This will be my third try reading Infinite Jest. Which would be pathetic, if it weren’t completely understandable, given the book’s whopper size. But as I’ve contemplated finally reading the damn thing, I’ve realized that size was not really the main factor in my previous aborted attempts. I’ve read long, complex, difficult books before. Big Books. Terrible books that could concuss you if they dropped onto your head from some height. I was a serious-minded philosophy major, fifteen years ago. I have fond collegiate memories involving Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which I regarded as something of an erotic adventure novel (at the time). I read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time—extracurricularly, twice. The last time, I was living alone in Binghamton, NY, just after my final semester. In the mornings, I worked my way through the text, sitting earnestly at my desk (not on a sofa or futon), and in the afternoons and evenings, I worked in a nursing home, cleaning up the bodily fluids of elderly, demented, and dying people. It was just a matter of commitment.

But, you might say, Marco, your life is completely different now. You have a wife, kids, responsibilities. You don’t have time the way you used to. You have Being, but you don’t have Time. This is the story I’ve been telling myself, all these years. And it’s just bullshit. Because if you think about it, people read super-long books all the time. Books like the Bible, the Qur’an. How many kids have read the entire Harry Potter series? So it’s not just the length or even, I would argue, the complexity of a book that might give a reader pause—even in this age of Twitter and the scattering of our attention spans. I think it’s also something about the power or aura that certain books possess. Some books seem destined to change your life. Or at least, that’s how people relate to this book… which is, of course, cause for both suspicion and intrigue. On the one hand, how much can you ask or expect of a mere book? Only words, words, words. On the other hand, it’s art—and I still have to believe in the power of art to change one’s life.

I get that Infinite Jest is a book intended for “serious readers,” people who long to go beyond the appearance of things and get to the heart of the matter, the big questions—who are we? what are we doing here? and so on. And yet, it’s not just an academic interest that drives such readers. It’s more a like a “splinter in your brain” kind of phenomenon. It’s a recognition that there’s something important being said here, and you don’t know exactly what it is, but you know you need to find out. Moreover, you’ve been told multiple times, by respectable sources, that you should read the book: it’s as if the universe is trying to tell you something. And perhaps you’ve read other, shorter, more accessible works by the same author, or you’ve listened to a number of interviews or seen films based on his work, and you recognize that here is a mind that is not typical, a freakish mind, a mind with a radically perspicacious take on things. A mind that might have something important to say about what it means to be you. You want to get to know it better.

And yet, until very recently, I’ve been ignoring the big book with the ugly cover featuring blue sky, cloud, and inexplicably truncated title lettering. The real reason was pretty stupid. I stopped reading Infinite Jest, or just didn’t take it seriously, because I refused to let go of a prejudice. My take on David Foster Wallace was that he was “postmodern”—and postmodernism, according to the bias of my “post-postmodern” worldview, was a degenerate stage of consciousness, concerned only with self-reflexive indeterminacy, the fragmentation of meaning, and the rejection of quaint notions such a truth, goodness, and beauty. Of course, once I started learning a little about the real David Foster Wallace, I realized that the exact opposite is the case. On the surface a novel like Infinite Jest appears to be a monstrosity of self-absorbed, gratuitous complexity, but what’s actually happening, on a deeper level, is a sincere meditation on the human condition—and more specifically our condition, our human existence in this post- and post-postmodern world, a world in which, as many have noted, it’s actually pretty hard to be human. So maybe there’s something about a novel that’s hard to read that’s appropriate to our situation. This is what I’ve realized from my hundred or so pages of prior reading, and from thoughtful commentaries like this one and this one.

But there’s another reason I want to read Infinite Jest, and that’s that I want to read Infinite Jest in a community with other readers, sharing the experience in some real ways. It’s a book that, frankly, I wonder if I’d even want to read alone, at this stage in my life. I’ve spent so many years, as a reader and writer, in proud solitude, and I’m done with it. Why would I want to go even deeper into a maze of self-consciousness, such as this book would seem to be the epitome of? I also wonder, is it possible that Infinite Jest was meant to be read together? Isn’t this book the ultimate critique of the self-conscious, atomically isolated ego of contemporary American culture; its inability to communicate deeply, meaningfully, and authentically? Is it possible that the book is meant to serve some kind of social healing, which might most effectively occur in the camaraderie of a fellowship of readers? I would like to test this hypothesis.

There’s something else, too. It’s almost summertime. And summers are supposed to be special. I want to make this summer special. And nothing says special like 1,079 pages of sheer literary revelry. Plus all the other fun stuff, like barbecues, music, riding my bicycle, taking my daughter to the park, etc. I know that David Foster Wallace said of Infinite Jest that he wanted to write a sad book. But just because a book is deeply sad, doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable. Because there’s something about summer that’s also sad. There’s something about the color of the sunlight, the hush of certain hours. The sad sweetness of a peach that’s so ripe you can’t bite into it without the juice dripping down your chin.

So I want to read Infinite Jest, and I want to read it with others, and I hope people will join me, and we’ll walk through this literary maze together—each on our own particular path, confused and lost at times, but knock-knocking on the walls, echoing our voices through the corridors—alone in some inevitable (and beautiful) ways, but also knowing that others, friends known and unknown, are sharing some part of our experience, and perhaps we bump into each other at some junctures or dead ends, and then go our separate ways, but ultimately we help each other make it to the end.

I’m entering the zone of David Foster Wallace. I’m beginning to see the world through his eyes. The first thing I notice: I feel a lot more self-conscious. Self-questioning. Self-complicated. And I wonder if this is a function of heightened self-awareness, or some kind of weak act of emulation, or an infection of recursiveness carried in David’s language, a projected effect of his being.

I also find myself becoming just as interested in the man—in his mind, his feelings, his life—as I am in his books. And I wonder, is it possible to separate the two? And, to keep oneself separate? Can I relate to the author’s work as an objective observer, a mere appreciator of literature, with no human interest?

I read a quote the other day, remarks made by William Gaddis when he won the National Book Award in 1976. He said, “I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.”

Before proceeding, let me note that I don’t know anything about William Gaddis. I read the first few pages his novel, The Recognitions, because I’d heard David mention in an interview that he admired him. I wanted to know why. But I read the quote and thought how right that is! Let language speak is what Heidegger said. Why can’t we simply appreciate the art, which is the real point of the artist’s life (qua artist), rather than fixate on the artist? Why do we have to make it personal? And when we focus on the artist as a person (as in a cult of personality), isn’t this a way to avoid truly engaging the depth of his work?

There’s something I love about the image of the writer as X—a fecund darkness, a shadowy figure shining a flashlight in the basement of consciousness. A Salinger type. Or like the reclusive novelist Bill Grey in Don Delillo’s Mao II, who refuses, not only to give interviews and do the traditional media stuff, but even to publish his finished novel, ten years in the making, lest the availability of his work diminish the aura surrounding his absence from public view

(Wallacian footnote #1: What happens next in DeLillo’s book is that Bill Grey, for some crazy reason, agrees to allow a photographer, a woman, to visit his secret cabin for a photo shoot, precipitating a series of events leading to a confrontation with the spectacle of global terrorism. The sack of liquid containing Bill Grey is ruptured, and he bleeds out into the world.)

And yet how wrong Gaddis was—as if the artist is just a vessel for words and not a human being. As if, as readers, we can pretend that the text came from some otherworldly dimension—that we can receive it as pure minds without social emotions regarding the human being that produced it.

Or isn’t it different for different writers? Doesn’t culture, how much of it we share in common, make a difference? Do I really care, for example, about Plato’s personal life? He’s essentially a cartoon character to me. I can’t fathom what his life or actual consciousness was like. I can’t convince myself that any possible depiction I could conjure would be anything like the actuality of being Plato in what we, now, call ancient Greece. All I have access to are Plato’s ideas (in translation), and even those are cartoonish. And yet Plato was a real human being, with his own interiority, his own depth of presence and thought, which is completely lost on us, living today.

I feel like David Foster Wallace is someone I know. Whether or not this is true, or to what degree it’s true, the fact that I feel this way is an unavoidable dimension of my relationship to his writing. I can’t read Infinite Jest as if it’s a book that could have been written by anyone, in any time or place—as if the guy who wrote it didn’t just live and die in this same world I inhabit; as if we don’t share significant cultural, demographic, economic, gender, racial, and other characteristics. But even more than this, there’s a deeper emotional and spiritual logic that we seem to share. I believe it’s this logic, which I can’t quite define—which, at its heart, remains unknown—that draws so many people, including myself, to both the man and his work.

I want to be particularly cognizant of the underlying logic in David’s work, how it comes through in his personality (including his essay, interviews, etc.), how it does or doesn’t reflect parts of my own conscious experience—and what remains outside of it, what’s more universal. The Platonic dimension, if you will.

(Wallacian footnote #2: I will just point out before closing that I use the word Platonic, here, to refer to the abstraction of ideas, but also to a form of love. Every ghost story is a love story, too. And why else would I be doing all this if there wasn’t love involved?)

So I’m noticing the infection of hyper-self-consciousness, which seems to be some kind of epiphenomenon or recursive flux or strange loop in the spiritual wavelength I’m attuning to as I approach the book,  and I’m trying to simultaneously accept it—see the world through David’s eyes—and shake it off. Breathe. Feel the stillness in my own body. Abide as my own singularity of awareness. And touch the universal… even as I feel myself implicated in the consciousness from which he created his art.

Hello Hello fellow Jesters

First thank you for taking time to read my blog I shall start by telling you that I have never ever wrote a blog post until right now so if you have any criticisms please send all notices to my attorney bob blah blah law.

Now this book has been on my radar for years hearing about it from a few different people and I was always dismissive of it because I got the feeling of high snobbery BUT it never left my mind either. Last night my friend Jessica Bellian posted on facebook a link to this Summer of Jest reading club and I totally loved the idea but I still slept on it and in between my Jamie Lannister dreams and terrible back to school dream I decided that I would dive right in, why not right? I am not one to waste a summer laying in the sun running from bees and other insects that scare me.

So tomorrow after work and cleaning the house (which I promised my husband I would do so I would never have to cut the grass) I shall embark to Barnes and Noble and purchase the overpriced book because I believe this should be read on dead trees and not my kindle (or maybe I want it so that when I am done I can display it and when people come over I can say yes I read that super huge book look how smart I am) anyhoo my journey officially kicks off tomorrow and I do hope you all come on the adventure of reading and blogging with me.

