and all of his Tweets were from before the election. I thought, "Oh, that's weird; his campaign must've scrubbed up his account, deleting all of the election stuff . . . AND UNFOLLOWING MITT ROMNEY OH MY GOD AHHHHH" and I sent out this bad boy:

.@reppaulryan changed his name back AND HE UNFOLLOWED @mittromney

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 25, 2012

As you should expect from a nobody like me with so few followers, nothing happened. I think two of my friends^[5] favorited it. Basically no reaction; my poop jokes usually garner the same amount of activity. I moved on, sort of. The next day -- so, yesterday -- I tried again. My goal was to have more people see it. It was a Funny Thing I Found On The Internet.

This bears repeating: Paul Ryan unfollowed Mitt Romney. That is hilarious.

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 25, 2012

The world exploded.^[6] I don't know who, but somebody with a decent following decided to re-tweet^[7] my update. After that, it snowballed. People kept on passing it along. "Look at this," they said. "This kid wrote a thing." Eventually, it was shared by Mia Farrow, some dude from CNBC, and Chris Hayes of MSNBC. Shit blew up, is what I'm trying to say.

I was on the train back to Boston from NJ after Thanksgiving before it got truly big. I looked at the Twitter app on my phone and saw a Favstar^[8] notification about "Congrats on your 100-star Tweet!" and I said, "Oh no, something terrible has happened." I checked the Interactions and that "This bears repeating" Tweet had around 300 retweets. For the next few hours, the app was constantly showing new activity. Every time I checked the Interactions tab, I'd see, "So-and-so and 15 other people retweeted . . ." I was jazzed.

GUYS WTF THAT TWEET BLEW UP

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

Shout out to whoever started this avalanche of Interactions. Looks like I have to be funny now.

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

I wrote more jokes about it during the day. I was excited; my Tweet was trending,^[9] for chrissakes. Justin Bieber trends.

Then came the haters. I don't remember the exact like timeline of when these guys started coming out of the woodwork, but people started replying to my Tweets in a pretty haterish manner. Some of my favorites:

This woman apparently dislikes Mia Farrow:

@iandonovanvp If you consider getting RTed by that train wreck some great achievement, I feel sorry for you.

— Melissa E. (@DreadfulPenny81) November 26, 2012

@iandonovanvp Moron!

— Jay McHue (@jinx_mchue) November 26, 2012

@iandonovanvpyou sure did make an ass out of yourself over Paul Ryan,thanks for the entertainment

— belinda henry (@belinda_henry) November 26, 2012

Belinda, I make an ass out of myself literally all of the time on Twitter. Like 90% of what I post is about how I love such-and-such Taylor Swift song or "Hey, guys, I farted just now. Isn't that something." Why you gotta be so mean?

Around 10:00 PM, this article was posted on the Web. It is not inaccurate in that everything they posted, well, I said all those things. They cut some things out, though, to better fit the narrative they wanted,^[10] which was really interesting. I had never been the subject of a story before. I know the entire tale of what happened, so it's neat to see those events shaped into a Piece Of Journalism.

Speaking of journalism, Buzzfeed can go fuck itself.^[11] Once my Tweet hit its apex (give or take), a Buzzfeed journo named Micah Grimes mentioned me and how what I said actually wasn't true.^[12] I chimed in, crediting them and explaining exactly what my motives were:

@micahgrimes @ethanklapper I saw the Rep account didn't follow; I thought the VP was a name change, not a separate account. Whoops.

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

Then I wrote a joke to Alex Prewitt, my friend -- in a Tweet not directed at Mr. Grimes, mind you -- about how I was rolling in a pit of Twitter fame:

@alex_prewitt Too late I'm bathing in faves/RTs and followers HI HATERZ

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

For which I was called a "tool."

.@ethanklapper, I take it back. Dude's a tool -> RT @iandonovanvp@alex_prewitt Too late I'm bathing in faves/RTs and followers HI HATERZ

— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) November 26, 2012

The state of online journalism:

Buzzfeed headline: College kid tweets without fact-checking, makes dick jokes. More at 11.

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

I just saw this one now, and it's actually hysterical. This person called me ugly and then favorited his own Tweet.

@iandonovanvp Only 1 person Hating! Look in the ugly mirror!

— Jimmie Musu Garcia(@AgnesphAgnes) November 26, 2012

Anyway, yeah. Oh, and here are some more Tweets I wrote about this whole thing:^[13]

DONT RT ME IF YOU AINT FOLLOW ME SMH

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

"This kid wrote a wrong thing about Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. He also talks about penises. Follow." - Roughly 100 of you.

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

What's a "libtard" and why are so many old white ladies shouting it at me

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

Joe Biden kicked Obama out of his G+ hangout!! Omg!*everyone showers me in roses, children cheer*

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

Turning off email notifications was the best decision I ever made, and I've super-sized a McFlurry

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

And lastly:

.@realdonaldtrump did u hear about paul ryan unfollowing mitt romney

— Ian Donovan (@IanDonovanVP) November 26, 2012

No response yet from The Donald himself, but someone else chimed in:

@iandonovanvp this is a lie.Typical lying lib.

— Kristye(@Kristye4) November 27, 2012

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[1] I wish my name were something like Rick so I could be all, "This is a Rick-tatorship!"↩

[2] He knows how senior citizens love coupons, so he was gonna replace Medicare with vouchers. EXTREME!↩

[3] Who is aka the ACTUAL Vice President.↩

[4] And if anyone is to do it, it's me, a snarky college graduate.↩

[5] AFM and JH, I think.↩

[6] This is untrue. A figure of speech.↩

[7] This is like "Sharing" a Facebook update. The idea is that this person showed my tweet to his or her (almost certainly many) followers.↩

[8] A series of bots to tell you when your Tweets reach various numbers of favorites: 50, 100, 250, 500, etc.↩

[9] "Trending" is when a phrase becomes popular on Twitter. In this case, it was "Paul Ryan unfollowed Mitt Romney." Twitter keeps a list of its currently-trending phrases, only adding to their popularity.↩

[10] This, I think, is that a Crazed Idiot Liberal Tweets Lie, Brainless Morons Believe It. The goofy part is that nothing about my Tweets indicated that I was liberal. I could've voted for Romney -- stop laughing! -- and still written those things. Regardless of my allegiance, Paul Ryan unfollowing his old running mate on Twitter is funny. I wonder what their breakup song would be?↩

[11] Earmuffs, Grandma.↩

[12] This, to his credit, is absolutely right. The @PaulRyanVP account is separate from @RepPaulRyan, though both are verified. Can one person have two verified accounts? Is that allowed? Huh. Anyway, the VP one still exists and it still follows Mitt. The Rep one never followed Mitt.↩

[13] Really all of this is an excuse to pimp my faux-wit.↩

Infinite Jest #11

Entry Eleven

The Quebecois have a reverse-Medusa myth called L'Odalisque de Sainte Thérese -- I don't know how to make l'accent grave -- where anyone who looks it in the face becomes a bunch of diamonds and jewels (this as opposed to being turned to stone, which is not exactly the reverse of jewels, but okay) and DFW makes a point of mentioning it a bunch of times: Steeply and Marathe mention its parallels to The Entertainment and they talk about Himself's weird movie where a Medusa and The Odalisk have a like hour-long fight scene, which they view as some kind of comedic thing.

