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.