Jen of House Jest

I picked up my copy of Infinite Jest on Thursday at B&N working my way to the front of an apparent middle school field trip to the store (budget cuts?). The last three books I have read have been the 1^st 3 in the Game of Thrones series so the size of IJ was less daunting to me than it would have been. (The first 5 pages into IJ I had to remember that the word “seed” which was used often has a vastly different meaning than in Game of Thrones)

When I cracked open the book and started reading I had a sense of dread like what kind of rabbit hole am I going to get into and that sense continued on until I got to “Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment” Also during this first segment I could not stop reading this in a fake British accent, I am not sure if I have been so entwined in Game of Thrones that it just bled over into this book or that it reminded me of a dry and funny English novel. Regardless of the reason I was able to break this bad habit.

My biggest problem so far was being frantic over trying to figure out what was going on and how this is all connected but I read a post that helped me through that basically said just relax and read without trying to connect the dots because it will come together,so I am using that wisdom to relax and read.

I came across this line in the book, it made me laugh, out loud, LOUDLY and that was on page 15,

“The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir” I can’t wait to use this in real life when appropriate.

I am 49 pages in and I am enjoying it now, I am optimistic and feeling less skeptical and I hope this feeling continues. I plan on reading more tonight after I watch Breaking Bad and Maron.

Big thanks to Marco Morelli for letting a complete blogging amateurhave a chance at writing her way through this book and forming such a great way to read this book, Summer of Jest is just getting started and I am excited to see what everyone has to say about this book!

2 websites that have really helped me out in navigating IJ,

www.infinitesummer.org
www.infinitejest.wallacewiki.com

“The familiar feeling of being misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.”

                                                                                                         -Hal Incandenza

Note: This is the first in a series of summaries I plan to do as we move through Infinite Jest. The summaries will be organized by scene. Each entry will begin with the year the scene takes place (accompanied by its corresponding unsubsidized year in parentheses) and its location. I am very interested in suggestions for making these more useful and more compelling. My goal is to hit the major events of each scene and to notice details that can aid in gaining a fuller understanding of the novel’s plot. Sections will be posted according to the schedule Marco put up. My thanks to him for this great idea and this beautiful site.

Year of Glad (2010) – University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Infinite Jest begins with a failure to communicate. The first scene takes place in an administrative office. One of the novel’s main characters, Hal Incandenza, hopes to receive a scholarship to the University of Arizona for tennis.

Hal is an eighteen year old tennis prodigy currently attending the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) in Boston, MA, an institution founded by his father. He is accompanied by his half-uncle Charles “C.T.” Tavis, the headmaster of ETA, as well as one of the academy’s prorectors, Aubrey deLint. Hal, Tavis, and deLint are in Arizona for the annual WhataBurger Invitational, a tournament for junior tennis players. They find themselves in an administrative office and face to face with several of the University’s deans.  They are here because of discrepancies between Hal’s application materials from ETA and the scores Hal received on his college entrance exams.  He submitted a transcript of incredible grades (‘A’s with multiple pluses), but his tests came back with verbal  scores “quite a bit closer to zero than [The Deans are] comfortable with.” The impression they have is that Hal’s family doctored his transcripts and helped write his essays for him, hoping the University of Arizona’s administration would be focused on Hal’s prowess on the tennis court. Hal’s scores were doctored, but not because Hal struggles academically, at least not until recently. The impression we get is that something has happened to Hal over the last year, causing him to do poorly on his college entrance exams and making his recent attempts to write appear like “some sort of infant’s random stabs at a keyboard.” To compensate, ETA has doctored his grades for the last year and he has turned in essays written earlier in his academic career. The titles of these essay imply an incredible teenage mind: for instance, “Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar,” or “Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica.”

Hal, in addition to being very good at tennis, is a language prodigy. He comments several times throughout the scene on The Deans’ language usage. At one point Hal thinks, “The yellow administrator’s usage is on the whole undistinguished, though I have to admit he’s made himself understood.” That the “yellow” dean is able to make himself understood and that Hal cannot is one of the chief ironies of the opening scene: though Hal has a profound understanding of the English language – as evidenced by his powers of observation and description in the narration – he cannot speak to The Deans. He cannot make himself understood. This is why Tavis does all the talking before The Deans ask him (Tavis) to leave. Hal claims “I am in here,” but he cannot prove this to The Deans.

After Tavis fails to reassure the deans, he is forced to leave Hal alone in the office. Cornered and forced to say something, Hal attempts to reassure:

‘I am not just a jock.’  I say slowly.  Distinctly.  ‘My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot.  The grades prior to that are de moi.’  My eyes are closed; the room is silent.  ‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’  I am speaking slowly and distinctly.  ‘Call it something I ate.’

Unspecified Time (199?) – Incandenza Home, Weston, MA

This claim triggers a flashback to a scene Hal says he doesn’t actually remember, but has been recounted to him by his brother. The scene is of Hal’s mother, Avril, another administrator at ETA, and his brother Orin. They are outside. Avril is doing yard work when Hal emerges from the house carrying a mound of mold, saying he ate from it. Avril, caught between the paradoxical feelings of her love for Hal and her repulsion from what he is holding and claims to have eaten, circles the yard, screaming “God! Help! My son ate this! Help!”

Year of Glad (2010) - University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

As Hal’s recounting of Orin’s memory recedes, we return to the administrative office where Hal is insisting that he cares, that he is a person, that he is well read, that he has thoughts. But his claims are met by stares of uncomprehending horror from The Deans. As they stare, he becomes more agitated. Finally, they tackle him. The scene ends with Tavis trying to get The Deans off of Hal and with Hal telling the floor, “I’m not what you see and hear. I’m not.”

Image source is here.

I associate this book with heat. I suppose that is an inevitability of the summer reading group idea. The way you are more aware of your skin when it is hot out, whether it is the sweat or the burn or the we-are-wearing-too-many-clothes-let-us-out-please feeling of needing to be free. I don’t feel my skin that way in the winter, because I live in cold winter weather climates. My experience of the book is somehow tied so tightly to that feeling of heat on your skin, in your life, trying to cook your scrambled brains, where you notice it acutely because it isn’t always around.

As I open the book to Hal’s bathroom meltdown and Erdedy’s climbing swirling thoughts of anxiety and addiction and our first introduction to Himself as he tries to act as not quite himself, my skin greets these scenes with a, “Oh hello. I remember you,” sort of feeling. There is also a wave of delight dancing through my bones as the scenes that seemed confusing and decontextualized the first time around are now familiar to me in a way that helps me piece the disparate pieces together a little bit more. This is what I love about re-reading anything, but maybe extra specially this book.

It was so much work the first time, as it no-doubt is and will keep being for those of us who are IJ virgins. But now I know what I’m getting into, and I will wave a flag of support in your own endeavors to make it to the end, if you are one of these virgins. It is well worth every ounce of work and sweat it asks of you. I am tempted to promise this, but it is against my ethics to project my own experience of any kind of creative product onto anyone else in a way that doesn’t leave them space to have a different opinion. I hope you’ll have your own experience of this brilliance that makes it worth it, though.

There are more differences in my reading it this time around: I am as old as Don Gately now. That feels exceedingly strange, as my first full encounter with him left me wanting to adopt him as my wise life-long uncle. I’m not used to being as old as my uncles and I certainly do not want to out-age him. This is the strange stasis of literature over the course of a life – pages that are so alive and yet so unchanging, held by hands and read by eyes that look different, that change, see things differently, with every season.

Also: There is no air conditioner with its white noise buzz in my window, because there is no longer a cat to try to keep from heat stroking out as the mercury rises. Instead, there is the noise of the buses that stop outside my apartment when the light is red, and their idle diesel shudder that I only actually hear anymore if I stop and try. A different kind of mechanical soundscape background, but a welcome one nonetheless. I am in the northeast, not the midwest, am now only one large city away from Boston. Corn fields are inaccessible to me this time around, but the ocean is only six miles south. And I am, this time, sober. Last time I read the book I was a mess of drinking and weeping, was pounding club dance floors at night trying to fling my own self out of my body. Was pounding the pavement in the daytimes when I came to, hopping on my bike and making my legs fly me as far away from the city as often and as long as possible. I read the book because I wanted DFW to drown me, to brainwash me, to give me an entire different world to live in. My immediate post-coming-out uncloseted world was unbearable.

I kept many bottles of gatorade in my fridge, those brilliant little many purposed keep-you-alive-beyond-your limits containers of hydration, with their no-holds barred effect that will kick in without discrimination and provide blessed relief after a 15 hour binge at the bars or a 15 mile speed demon loop on your bike that you stupidly staggered out on not enough hours after waking from that binge. I am less stupid, now. I am more measured of soul and spirit, and finally have an understanding of what health is and how to cultivate it in my life. Life is, on the whole, blessedly more bearable.

All of that has nothing to do with this actual book, except for the fact that the gatorade and the cover of my book (the sky blue one with the slanted bright green words) are the same light blue color, and that I committed when I sat down to write this to write my felt reflections instead of trying to agonize my brainwaves into communicating sense. I am internally wrestling with some obscure pressure to make this more about DFW or IJ, but here is the thing: this book is one small part of my large life and I am still alive to write new stories. Maybe this is irreverent to say and truly I love the guy deeply (truly) but DFW surrendered his chance to write new stories, and so I will insist, stubbornly, and belligerently, with maybe a little edge of lingering bitterness at his departure, on meandering these words through some of the ways his story intersects with mine.

“Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.”

This stretch of scenes zooms out from the tight-focus on Hal that the novel began with. We move quickly from scene-to-scene, introducing radically different characters. We also travel from Tucson to several areas around Boston, MA, and then return to Arizona, this time to Phoenix. In these scenes, addiction and inheritance are important themes.

Year of Glad (2010) – Lavatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

We rejoin Hal in an institutional bathroom a few minutes after the debacle in the administrative office. The Deans, Tavis, and deLint trade accusations. Tavis blames The Deans for putting Hal in a stressful interview situation; The Deans blame Tavis for trying to smuggle a troubled young man into their university. Again, we get an indication of Hal’s intellectual prowess as Tavis asserts that Hal doesn’t just read, but “digests things.”

Year of Glad (2010) – University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Soon we are outside with Hal who is strapped onto a stretcher and being placed in a special ambulance, which reminds Hal that he was in an ambulance about a year ago. He notices the skill of the medical personnel. It is hot in Arizona. Memories of Cosgrove Watt, a grief therapist, and – most importantly – a scene of him, John Wayne, and D. Gately digging up Hal’s father’s head all float back to Hal. He is asked to tell his story.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Ken Erdedy’s Home, Cambridge, MA

This section stands as the first scene fully dedicated to the theme of addiction. Ken Erdedy is at home and waiting for a woman to arrive with a fifth of a kilo of marijuana. He is anxious. His marijuana addiction makes him obsessive: he changes his answering machine message; he buys a special bong; he buys snacks. The point is that his usage of marijuana controls his life. When he is going to use marijuana, he has to “shut the whole system down.”