Mirrors: Effective against mythical beasts and babies

Joelle is the Odalisk, only real. Obviously (well, maybe not obviously; I can't rule out supernatural creatures in a book like this) L'Odalisque isn't a real tangible monster any more than dragons or fairies are but Joelle is (A) real and (B) the human equivalent of a creature that freezes people with her beauty. She claims that that's why she wears a veil: Her beauty is so striking and thorough that people see her face and cease having the will to do anything other than stare at it forever. I don't know if that's entirely true, but I can think of two reasons why it would be the case and two why it wouldn't be:

1. She worked with Himself in the making of The Entertainment, so I can only assume she's the star of the thing. The samizdat does actually consume people entirely, so there's a point in her favor.
2. Her work as Madame Psychosis puts Mario into a similar state -- maybe not Frozen With Pleasure, but the kid can relax and go to sleep -- so maybe her "power" is transmitted, albeit in a watered-down fashion, through her voice.
3. Presumably she didn't wear the veil while dating Orin or before making The Entertainment; did her power only surface during the making of the film? Is it possible that the movie itself is what gave her the ability to freeze people with just how gorgeous she is? No one got frozen in real life, pre-samizdat? Really?
4. Avril once threw acid at her face and Wallace describes Joelle as an "acid-dodger extraordinaire," but he may be being ironic, kind of like how you'd call a guy who gets punched in a nose a professional boxer.

Anyway Joelle and Gately have a nice conversation about a guy who shoots another guy in a bar for "making him small in front of his girl." I like Gately a lot because he seems like a genuine fella who's made mistakes, but it's always weird to read the weird shit he's seen and lived. I completely forgot that he killed a man by suffocating him via a gag when he (the man, Gately's robbery victim) couldn't breathe through his nose on account of a cold. I also really like it when he gets flustered when talking to Joelle or Geoffrey Day with their insane vocabularies and syntax. He's almost acting as a voice for the reader: "And jesus here she goes again talking like an English teacher."

Randy Lenz kills a lot of animals and it makes me uncomfortable, probably even moreso than the man-turned-rotisserie-chicken of however many chapters ago. Something about suffocating cats in trash bags, lighting them (the cats) on fire -- though the one that ran after him was kind of funny -- and luring dogs with meatloaf before cutting their throats bothers me a lot.

YOU WILL TASTE REVENGE, LENZ

Rodney Tine, a USOUS official, measures his penis constantly. I do not know what this represents.

What in the hell are Avril and John Wayne doing? Were they gonna do it? Make a sex? Why are they dressed as a (nude) football player and a cheerleader? Is Avril into roleplaying as her son's life? What the shit is going on? Pemulis walks in on them and kills it with his Best Lines Ever:

I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting.
I predict this'll take about two minutes at most.

Pemulis's face when

The scene with Hal lying on his bed is great, too. Pemulis pops his head in and asks if Hal's eaten; Hal says, "The beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree." Pemulis leaves. Then Wayne pops his head into Hal's room, says nothing at all, just stands there for two minutes, and then leaves. Amazing.

"Hey, erm, Hal, me and your Mom, uh . . ."

Every time a chapter (section?) has an overlong title like "SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D.W. GATELY . . . " I do a little dance because I know it's going to be a treat.

David Foster Wallace writes sex scenes in a way that confuses my genitalia.

There's a blind kid at the Academy and he's actually really good, so a few of the other students begin wearing blindfolds in a like zen attempt to heighten their other senses. Pemulis gets a hold of one, a blindfold-wearer, and this poor kid just has to pee and he wants someone to lead him to the bathroom and Pemulis talks his ear off about various topics -- all this time the boy doing a pee-pee dance -- and they discuss the possibility of Pemulis maybe securing some of the lad's urine to sell on the black market.

I think Pemulis might be my favorite character, actually. It's probably between him and Don W. Gately and maybe Hal but Pemulis stars in most of my favorite sections. I don't know anything about him, like where he's from or what his deal is or anything, but the dude's a jokester.

Four More Books!

I knew how to read prior to this summer's Book-a-Thon^[1] and I did use that skill before writing about it on the World Wide Web.^[2] Here's a list of a few of the books I remember enough that I must've enjoyed them. Unlike other posts, I'm not going to go back to the source material, so there's a good chance that most of what I say about these will be outright false.

• The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman. It's his second novel and it's much better than the first.^[3] It's about a guy who has a special paint that makes him invisible, and he uses it to watch people. He'll go in your house, sit in the corner for like four days, and watch your life. I read it over a week during senior year, concurrent with working -- real creepy story and the pages turn quickly.
• I Drink For A Reason by David Cross^[4]. I looked at that link just now and you can get it from Amazon for $5.60, which is a total steal. It's a series of essays and memoirs and fictional satirical memoirs written by one of the more daring comics in the biznizz. The true masterpiece is his open letter to Larry The Cable Guy, available on YouTube in two parts HERE and HERE. It's one of the best takedowns in recent memory. Apply a cold rag to the burned area, "Larry."
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman is a really neat look at one of the world's brightest minds. He reminds me of my grandfather, if my grandfather had a Ph.D in physics and worked on the Manhattan Project. Watch him talk about magnets. Now imagine that style of explanation applied to telling neat stories about his time in college picking up women^[5] and pleding a fraternity. There's really neat historical stuff about the making of The Bomb, too. I dunno. Guy's one of my Science Heroes.
• Simon Pegg's Nerd Do Well. Simon Pegg is my favorite comedic actor -- Spaced^[6], Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, the upcoming The World's End -- and he (co)writes every good thing he stars in. Makes sense that I'd like his book. It wasn't great -- his professional acting career (i.e., his life from 1999 to the book's present) gets maybe 10% of the page space in favor of more childhood reminiscences -- but it's definitely worth a read if you're curious about Pegg's early life. The bit where he meets George Romero^[7] is a neat I-admire-your-work-no-I-admire-YOUR-work moment.

I'm still reading Infinite Jest and I'll write about it eventually. Things are happening.

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[1] More of a Book-a-Sisyphean-Trudge now, thanks to Infinite Jest.↩

[2] Trenchant!↩

[3] Downtown Owl is okay, and I say that as a fan of his. "Owl" has a huge problem where all of the characters -- high-schoolers, mostly -- talk in exactly the same detached, ironic fashion; they sound like the author. The Visible Man doesn't have that issue because (A) there are far fewer characters -- the story revolves around the Visible Man and his psychiatrist -- and (B) literally everyone shouted at Klosterman about the problem, so he consciously changed his style.↩

[4] Perhaps best known as Dr. Tobias Funke on Arrested Development.↩

[5] SPOILER ALERT: Feynman was a total ladies' man. (Also let me randomly plug Father John Misty's "Only Son Of The Ladiesman.")↩

[6] This is my favorite show. TV in the UK works differently (and I'd say better) than in the US, so they "only" did 14 episodes, but it's a perfect series about "life-wasting" Gen Xers. Pegg and Jessica Stevenson wrote it and star in it, Edgar Wright (who directed those three movies, too) directs it, Nick Frost is another main character, it's just great. Shaun Of The Dead is its like spiritual successor.↩

[7] Director of the old ". . . Of The Dead" films, father of the Zombie Movie.↩

Infinite Jest #10

Entry Ten

Gately's in charge of cooking at the House, and one night he boils up some hot dogs and there's some rumblings of "I'd rather not" from Joelle van Dyne, so he goes to drive to some Whole Foods hippy thing and pick up some greens. He drives through Inman Square, which means DFW describes my neighborhood for like a whole page. Dude's talking about driving down Prospect, turning, going past Ryle's Jazz Club, and c.

