Entry Nine
I've read over 100 pages since the last time I wrote so I'm going to do two posts again.
Fish soup. Marathe and Steeply talk about fish soup forever. They're going on about the whole freedom to / freedom from dichotomy and Steeply says something to the effect of, "Americans are motivated to acquire pleasure for themselves," and Marathe says, "Well, what is to stop you from hurting others to reach that goal? What if your pleasure is only attainable by preventing the pleasure of another?" And then they talk about splitting a can of soupe aux pois for approximately four hours.
"Ah, but yes, let's say it is just you and I, and it is a Single Serving Size of la spoupe."
"We'd split it. That's an American invention, by the way, the S.S.S."
"You are insatiable for this soupe; a half-serving will only infuriate you, teasing your hunger."
"Well then we'd bid on the soup, and the winner would pay the other person the money, and then he'd go to the store and buy more soup."
"This is the only soup. There is no more soup."
It's mostly about how people will choose to watch The Entertainment, even knowing that it may kill them, because the curiosity will eat them up inside.
I was wrong about that Clipperton kid killing himself, by the way. I mean, he does totally kill himself, but it's not because he loses. To the contrary, he wins a ton and becomes a like national phenomenon. He's not ranked #1 in the country, though, because all of his wins are sort of negated on account of the terroristic threats, and being ranked first is all he wanted (probably). But then the person in charge of junior tennis in the USA retires or is fired or whatever and a new guy comes in from left field, unaware that Clipperton is batshit insane and holding his life hostage to win matches. Dude looks at Clipperton's undefeated -- aka "Still Alive" -- record and says, "Well, shit, he's got to be number one," and Clipperton can't take it, the pressure, and drops out of whatever academy he was in and falls off the face of the Earth for a while. He shows up at the ETA and demands -- begs, too -- to talk to Himself about (re?)admission to the Academy and so Mario brings him in and he sits down with him a while and Himself comes in and Clipperton pulls his gun out and blows his own brains out onto the walls. Some junior players just can't handle the pressure.
Gately cleans shit and semen from another halfway house in the mornings as a job. It's pretty gross how these guys have a Jizz Corner where they go and just mercilessly have at their own genitals.
Subsidized Time was put in place by President Gentle to solve a financial crisis. Turns out people want a lot of social programs paired with virtually no taxation. Who knew. Demand their leaders sign pledges not to raise taxes. Truly a nightmare dystopian world.
Whole lotta tennis in this section -- lots of tennis drills, more accurately -- and it was much worse than anything I did on the baseball team in high school. I played baseball in high school -- ladies -- and this conditioning is much worse. (I was also really slow and awful, athletically, so my memories of conditioning are bound to be skewed negative.) Lots of running, hitting balls, sprinting back, running some more, drinking Gatorade out of paper cones, doing insane wind-sprints where you're basically like expected to vomit at the end.
More to the point, I don't know what this part of the book has to do with anything. Is it weird that I'm not entirely sure what this story is about? At work, people will ask me what it's about, what's going on with the story, and my best way to answer is to say, "There are three separate story threads right now -- a tennis academy, a halfway house, and this league of assassins in wheelchairs -- and I'm not sure how they're going to come together. I don't know if they will come together." I'm now seeing that that's actually a decent synopsis of the book that you could put on the back with a big picture of my stupid face but, like, why is there all this tennis stuff? What's advanced, plot-wise, by reading about the Tap-And-Whack drill? Is advancing the plot even the point? I feel like it isn't. Maybe something with Hal's ankle? Maybe he'll smoke way too much marijuana on account of the ankle pain and end up in the Enfield House.
BIG NEWS re: the Entertainment. Apparently there was some sort of study where scientists (it's always the damn scientists) prodded some part of a brain that unleashes insane endorphins and then they hooked the prod up to a lever -- this was through some sort of light electrostimulus -- so the mice/cats/dogs/dolphins could unleash the pleasure (HIYOOO) on themselves and then that's totally all they did. Each animal died because they'd only push the lever. Moved up the food chain, too, and each one killed itself, basically, for the sake of the pleasure. They moved to humans and said, "HEY SERIOUSLY THIS MIGHT KILL YOU," and people showed up in droves. Took off work for this thing. And so back to the "Humans are incapable of resisting things they want, even when those things can kill them."
That's probably what the book is about, actually.