We also begin to see that the novel (published in ’96) takes place in the future, as Erdedy talks about using a “teleputer” or “TP” to send and receive “e-notes,” as if the teleputer has become ubiquitous in ONAN (Organization of North American Nations) culture:

The intensity of Erdedy’s anxiety makes his observations micro and he’s able to see time as dialectic; he notices the second hand’s individual movements are comprised of three parts: preparation, movement, and readjustment. While waiting, Erdedy decides that he will make this debauch so intense and painful to himself that he will never want to smoke again. He will kill his desire by force-feeding it. He thinks about the routine he has established for when he wants to quit, which seems to be always. He makes each marijuana source promise to never deal to him again. Thinking about his last source, who was an “appropriation artist,” he remembers that he has her art in his room, art he clearly dislikes; he thinks how he spent ten straight days with her; he remembers that after he got his weed and disappeared from her life she sent him an angry postcard.

After several pages of waiting, Erdedy gets a call, which turns out to just be a colleague. He is disappointed. We leave him a few moments later. The door’s intercom and his phone have both sounded at the same time. Having attempted to go in both directions at once, Erdedy, we are told, “stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.”

01 April, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (2004) – An Unmarked Office, Enfield, MA

In this scene, we see a ten-year-old Hal Incandenza arriving at an unmarked office. He is here to meet with a professional conversationalist. The conversationalist turns out to be his father, James O. Incandenza (a.k.a. Himself). We learn that Hal is currently memorizing the OED and that he is familiar with other dictionaries. We learn that Hal’s father is an alcoholic whose consumption of Wild Turkey causes him to hallucinate. As the conversation progresses, it devolves. James stops hearing his son and becomes agitated as he excitedly moves from prescriptive grammar to ranting about “over 30 Near Eastern medical attachés” and telling Hal about his feeling that despite his best efforts to avoid the fate of his own father and himself he cannot communicate with his own son. Hal asks his father if this is some sort of April Fool’s gag. His father asks why all of his encounters with his son have to “end in terror.”

09 May, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

It is morning; we join Hal preparing for dawn drills at the Enfield Tennis Academy. He shares a room with his older brother, Mario Incandenza. The phone rings; Hal answers it; it is his eldest brother, Orin. Orin merely states the first lines from the Beatles song “I Want to Tell You.” Hal responds in kind. The call wakes Mario, who is described as “a small hunched shape with a big head.” Mario asks who it was. Hal responds, “No one you know, I don’t think.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Medical Attaché’s Apartment, Boston, MA

A Saudi medical attaché returns home early from work after failing to calm the “maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in [Prince Q’s] intestinal flora.” Used to his wife attending his most basic needs on his arrival home, he finds her gone to her Wednesday night tennis game. Frustrated, he thinks about the absurdity of subsidized time in the ONAN and the “apposite” obscenity of the “Libertine Statue” swaddled in its sponsored diaper. He thinks of Byzantine erotica, which was one of Hal’s interests when he was ten. Looking for something to watch and unwind in front of with his dinner, he finds a mail package that contains a video cartridge. The package was mailed from Arizona and says “Happy Anniversary!” The cartridge itself is unmarked, except for the image of a smiley face that appears constantly in ONAN culture and that the attaché dislikes. He begins watching the cartridge at 1927 hours.

Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar – Reginald’s House, Boston, MA

This is a difficult section. Wallace attempts to write in blackface. What follows is my attempt at a straightforward description of what this section narrates.

Reginald visits Clenette, who is outside her apartment jumping rope with Delores Epps. He tells Clenette that Wardine is at his house crying because of something her (Wardine’s) mother did to her. Clenette returns to Reginald’s house with him and they find Wardine crying in the closet. Her back hurts. They remove her shirt and find that she has lacerations from where her mother beat her with a hanger.

Wardine’s mother has beaten Wardine because she believes her daughter has given her boyfriend, Roy Tony, reasons to flirt with her. Roy Tony has been giving Wardine money and candy, physically getting in her way, and going into the room where Wardine and her siblings sleep in order to make advances toward Wardine by whispering to her. Clenette says that her mother claims that Wardine’s mother is crazy and everyone agrees that Roy Tony is scary.

Reginald likes Wardine and he complains that she never sleeps with him. The reason she does not sleep with him, she says, is that her mother has threatened to kill her if she has sex before she turns sixteen. Reginald assures Wardine that he will always protect her.

Part of the reason Roy Tony is feared is because he killed Delores Epps’ brother, Columbus, at the Brighton Projects because he was interested in Clenette’s mother. Roy Tony is currently on parole.  He can’t leave Brighton and wears an ankle monitor. It turns out that Roy Tony is actually Wardine’s uncle, on her father’s side.  Her father is no longer around. Clenette is also Wardine’s half-sister. At the end of the scene, Reginald declares that he will make Roy Tony stop harassing Wardine, which makes Clenette afraid for him.

The last thing we learn is that Clenette is pregnant, but she hasn’t told anyone yet.

Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (2004) – Near the Allston Spur, Boston, MA

This is a love story about Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk. Bruce first takes a liking to Mildred in the eighth grade. She is fatally pretty. Even the teachers find her attractive, describing her hair as flaxen. Bruce has not yet reached it, but puberty has made Mildred seem like an adult despite her actual age. The text implies that some teacher may have abused Mildred.

In the tenth grade, she undergoes a change. She drinks, smokes cigarettes, and rides in low-slung cars, generally displaying a “bored mask of Attitude.” Bruce adopts this same mask in order to appeal to Mildred. It works. At the end of the story, they live in a trailer with another couple and a drug dealer named Tommy Doocey who keeps snakes. They have a daughter, Harriet Bonk-Green. They dropped out of high school and, in what should be their senior year,  Bruce has a job while Mildred stays home “and for a while life [is] more or less one big party.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Late at night, Mario wants to talk to Hal about a match in which Hal badly beat his opponent. Hal is uncomfortable talking about it. Mario asks if his rooming with Hal is an imposition; Hal denies that it is. Mario goes on to say that Hal’s athletic performance made him seem as if he must believe in God. Hal claims to be a reluctant agnostic, that he has problems with death (“bones to pick” with God), since his and Mario’s father died. The conversation shifts to their mother, Avril, and whether she mourned. To Mario’s mind, she became more active and laughs more. Hal replies that there are two ways to take a flag to half-mast: you can lower the flag halfway or you can double the height of the pole.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Medical Attaché’s Apartment, Boston, MA

The medical attaché is still in his recliner watching the cartridge at 2010 hours.

October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Orin’s Apartment, Phoenix, AZ

This scene takes us into a routine morning for Orin Incandenza, Hal’s oldest brother. Orin suffers mornings. Arizona’s heat is too much for him. He can’t keep food down in the mornings. And he frequently has female visitors, who he refers to as “subjects,” who stay beyond their welcome (that is, until the next morning). Last night’s subject wrote him a note that he had a nightmare and stiff-armed her in his sleep. His left-side arm and leg are both over-sized, due to his time at ETA and his pro football career as a punter for the Arizona Cardinals.

As Orin eats honey and toast, he recalls how recently he was in the jacuzzi and a bird fell out of the sky and into the water next to him. He thinks of his fear of heights and cockroaches, the latter of which he kills by placing tumblers over them until they asphyxiate. Before becoming a Cardinal, Orin played for the New Orleans Saints.  Moving to the desert southwest, where his father grew up, has made his nightmares worse. He has nightmares of his face being attached to his mother’s face by the gut string of a tennis racket.

Orin does not respect his “subjects,” the women who sleep with him. One recent subject was the sister of his friend from ETA, Marlon Bain. Another thought he was tracing an 8 on her thigh; for this, he thinks her stupid. He feels constantly assaulted, particularly when a subject burdens him or when the team asks him to do a “soft profile” with some woman from Moment magazine.

Finally, he shaves South to North, as his father taught him.

Image source is here.

You may want to spend some time looking at the great visualizations of many of Incandenza’s films created by Chris Ayers.

J.O. Incandenza was an active director for 12 years. Because of the rapidly changing technologies of film dissemination and the idiosyncratic nature of both him and his work, Incandenza’s filmography presents a challenge to would-be-archivists.

The first years of Incandenza’s work involve technical experimentation with optics; he makes films that play with light, mirrors, and lenses. Cage, his first film, was made “utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress.” These early films also  experiment conceptually. Dark Logics apparently presents a “child-sized but severely palsied hand [turning] pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, alchemy, religion, and bogus political autobiography, each page comprising some articulation or defense of intolerance and hatred.” We assume the pages are turned by Mario, who will become something of a side-kick for the director. Finally, the early work explores Incandenza’s previous professions in, for instance, Annular Fusion is Our Friend and Flux in a Box.

As his work matures, we see the director begin to explore more complicated subject matter that is at times political and at times deeply personal. In Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge, Incandenza looks at his spouse’s (Avril Incandenza’s) debates with Steven Pinker about prescriptive grammar, the synopsis suggesting that these debates helped incite the MIT language riots. The riots are a part of ONAN’s fictional history and other moments of this history can be discerned in Incandenza’s work. In, for instance, The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, we see a historic road stripped of bricks that are replaced by cement. The movie follows one particular brick that is, first, used in a work of art, before ending up in an EWD catapult and shot into Southern Quebec. Finally, the brick is used in an FLQ-incited ONAN riot in the Year of the Whopper. These movies help us see the political environment of the novel. As we will learn later, the FLQ is a violent separatist cell in Quebec; and EWD (Empire Waste Displacement) catapults are launching a great deal of US waste into their country.

On the personal end, movies like Widower open a window to the director’s past:  ”Shot on location in Tucson AZ, parody of broadcast television domestic comedies, a cocaine-addicted father (Watt) leads his son (Reat) around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders.” Incandenza’s family suffers from terrific phobias, one of which is a fear of spiders. And in the work (At Least) 3 Cheers for Cause and Effect we get a film about litigation that actually happened after the construction of ETA and gain more background on Avril’s infidelity.

It is also important to notice the way Incandenza’s films are explicitly about art. Films like The Joke, where the film is actually footage of the film’s audience as it sits in the theater, are an obvious send-up of certain practices of metafiction – and postmodernism more broadly. Other films like The Medusa Versus the Odalisque explore more classic aesthetic questions, such as that of beauty, sublimity, and mimesis. It is not an accident that Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa appears in the filmography and reappears throughout the novel. It is a fantastic work that raises a range of questions about the relation between the aesthetic and the divine, about perspective, and about the communicability of intense personal experience.

