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.