So he's driving and he drives past a video shop run by some dudes and the AFR shows up, looking for their copy of The Entertainment. Poor guys didn't even know they had it, but les Assassins knew, and they showed up with a vengeance. They kill one guy by driving a train spike into his eye -- that isn't really described, though: It's more of a "Oh, shit, my brother's at the table with a train spike driven into his eye!" The other one, though, fuck.

One assassin clubs the fella's knee so he kneels to their height, and another asks him where the video is. He really doesn't know what they're talking about -- the store's a mess, videos all over the place (though this may have been exacerbated by the AFR coming in and rummaging) and there's like no inventory system -- but they don't care. The guy had been carrying a broom, sweeping up the shop, and one end had been whittled to a point. He had weaponized it, is what I'm saying. So the one assassin grabs him by the hair and pulls his head back so he's looking straight up, and another one takes the broom and pushes it through his mouth, down through his internal organs -- this is described really slowly and thoroughly, by the way; I'm curious as to its anatomical accuracy, given how the different nerve endings are named and something, like, pops inside him so he tastes blood -- and out the (erm) other end.

He doesn't die right off the bat, either. I mean, he might as well be dead, as he's been made into a rotisserie and he's immobile, but he stays alive for a few seconds, choking and bleeding shit into himself. Ugh.

There's also a long section in here where Himself is writing some sort of memoir -- it actually is from a collection of short autobiographical essays of famous directors, if you read the endnote -- about moving a bed with his father. It's written in an entirely different style. It's not like the Roy Tony ebonics sections, where the difference is more clear; it's just another, like, "valid" kind of writing.

This happens near page 500. By this point, we're around halfway done with Infinite Jest. We sort of know DFW's bag of tricks, or at least we've been exposed to most of them. Prior to this section, though, I had forgotten a little bit what "normal" or at the very least non-postmodern (modern?) prose looked like. For a while, there aren't end notes. People don't reference weird mathematical formulas. It's like a section from another book by another author, which is the point, because Himself wrote this. I guess what I'm saying is that Wallace is capable of writing a 12-page chapter through the hands of one of his fictional characters and have it be (A) totally different and (B) like a critically-acclaimed book I'd have read in high school.

Roy Tony scares Ken Erdedy into receiving his hug.

I think both Steeply (USOUS) and Marathe have copies of the samizdat, since they talk about both having lost people to its viewing. Force of will is irrelevant. The Entertainment always wins.

Moms leads an "anti-diddling" seminar with the young girls in the ETA while Hal, Axford, and Pemulis wait to be punished / murdered for the Eschaton incident. They're sitting and waiting for Hal's Uncle Charles Travis -- the headmaster of the ETA, now, after Himself's microwave suicide -- to finish talking to some unfortunate 7 year-old girl who's been admitted to the Academy on account of her being ranked something like 30th in the country in Girls' 12's. C.T. gives her the spiel about "We will break you down and rebuild you as a stronger tennis player," and he mentions something like, "We'll take your head apart and implant the force of will . . ." and the girl starts crying because she's afraid she's about to be murdered.

Hal, Axford, and Pemulis enter Travis's office and he ominously has the door close behind them. Shit's about to GO DOWN, SON.

Infinite Jest #9

Entry Nine

I've read over 100 pages since the last time I wrote so I'm going to do two posts again.

Fish soup. Marathe and Steeply talk about fish soup forever. They're going on about the whole freedom to / freedom from dichotomy and Steeply says something to the effect of, "Americans are motivated to acquire pleasure for themselves," and Marathe says, "Well, what is to stop you from hurting others to reach that goal? What if your pleasure is only attainable by preventing the pleasure of another?" And then they talk about splitting a can of soupe aux pois for approximately four hours.

"Ah, but yes, let's say it is just you and I, and it is a Single Serving Size of la spoupe."
"We'd split it. That's an American invention, by the way, the S.S.S."
"You are insatiable for this soupe; a half-serving will only infuriate you, teasing your hunger."
"Well then we'd bid on the soup, and the winner would pay the other person the money, and then he'd go to the store and buy more soup."
"This is the only soup. There is no more soup."

It's mostly about how people will choose to watch The Entertainment, even knowing that it may kill them, because the curiosity will eat them up inside.

I was wrong about that Clipperton kid killing himself, by the way. I mean, he does totally kill himself, but it's not because he loses. To the contrary, he wins a ton and becomes a like national phenomenon. He's not ranked #1 in the country, though, because all of his wins are sort of negated on account of the terroristic threats, and being ranked first is all he wanted (probably). But then the person in charge of junior tennis in the USA retires or is fired or whatever and a new guy comes in from left field, unaware that Clipperton is batshit insane and holding his life hostage to win matches. Dude looks at Clipperton's undefeated -- aka "Still Alive" -- record and says, "Well, shit, he's got to be number one," and Clipperton can't take it, the pressure, and drops out of whatever academy he was in and falls off the face of the Earth for a while. He shows up at the ETA and demands -- begs, too -- to talk to Himself about (re?)admission to the Academy and so Mario brings him in and he sits down with him a while and Himself comes in and Clipperton pulls his gun out and blows his own brains out onto the walls. Some junior players just can't handle the pressure.

Gately cleans shit and semen from another halfway house in the mornings as a job. It's pretty gross how these guys have a Jizz Corner where they go and just mercilessly have at their own genitals.

Subsidized Time was put in place by President Gentle to solve a financial crisis. Turns out people want a lot of social programs paired with virtually no taxation. Who knew. Demand their leaders sign pledges not to raise taxes. Truly a nightmare dystopian world.

Whole lotta tennis in this section -- lots of tennis drills, more accurately -- and it was much worse than anything I did on the baseball team in high school. I played baseball in high school -- ladies -- and this conditioning is much worse. (I was also really slow and awful, athletically, so my memories of conditioning are bound to be skewed negative.) Lots of running, hitting balls, sprinting back, running some more, drinking Gatorade out of paper cones, doing insane wind-sprints where you're basically like expected to vomit at the end.

More to the point, I don't know what this part of the book has to do with anything. Is it weird that I'm not entirely sure what this story is about? At work, people will ask me what it's about, what's going on with the story, and my best way to answer is to say, "There are three separate story threads right now -- a tennis academy, a halfway house, and this league of assassins in wheelchairs -- and I'm not sure how they're going to come together. I don't know if they will come together." I'm now seeing that that's actually a decent synopsis of the book that you could put on the back with a big picture of my stupid face but, like, why is there all this tennis stuff? What's advanced, plot-wise, by reading about the Tap-And-Whack drill? Is advancing the plot even the point? I feel like it isn't. Maybe something with Hal's ankle? Maybe he'll smoke way too much marijuana on account of the ankle pain and end up in the Enfield House.