"Hey Ian, what's Infinite Jest about?"
"I dunno; did you see they've got Freaks And Geeks on Netflix now? I watched the whole thing this weekend."
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Eschaton
Infinite Jest: Eschaton
Eschaton is too cool of a part of the book -- and it's too niche, too deep of a thing -- for me to include it in another already sort of-long post. The idea is that now it's isolated so I can write more about it without making anyone feel too tired because "I just want to get an overview of the plot and why is he writing all of this garbage about a game that does not and can not exist."
Eschaton is a game the students in the Enfield Tennis Academy play every Interdependence Day. Michael Pemulis perfected it and, as such, he is the Best Player Ever. His moves are the stuff of legend. As a senior student, he doesn't play anymore -- the game is generally reserved for younger kids, though it's by no means for children -- and has stepped into a sort of Overseer role. He has veto power over calculations, but not rulings; those are reserved for the God player, a kid named Lord.
The general idea of Eschaton is as follows: God thinks up some sort of Doomsday Scenario for the players to react to. They form teams, representing various factions -- LIBSYR, SOVWAR, REDCHI, SOUTHAF, INDPAK, though these are never really clarified -- and each faction gets a bucket of tennis balls, each yellow fuzzy sphere representing a 5-megaton nuclear warhead. Eschaton is played over six tennis courts, and factions take turns lobbing the tennis balls -- Eschaton is permitted to survive at the ETA because it requires actual tennis skill -- onto various objects strewn about the courts (territories). A shirt can represent a radio tower, for instance. The winner of Eschaton is the faction that sports the highest damage given / damage taken ratio.
During this time, God is running around with a cart with a computer in it. He's calculating destruction dealt, keeping track of the ratios, and doing all sorts of complex math. He also wears one of a few different beanies to reflect the general mood of the game at any given time.
Eschaton is, I think, a perfect microcosm for what Infinite Jest is all about stylistically. I would almost recommend reading this section -- roughly 25 pages long -- before committing to reading all of Infinite Jest. If it were available as a separate essay for Kindles or something (not unlike how the John McCain essay from Consider The Lobster is available for $1.99), I would definitely tell you to plop down the money and give it a shot before plunging into the deep end. It's sort of perfect.
Why? Why is it representative of the book as a whole? In these twenty-odd pages, you get a taste of everything to love (or hate) about Infinite Jest. Sure, you don't get introduced to the AFR or the Recovery House, and the characters you do meet are transient and don't develop any real relationships with one another, but the section pretty clearly goes through the range of emotions one runs through while reading the book proper.
First, it starts with esoteric abbreviations that are either (A) explained once and then abbreviated every other time or (B) never explained because you understand that it stands for some sort of warring group of countries and the specifics don't matter. Then you hit a mother fucking endnote about the Mean Value Theorem For Integrals. It's, like, a calculus proof. There are graphs in the back of the book. I am not joking. You read how God calculates the scores and stuff, and you see this superscript above Mean Value Theorem and you say, "Oh, this shouldn't be too bad," and you get hit with a like postmodern math textbook for a while and you start getting pissed off but then you realize it's written pretty wonderfully: Pemulis, a math guy, is explaining the Theorem to Hal, an English guy, so that he (Hal) can transcribe it; Hal interjects in Pemulis's long-winded speech and puts "sic" everywhere because fuck Pemulis and his math bullshit, the guy can't even write, and it ends with "P.S. Wolf spiders ruleth the land," which is just the most badass sentence ever.
So the kids are playing this game and it's incredibly dense. There's negotiation talks, the abbreviations get worse (SACPOP, which I'm now noticing "went total SACPOP on" is a synonym for "beat" we see in the Sports Report) and now the abbreviations are interacting with each other -- e.g., "LIBSYR has no choice but to SACPOP REDCHI lest they lose the MAMA" -- and it's incredibly frustrating and then there's a "2 [pi symbol] / (1 / total Toronto area in m^2)" just hanging out in the main text and you're thinking there's just no way this is important.
But it takes a turn. Somewhere along the line, you get used to it. You accept that this is how it's going to be. You laugh when that poor bastard is high on 'drines and falls out of his chair for what feels like an hour. Hal smokes weed in public -- a rare feat, as he likes the secrecy of getting high in secret almost as much as he likes the getting high -- and he's trying to spit his chewing tobacco at the same time but it just isn't happening. The pages turn more readily, and then something amazing happens.