The names Incandenza chooses for his production companies are important as well: the first is Meniscus Films, which is presumably named for his father’s destroyed knees; the second is Heliotrope films, named for a movement inspired by the sun; the third, Latrodectus Mactans Productions, is the binomial name of the black widow spider that haunts the Incandenza imagination; and finally, Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited is obviously named for the dead jester in Hamlet‘s graveyard scene. This is the same scene that gives us the title of our novel and a film that Incandenza attempted to make five (or maybe six) times. It is worth reading Hamlet’s speech and the entry on Infinite Jest (V) in full.

Here’s Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1.

It is also worth noting that Infinite Jest (V) is described as “far and away [James O. Incandenza's] most entertaining work” and that its master cartridge “was either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.”

Ecstasy source is here.

                   ”Little is known with scholarly definitiveness about the wheelchair assassins.”                                                                         -Geoffrey Day

Endnote 39 includes a footnote that directs us to see endnote 304. Endnote 304 tells two stories.

Story 1:

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We join Jim Struck in his ETA dorm. It is 2030h. He is poring over research materials for his “post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. [Thierry] Poutrincourt’s History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing.” Struck has chosen a sexy topic and set his sights high, with regards to the paper; but he is, at this late hour, struggling to make his work match his original expectations. Plus, he’s not feeling well: his sinuses are backed up; and he has a headache.  In a slight admission of defeat, he is searching for a source for his paper that he can “semi-plagiarize” without getting caught.

Struck chose to write on the wheelchair assassins of Quebec and he eventually lands on an essay written by Geoffrey Day, from a journal put out by Bayside Community College. The essay is loaded with enough academic jargon that (Struck hopes) Poutrincourt, who is French-Canadian, won’t bother to struggle through it. Struck assumes the author (Day) must have been on Quaaludes and wine when he wrote it. The biggest challenge will be to translate the academese into English, Struck thinks. As the translation work proceeds, Struck becomes progressively more tired and he imagines the influence of Quaaludes and wine on Day’s writing becoming more and more powerful.

As the essay wears on, the academic style actually starts to appeal to Struck because he imagines Poutrincourt will have to struggle to read it. He thinks about his own father’s addiction to wine and tranqs and how he dove into their family’s empty swimming pool one night and died. This was before Struck came to ETA. Eventually, he starts to lose control of his translation, making mistakes like copying “hurling himself athwart” directly from its source into his own paper, “a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase.” At another point, the narrative informs us that Hal sometimes wonders why “congenital plagiarists” like Struck go to seemingly more trouble to plagiarize than it would cause them to just write the paper straight. Hal has no firm opinion on the cause of this, ultimately. It would seem that Hal himself does not plagiarize.

At the end of the endnote, Struck’s ability to cover the trail of his plagiarism deteriorates to the point that Struck is allowing untranslated French terms into his paper – terms he does not bother to look up. This is particularly “suicidal” because, according to the text, “Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck’s got, or rather hasn’t.”

Story 2:

As of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Papineau Regions of SW Quebec

What follows is according to the scholarly work of Geoffrey Day of Bayside Community College.

Day’s essay begins with an account of the wheelchair assassins (or Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, or the AFR).  The AFR is a highly feared terrorist cell that originates from the Papineau Regions of Southwest Quebec. Their terrorism has included the placing of mirrors on ONAN highways that cause drivers to veer off the road to their death; the destruction of pipelines used for annular fusion; the destruction of EWD launch and reception capabilities; and the assassination of prominent Canadians who aid or allow the continued “sudetenlandization” of Quebec by the ONAN. The AFR is so effective and has become so feared that the phrase “to hear the squeak” (of their wheels) has become synonymous with assassination.

The assassins have several demands. 1) They demand the right for Quebec to secede from the ONAN. 2) They demand the elimination of all English cognates from Quebecois French. And 3) they want all EWD activity in Quebec to cease.

The AFR’s political activity, then, appeared with the establishment of the ONAN, in what has become known as The Reconfiguration. Particularly vexing was the subsequent experialist “gifting” of the region formerly known as the Northeastern US to Canada in the formation of the The Great Concavity/Convexity. But Day asserts that the people who became the wheelchair assassins were a cult long before the establishment of the ONAN. Their origins are shrouded in myth, he says, but their capacity as assassins is a result of their adherence to certain principles taken from the game that has maimed them and resigned them to wheelchairs, which is The Game of the Next Train.  Hence, the Cult of the Next Train.

Day suggests that the terrorists are hard to understand because their principles fully eschew the demands of rational self-interest – the governing philosophy of the ONAN. Rather, their principles come from the game. Originally thought up by miners’ sons, The Game of the Next Train involves 6 boys (ages 10-16) who line up shoulder to shoulder along a stretch of railroad tracks. Then, they wait for a train. The winner of the game is the last boy to leap across the railroad tracks without getting hit before the train arrives. The second, third, fourth, and fifth jumpers all lose, but the first jumper must walk home from the game alone. Day tells us that to not jump is not a possibility within the game. But it is said that one boy did not jump. Bernard Wayne allegedly did not jump and later drowned, his name becoming a symbol for all that is disgusting and ridiculous.

Day writes that “several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise” the AFR. The violence of the cult and its willingness to sacrifice life and limb to the integrity of the game it engages is what creates the particular philosophy of the AFR. As a counterexample, Day discusses the Cult of the Endless Kiss, which seals two combatants’ mouths together, forcing them to breathe in the air of their combatant, hold it in their own lungs, and then release it back into their combatant’s lungs again. This continues until the shared air depletes to the point where one combatant swoons. Day asserts that the survivors of this group went on to found their own separatist groups, such as Les Fils de Montcalm, who, because they directed their lives to the Endless Kiss rather than the Next Train, focus more on “using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization” that illuminates that particular group’s “relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents’ whole ‘raison de la guerre outrance’” or “reason for all-out war.”

With this endnote, Wallace cleverly illuminates the way day-to-day practice forms and informs ideological structures. This will be important for thinking about the relations between both the students at ETA and the residents at the halfway house and the larger political organization of the ONAN.

Image created by Chris Ayers.

This blog entry deals with content through page 126 and end note 48 (page 995), and a brief quote from page 169. I don’t believe there are any terribly important spoilers excepting, possibly (depending on how you read and what you care about when you do), the medical condition of Marathe’s wife. 

I’m including the following picture so that if you don’t want those potential spoilers you can read it and then click away before accidentally continuing on to the meat of what I’ll write about!

“I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking…” -pg 169

I was avoiding some of my real life tasks/duties last weekend, and ended up reading pages 50-some through 130-some in one afternoon. It was delicious, really, but one thing I noticed in having so many less stops and starts than the first time I read (not to mention being so much less overwhelmed by keeping all the characters straight), was how certain images connected with each other in my mind in ways they didn’t previously. Specifically, in this case, sinuses.

[Sidebar: I’ve also been thinking about bodies more generally, in relation to this book. There are so many points at which DFW’s writing and the characters and plot ask us to think about what ability or disability means, how our psyches connect with our body parts, and all the feelings or experiences that go into what it means to be alive, in a body, that is more or less functioning in a more or less efficient and (what we might deem) successful way on any given day. Those thoughts, for now, are too large and overwhelming for me to try to type about, so I’ve boiled it down to something more human scale, at the moment.]

[Second sidebar: I’m not a medical professional, nor have I ever studied beyond the most basic introduction to biology as it is generally taught in U.S. Undergraduate curriculum. This is a layperson’s interpretation of ideas and images that I’m sure would be much more profound and well fleshed out if a more studied or intelligent human were to tackle them. But, here I am, haha!].

Sinuses, I’ve read in recent days, is a general term for a variety of types of cavities or passages within our body. There are the more typically well-known nasal sinus cavities, in the bones of our skulls on the front of our faces. A brief jaunt into Gray’s Anatomy has shown me that there are also vein-related sinuses that carry blood from our brains to other places. You can also use the word “sinus,” to describe venal passages in our hearts (ie our arteries), and I’m sure many other veins or portals or orifices/entry/exit points in our bodies.

Interestingly enough, all of the aforementioned instances of sinuses are used by DFW to move various plot points along in the first tenth of the book. These are the pieces I can remember:

The medical attache specifically treats the sinus related thrush of Prince Q (which you can read about on page 33), and in fact it is the malfunctioning, yeasty, sinuses of the Prince that trigger, overall, the public discovery of the mysterious, debilitating entertainment cartridge. A bit later, we are brutally exposed to the death of the man who Gately robbed circa pages 56-59 due to a rhinoviral infection affecting his sinuses. Immediately following that scene we see Jim Troelsch’s attack out of nowhere of rhinovirus that leaves him out of A.M. Tennis drills on 3 November in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (page 60). We are then told on page 126 that Marathe’s wife is dying of ventricular restenosis, which is explained in the footnote on page 995, as “[t]he progressive asymmetrical narrowing of one or more cardiac sinuses,” and that this disease is the third leading cause of Canadians in Quebec and New Brunswick, and the seventh leading cause of death in the Northeastern U.S. These are all the main, plot-related examples I could think of off the top of my head (you might know of more!!).

What does this mean, if anything? I have been asking myself all week.

All of these images have to do with the closing off of the sinuses, and the sickness and unbearable pain they cause. In the cases of ventricular restenosis and Don Gately’s unfortunate robbery, even death. The remarks that DFW makes on sinuses aren’t simple observations of body parts. They are specific descriptions of agony induced by the malfunction of the sinuses. The whole (literal) mess of these images reminds me of Kate Gompert and her nauseous cells, somehow. The connection between physical and psychic agony. In this case, the physical sickness/disease/agony inducing severe mental distress.

Overall, I don’t really have an argument yet for what I think it conclusively might mean. I’m mostly observing, and pondering. I’d like to hear everyone else’s opinions, if you have them, honestly, because this book (and in this case, these images) spin my head around and make it almost impossible for me to settle on what I think DFW is actually trying to say. All the googling in the world has brought me exactly zero hits for anyone else who has attempted an analysis of sinus imagery in Infinite Jest, so I don’t even (yet!!) have anyone else’s thoughtful analysis or opinions to contextualize my own with.

This is my meager start, and you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this kind of imagery for the rest of the book.

“Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit.”          -Gerhardt Schtitt

                                                “Bless you.”                                                                                                                          -Mario Incandenza

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Pump Room, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

After spending the morning with Orin, we move to Hal in the tunnels and rooms that lie beneath ETA. He is smoking marijuana. In this scene, we see that Hal has at least three addictions: Kodiak chewing tobacco, marijuana, and the need to be secretive about his drug usage. Echoing the previous scene with Ken Erdedy, we find Hal going to elaborate ends to consume marijuana: he goes into the bowels of ETA, where they store The Lung (used to cover the courts in cold weather); he carries a one-hitter wrapped neatly in a baggie and keeps a toothbrush with him at all times; and he gets high almost exclusively by himself. A few people do know that Hal gets high, but they are limited to other drug users and, mysteriously, his brother Orin.