BIG NEWS re: the Entertainment. Apparently there was some sort of study where scientists (it's always the damn scientists) prodded some part of a brain that unleashes insane endorphins and then they hooked the prod up to a lever -- this was through some sort of light electrostimulus -- so the mice/cats/dogs/dolphins could unleash the pleasure (HIYOOO) on themselves and then that's totally all they did. Each animal died because they'd only push the lever. Moved up the food chain, too, and each one killed itself, basically, for the sake of the pleasure. They moved to humans and said, "HEY SERIOUSLY THIS MIGHT KILL YOU," and people showed up in droves. Took off work for this thing. And so back to the "Humans are incapable of resisting things they want, even when those things can kill them."

That's probably what the book is about, actually.

"Hey Ian, what's Infinite Jest about?"
"I dunno; did you see they've got Freaks And Geeks on Netflix now? I watched the whole thing this weekend."

Eschaton

Infinite Jest: Eschaton

Eschaton is too cool of a part of the book -- and it's too niche, too deep of a thing -- for me to include it in another already sort of-long post. The idea is that now it's isolated so I can write more about it without making anyone feel too tired because "I just want to get an overview of the plot and why is he writing all of this garbage about a game that does not and can not exist."

Eschaton is a game the students in the Enfield Tennis Academy play every Interdependence Day. Michael Pemulis perfected it and, as such, he is the Best Player Ever. His moves are the stuff of legend. As a senior student, he doesn't play anymore -- the game is generally reserved for younger kids, though it's by no means for children -- and has stepped into a sort of Overseer role. He has veto power over calculations, but not rulings; those are reserved for the God player, a kid named Lord.

The general idea of Eschaton is as follows: God thinks up some sort of Doomsday Scenario for the players to react to. They form teams, representing various factions -- LIBSYR, SOVWAR, REDCHI, SOUTHAF, INDPAK, though these are never really clarified -- and each faction gets a bucket of tennis balls, each yellow fuzzy sphere representing a 5-megaton nuclear warhead. Eschaton is played over six tennis courts, and factions take turns lobbing the tennis balls -- Eschaton is permitted to survive at the ETA because it requires actual tennis skill -- onto various objects strewn about the courts (territories). A shirt can represent a radio tower, for instance. The winner of Eschaton is the faction that sports the highest damage given / damage taken ratio.

During this time, God is running around with a cart with a computer in it. He's calculating destruction dealt, keeping track of the ratios, and doing all sorts of complex math. He also wears one of a few different beanies to reflect the general mood of the game at any given time.

Eschaton is, I think, a perfect microcosm for what Infinite Jest is all about stylistically. I would almost recommend reading this section -- roughly 25 pages long -- before committing to reading all of Infinite Jest. If it were available as a separate essay for Kindles or something (not unlike how the John McCain essay from Consider The Lobster is available for $1.99), I would definitely tell you to plop down the money and give it a shot before plunging into the deep end. It's sort of perfect.

Why? Why is it representative of the book as a whole? In these twenty-odd pages, you get a taste of everything to love (or hate) about Infinite Jest. Sure, you don't get introduced to the AFR or the Recovery House, and the characters you do meet are transient and don't develop any real relationships with one another, but the section pretty clearly goes through the range of emotions one runs through while reading the book proper.

First, it starts with esoteric abbreviations that are either (A) explained once and then abbreviated every other time or (B) never explained because you understand that it stands for some sort of warring group of countries and the specifics don't matter. Then you hit a mother fucking endnote about the Mean Value Theorem For Integrals. It's, like, a calculus proof. There are graphs in the back of the book. I am not joking. You read how God calculates the scores and stuff, and you see this superscript above Mean Value Theorem and you say, "Oh, this shouldn't be too bad," and you get hit with a like postmodern math textbook for a while and you start getting pissed off but then you realize it's written pretty wonderfully: Pemulis, a math guy, is explaining the Theorem to Hal, an English guy, so that he (Hal) can transcribe it; Hal interjects in Pemulis's long-winded speech and puts "sic" everywhere because fuck Pemulis and his math bullshit, the guy can't even write, and it ends with "P.S. Wolf spiders ruleth the land," which is just the most badass sentence ever.

So the kids are playing this game and it's incredibly dense. There's negotiation talks, the abbreviations get worse (SACPOP, which I'm now noticing "went total SACPOP on" is a synonym for "beat" we see in the Sports Report) and now the abbreviations are interacting with each other -- e.g., "LIBSYR has no choice but to SACPOP REDCHI lest they lose the MAMA" -- and it's incredibly frustrating and then there's a "2 [pi symbol] / (1 / total Toronto area in m^2)" just hanging out in the main text and you're thinking there's just no way this is important.

But it takes a turn. Somewhere along the line, you get used to it. You accept that this is how it's going to be. You laugh when that poor bastard is high on 'drines and falls out of his chair for what feels like an hour. Hal smokes weed in public -- a rare feat, as he likes the secrecy of getting high in secret almost as much as he likes the getting high -- and he's trying to spit his chewing tobacco at the same time but it just isn't happening. The pages turn more readily, and then something amazing happens.

The kids become kids again. Two teams are negotiating and one kid takes a tennis ball and hits it right into a girl's head. She's furious. You can't hit a person, she's on the map, but not the terrain! Like, yes, the court is the map, and the shirts are on the map, but they're actually on the terrain, which is why you can hit them. The players' invulnerability is a like pre-axiom that makes Eschaton possible. And then the girl breaks free and starts spiking tennis balls at the kid who hit her. Other players smell blood in the water and follow suit.

Then they start fighting. Children, pretending to be heads of state during a nuclear war, are having knuckle-dragging brawls on the tennis courts.

God takes his white beanie off and puts on the red one on, the one with the little propeller, and he starts flicking the propeller because this is a "worse-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type-situation." All of this is written as though a reporter on the sidelines is relaying the action. No one speaks directly. Action after action and jesus god he is running around, flicking this pinwheel on his beanie, "Stop! Help!" How funny is that.

Eschaton makes the transformation from esoteric game that hurts you when you try to read about it to an incredibly vibrant, funny section that flows like water. In those twenty pages, it evolves just like the book itself does.

AND IT'S THE BASIS OF A MUSIC VIDEO BY THE DECEMBERISTS! HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT?

Infinite Jest #8

Entry Eight

TURNS OUT JOELLE VAN DYNE ISN'T DEAD, GUYS. My bad. I really thought she was dead after her coke binge in that bathroom but she is very much alive. She's in the Boston AA and now I think I'm starting to see how these characters are melding together. See, Joelle starred in a bunch of Himself's movies -- including Infinite Jest -- so she's the link between the halfway house and the ETA family. She takes some umbrage with one of AA's slogans, "But by the grace of God," and Gately is totally prepared with a well-rehearsed agnostic-pleasing reply, something to the effect of, "Well, 'God' here is whatever Higher Power you choose -- pick Satan, Thor, whatever you want," but J.D. smacks him upside the head with, "No. It's subjunctive, a counterfactual, and can only make sense when introducing a conditional clause." She complains about the poor prescriptivist grammar.

