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.