Infinite Jest #3

Entry Three

I'm on p. 151 and the book is picking up. Maybe the first hundred pages were a test, maybe I'm just used to this style of writing by now; either way, it's gotten better, or at least less frustrating. I still don't like the Poor Tony portions, though. I can only take so much in the way of intentional misspellings (Harvard Squar) and grammatical mistakes (youre', were', its'). I'm obviously not someone to critique the guy's style. I wish those parts were more readable, is all. It's cool to see the characters go to places I know; C (before having his eyes pop out of his head from injecting bad dope) wants to Red Line into Chinatown and I was like, "So, you gonna transfer?" and sure enough later on it's all, "And so at the Orangeline Tstop we grab a fat cab for about two blocks from Hung Toys and screw out of the cab at a light and the thing with fat cabbies is they cant' run after you and Poor Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in hiheels . . ."

Also

• Assassins talk about love.
• DFW really, really likes tennis. Hal and the gang discuss how the E.T.A coaches are assholes intentionally so as to give the team a common enemy in a highly individualistic, competitive sport. It keeps them from consciously cannibalizing one another, instead never acknowledging the internal rankings they all know by heart.
• Mario, Hal's older brother, once had a romantic encounter with a large girl referred to as "The U.S.S. Millicent Kent." It reminded me (mildly) of this great Quora thread about dating someone with Asperger Syndrome.
• Orin slyly accuses Hal of incessant masturbation before asking him what he knows about the Canadian Separatist movement.
• A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy, sic.) and its founder. Very similar to (in fact, based on) the halfway house DFW stayed in during his rehabilitation.
• An email recounting this myth.
• The advent of video telephone calls (think Skype) and the reasons why people were uncomfortable with using them, leading to the demise of the industry. (In short, the beauty of audio-only phone calls is their ability to let each participant not pay attention to the other while believing he or she is receiving full attention. Video destroys this illusion.)
• Weirdly, an essay Hal wrote about action heroes.

I don't know how any of this ties into the main plot at all. Is there one? Each "chapter" is basically a short story. Gonna keep on readin'.