The kids become kids again. Two teams are negotiating and one kid takes a tennis ball and hits it right into a girl's head. She's furious. You can't hit a person, she's on the map, but not the terrain! Like, yes, the court is the map, and the shirts are on the map, but they're actually on the terrain, which is why you can hit them. The players' invulnerability is a like pre-axiom that makes Eschaton possible. And then the girl breaks free and starts spiking tennis balls at the kid who hit her. Other players smell blood in the water and follow suit.
Then they start fighting. Children, pretending to be heads of state during a nuclear war, are having knuckle-dragging brawls on the tennis courts.
God takes his white beanie off and puts on the red one on, the one with the little propeller, and he starts flicking the propeller because this is a "worse-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type-situation." All of this is written as though a reporter on the sidelines is relaying the action. No one speaks directly. Action after action and jesus god he is running around, flicking this pinwheel on his beanie, "Stop! Help!" How funny is that.
Eschaton makes the transformation from esoteric game that hurts you when you try to read about it to an incredibly vibrant, funny section that flows like water. In those twenty pages, it evolves just like the book itself does.
AND IT'S THE BASIS OF A MUSIC VIDEO BY THE DECEMBERISTS! HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT?
Eschaton is too cool of a part of the book -- and it's too niche, too deep of a thing -- for me to include it in another already sort of-long post. The idea is that now it's isolated so I can write more about it without making anyone feel too tired because "I just want to get an overview of the plot and why is he writing all of this garbage about a game that does not and can not exist."
Eschaton is a game the students in the Enfield Tennis Academy play every Interdependence Day. Michael Pemulis perfected it and, as such, he is the Best Player Ever. His moves are the stuff of legend. As a senior student, he doesn't play anymore -- the game is generally reserved for younger kids, though it's by no means for children -- and has stepped into a sort of Overseer role. He has veto power over calculations, but not rulings; those are reserved for the God player, a kid named Lord.
The general idea of Eschaton is as follows: God thinks up some sort of Doomsday Scenario for the players to react to. They form teams, representing various factions -- LIBSYR, SOVWAR, REDCHI, SOUTHAF, INDPAK, though these are never really clarified -- and each faction gets a bucket of tennis balls, each yellow fuzzy sphere representing a 5-megaton nuclear warhead. Eschaton is played over six tennis courts, and factions take turns lobbing the tennis balls -- Eschaton is permitted to survive at the ETA because it requires actual tennis skill -- onto various objects strewn about the courts (territories). A shirt can represent a radio tower, for instance. The winner of Eschaton is the faction that sports the highest damage given / damage taken ratio.
During this time, God is running around with a cart with a computer in it. He's calculating destruction dealt, keeping track of the ratios, and doing all sorts of complex math. He also wears one of a few different beanies to reflect the general mood of the game at any given time.
Eschaton is, I think, a perfect microcosm for what Infinite Jest is all about stylistically. I would almost recommend reading this section -- roughly 25 pages long -- before committing to reading all of Infinite Jest. If it were available as a separate essay for Kindles or something (not unlike how the John McCain essay from Consider The Lobster is available for $1.99), I would definitely tell you to plop down the money and give it a shot before plunging into the deep end. It's sort of perfect.
Why? Why is it representative of the book as a whole? In these twenty-odd pages, you get a taste of everything to love (or hate) about Infinite Jest. Sure, you don't get introduced to the AFR or the Recovery House, and the characters you do meet are transient and don't develop any real relationships with one another, but the section pretty clearly goes through the range of emotions one runs through while reading the book proper.
First, it starts with esoteric abbreviations that are either (A) explained once and then abbreviated every other time or (B) never explained because you understand that it stands for some sort of warring group of countries and the specifics don't matter. Then you hit a mother fucking endnote about the Mean Value Theorem For Integrals. It's, like, a calculus proof. There are graphs in the back of the book. I am not joking. You read how God calculates the scores and stuff, and you see this superscript above Mean Value Theorem and you say, "Oh, this shouldn't be too bad," and you get hit with a like postmodern math textbook for a while and you start getting pissed off but then you realize it's written pretty wonderfully: Pemulis, a math guy, is explaining the Theorem to Hal, an English guy, so that he (Hal) can transcribe it; Hal interjects in Pemulis's long-winded speech and puts "sic" everywhere because fuck Pemulis and his math bullshit, the guy can't even write, and it ends with "P.S. Wolf spiders ruleth the land," which is just the most badass sentence ever.