The narrative soon shifts to a discussion of ETA’s drug policy. Drugs are unsurprisingly against the rules, but users are not actively sought out and punished. The text tells us that there is an assumption ETA makes with regards to drug usage: high-performance athletes whose reason for attending ETA is to gain a mastery over their bodies would not want to do their bodies harm with regular drug usage. The narrator insists this is a mistaken view. In fact, one of the major themes of Infinite Jest – particularly exemplified in the figure of Hal’s father, James O. Incandenza – is the reality that high-end performance and substance addiction are in no way mutually exclusive. Hal looks to be at least the third generation of Incandenza men who have a problem with substance abuse, a family inheritance passed down from father to son. His mother worries about Hal’s substance abuse – in light of his father – but also wants him to feel free to make his own choices.

*Endnote 3 gives a description of ETA’s appearance. Its shape is cardioid:

Endnote 3 also gives us a revealing moment we can use to understand Hal’s and Mario’s different ways of dealing with the world. An architect who designed ETA and with whom Avril had an affair “wow[s] Mario and Hal by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket.” Later, Pemulis exposes this as a “cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa’s-not-real type of secret way, and which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic.” Mario’s investment in mysticism will continue to be an important explanation for his ability to evade the metaphysical snares that Hal gets hung up on and that fuel his (Hal’s) need to escape his mind through drug usage.

2 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Boston, MA

0015 hours: the medical attaché’s wife leaves Mount Auburn Total Fitness Center.

0020 hours: the medical attaché is still watching the cartridge. He has soiled himself.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Mario’s function at ETA is to film the drills and matches. This helps the players improve the various elements of their games because the instructors can show them what they are doing.

Autumn, Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (2008) – Greater Boston, MA

In this scene we get the first real introduction to Don Gately, though he’s first mentioned in scene 5. Gately will be one of the novel’s principal characters. In YDPAH, Gately is a talented burglar at the top of his game. We are told that he is of the Don’t-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. He is very large, has a square head, and is a “twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict.”

After serving a 92-day bit in jail, courtesy of a North Shore Assistant District Attorney incarcerating Gately on mere suspicion, Gately and  Trent (‘Quo Vadis’) Kite pay a visit to the ADA’s house, rob him, and take pictures of themselves with the ADA’s and the ADA’s wife’s toothbrushes protruding from their (Gately and Kite’s) bottoms.  Shortly thereafter, Gately mailed the ADA the pictures of he and Kite and the toothbrushes along with a brochure about good dental hygiene.

Though he avoided the North Shore after that, Gately ran into some bad luck when he invaded the home of a prominent French-Canadian of terrible importance. After shunting the French Canadian’s house alarm (a signature and thus tell-tale move for Gately), Kite and Gately began to rob the home, only to find the French Canadian at home and in bed sick, with the rest of his family gone to see the fall foliage of what is left of New England. Gately then binds the guy in a chair in the kitchen and gags his mouth with a dishrag.  Because of his cold, the French Canadian is unable to breathe through his nose. He dies a couple hours after Gately and Kite leave. His name was Guillaume DuPlessis, the right-hand man to Rodney Tine, the ONAN’s Chief of the Office of Unspecified Services.

DuPlesiss’s death gave the ADA whose toothbrush Gately had soiled the opportunity to get Don Gately “in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man’s life right around.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – ONAN

At this point in millennial ONAN history, technology has seriously advanced.  It consumes so much of their time that the citizens of the ONAN are developing serious headaches, sore bottoms, and lower back pain.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Rm. 204, Subdormitory B, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

In this scene, we join Jim Troeltsch, who is sick. He is watching an old tennis match from this year’s US Open. He had been calling the match – that is, pretending to be the match’s television announcer, which is something he does often – when the illness came on. He has several expectorants and pertussives and used Kleenex tissues around him. He also has several Tenuate capsules he stole from his roommate, Michael Pemulis. Troeltsch hovers above sleep daydreaming in “the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a sort of psychic clunk…convinced there’s someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you.”

Endnote 21 redirects us to endnote 211. There we learn that Pemulis was gifted a poster with the picture of a King. The text on the poster reads, “Yes, I’m Paranoid; But Am I Paranoid Enough.” Pemulis is paranoid about not making it to graduation at ETA and having to return to his home of Alston in disgrace.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Subdormitory, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We get a first-person description of Hal’s “worst nightmares.” What makes these dreams terrible, he says, is that the “nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been…overlooked.” Hal describes the room in his dream: there is a face in the floor; the face is evil; and it looks up at him with a yawning mouth, just before he wakes up. Upon waking, he says, “you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.”

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

ETA has been in operation for eleven years; it was founded by James O. Incanenza. Jim’s father was a failed method actor who raised Jim to be a serious junior tennis player. His father was a continual failure; he was afraid of spiders; and, despite being an actor, suffered from stage fright. Jim ended up being his father’s antithesis in terms of career success. JOI used his tennis skills to fund his education, ultimately earning a PhD in optical physics. He served the government after school, helping to create cold annular fusion. After leaving government service, he used his background to make his fortune with inventions. Eventually, he opened the Enfield Tennis Academy before beginning his final career as an avant-garde filmmaker. Endnote 24 gives us his filmography.

Incandenza ended up marrying Avril Mondragon, a Canadian bombshell and expert in prescriptive grammar. As an academic with ties to the Quebecois-Separatist Left, she is on the Mounties’ list of “Persons We Must Watch Carefully” and had trouble gaining citizenship to the US because of her relations. James and Avril’s first son, Orin, “had been at least partly a legal maneuver.”

James O. Incandenza committed suicide at fifty-four.

1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Mile High Stadium, Denver, CO

This scene shows us Orin Incandenza gliding into Mile High Stadium. This is apparently how the Cardinals enter the field each time they play, in the world of the novel. Orin is afraid of heights and dislikes this indignity. He is the team’s first-string punter and thinks he should not have to serve as a spectacle – a feeling that applies to both gliding into stadiums and giving interviews. This question points to one of the book’s larger themes, the affinities between athlete and performer.

1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Viewing Room,  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

ETA employs a “Big Buddy” system, where upperclassmen are assigned a number of lowerclassmen to mentor. This scene shows us Michael Pemulis having a “powwow” with his little buddies, where he’s holding forth on the effects of taking “the fly agaric mushroom.” The little buddies do not seem particularly interested.

1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Hal tells us that many ETA students begin using substances as early as 12, but that because of his father’s trouble with substances he abstained until he was fifteen, when a dread of a certain dream allowed him to be persuaded by Bridget Boone to try some “Low-grade synthetic Bob,” which worked like a charm.

The dream is of Hal on a football-sized tennis court. The giant court’s stands are filled with silent spectators. The court is not normal; many lines run in all directions; high overhead, in the umpire’s chair, there is the exhortation to ‘Play.’ In the stands, Hal can see his mother, who “sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.”

The umpire again asks Hal to play. And Hal says, “We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Psych Ward, Hospital, Greater Boston, MA

This scene gives us an interaction between Kate Gompert and a resident MD. The scene begins by examining the rhetorical posturing of medical doctors when they address patients in psych wards. Kate’s posture when the doctor first sees her looks to him as if it comes right from a picture in Yevtushenko’s Field Guide to Clinical States. Gompert has recently attempted suicide with pills: “I took everything I had in the world.” The attempt was unsuccessful. She has a history of depression, which leads the narrative to distinguish her suicide attempt and those that are merely made for attention. She later makes the same distinction. This distinction leads her to make a distinction between wanting to hurt herself and wanting to die; it is not like she dislikes herself, she asserts; she simply wants the pain to stop; she no longer wants to be alive.

The MD, for his part, walks a line: he is clinically interested in Gompert because she is a true uni-polar depressive, but he is also good at his job. The MD gets Gompert to take a chance with him, asking him if she can just receive electroconvulsive therapy. It worked last time she says; she didn’t mind it, really.

Gompert uses marijuana (a.k.a. Bob Hope) to manage her depression when she feels overwhelmed. She describes cycles where she can work well for a few weeks before having to try some Bob. Then, her usage will increase until she is actively doing it at work. Then, she’ll force herself to stop again. But the cycle always repeats itself until the Bob stops working and she does not even want to get high. She just wants to not hurt.

Her depression, she says, is more like horror than sadness. She tells the doctor, “I don’t want to play anymore,” which echoes the “Play” command the umpire gives Hal in his dream (above).

2 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Medical Attaché’s Apartment, Boston, MA

0145 hours: the medical attaché’s wife returns home, sees her husband soiled, runs to his side, and “eventually and naturally turn[s] her head and follow[s] his line of sight to the cartridge viewer.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

In this scene we are introduced to the Head Coach and Athletic Director of ETA, Gerhart Schtitt, who was courted to come to ETA by the academy’s founder, James O. Incandenza. Schtitt has a reputation for corporal punishment, but has apparently mellowed over the years – a mellowing that Wallace symbolizes with the substitution of a telescoping pointer for his old riding crop. He has become an elder statesman of tennis pedagogy.

Schtitt’s favorite companion at ETA is Mario Incandenza. The two often go on walks after meals, Schtitt enjoying his pipe and Mario enjoying the calliopsis. In this particular scene, the two go for ice cream, where it is revealed that Schtitt experiments bravely in his flavor selection while Mario can be relied on to always order chocolate.

Most of the scene is dedicated to a conversation wherein Schtitt outlines his philosophy of tennis and life-as-citizenship for Mario. This philosophy is described by the narrator as Kanto-Hegelian. And, yes, it is a philosophy that takes education as its cornerstone. The conversation begins with Schtitt’s claim that ONAN culture has fallen prey to the myth of efficiency – that one can travel in a straight line to one’s goals. For a Kanto-Hegelian like Schtitt, the problem with this perspective is that it takes the person who travels the straight line to be an unchanging person who overcomes that which challenges it. Hence, Schtitt characterizes this view saying, “But what then when something is in the way when you go between places, no? Plow ahead: go: collide: kabong.” This view is short-sighted and violent.

Schtitt recalls the motto of his youth: “We Are What We Walk Between.” And the narrator gives us JOI’s original motto for ETA, which endnote 32 translates as “They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.” From which, Charles Tavis changed ETA’s motto to “The Man Who Knows His Limits Has None” when he took over from Incandenza.