In an AA meeting, a woman goes through a horrid account of her childhood. It is the most disturbing thing I have ever read; worse than The World According To Garp. It's truly vile and fucked up. Read it yourselves, I'm not going to go into it too heavily, but it involves the molestation of the disabled. (Differently-able? Handi-capable?)

The woman Orin is interviewing with for Moment is named Helen Steeply, aka Hugh Steeply, the USOUS operative. Now everything is coming together, some 40% into the book.

Lyle is like a Buddha in the Enfield Tennis Academy. He hangs out in the weight room and will listen to your problems and give you life advice if you let him lick the sweat off of your body. It is weird and I doubt he's getting his necessary nutrition, but the kids don't seem to mind.

Mario made a puppet movie however long ago and everyone at the ETA watches it each Interdependence Day. This is how Wallace decides to explain how O.N.A.N came to form, and it works pretty well. It's a relatively natural (yet still zany -- a puppet show?!) way to introduce a ton of of the world's history. In short, a man named Gentle is elected President by making everyone extremely germophobic. He cleans up the US and basically forces Mexico and Canada to join it in some sort of Super-Pac. He plans on launching waste into space.

There's a long string of newspaper headlines (many of them funny) that explain (I think) chronologically the formation of O.N.A.N. He even creates a headline writer who stays constant for a few of them, a guy who writes too-long headlines and keeps shuffling from one paper to another as he gets fired.

Oh, there's some film theory, too. Light stuff (anticonfluentialism??) that mostly documents Himself's work a bit further. He created the pinnacle of neorealism, something he called Found Drama as a way to get back at his critics. The idea is that he'd take a page out of the White Pages and tape it to a wall. He'd throw a dart at it, and whatever name the dart landed on, that person became the star of his Found Drama. Thing is, he didn't know he was the star. Additionally, no one knew the plot of the Found Drama. You wouldn't make an attempt to find this person; anything the star was doing was the plot of the movie, only you didn't know what it was and he didn't know it was even a movie. There's no audience. What's realer than that?

OH and a bit about a tennis player who wins several tournaments by threatening to kill himself on whatever court he's defeated on. Plays matches with one hand holding his racket, the other holding a gun at his temple. Eventually, someone does beat him and he totally kills himself in front of everyone.

A bit about the rise of TPs and the entertainment system currently run in O.N.A.N. It's a lot like what we have for On-Demand television, only it encompasses all known forms of visual entertainment. Sports, movies, TV, plays, anything you want to see, right there on your TP. Hal wrote an essay about the downfall of the advertising industry; all TPs can skip over any content the viewer doesn't want to see, so ads disappear. Eventually, magazines have dozens of those pull-out cards to try to recuperate the revenue.

Marathe and Steeply are talking again. I'm on p. 424.

Infinite Jest #7

Entry Seven

I went to New York this weekend (pre-Sandy) to see Louis CK live at the NY City Center with my biffle (kill me) so I had some time to read on the bus. I probably could've read more if I didn't have such a shitty inclination towards car-sickness when reading. The ride down was at night and the bus light was pretty dim, so I probably only read for half the trip; doesn't help that Infinite Jest has some tiny text (and even smaller in endnotes!) on large pages. My head hurts thinking about it. Coming back was a bit brighter, though, so I read more then.

I am on page 418, which means I have read 112 pages since the last time I wrote on this admittedly-deteriorating blog. This is not true, as this particular part of the novel is rife with endnotes: Three of them span multiple pages each, and one is essentially a whole chapter. I'll write about ~50 pages now and the other ~50 pages in a separate post. Woooooo0oo0o0o0oo.

So there are easier classes at ETA taught by prorectors, who are often washed up semi-pros. One of 'em is having an exam today, and during the exam, there's a Sports Report over the school radio where the announcer (a student, Jim Troeltsch) cycles through the various games played since the last Report -- this can be a large number, as the Tennis Academy often travels and plays many games without a new Report, so they can be quite long, the Reports -- but he's a bit of a thesaurus nut so he sprinkles his speech with all of the synonyms for "beat" and "was beat by," so this turns into another hilarious portion of Infinite Jest that includes phrases like "hopped up and down on the thorax of," "made Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in the same room together," "spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down," and c.

Mario is a thoroughly disfigured dude, but he's taken up his father (Himself)'s mantle re: filmmaking and he's pretty good behind the ol' lens. He made a puppet movie, but I'll get to that later.

Remember Marathe, the Quebecois Assassin, and Steeply, the Canadian quadruple-agent? I fucking hope you do because there's some REAL PLOT going on with the Entertainment. The AFR (Assassins des Fauteuils-Rollents) either have or are threatening to have a copy of the Entertainment aka Infinite Jest aka the Samizdat and their plot is to release it into America as a strike against O.N.A.N. They (the Quebecois separatists) want out of O.N.A.N, see -- if you're confused, you can refer to the chapter-long endnote featuring a discussion between Orin and Hal re: the merits and motives of the Separatist mission, particularly why they would switch from "We want out of Canada" to "We want Canada out of O.N.A.N." -- and they're going to release the Entertainment into America because Americans have been trained to love Freedom and partake in its bounty as often as possible. The idea is that Americans will be unable to know the film exists and NOT watch it, so they'll all cave in and die. No one wants hundreds of millions dead and like what does Quebec offer anyway.

Then there's mother fucking Eschaton. Listen, I'm going to write a whole separate post about Eschaton, but suffice it to say that that part was my favorite part of the book so far, maybe. Okay. The post about Eschaton is HERE.

Back on Quebecois Separatism real quick: Orin and Hal discuss it because Orin is doing an ostensibly light fluff piece for Moment magazine about his life and how he dealt with Himself's death. I think I wrote about it a bit before; Orin called Hal in the past to learn how to be sad about Himself's killing himself by microwaving his head, and now he's called him again to brush up on the Separatist movement. He wants to seem deep and learned so he may make sex on his interviewer.

Then there's a pretty long chapter about Boston AA and their Group dynamic. It's probably hindsight bias -- I've read a bit about DFW's life before and after he wrote this book, but I haven't picked up his biography, which I will eventually read -- but it feels like something only someone who's been through the Program could've written. There's also a fucking hysterical passage where a man with an Irish brogue describes his first solid bowel movement after being "a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b'yond contin'." It was sort of hard to read at first, like the original few Poor Tony passages, but it became easier when I adopted an Irish accent in my head. Zany.

Space!!

I read The Sirens Of Titan over a month ago (maybe even two months ago) so I don't remember much in the way of specifics. This phenomenon -- this not remembering details -- usually indicates that one did not enjoy the thing he or she is trying to remember,^[1] but that is not the case with Sirens. I loved it.

Sirens is about a dude named Malachi Constant; he's a millionaire playboy, the richest man in America at the time the novel takes place. Throws sick parties.^[2] He's invited to see an Appearing by a space-traveler man, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who can (sort of) teleport over vast galactic distances and predict the future; he dematerializes, gets whisked away to say Titan and chills there for a bit, then comes back. Rinse, repeat.