So the kids are playing this game and it's incredibly dense. There's negotiation talks, the abbreviations get worse (SACPOP, which I'm now noticing "went total SACPOP on" is a synonym for "beat" we see in the Sports Report) and now the abbreviations are interacting with each other -- e.g., "LIBSYR has no choice but to SACPOP REDCHI lest they lose the MAMA" -- and it's incredibly frustrating and then there's a "2 [pi symbol] / (1 / total Toronto area in m^2)" just hanging out in the main text and you're thinking there's just no way this is important.
But it takes a turn. Somewhere along the line, you get used to it. You accept that this is how it's going to be. You laugh when that poor bastard is high on 'drines and falls out of his chair for what feels like an hour. Hal smokes weed in public -- a rare feat, as he likes the secrecy of getting high in secret almost as much as he likes the getting high -- and he's trying to spit his chewing tobacco at the same time but it just isn't happening. The pages turn more readily, and then something amazing happens.
The kids become kids again. Two teams are negotiating and one kid takes a tennis ball and hits it right into a girl's head. She's furious. You can't hit a person, she's on the map, but not the terrain! Like, yes, the court is the map, and the shirts are on the map, but they're actually on the terrain, which is why you can hit them. The players' invulnerability is a like pre-axiom that makes Eschaton possible. And then the girl breaks free and starts spiking tennis balls at the kid who hit her. Other players smell blood in the water and follow suit.
Then they start fighting. Children, pretending to be heads of state during a nuclear war, are having knuckle-dragging brawls on the tennis courts.
God takes his white beanie off and puts on the red one on, the one with the little propeller, and he starts flicking the propeller because this is a "worse-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type-situation." All of this is written as though a reporter on the sidelines is relaying the action. No one speaks directly. Action after action and jesus god he is running around, flicking this pinwheel on his beanie, "Stop! Help!" How funny is that.
Eschaton makes the transformation from esoteric game that hurts you when you try to read about it to an incredibly vibrant, funny section that flows like water. In those twenty pages, it evolves just like the book itself does.
AND IT'S THE BASIS OF A MUSIC VIDEO BY THE DECEMBERISTS! HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT?
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.
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.
Infinite Jest #7
Entry Seven
I went to New York this weekend (pre-Sandy) to see Louis CK live at the NY City Center with my biffle (kill me) so I had some time to read on the bus. I probably could've read more if I didn't have such a shitty inclination towards car-sickness when reading. The ride down was at night and the bus light was pretty dim, so I probably only read for half the trip; doesn't help that Infinite Jest has some tiny text (and even smaller in endnotes!) on large pages. My head hurts thinking about it. Coming back was a bit brighter, though, so I read more then.
I am on page 418, which means I have read 112 pages since the last time I wrote on this admittedly-deteriorating blog. This is not true, as this particular part of the novel is rife with endnotes: Three of them span multiple pages each, and one is essentially a whole chapter. I'll write about ~50 pages now and the other ~50 pages in a separate post. Woooooo0oo0o0o0oo.
So there are easier classes at ETA taught by prorectors, who are often washed up semi-pros. One of 'em is having an exam today, and during the exam, there's a Sports Report over the school radio where the announcer (a student, Jim Troeltsch) cycles through the various games played since the last Report -- this can be a large number, as the Tennis Academy often travels and plays many games without a new Report, so they can be quite long, the Reports -- but he's a bit of a thesaurus nut so he sprinkles his speech with all of the synonyms for "beat" and "was beat by," so this turns into another hilarious portion of Infinite Jest that includes phrases like "hopped up and down on the thorax of," "made Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in the same room together," "spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down," and c.
Mario is a thoroughly disfigured dude, but he's taken up his father (Himself)'s mantle re: filmmaking and he's pretty good behind the ol' lens. He made a puppet movie, but I'll get to that later.