Schtitt’s manner of attacking the myth of efficiency is why he was courted by JOI, because Schtitt knew “real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game’s technicians revered [see Tavis's motto above], but in fact the opposite – not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty.” Here then is the theory of Hal’s nightmare of a few scenes ago. The theoretician is opposed to the technician. Where the theoretician looks out from the game of tennis – to see how one’s limits in tennis can inform one’s understanding of one’s limits in life – the technician tries to pin the game down, to conquer the game for life. It is the theoretical expansiveness of the game in Hal’s mind (being his father’s son and the student of Schtitt) that haunts him before he takes up marijuana; the game expands and swallows his life, providing the confusion and tangle of lines that obstructs his vision of any opponent other than himself.

To make this a little more (or maybe less) concrete, Wallace gives us endnotes 34 and 35. In 34, we learn that JOI would have been into Extra-Linear Dynamics because its “theorems and nonexistence proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat in certain cases; [the theorems and proofs amount to] hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification.” The note goes on to say that “Incandenza, whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four different careers, would have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had he survived.” This endnote points to JOI’s inability to fail in life, a failure to fail which might be seen as a failure to relate to his father who failed continually.  The other thing to notice in this quote is that Incandenza would have been excited by a deductive justification to surrender. That is, he would have liked a theoretical justification for giving up, this man who committed suicide. The note thus ends by implicitly drawing a distinction between the perspectives of Schtitt and Incandenza. This distinction will become more apparent below.

Endnote 35 follows by discussing Georg Cantor’s work on infinity, where he showed there “can be an infinity of things between any two things no matter how close together the two things are, which [proof] deeply informed Dr. J. Incandenza’s sense of the transstatistical aesthetics of serious tennis.” Let’s just note here that what we are seeing here for tennis is the claim that though the tennis court is a space comprised of boundaries, within those boundaries there are an infinite number of possibilities that can occur. This is why one of Incandenza’s documentary titles on tennis was called Flux in a Box.

Schtitt’s interest in failure and infinity, then, come together: “The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

Schtitt’s speech makes Mario think of his brother’s comment earlier; Hal had said that there are two ways to take a flag to half-mast: you can either lower the flag halfway or double the height of the pole.

This memory leads Mario to ask if life is pro-death then. Schtitt says that it is maybe not different than being pro-death, “except the chance to play,” a chance Kate Gompert attempted and JOI succeeded in opting out on.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Taxi, Travelling into East Watertown, MA

We join the non-ironically named Tiny Ewell in a taxi cab driving into East Watertown. Ewell is from Watertown and he prefers to avoid it.  He is travelling from a detox at St. Mel’s hospital for “late-stage alcoholism” to a halfway house in Enfield, MA.  Tiny dresses well. And he, we’re told, looks like a miniature Burl Ives.

The narrative shifts to Ewell’s roommate back at St. Mel’s. He sits in front of an air-conditioner smoking and drinking coffee.  He plays with the A/C’s power setting, blowing smoke up and behind him. He gives Ewell the howling fantods and seems thoroughly entertained by the A/C.

We flash back to the black staffer at St. Mel’s who put Tiny in the cab and directed the cab driver to  ”Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield.” The Cabbie asks Ewell if he’s sick. He replies, “So it would seem.”

2 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Medical Attaché’s Apartment, Boston, MA

The Near Eastern Medical Attaché, his wife, Prince Q’s personal physician’s assistant, the personal physician, two Embassy security guards, and two Seventh-Day-Adventist pamphleteers, are now all watching the cartridge.

30 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

This is the first of several scenes that depict a meeting between Remy Marathe and M. Hugh Steeply. The scene opens on Marathe, sitting in a wheelchair, looking toward Tucson, AZ.  The setting sun behind him makes his shadow stretch towards downtown. The sunset reminds Marathe of his home, the Southwest, Papineau Region of Quebec, where his wife is. She is sick. Marathe continues to stare towards Tucson as Steeply makes stones fall behind him, as he falls into a cactus, and as he tumbles to Marathe who grabs his arm to stop him from falling farther. Steeply is dressed as a woman; he wears a skirt, hosiery, and an unconvincing pair of breasts.

The narrative in this section makes the mistakes of a native French speaker whose second language is English because we are seeing the world from Marathe’s perspective. Steeply and Marathe apparently have covert meetings like this with some frequency and usually speak in English, against the wishes of Marathe’s AFR (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. The Wheelchair Assassins) superior, M. Fortier. The reason for this  is that Marathe gave up on demanding they speak in French when he decided that he was “tripling” – that is, he was actually betraying his fellow members in the AFR in order to save his wife, rather than just pretending to betray them in order to further the AFR’s political agenda.

The two speak of an event in the Northeast: an individual received a video cartridge that Steeply refers to as “The Entertainment.” Steeply accuses Marathe and the AFR of mailing the medical attaché this cartridge. The mailing and subsequent viewing of the cartridge took out “upwards of twenty” people (see the previous scene).

Steeply apes the mannerisms of women in his undercover role as a woman.

We then learn that the attaché may have had involvement with The Entertainment maker’s wife. The cartridge is now referred to by Steeply as the samizdat. The wife was having sex with many Canadians. This wife is on the same list that was mentioned earlier. Marathe suggests that this is a question of sex then, not of politics. Steeply responds: “There’s such a thing as political sex.” Marathe claims he doesn’t know anything about the event, that it wasn’t the AFR. To which, Steeply admits that he assumed as much, that he just needed to confirm that Marathe didn’t know anything, that in actuality, his office (the Office of Unspecified Services) had no idea what had happened.

The narrative then gives a strange parenthetical paragraph that tells us about one of Steeply’s higher-ups, Rod (the God) Tine, the “acknowledged architect of ONAN and continental Reconfiguration,” who has an attachment to one Mlle. Luria Perec, a French-Canadian spy pretending to be a stenographer for the recently deceased M. DuPlessis (see above). His attachment to the doubling stenographer raises questions about Tine’s loyalty to the ONAN. This question of loyalty obviously parallels Marathe’s situation.

Image source is here.

[This is mostly for re-readers.]

Since the last big group-read of Infinite Jest, what’s changed? In the summer of 2009, the Infinite Summer reading group, led by Matthew Baldwin, vaulted into the mainstream when it was covered by dozens of media outlets and was helped along by contributions from Michael Pietsch, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, John Green, John Moe, Ezra Klein, and others.

Even just that short list of names have experienced a lot of change in four years:

-         Michael Pietsch is now CEO of Hachette Book Group

-         The Decemberists created one of the best pieces of fan art ever when they filmed a video for their “Calamity Song” in August 2011 that was based on the Eschaton sequence in Infinite Jest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJpfK7l404I

-         John Green published The Fault in Our Stars in January 2012. It is now a cult classic, if not an outright classic.

Also, the world of DFW studies has exploded since 2009. Books published since then include:

-         David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

-         D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

-         The Legacy of David Foster Wallace edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou

-         Conversations with David Foster Wallace edited by Stephen Burn

-         Consider David Foster Wallace edited by David Hering

-         Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis titled Fate, Time, and Language

In fact, there were so many articles and posts and projects about DFW in 2012 alone that it took Fiction Advocate three very long posts to cover them all:

http://fictionadvocate.com/2012/12/20/yearofdavidfosterwallace2012/
http://fictionadvocate.com/2012/12/29/year-of-david-foster-wallace-pt-2/
http://fictionadvocate.com/2013/01/21/year-of-david-foster-wallace-errata-and-concordia/

One of the biggest changes, though, has been the publication of Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (and somewhat less so, the publication of a non-fiction collection, Both Flesh and Not). Between 2009 and 2011, there was much speculation about what The Pale King would look like and if it would stand up to inevitable criticism or if it would be considered a worthy follow-up to Infinite Jest. In my mind, despite a few reservations, The Pale King does hold up—and I believe it contains some of Wallace’s best writing.

One thing that The Pale King teaches us is that Wallace remained interested in writing fiction that sought a deeper connection with the reader than traditional empathetic characters could convey (Hal vs. Fogle). And that he struggled with the form that that fiction should take. The Pale King (as assembled by Pietsch) gives us layers of metafictional “David Wallace” stories, a pure meditation on religion and abortion (Lane Dean’s worry), a catalyst for life-changing events (Fogle’s), anxiety about social-sexual interaction (Rand and Drinion’s conversation), a Reagan-era civics lesson, terrorism, the skeleton key to boredom, and more. From the early 1990s sad problems of addiction to substances, TV/entertainment, fear, and the “constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, something infinite thing,” Wallace moves on to tackle not just boredom in the sense of repetitive monotony, but how the tedium of everyday adult responsibility can be transcended by the ability to pay attention.

Some of this transition is evident in Infinite Jest, particularly the storylines about sobriety and Gately’s recovery. We know more about how Wallace structured the novel, and the order in which he wrote it, from D.T. Max’s biography. For example, Wallace integrated into the novel some pieces he’d written in graduate school in Arizona in 1986 (a story/voice exercise titled “Las Meninas” is an early draft of the Wardine-be-cry section). In a 1987 application to the Yaddo writing colony, he writes that he is working on writing something called “Infinite Jest,” which implies that he is working on the Incandenza section with its Hamletesque dead father and paralyzed by fear son.

Personally, I find myself skimming through the opening sections of Infinite Jest because they seem so familiar to me, sixteen years after I first read them and I start looking for sections halfway through (or later) that seem unfamiliar to me now. I find myself more interested in little plot questions that are surrounded by little clues throughout the later sections and end notes. (I particularly love the stuff around pages 916-931 about Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob and Whitey Sorkin, which takes on a whole new resonance since Whitey Bulger has been captured and is currently on trial and new stories about his crimes are emerging). 

Infinite Summer was a direct response to Wallace’s death. It was an opportunity for many people who had Infinite Jest sitting on their to-read shelf for years to finally complete it. Now, four years on, we’ve seen millions more readers discover Wallace’s writing (often through his “This is Water” speech {or video}) and dip their toe into his short stories or journalistic essays before picking up his 1000-page masterwork. I look forward to the 2017ish iteration of this project, pulling down my tattered old paperback again, and looking back on what’s changed since today.

“Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”                         -Remy Marathe

“How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?”              -Hugh Steeply

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Southern Reaches of the Great Convavity/Convexity, Canada

A herd of feral hamsters moves through what used to be Vermont. The herd descends from a pair of hamsters named Ward and June, originally set free by a young boy from Watertown, NY. We are told that this region is now in Canada. The narrative advises that American persons who happen to see a herd of feral hamsters should not approach the herd, should carry nothing vegetablish, and should move South with all due haste.

30 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

We return to Marathe and Steeply, who continue their conversation. Marathe watches Steeply smoke his cigarette like a woman and thinks that Steeply enjoys something about being degraded by the disguises he wears for his work with Unspecified Services. There is a question of whether Marathe will report their conversation to M. Fortier because it remains unclear whether Marathe is actually “tripling” for the ONAN or “quadrupling” for the AFR. Which side is he on?

