New Year, Same Literacy

Mo' Books, Probably The Same Number Of Problems, All Things Considered

Since finishing Infinite Jest over three months ago -- woah -- I've read a few more books and I have a bit of time so I figured I'd grace you with my thoughts on them. I'm actually back in the market for more book recommendations, so if you want to shout at me about a thing I should read, I'm all for it. Maybe something postmodern? I need my fix.

1. You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers was very, very disappointing. This is the best way I can summarize it: On the cover of the book, there's a liner note with praise from John Leonard of the New York Times. "Entirely honorable and ultimately persuasive," he writes. "Eggers's frisbee sentences sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace." Two notes. First: Nice alliteration, dude. Second: There are no frisbee scenes in this novel. None. It's about two dudes, Will and Hand, and their adventure across the world on a mission to give away a bunch of money. They do not play frisbee or any other sport. They drive a lot, get on a lot of planes, and feel guilty about giving money to the very poor, but there's no frisbee. There's a ton of frisbee in A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, though, so it's abundantly clear that they've just taken praise for the other, better book and thrown it on the cover.
   
   Don't get me wrong: This was not a bad novel. AHWOSG is one of my all-time favorites, though, so to see an author take a dip in quality like that was upsetting. It wasn't as awful as Weezer's truly dreadful post-Pinkerton work (except for Maladroit, which is a good album, and if you don't agree with me then I will fight you in the fuckin' street) but still, c'mon, bro. One cool point was that Hand sort of sounds like (Super) Hans, a character from Peep Show. Eggers takes pains to explain that Hand is blond and Nordic but I couldn't stop thinking of him as a coke-addicted Brit.
2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace was a good post-Infinite Jest cooldown. It's still DFW, it still has footnotes, and the first essay is even about tennis; it's just not quite as intense as Hal and the gang. I have nothing but good things to say about this collection: I liked it more than Consider The Lobster, even. Highlights include the essay about fiction in a TV-riddled world (television is post-postmodern, see) for its expounding on IJ's main theme, the essay about the Illinois state fair for its explanation of how terror is terrifying, and the one about the Nordic Luxury Cruise for the imagery of a semi-agoraphobic writer managing forced social events with the elderly.
3. House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a contender for Ian's Favorite Book Of All Time. Top 5, certainly. Read it, preferably very soon. It's creepy as hell, has a gripping plot, and the ending basically demands a re-reading of the whole book. There are secret messages in the text, for crying out loud. The one negative was the layout of the print in certain portions. See, it's about a house with a labyrinth in it, and during the particularly maze-y parts, the words on the page are literally arranged in a disorienting way. I had to rotate the book -- sometimes holding it upside-down -- on the T, and I got looks. I understood why it was made that way, but that doesn't make it less frustrating. It's also a pretty sharp satire of academia. And did I mention it's creepy as hell? I only read it at night like twice before deciding it'd be best if I had some time between House Of Leaves and dreamland.
4. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is another one on the IFBOAT (haha, another anagram where "Of All Time" forms a new word, like Joelle being the Prettiest Girl Of All Time) list. It's up there. It's about an old couple in the Midwest with now-adult children and their "one last Christmas" together. It's alternatingly hilarious and sad -- I felt pretty awful for laughing at some scenes that (probably) were not intended to be funny, like Alfred's battle with the turds -- and there's tons going on. It jumps around between places and times, too, which is a pretty interesting device. I'm still confused about whether Gary is a sympathetic character or not.
5. 2 B R 0 2 B by Kurt Vonnegut is super short and free. Seriously, read it right here. It'll take like ten minutes and it's a really cool story. Just do it. Do it!

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.