Remember Marathe, the Quebecois Assassin, and Steeply, the Canadian quadruple-agent? I fucking hope you do because there's some REAL PLOT going on with the Entertainment. The AFR (Assassins des Fauteuils-Rollents) either have or are threatening to have a copy of the Entertainment aka Infinite Jest aka the Samizdat and their plot is to release it into America as a strike against O.N.A.N. They (the Quebecois separatists) want out of O.N.A.N, see -- if you're confused, you can refer to the chapter-long endnote featuring a discussion between Orin and Hal re: the merits and motives of the Separatist mission, particularly why they would switch from "We want out of Canada" to "We want Canada out of O.N.A.N." -- and they're going to release the Entertainment into America because Americans have been trained to love Freedom and partake in its bounty as often as possible. The idea is that Americans will be unable to know the film exists and NOT watch it, so they'll all cave in and die. No one wants hundreds of millions dead and like what does Quebec offer anyway.
Then there's mother fucking Eschaton. Listen, I'm going to write a whole separate post about Eschaton, but suffice it to say that that part was my favorite part of the book so far, maybe. Okay. The post about Eschaton is HERE.
Back on Quebecois Separatism real quick: Orin and Hal discuss it because Orin is doing an ostensibly light fluff piece for Moment magazine about his life and how he dealt with Himself's death. I think I wrote about it a bit before; Orin called Hal in the past to learn how to be sad about Himself's killing himself by microwaving his head, and now he's called him again to brush up on the Separatist movement. He wants to seem deep and learned so he may make sex on his interviewer.
Then there's a pretty long chapter about Boston AA and their Group dynamic. It's probably hindsight bias -- I've read a bit about DFW's life before and after he wrote this book, but I haven't picked up his biography, which I will eventually read -- but it feels like something only someone who's been through the Program could've written. There's also a fucking hysterical passage where a man with an Irish brogue describes his first solid bowel movement after being "a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b'yond contin'." It was sort of hard to read at first, like the original few Poor Tony passages, but it became easier when I adopted an Irish accent in my head. Zany.
I went to New York this weekend (pre-Sandy) to see Louis CK live at the NY City Center with my biffle (kill me) so I had some time to read on the bus. I probably could've read more if I didn't have such a shitty inclination towards car-sickness when reading. The ride down was at night and the bus light was pretty dim, so I probably only read for half the trip; doesn't help that Infinite Jest has some tiny text (and even smaller in endnotes!) on large pages. My head hurts thinking about it. Coming back was a bit brighter, though, so I read more then.
I am on page 418, which means I have read 112 pages since the last time I wrote on this admittedly-deteriorating blog. This is not true, as this particular part of the novel is rife with endnotes: Three of them span multiple pages each, and one is essentially a whole chapter. I'll write about ~50 pages now and the other ~50 pages in a separate post. Woooooo0oo0o0o0oo.
So there are easier classes at ETA taught by prorectors, who are often washed up semi-pros. One of 'em is having an exam today, and during the exam, there's a Sports Report over the school radio where the announcer (a student, Jim Troeltsch) cycles through the various games played since the last Report -- this can be a large number, as the Tennis Academy often travels and plays many games without a new Report, so they can be quite long, the Reports -- but he's a bit of a thesaurus nut so he sprinkles his speech with all of the synonyms for "beat" and "was beat by," so this turns into another hilarious portion of Infinite Jest that includes phrases like "hopped up and down on the thorax of," "made Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in the same room together," "spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down," and c.
Mario is a thoroughly disfigured dude, but he's taken up his father (Himself)'s mantle re: filmmaking and he's pretty good behind the ol' lens. He made a puppet movie, but I'll get to that later.
Remember Marathe, the Quebecois Assassin, and Steeply, the Canadian quadruple-agent? I fucking hope you do because there's some REAL PLOT going on with the Entertainment. The AFR (Assassins des Fauteuils-Rollents) either have or are threatening to have a copy of the Entertainment aka Infinite Jest aka the Samizdat and their plot is to release it into America as a strike against O.N.A.N. They (the Quebecois separatists) want out of O.N.A.N, see -- if you're confused, you can refer to the chapter-long endnote featuring a discussion between Orin and Hal re: the merits and motives of the Separatist mission, particularly why they would switch from "We want out of Canada" to "We want Canada out of O.N.A.N." -- and they're going to release the Entertainment into America because Americans have been trained to love Freedom and partake in its bounty as often as possible. The idea is that Americans will be unable to know the film exists and NOT watch it, so they'll all cave in and die. No one wants hundreds of millions dead and like what does Quebec offer anyway.