Steeply mentions the possible betrayal symbolized by the Chief of Unspecified Services’s (Rodney Tine’s) relationship with the insurgent Luria Perec. Marathe responds by mentioning the absurdly suspicious conditions of M. DuPlessis’ death (see the scene with Don Gately in summary 3). Marathe asserts that if Tine’s betrayal were not complete, the  AFR would know it – because of Luria.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We get a brief sketch of a student’s intense daily schedule at ETA; after which, we find ourselves in the boy’s locker room, at 1640 hours. The older students are in there, freshly showered and in towels. They talk about a recent language exam. The boys are tired. They discuss potential questions for an exam in a class called The History of Entertainment. Their discussion centers on their teacher’s (Disney R. Leith’s) expectations for a question on seminal advances in entertainment technology.

Somebody asks for the definition of acutance. Hal replies, “A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse’s digital.” The other boys make fun of him. He does not mind too much.

As they tease him, Radar defines ‘Halation’ as “A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed.”

30 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

Marathe and Steeply sit and stand, respectively, looking toward Tucson as night falls.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We return to the locker room. Several ETA boys sit around, each with a white towel around their waist – except Ortho “The Darkness” Stice, who wears all black always. The text describes the Big Buddy System that Tavis instituted at ETA: each older boy is assigned four-to-six younger boys to mentor; the more the older boy is trusted, the more young and clueless his charges will be. We learn that Evan Ingersol, as a Little Buddy, was traded from Trevor Axford to Hal because Axford can’t stand Ingersol. Hal doesn’t care for him either.

Being a Big Buddy is an honor, a sign that the administration thinks the chosen Big Buddy is headed in the right direction. The narrative asserts that the wise Big Buddy keeps his distance, allowing their Little Buddies to realize when they need help and to ask for it. ETA is hard. Not everyone makes it, the narrator says. The Big Buddies help by serving as a link between the administration and the younger students. In this sense, the Big Buddies have divided allegiances between their duty to ETA as an institution and their Little Buddies who depend on them for support and having their best interests in mind. Hal likes being a Big Buddy because he learns about himself when he teaches the Little Buddies and he gets to feel kind without any real cost.

The boys in the locker room complain of being tired, saying they need new words to describe their level of exhaustion. They are well educated in matters of language.

We learn that Hal looks somewhat “ethnic,” thanks to a Pima tribe great-grandmother, though he is the only Incandenza who carries her traits of appearance. We also learn that Orin, who received his appearance more from his mother’s side, can do the splits. Mario doesn’t resemble anyone they know.

The students continue to complain about being tired, wishing that Schtitt would give them a break before midterms, that they didn’t have to study when they finished their rigid schedule this evening, wishing that they could turn their brains off, have sex, watch action movies, etc.

Hal sees Schtatt’s (who has Crohn’s Disease and arthritic gout in his right knee) shoe under a bathroom stall door and contemplates the accepting posture of defecation. He imagines centuries of pooping humans, their shoes appearing below stalls, from the centurion’s sandal to the salesman’s well-shined, dress shoe.

Still complaining, the boys consider how much time they spent in constant motion today. They observe that Schtitt has no intention of losing to Port Washington this year. And they worry that this much skeletal stress will ruin them for professional tennis when they get older. John Wayne does not speak. The feeling of community in the locker room deteriorates. People leave. A couple students argue whether it is Schtitt or Tavis who is programming the intensity of their work. The scene ends echoing the leonine roar of the toilet from the third scene.

30 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

We return to Marathe and Steeply. Steeply raises the love of Luria Perec and Rodney Tine again, suggesting that it is an archetypal love, like in the legends of Tristan and Isolde or Lancelot and “what’s her name.”  Marathe responds by mentioning the loves of “Kierkegaard and Regina” and “Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the mail.” Steeply chuckles at the mention of the mailbox, it being apropos to their recent discussion of the samizdat. Marathe tells Steeply he is ignorant: Helen and Agamemnon were not in love, Paris and Helen were – the Paris of Troy. Steeply talks about the reclaiming of Helen as the justification for the Trojan War; Marathe becomes offended at what he calls Steeply’s ignorance of history, asserting that the Trojan war was about commercial interests. Steeply retorts by asking if the war even took place, to which Marathe says, “‘The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its interests,’… ‘You only wish to enjoy to pretend for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’”

What follows is a discourse on love. Steeply claims that the tragic love of Tine for Luria P. is validated in the fact that Tine has no choice in the matter. Tine must act for his love. Marathe scorns this claim of “must,” saying that we choose what we worship and what we love.

Buried in this conversation is the knowledge that Marathe is a terrorist or has been one in the past – a person who sacrifices his life (and the lives of others) for the advancement of a cause.

Marathe argues that by choosing what we love and worship, we can direct our lives towards that which outlasts us. We control our desires. For Marathe, a product of the Cult of the Next Train, the self does not have value independent of the values and principals of a community. Marathe goes on to ask how you teach children how to think about their choices if you don’t show them that their choices have something to do with desire.

Steeply responds by asserting that we do not choose what to love; rather, we are overthrown by desire in moments of true love. Marathe contends this makes a person nothing; it makes people slaves to their desire.

Steeply uses silence to show Marathe the irony of his situation.

When Marathe speaks again, he says that denying choice in desire leaves one tragically and involuntarily lost.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

In this scene, we travel to various Big Buddy meetings, where we see the upperclassmen of ETA give mini-lectures to their Little Buddies.

The scene begins with Hal discussing the complaint session that just took place in the locker room. He contends that Tavis and Schtitt program the time for the students to complain about the rigors of ETA into the schedule, so the students can bond and blow off steam. He claims these moments are good for ETA as a community. The meeting takes place in Viewing Room #6, where Hal plays a looping video of Stan Smith hitting textbook forehands. His strokes are described as “egoless.”

The younger boys are exceptionally tired. They are splayed on the floor and are varying distances from full-on sleep. They continue to discuss how ETA structures their lives and arranges them in relation to one another, how they each know how they compare with each other in terms of ranking, and how they also know that their chances of reaching pro tennis – despite their years at ETA – are slim.

They think about their isolation from each other: “We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of the word individual. We are each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common. This aloneness.’ ‘E Unibus Pluram, ‘ Ingersoll muses.’” (Wallace has a somewhat famous essay about television and fiction writing entitled “E Unibus Pluram.”)

Hal contends that fatigue creates a common enemy for the students at ETA, that their training at this point is not about the physical.  The ETA faculty are working on the students’ minds. Hal further asserts that it will help his Little Buddies if they look for design in the system. Tavis and Schtitt are giving the students of ETA community.

Blott suggests that this helps the suffering be less lonely.

The narrative shifts to another Big Buddy/Little Buddy meeting. Here we join John Wayne who is speaking about transcending former limits – what he calls plateau-hopping. He describes three types of people who fail to progress from plateau-to-plateau, in terms of their tennis development: there is the one who despairs of the challenge of hopping to the next plateau after their easy development has ended; there’s the obsessive type who becomes so dedicated to self-transcendance that he over-labors and burns out or hurts himself; and there is the one who grows complacent with his current place and pretends he does not need to improve, building a game around his strengths in order to compensate for his deficiencies. John Wayne is the most desirable Big Buddy because he is show-bound.

When we shift to Pemulis’s meeting, he is scamming money off his Little Buddies with a card trick.

In Schacht’s meeting, he is giving his Little Buddies a lecture on good dental hygiene.

Troeltsch speaks with his Little Buddies about repetition, how right now they are training their bodies so that in a few years they can begin to work on their minds. Their play on court has to be subconscious before the real training can begin. Because in a couple years they will have to face real fears on the court and cannot be thinking about the physical.

Struck speaks to his Little Buddies in a formal, Socratic manner. One of the younger ETAs asks Struck what he (the Little Buddy) should do if someone cheats when no one is around except the Little Buddy. Struck says that one should play one’s game as well as one can and not cheat. If the opponent continues to cheat and the Little Buddy loses, he should do “something unpleasant” to his water bottle. The Little Buddies ask what they should do if they have to fart during play, but they are unsure that they do not actually have to use the bathroom.

We shift to Ortho “The Darkness” Stice. He talks about getting inside what you didn’t know you had in you to begin with. A big fan of Gerhardt Schtitt, he parrots the instructor’s suggestion that one must sacrifice one’s self in order to find one’s self.

We return to Struck, who says that he lets the fart ride. The Little Buddies ask if he means let it out; he says no, nothing escapes his bottom during play.

We then move back to Pemulis, who – having just taken five dollars off each of his Little Buddies – is now persuading them to bet again.

And finally, we close the scene back with Hal, who is thinking about his addiction to marijuana, limits, and rituals. Can he get down into the tunnels before dinner? He thinks about limits and rituals and he thinks about need and desire.

Mid-October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We join Mario and Hal on a stroll through the ETA grounds. Mario, aware of the cadences of Hal’s desires, allows Hal to slip away for a few private moments. Soon Mario hears noise from the nearby brush and one USS Millicent Kent, who is “200 kilos if she’s a kilo,” comes into view. She tells Mario that she has seen the strangest thing, a Husky VI brand telescoping tripod in a deep part of the thicket. Mario comments that Himself used to use a Husky VI. They go into the brush together, in search of the tripod.

As they go, Millicent Kent tells Mario she likes his eyelashes and Mario thanks her. She can’t find the tripod. As they continue their search, Kent confides several things to Mario: she says that though she has a future in professional tennis, her passion has always been interpretive dance; she confides that she has come to ETA, a boarding school, in order to escape her father because she came home early one day to find him capering around the house in her leotard. He disgusts her.

She further confides that she has long had a crush on Mario and that she is very attracted to his police lock and his vest. Mario hears Hal tramping through the brush, looking for him. Millicent pulls Mario to her, undoes some straps, and reaches for his penis. But Mario is very ticklish and his laughing quickly brings Hal to their place in the thicket. On their way back to Comm-Ad., they stumble upon “the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle-tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn’t such a very tall or thick thicket at all.”

30 April – Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

We rejoin Steeply and Marathe as they continue to look toward Tucson. Steeply asks Marathe why the AFR chose to set up a base in Boston, MA, the former home of The Entertainment’s purported director. He then asks Marathe about rumors of an anti-Entertainment that can reverse the effects of the samizdat. Marathe responds that  they are just that, rumors.

Marathe asks Steeply why the OUS dresses Steeply in such ridiculous costumes? Wasn’t he previously disguised as a black man? Steeply responds that he was Haitian.

Marathe knows that he (Marathe) is not eidetic because he can remember several crucial observations he has failed to remember.