So Rumfoord owns a spaceship, and he sends Malachi to Mars in it. Malachi's memory is wiped out and he is known only as Unk; he repeatedly tries to remember where he came from and who he is, but he (and everyone else on Mars) is under radio control. He's broken free and gone searching for his past something like seven times, but each time ends with his memory being erased more aggressively.

There aren't any stereotypical Martians on Mars: No green men with big heads or anything, just ex-Earth people. They're all in an Army and they're going to attack Earth. (Rumfoord is behind this entire operation.) They train for a bit (but not long enough) and launch their assault. It does not go well. They have far too few soldiers for the job^[3] and they're divided over a huge number of ships. To their credit, their first assault is successful: They manage to overthrow the couple of people on the moon and claim it as their own. As a "Warning Strike," they fire some rockets at the Earth that get burned up in the atmosphere. Earth, in retaliation, destroys the moon with like twenty nukes.^[4]

The Martian Army does not back down and keeps sending their ships to Earth, each one carrying like 50 soldiers and landing many, many miles away from one another. In the American South, farmers await the arrival of smaller ships and dispatch the soldiers themselves. Where actual Earth military is needed, the casualties are entirely on the Martian side. It's a slaughter, but it's a planned one.^[5]

When all of the soldiers are killed, Rumfoord sends the women and children in ships. They, too, are slaughtered -- and Rumfoord appears on Earth and explains that this whole time they've been killing transported Earthlings. Ostensibly, he does this to bind the whole human race together under a common tragedy, which is mostly what happens. He also decides to start a religion, the Church Of God The Utterly Indifferent, which is sort of like Deism.^[6]

In one of my favorite passages, Rumfoord commands that the people listen to him and follow his new religion -- abandoning their old ones -- because he can actually do miracles. He predicts the future, for example, and everything he says totally comes true. His teachings are viewed as more valid because of his actions, which is an awfully slippery slope,^[7] but it's exactly what happens.

The primary tenet of the Church is the adamant belief that no God has chosen us for anything. "Somebody up there likes me" and similar phrases are incredibly offensive, arrogant, and solipsistic. There is no plan.

During this whole thing, Malachi (Unk) is on the Mothership, a much slower, larger vessel with something like thirty years' worth of hot dogs, hamburgers, and soda. He goes to a different planet with glowing things, completely misses the "Oh the horror!" of the Martian genocide, and arrives on Earth well after Rumfoord has established his Church. This is where my memory fails me, but I think Rumfoord's predicted Malachi coming back to Earth, so his prediction is seen as the Big Miracle that convinces everyone completely that he's right. Malachi is then banished to Titan.

On Titan, there is a marooned "alien" explorer named Salo. His ship crashed and it needs a replacement part. He's stuck there for over 200 millenia, and he sends a distress signal to his home planet. His people manipulate human history and make mankind evolve so that they may produce the replacement part. The Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, and other human constructions are simply messages to Salo indicating how much progress has been made towards making the part.

That part is the ship that brings Malachi to Titan. Literally all of human history, everything was predetermined to bring a replacement part to a stranded alien.^[8] Rumfoord was a pawn. Free will doesn't exist.^[9]

Lol.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] The idea being that you don't commit brain-space to things you hate; why remember the backstory of a minor character in a movie you found boring?↩

[2] Pretty sure he wakes up in his drained swimming pool and has his butler recount his evening to him, The Hangover-style. He gives all of his money away, telling everyone to take and sell whatever they can get their hands on.↩

[3] Something like 300,000.↩

[4] This reminded me of the scene in (I think) the first Austin Powers movie where the President threatens to blow up the moon. Yep. Here it is.↩

[5] DUM DUM DUM↩

[6] Sort of like, "Sure, God exists, but it doesn't affect our lives in any way; it's hands-off."↩

[7] If I taught people, for example, that murder was totally justified for any and all reasons, I would be regarded as (A) wrong and (B) insane. The Sirens Of Titan posits that if I made that claim and then levitated in mid-air, people would say, "Oh, this person is clearly a divine being and we must do what he tells us," even when what I say is immoral. Sure is a good thing no omni-benevolent God ever told anyone to do anything bad. That'd be zany.↩

[8] ↩

[9] ↩

Infinite Jest #6

Entry Six

Good news! The Enfield Tennis Academy whooped Port Washington and they all got to have the Denny's Mega Breakfast at 00:30 when the three buses pulled in. I'm pretty sure Mike Pemulis spiked P.W's gatorade or something, though, 'cause one of their (Washington's) players started hallucinating pretty badly mid-match. The tennis balls were too pretty to hit, or something. He's very lewd towards his headmaster's wife. Standard ultra-acid fare.

I think these were the funniest 50 pages of the book I've read, maybe. It's definitely in a groove. I know I've said this before, but the trick with Infinite Jest is to get past the first 200 pages. The first chapter, with Hal's breakdown, is extremely good and accessible, but then it takes a huge dive into what-the-hell-is-this w/r/t its language and diction. I don't know if it's actually taken an upswing back into more mainstream readability or if I've just gotten used to it -- I remember typing this sentence before, nearly verbatim, but I do not care -- but either way it's very enjoyable now.

Anyway this section was hilarious. Of note:

1. Endnote 90, with Geoffrey Day's talk with Don Gately. Day is a newcomer to the Enfield House and I'm pretty sure he's DFW's way of inserting himself into the story a little bit. Day is a professor at a local college (Wallace taught at Emerson and then Illinois State before Infinite Jest) and he has a skeptical attitude towards AA's policies. Most telling, I think, is the way Day talks, though: He's constantly dropping clauses on clauses and using absolutely pretentious and, well, professorial language -- moreso than everyone else. There's an exchange where Day pins AA into a logical corner re: its policy that all who claim to not be dependent on a Substance are in Denial and thus in greater need of rehabilitation and Gately responds with another maxim, "Analysis Paralysis," which is basically a command to not think logically and just do. Day is not pleased.
2. The aforementioned Port Washington kid hallucinating and being escorted off.
3. Repeatedly referring to Joelle as the "Prettiest Girl Of All Time," or "P.G.O.A.T."
4. On one of Orin's punts: 'It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal competitive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during.'
5. Poor Tony's heroin-and-codine withdrawal is very funny (and terrible, considering it ends in him seizing up on the Gray Line) but it has some choice lines, like:

'He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom from whence all the shit came from when he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus.'

and

'In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center's underground Gray Line platform, when the first hot loose load fell out into the baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heel -- he still had only his red high heels with the crossing straps, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide -- Poor Tony closed his eyes against the ants fornicating up and down his arms' skinny length and screamed a soundless interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe.'

Gettin' real dark, guys. Page 307.

Infinite Jest #5

Entry Five

I'm on page 268 because I got into a bit of a groove. Infinite Jest is definitely really, really good. I noticed something about it, too: The descriptive prose is extremely long-winded. (I am aware that for a book like Infinite Jest, that is not exactly a staggeringly astute claim. Hear me out.)