Then there's mother fucking Eschaton. Listen, I'm going to write a whole separate post about Eschaton, but suffice it to say that that part was my favorite part of the book so far, maybe. Okay. The post about Eschaton is HERE.
Back on Quebecois Separatism real quick: Orin and Hal discuss it because Orin is doing an ostensibly light fluff piece for Moment magazine about his life and how he dealt with Himself's death. I think I wrote about it a bit before; Orin called Hal in the past to learn how to be sad about Himself's killing himself by microwaving his head, and now he's called him again to brush up on the Separatist movement. He wants to seem deep and learned so he may make sex on his interviewer.
Then there's a pretty long chapter about Boston AA and their Group dynamic. It's probably hindsight bias -- I've read a bit about DFW's life before and after he wrote this book, but I haven't picked up his biography, which I will eventually read -- but it feels like something only someone who's been through the Program could've written. There's also a fucking hysterical passage where a man with an Irish brogue describes his first solid bowel movement after being "a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b'yond contin'." It was sort of hard to read at first, like the original few Poor Tony passages, but it became easier when I adopted an Irish accent in my head. Zany.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Space!!
I read The Sirens Of Titan over a month ago (maybe even two months ago) so I don't remember much in the way of specifics. This phenomenon -- this not remembering details -- usually indicates that one did not enjoy the thing he or she is trying to remember,[1] but that is not the case with Sirens. I loved it.
Sirens is about a dude named Malachi Constant; he's a millionaire playboy, the richest man in America at the time the novel takes place. Throws sick parties.[2] He's invited to see an Appearing by a space-traveler man, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who can (sort of) teleport over vast galactic distances and predict the future; he dematerializes, gets whisked away to say Titan and chills there for a bit, then comes back. Rinse, repeat.
So Rumfoord owns a spaceship, and he sends Malachi to Mars in it. Malachi's memory is wiped out and he is known only as Unk; he repeatedly tries to remember where he came from and who he is, but he (and everyone else on Mars) is under radio control. He's broken free and gone searching for his past something like seven times, but each time ends with his memory being erased more aggressively.
There aren't any stereotypical Martians on Mars: No green men with big heads or anything, just ex-Earth people. They're all in an Army and they're going to attack Earth. (Rumfoord is behind this entire operation.) They train for a bit (but not long enough) and launch their assault. It does not go well. They have far too few soldiers for the job[3] and they're divided over a huge number of ships. To their credit, their first assault is successful: They manage to overthrow the couple of people on the moon and claim it as their own. As a "Warning Strike," they fire some rockets at the Earth that get burned up in the atmosphere. Earth, in retaliation, destroys the moon with like twenty nukes.[4]
The Martian Army does not back down and keeps sending their ships to Earth, each one carrying like 50 soldiers and landing many, many miles away from one another. In the American South, farmers await the arrival of smaller ships and dispatch the soldiers themselves. Where actual Earth military is needed, the casualties are entirely on the Martian side. It's a slaughter, but it's a planned one.[5]
When all of the soldiers are killed, Rumfoord sends the women and children in ships. They, too, are slaughtered -- and Rumfoord appears on Earth and explains that this whole time they've been killing transported Earthlings. Ostensibly, he does this to bind the whole human race together under a common tragedy, which is mostly what happens. He also decides to start a religion, the Church Of God The Utterly Indifferent, which is sort of like Deism.[6]
In one of my favorite passages, Rumfoord commands that the people listen to him and follow his new religion -- abandoning their old ones -- because he can actually do miracles. He predicts the future, for example, and everything he says totally comes true. His teachings are viewed as more valid because of his actions, which is an awfully slippery slope,[7] but it's exactly what happens.
The primary tenet of the Church is the adamant belief that no God has chosen us for anything. "Somebody up there likes me" and similar phrases are incredibly offensive, arrogant, and solipsistic. There is no plan.
During this whole thing, Malachi (Unk) is on the Mothership, a much slower, larger vessel with something like thirty years' worth of hot dogs, hamburgers, and soda. He goes to a different planet with glowing things, completely misses the "Oh the horror!" of the Martian genocide, and arrives on Earth well after Rumfoord has established his Church. This is where my memory fails me, but I think Rumfoord's predicted Malachi coming back to Earth, so his prediction is seen as the Big Miracle that convinces everyone completely that he's right. Malachi is then banished to Titan.
