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.