I tune it out, this prose, sort of -- or at least I don't pay as much attention to literally page-long paragraphs about the wind in Boston that day -- which I think is human nature, or some sort of learned behavior where generally things that progress the plot are at least partially dialogue. I feel like DFW knows that, maybe, and he's basically saying, "Fuck you, you're hardly reading this anyway since it's not people talking. I'm going to make this very, very esoteric so it still takes you a long time to get through. God, I hate you."

But it's sort of endearing.

Additionally, he really likes tennis. Jesus lord. The section I'm reading now is about a series of tennis matches ETA has with the Port Washington school. It's very long, for there are many matches.

Other things:

• The pseudo-checklist of things one discovers if one spends any time in a half-way house was pretty great and funny. I haven't laughed as much as I thought I would -- Consider The Lobster had some downright hilarious passages -- but every once in a while I read a part like this that makes me laugh. Still extremely dark, though. (It is obviously dark, Ian, you moron, it's about recovering addicts in a shitty house.)
• Hal's insistence on reading The Literature re: this extremely-potent MDMA variant was also funny. The kids are discussing how high they're gonna get and Hal is all, "Yes, I know you've read some papers Online, but have you actually gone to a like medical library?"
• Thanks for the timeline on p. 223, bro. Seriously. I'm gonna be referring to that.
• Madame Psychosis / Joelle van Dyne's suicide was eerie as fuck. Her overdose isn't sensationalized and she dies almost too realistically. I guess I was expecting some sort of passage along the lines of, "She took the drugs and such and such colors overtook her view," but instead it's more, "No, she's extremely ill and she's vomiting blood in the bathtub and now she's fucking dead because drugs will kill you."
• The entire Orin / Hal phone call was amazing. I noticed that DFW will start dialogue and then never again say who is speaking -- it's like a movie script, just lines on lines, but without the speaker's name anywhere -- so it can get sort of confusing re: who's saying what. More than once I had to backpedal through the conversation, saying, "Hal . . . Orin . . . Hal . . . Orin doesn't reply . . . Hal again," but it was great.
• On that note: Are you serious with the microwave suicide, man? Is that shit for real? Probably the zaniest, most haunting death I've read. Himself really wanted out, I guess.

'Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?' 

 

OTTER-PEOPLE

I do not remember any specifics about Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, but I will not let fact-checkers dictate my blog, dammit.^[1] Let's do this thing.

Galapagos was good, but I didn't like it as much as the other Vonnegut books I've read; there wasn't anything wrong with it, but after Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan, it was kind of a disappointment. It was worlds better than anything I've ever produced but, like, meh.

The book is about a cruise ship that sets sail right before a war of some kind in the Pacific^[2] and it unfolds that the voyagers are the last surviving people. They get marooned on an island and every other human dies. I don't know how that comes to pass, actually; is there some sort of nuclear bomb? Does everyone else on Earth die in the war? I think I remember something about food.^[3] Oh, fuck, there's some epidemic that makes people infertile but they aren't exposed to it. That's it. ANYWAY.

So these people^[4] sign up for the Nature Cruise Of The Century, set to go to the Galapagos Islands. Jackie Onassis is supposed to go on this cruise but she doesn't on account of a financial crisis^[5] and then there's the war thing and people get marooned and weird shit goes down. It's like Gilligan's Island mixed with science-fiction.

The story isn't told chronologically, but it sort of is. It's framed, kind of. Like, the narrator is a (SPOLERS) ghost on the ship that runs aground. He was a worker during its construction and something fell and decapitated him, so he died, but he now hangs out as a ghost. He studies humankind and remarks on their "big dumb brains" and things of that ilk. About that, actually: A theme of the book is that our brains are not an evolutionary advantage, but rather an impediment; all our thinking only gets us in trouble.

So the narrator-spectre keeps talking about how this story takes place a million years in the past, in 1986. So he's in the future in some sort of advanced society. In a way, nothing in the story happens in the present; humanity's transformation into otter-people isn't actually described, but rather explained as, "Now, of course, we are much better swimmers." Given enough of those little asides, you piece together exactly what happens, but there isn't any part of the book that goes, "And so this happens right now." It is neat.

Somehow or another, one of the women on the cruise ship is pregnant^[6] but she gives birth to a furry baby. Was it radiation? Might've just been a random mutation.^[7] Anyhoo, this baby's born all furry and shit and people are like, "Oh my god furry baby why is this baby covered in fur." It's intense.

Then there's only one man left on the island and he's sleeping with one of the women, and the woman (GROSS) scoops some of his semen out of her vagina and impregnates a few of the younger girls.^[8] By this time, Furry Baby (whose name is Akiko, I think) has grown up a bit. She gets prodded with the finger-sperm^[9] and gets pregnant, giving birth to a furry baby herself. This kid grows up and has a ton of kids, each one also furry.

Eventually, the only thing to eat on the island is fish, and so the better swimmers get to eat more and they live longer and have more children, etc., etc. This turns into children being born who bear more and more resemblance to otters. Their heads are streamlined to better catch fish hiding between rocks, they swim faster and faster, and each generation continues this trend. Otter-people. I've always liked otters; they eat on their tummies!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] As an aside: The Vice Presidential debate is tomorrow night and I am very, very excited. It's always fun when they let Crazy Joe out of his cage. It's gonna be all, "The Vice President has --" "YOU SHUT YOUR TRAP, YOUNG MAN. I'LL SKIN YOU ALIVE!"↩

[2] Or maybe South America, I honestly have no idea and I'm not going to look it up. This also betrays my fundamental issues with geography, as the answer should be obvious. I do not know where anything is.↩

[3] "These people think they're entitled to food!"↩

[4] I remember literally none of their names, so you will have to excuse my vague wordings.↩

[5] Vonnegut has a pretty neat take on the whole financial crisis thing: It's all a human construction. Money isn't real. We made the whole idea up. Our "big stupid brains" -- this is a larger theme -- can just decide the money is worth more things and then there won't be a crisis. He also says something like, "In our time, we have eradicated financial crises because we don't use money; how can we barter when everyone has his share of fish?"↩

[6] I suppose the "how" of this is not exactly a mystery. It involves doing it. (Sex.)↩

[7] Please never show this book to an evolution-denier. "If evolution is real, how come we don't have fur?"↩

[8] Vonnegut does all of this in a cheeky way. The narrator's dad was a writer, and he (the narrator) says something like, "My father used to write some pretty base, vulgar things in his stories, and so I will something similar to it in mine when I tell you about all this (all things considered, pretty fucking metal) semen transportation."↩

[9] Icky, right?↩

Infinite Jest #4

Entry Four

Guys am I a bad person for thinking this book is difficult? Am I not smart enough? The dialogue flows much easier than the descriptive prose but each page takes me three minutes to read and it's a little frustrating. I'm definitely not getting this book finished on time (going on vacation -- which was amazing -- didn't help) but also maybe I shouldn't be thinking about finishing it in any sort of time frame. Like, maybe part of this experience is accepting that it's going to take some indefinite amount of time to complete. Do you even "complete" Infinite Jest?

I bought a new hardcover copy on Amazon today because I'm going to display it and yell at strangers about how I triumphed over it.