On Titan, there is a marooned "alien" explorer named Salo. His ship crashed and it needs a replacement part. He's stuck there for over 200 millenia, and he sends a distress signal to his home planet. His people manipulate human history and make mankind evolve so that they may produce the replacement part. The Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, and other human constructions are simply messages to Salo indicating how much progress has been made towards making the part.
That part is the ship that brings Malachi to Titan. Literally all of human history, everything was predetermined to bring a replacement part to a stranded alien.[8] Rumfoord was a pawn. Free will doesn't exist.[9]
Lol.
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[1] The idea being that you don't commit brain-space to things you hate; why remember the backstory of a minor character in a movie you found boring?↩
[2] Pretty sure he wakes up in his drained swimming pool and has his butler recount his evening to him, The Hangover-style. He gives all of his money away, telling everyone to take and sell whatever they can get their hands on.↩
[3] Something like 300,000.↩
[4] This reminded me of the scene in (I think) the first Austin Powers movie where the President threatens to blow up the moon. Yep. Here it is.↩
[5] DUM DUM DUM↩
[6] Sort of like, "Sure, God exists, but it doesn't affect our lives in any way; it's hands-off."↩
[7] If I taught people, for example, that murder was totally justified for any and all reasons, I would be regarded as (A) wrong and (B) insane. The Sirens Of Titan posits that if I made that claim and then levitated in mid-air, people would say, "Oh, this person is clearly a divine being and we must do what he tells us," even when what I say is immoral. Sure is a good thing no omni-benevolent God ever told anyone to do anything bad. That'd be zany.↩
[8] 
[9] 
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Infinite Jest #6
Entry Six
Good news! The Enfield Tennis Academy whooped Port Washington and they all got to have the Denny's Mega Breakfast at 00:30 when the three buses pulled in. I'm pretty sure Mike Pemulis spiked P.W's gatorade or something, though, 'cause one of their (Washington's) players started hallucinating pretty badly mid-match. The tennis balls were too pretty to hit, or something. He's very lewd towards his headmaster's wife. Standard ultra-acid fare.
I think these were the funniest 50 pages of the book I've read, maybe. It's definitely in a groove. I know I've said this before, but the trick with Infinite Jest is to get past the first 200 pages. The first chapter, with Hal's breakdown, is extremely good and accessible, but then it takes a huge dive into what-the-hell-is-this w/r/t its language and diction. I don't know if it's actually taken an upswing back into more mainstream readability or if I've just gotten used to it -- I remember typing this sentence before, nearly verbatim, but I do not care -- but either way it's very enjoyable now.
Anyway this section was hilarious. Of note:
Good news! The Enfield Tennis Academy whooped Port Washington and they all got to have the Denny's Mega Breakfast at 00:30 when the three buses pulled in. I'm pretty sure Mike Pemulis spiked P.W's gatorade or something, though, 'cause one of their (Washington's) players started hallucinating pretty badly mid-match. The tennis balls were too pretty to hit, or something. He's very lewd towards his headmaster's wife. Standard ultra-acid fare.
I think these were the funniest 50 pages of the book I've read, maybe. It's definitely in a groove. I know I've said this before, but the trick with Infinite Jest is to get past the first 200 pages. The first chapter, with Hal's breakdown, is extremely good and accessible, but then it takes a huge dive into what-the-hell-is-this w/r/t its language and diction. I don't know if it's actually taken an upswing back into more mainstream readability or if I've just gotten used to it -- I remember typing this sentence before, nearly verbatim, but I do not care -- but either way it's very enjoyable now.
Anyway this section was hilarious. Of note:
- Endnote 90, with Geoffrey Day's talk with Don Gately. Day is a newcomer to the Enfield House and I'm pretty sure he's DFW's way of inserting himself into the story a little bit. Day is a professor at a local college (Wallace taught at Emerson and then Illinois State before Infinite Jest) and he has a skeptical attitude towards AA's policies. Most telling, I think, is the way Day talks, though: He's constantly dropping clauses on clauses and using absolutely pretentious and, well, professorial language -- moreso than everyone else. There's an exchange where Day pins AA into a logical corner re: its policy that all who claim to not be dependent on a Substance are in Denial and thus in greater need of rehabilitation and Gately responds with another maxim, "Analysis Paralysis," which is basically a command to not think logically and just do. Day is not pleased.
- The aforementioned Port Washington kid hallucinating and being escorted off.
- Repeatedly referring to Joelle as the "Prettiest Girl Of All Time," or "P.G.O.A.T."
- On one of Orin's punts: 'It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal competitive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during.'
- Poor Tony's heroin-and-codine withdrawal is very funny (and terrible, considering it ends in him seizing up on the Gray Line) but it has some choice lines, like:
'He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom from whence all the shit came from when he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus.'and
'In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center's underground Gray Line platform, when the first hot loose load fell out into the baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heel -- he still had only his red high heels with the crossing straps, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide -- Poor Tony closed his eyes against the ants fornicating up and down his arms' skinny length and screamed a soundless interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe.'
Monday, October 15, 2012
Infinite Jest #5
Entry Five
I'm on page 268 because I got into a bit of a groove. Infinite Jest is definitely really, really good. I noticed something about it, too: The descriptive prose is extremely long-winded. (I am aware that for a book like Infinite Jest, that is not exactly a staggeringly astute claim. Hear me out.)
I tune it out, this prose, sort of -- or at least I don't pay as much attention to literally page-long paragraphs about the wind in Boston that day -- which I think is human nature, or some sort of learned behavior where generally things that progress the plot are at least partially dialogue. I feel like DFW knows that, maybe, and he's basically saying, "Fuck you, you're hardly reading this anyway since it's not people talking. I'm going to make this very, very esoteric so it still takes you a long time to get through. God, I hate you."
But it's sort of endearing.
Additionally, he really likes tennis. Jesus lord. The section I'm reading now is about a series of tennis matches ETA has with the Port Washington school. It's very long, for there are many matches.
Other things:
I'm on page 268 because I got into a bit of a groove. Infinite Jest is definitely really, really good. I noticed something about it, too: The descriptive prose is extremely long-winded. (I am aware that for a book like Infinite Jest, that is not exactly a staggeringly astute claim. Hear me out.)
I tune it out, this prose, sort of -- or at least I don't pay as much attention to literally page-long paragraphs about the wind in Boston that day -- which I think is human nature, or some sort of learned behavior where generally things that progress the plot are at least partially dialogue. I feel like DFW knows that, maybe, and he's basically saying, "Fuck you, you're hardly reading this anyway since it's not people talking. I'm going to make this very, very esoteric so it still takes you a long time to get through. God, I hate you."
But it's sort of endearing.
Additionally, he really likes tennis. Jesus lord. The section I'm reading now is about a series of tennis matches ETA has with the Port Washington school. It's very long, for there are many matches.
Other things:
- The pseudo-checklist of things one discovers if one spends any time in a half-way house was pretty great and funny. I haven't laughed as much as I thought I would -- Consider The Lobster had some downright hilarious passages -- but every once in a while I read a part like this that makes me laugh. Still extremely dark, though. (It is obviously dark, Ian, you moron, it's about recovering addicts in a shitty house.)
- Hal's insistence on reading The Literature re: this extremely-potent MDMA variant was also funny. The kids are discussing how high they're gonna get and Hal is all, "Yes, I know you've read some papers Online, but have you actually gone to a like medical library?"
- Thanks for the timeline on p. 223, bro. Seriously. I'm gonna be referring to that.
- Madame Psychosis / Joelle van Dyne's suicide was eerie as fuck. Her overdose isn't sensationalized and she dies almost too realistically. I guess I was expecting some sort of passage along the lines of, "She took the drugs and such and such colors overtook her view," but instead it's more, "No, she's extremely ill and she's vomiting blood in the bathtub and now she's fucking dead because drugs will kill you."
- The entire Orin / Hal phone call was amazing. I noticed that DFW will start dialogue and then never again say who is speaking -- it's like a movie script, just lines on lines, but without the speaker's name anywhere -- so it can get sort of confusing re: who's saying what. More than once I had to backpedal through the conversation, saying, "Hal . . . Orin . . . Hal . . . Orin doesn't reply . . . Hal again," but it was great.
- On that note: Are you serious with the microwave suicide, man? Is that shit for real? Probably the zaniest, most haunting death I've read. Himself really wanted out, I guess.
'Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?'
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