Anyway, I'm on page 200 after not touching it for four days (due to the aforementioned vacation; shout out to J.) and it's still really good. Highlights:

1. Students at the E.T.A take piss tests four times a year, which has spawned a black market for buying and selling the younger kids' urine. It is described (the urine) as "piping hot." I giggled.
2. Himself's dad's tirade about tennis, how to open a garage door, how to handle a flask, how to put a book on the ground, Himself's grandfather, how Himself's dad ruined his knees (and tennis career), his (Himself's dad's) alcoholism, etc. Wow. Really good.
3. Inman Square shout out.
4. Hal makes a documentary about how to survive the E.T.A training regiment.
5. Transcripts of drop-in hours at the Ennet House were dope, too -- the lawyer in particular.
6. Jesus Christ that goddamn radio show with Madame Psychosis. As you'll remember from that many-page endnote detailing James Incandenza's filmography, MP starred in several films back in the day. I do not understand her show, but Mario loves it.
7. A description of the lot on which the Ennet House sits. It's next to a dispensary for workers with stress disorders, a methadone clinic, and a VA hospital, as well as the Enfield Tennis Academy. Not an ideal location for a halfway house.
8. The E.T.A boys lift weights and it is all very homoerotic.

Infinite Jest #3

Entry Three

I'm on p. 151 and the book is picking up. Maybe the first hundred pages were a test, maybe I'm just used to this style of writing by now; either way, it's gotten better, or at least less frustrating. I still don't like the Poor Tony portions, though. I can only take so much in the way of intentional misspellings (Harvard Squar) and grammatical mistakes (youre', were', its'). I'm obviously not someone to critique the guy's style. I wish those parts were more readable, is all. It's cool to see the characters go to places I know; C (before having his eyes pop out of his head from injecting bad dope) wants to Red Line into Chinatown and I was like, "So, you gonna transfer?" and sure enough later on it's all, "And so at the Orangeline Tstop we grab a fat cab for about two blocks from Hung Toys and screw out of the cab at a light and the thing with fat cabbies is they cant' run after you and Poor Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in hiheels . . ."

Also

• Assassins talk about love.
• DFW really, really likes tennis. Hal and the gang discuss how the E.T.A coaches are assholes intentionally so as to give the team a common enemy in a highly individualistic, competitive sport. It keeps them from consciously cannibalizing one another, instead never acknowledging the internal rankings they all know by heart.
• Mario, Hal's older brother, once had a romantic encounter with a large girl referred to as "The U.S.S. Millicent Kent." It reminded me (mildly) of this great Quora thread about dating someone with Asperger Syndrome.
• Orin slyly accuses Hal of incessant masturbation before asking him what he knows about the Canadian Separatist movement.
• A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy, sic.) and its founder. Very similar to (in fact, based on) the halfway house DFW stayed in during his rehabilitation.
• An email recounting this myth.
• The advent of video telephone calls (think Skype) and the reasons why people were uncomfortable with using them, leading to the demise of the industry. (In short, the beauty of audio-only phone calls is their ability to let each participant not pay attention to the other while believing he or she is receiving full attention. Video destroys this illusion.)
• Weirdly, an essay Hal wrote about action heroes.

I don't know how any of this ties into the main plot at all. Is there one? Each "chapter" is basically a short story. Gonna keep on readin'.

Infinite Jest #2

Entry Two

Ughhhhhh why is this book like thisssss ughghhghghahksldahsdlaknc

I read another fifty-six pages (I'm now on p. 105) but I have also read 43 endnotes so in actuality I have read about one thousand pages or however many pages it takes to make a person sigh audibly and ask why exactly he needs to know the chemical composition of various hard drugs ('drines, tranquilizers, MDMA, et. al) or how deep down the Pump Room is on the engineering diagram of the Enfield Tennis Academy -- it's 20 meters down, this Pump Room, well below ground and as such now we must read a description re: the ventilation system used therein -- when reading a novel ostensibly about -- well, actually, I don't know what this book is about; things are happening, but they're all disparate events that haven't yet melded into an overarching narrative but still I have read one hundred and five pages.

Most sentences in Infinite Jest are, at least structurally, like that one. One endnote is a god damn filmography for a character just then-introduced. James Incandenza, aka Himself, is the father of Hal, Mario, and Orin. Hal is a student at the E.T.A., Mario's a bit older and somehow physically disabled, and Orin is the guy with the anxiety and a house full of roaches. I think Hal is probably the "main character" but I don't feel confident in that. ANYWAY, Dr. James Incandenza (a polymath primarily interested in optical physics and mathematics: Don't worry, there are endnotes explaining set theory for the uninitiated) made like a ton of movies and his filmography is listed in the back of the book. It is moderately funny. One of the movies he made is titled Infinite Jest; he tried to make it five times. All copies are "lost," but the fifth one (probably) exists as something known as The Entertainment. I think that's the crux of the book.

The Entertainment is a film that people cannot stop watching. If it's on in your presence, you watch it over and over again, to the neglect of everything else in your life. Eating, drinking, not pissing yourself, every other facility of your daily existence is tossed out the window in favor of watching this film. Eventually, you die. A medical attaché stumbles upon this movie and he -- and everyone else who enters the room before they cut the power, some 23 people, only a few related to the attaché, the rest being policemen and other various kinds -- dies of a slow starvation.

Gately, a drug addict, robs a home. Mid-burglary, the owner exits his room and startles Gately. The owner has a head cold (grippe, as Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents would say) and so when Gately gags him (so he can't shout) he actually winds up preventing the poor guy from breathing at all. Gately finishes robbing, leaves quickly, and the fella dies. Clears a nasal passage temporarily by violently exhaling -- ripping ligaments in his chest -- but then it clogs up again and he's in too much pain to clear the other nostril so he just dies. It's kind of gross but I read The World According To Garp a month ago and as such I am impervious to graphic literature.

Additionally

• Hal gets high in the Pump Room pretty regularly; DFW takes this opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of various marijuana inhalation devices, ruling that one-hitters are the most efficient because they do not waste any product. Pipes, for example, often have "party bowls" that burn off too much smoke.
• A woman tries to kill herself and ends up in a hospital; she describes her depression and anxiety in a detailed, harrowing way: Like a sick-to-your-stomach feeling over your whole body that won't go away and you're certain it will never go away and it's always been there. She begs for electro-shock therapy, something DFW opted for before eventually hanging himself. Jesus Christ.
• There's a scene in a rehabilitation center where a man turns the air conditioning up to 9 and stares at it all day in November.
• One of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents -- a Quebecois separatist group, literally "Wheelchair Assassins" -- is operating as a quadruple-agent. He's in the AFR (single agent), giving (allegedly fraudulent) information to the Office of Unspecified Services, betraying the AFR (double) but the AFR knows about it and thinks he's pretending to betray them (triple) but guess what he's actually betraying them (quadruple). Mind, this character existed for roughly one page before all of this happened. It's explained over two endnotes.

I will not finish this book in a month, but I will buy my own copy -- in hardcover -- and put it on my shelf because I am going to finish this book.

Also I really do love it; I know I write angrily about it, but I feel as though it wouldn't be the same book if it didn't challenge and aggravate me. If nothing else, I look erudite reading it on the T.