30 April – Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

In its entirety: “Several times also Marathe called U.S.A. to Steeply ‘Your walled nation’ or ‘Your murated nation.’”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Weight Room,  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

In this scene, we get a description of Lyle, a guru who “sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top…on top of the towel dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station.” He is muscular and lives off the sweat of the students of ETA. In exchange for this sweat, he offers bits of cryptic wisdom to the students. His shirt says “TRANSCEND” on the front and “GOD WILL PROVIDE” (in Latin) on the back. One long-standing nugget he has shared with students: “And the Lord said: Let not the weight though wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.” Newer kids are scared of Lyle and sometimes they set the resistance on the shoulder-pull too high. Up they go. Lyle sits above them, serene and silent.

It is then revealed that this scene is written in the first-person. The narrator wants to be like Lyle, he says, able “to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time.”

24 December, Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (2008) – Boston, MA

C, Poor Tony, and yrstruly wake up and it is bright and they are sick from withdrawal. They steal items from a sidewalk sale in Harvard Square in order to buy their morning heroine fix.

Soon, they get in a car with an old acquaintance of Poor Tony, after PT promises that he will give the man a blowjob. Once in the car, they physically assault him, stealing enough money to buy heroine for the rest of the day. They debate whether to kill the man, but decide instead to just break his jaw and warn him not to go to the cops. But then C wants to remove the man’s ear. He does and they throw it in a dumpster.

They return to the Brighton Projects in order to meet up with and buy drugs from Roy Tony, who usually sits on a bench there. There are many people around, which makes them nervous, but they buy a half bundle of heroine from Roy Tony. They then go down to the library at Copley Square, take drugs in a stall of the men’s room, and feel compelled to figure out where to get the money for tomorrow’s drugs, which is Christmas Day.

They head back to Harvard Square, where Poor Tony wants to hang out at a gay club, but C and yrstruly can’t stand homosexuals in groups.

They leave to Central Square, where they steal NyQuil from a CVS, drink the NyQuil, and steal a student’s backpack that doesn’t have anything of value for them inside. The trio then meets a prostitute named Kely Vinory on her corner who is talking to someone named Eckwus who informs them that Stokely Darkstar has AIDS. Eckwus says that Darkstar plans to give other people the virus. The word is out not to shoot up with Stokely’s works.

Yrstruly, we learn, used to work as a prostitute in New York City.

They head back to Harvard Square, where they plan to rob a college student leaving a bar. Instead, they see an older person getting extremely drunk by himself. When he leaves the bar, they beat him up and leave him in a pile of snow under a dumpster. They remove the man’s shoes and throw them in the dumpster and steal $400 from him.

Unable to find Roy Tony, they decide to head to Chinatown, despite Poor Tony saying he doesn’t want to go there. Once they arrive in Chinatown, Poor Tony discloses that he might be privy to a scheme that got over on Dr. Wo, their source for heroine. They decide yrstruly and C should be the ones to go into Wo’s place, called Hung Toys, while Poor Tony hides outside.

Inside Hung Toys, we learn that Dr. Wo is a serious and powerful dealer. Wo takes his time getting their heroine. Poor Tony is outside trying to keep a low profile. Eventually, Wo asks yrstruly and C if they have seen either Poor Tony or Susan T. Cheese because he knows they crew together. C and yrstruly deny they have seen him, saying that they have stopped spending time around PT. Wo tells them that if they see Poor Tony to wish him a “thousand blisses.”

C and yrstruly leave Hung Toys and find Poor Tony hiding. They return to the library at Copley Square. Cooking up, yrstruly notices that Poor Tony is not clamoring to C and him to let Poor Tony have some of the heroine already. This makes yrstruly suspicious and he doesn’t shoot up right away. C does. It turns out the drugs are laced and C falls over grabbing at his throat and screaming. Yrstruly thinks it might be Draino. After a couple minutes, C dies.

Yrstruly and Poor Tony leave C in a dumpster. Yrstruly thinks about getting revenge on Poor Tony. He spends three days outside his mother’s apartment detoxing without methadone.

Image source is here.

I am in a mood folks, I’ve been reading for the past 2 hours hoping that would change but it hasn’t and I can’t put off this blog post any longer. I have been absolutely slammed at work and trying to keep up with things at the homestead and dealing with a puppy who won’t STOP CHEWING MY FUCKING BOOKCASE, but you did not come here to hear about my day to day and I am ok with that so on why you are here, Infinite Jest.

I like it people, I really do last time I was here I read up to page 50 and 2 weeks later I am on page 100 (shut up) The Kate Gompert was a very interesting (chapter?) I couldn’t help but think after reading her pot smoking schedule that the girl has severe OCD and maybe that’s her problem, when she stops her routine she gets depressed? But what do I know apparently nothing if you do not highlight every word take a note every 10 seconds and make diagrams. ANYWAY I am curious to see how that story line ends and I am excited to see all these stories come together that makes some sort of sense.

The Incandenza family is hysterical! I love every family member and I find myself laughing out loud quite often when I am reading about them. The visual I get with Mario in a Motorcycle side car even gets me smirking. My only real fear about this book is that it will end up like the characters from the HBO show Six Feet Under, however I see no reason as of yet to not remain positive.

I was extremely happy to see what appears to be the death of the Near Eastern Medical Attache. Nothing annoys me more than an able man who can not take care of himself without a woman doing everything for him. Now the curiosity and excitement about what he watched and how it killed him is something I am very much looking forward too.

Well I am out of nicotine gum and will have to pull quickly out of my drive way without my neighbor stopping me to talk about hockey, I am not sure how many times I have to tell him that I don’t give a flying fuck about the sport until he gets the point and leaves me alone. STAY TUNED FOLKS!

This image comes from Infinite Boston, a project that describes locations that appear in Infinite Jest as they actually exist in the Boston area. The picture is of the former home of Granada House, the home Wallace stayed in when he was in recovery and on which he based the descriptions of the novel’s Ennet House. You can read a description and promotion of Granada House’s services here. It is almost certainly written by Wallace himself.

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This scene opens on Hal Incandenza as he enters his room at ETA. The phone is ringing. When he answers, Orin accuses him of always sounding like he has been masturbating. Hal has just smoked marijuana. Orin complains of the heat in Arizona. Hal thinks about the fact that he constantly lies to Orin when he is on the phone with him, after which it occurs to Hal that Orin may be lying to him as well. Orin goes on about masturbation, complains about the heat again, and claims to be missing New Orleans.

Eventually, Orin comes around to the reason he called: he’s met “someone” and asks Hal about Separatism. Hal asks, “You mean in Canada?” Orin answers, “Is there any other kind?”

3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Enfield, MA 

In this scene, we are introduced to Ennet House, a halfway home for drug and alcohol addiction. It was founded in the Year of the Whopper (2001) by “a nail-tough old chronic drug addict and alcoholic who spent the bulk of his adult life under the supervision of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections,” before joining AA. His surrender to humility given to him by AA became the cornerstone of his life. Indeed, it became so important, he became the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name. Soon after gaining his sobriety, he founded Ennet House in order to pass on “the gift of sobriety” to others.

Ennet House is just down the hill from ETA, a part of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, which is managed by the VA. It can assist 22 residents in supervised recovery at a time.

The nameless AA did everything to get Ennet House up and running and he built his House on the firm belief that “no matter how broad the trail of slime they dragged in behind them, [everyone] deserved the same chance at sobriety through utterly total surrender he’d been granted.” He is described as a tough old “Boston galoot” (a.k.a. a crocodile).

According to legend, he asked early residents at Ennet House to chew rocks to prove their desperation for sobriety. Though this sounds extreme, the narrative asserts that recovery is so insane and so painful, “you’ll wish you had some feldspar handy, too.” His death in 2007 was unmarked outside the AA community.

Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (2008) – Headquarters of State Farm Insurance Companies, Inc., Bloomington, IL

This scene presents an inter-office memo. Murrayf sends an INTCOM MESSAGE to several of his colleagues, telling them to see the claim that follows in order to read the extraordinary story of a claimant who is still in the emergency room. Because the claimant entered the hospital with a blood alcohol level of over .3, the company will not have to pay out on the claim. What follows is more for entertainment.

The letter from the claimant tells us that he is a bricklayer by trade. On March 27th YDAU he was working alone. He had just finished his job at the top of a new six-story building when he realized he had extra bricks. Rather than make several trips carrying the bricks down, he decided to lower them in a barrel with a pulley. The man weighed 175 kg. The bricks weighed 900 kg. When he got down to the ground and unhooked the rope attached to the bricks, the bricklayer was lifted off the ground and up the side of the building until he collided with the barrel coming down. After reaching the top of the building, where his hands were jammed into the pulley, the barrel hit the ground, lost its bricks, and the man fell back toward the ground. Soon, he collided with  the barrel again, as it was again ascending, and he fell the rest of the way back to the brick-strewn earth. Finally, the empty barrel fell on top of him.

We might here remember Lyle’s advice to the students at ETA.

21 February, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (2004) -  Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This scene gives us a paper Hal wrote in the seventh grade.

This paper was written four years after the end of broadcast television (2000) and one year after JOI’s death (2003).

The paper received a B/B+ because the conclusion was largely unsupported supposition. In the essay, Hal compares the protagonists of two broadcast television action series’, Steve McGarrett of Hawaii 5-0 and Frank Furillo of Hill Street Blues. Where McGarrett exemplifies the modern man of action, Hal argues, Furillo typifies a man of postmodern “reaction.” Both protagonists are heroes of their own show’s culture, but both are also ill-equipped for the other’s world. McGarrett, as the modern man of action, is single-minded, acting to “refashion a truth the audience already knows into an object of law, justice, modern heroism.” Contrariwise, Furillo succeeds because he is cast within a large system; he excels at being a cog in a very large and bureaucratic machine. Where Furillo’s premature ejaculation would be the end of Hawaii 5-0, in Hill Street Blues it signifies a body that is responsive to its environment, changing and adapting to the world around it.

That Furillo comes after McGarrett as a typical US protagonist reflects a shift in US cultural preferences. Audiences, Hal says, want the stoic bureaucrat. His successes and shortfalls more closely align with their own. But, Hal ponders, what comes next? What hero will succeed Furillo? Hal posits perhaps the hero of non-action, a hero who simply is. He will be a man who is “divorced from stimulus.”

As Hal’s teacher noted, Hal’s conclusion is weak because Hal does not ground his suggestion about the man of non-action in a corresponding change in ONAN culture, as he did with the shift from McGarrett to Furillo.

10 August, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Boston, MA

This scene presents us with journalist Helen Steeply’s (Hugh M. Steeply’s) only “putative” published article with Moment magazine. We are told the article was published four years after the death of James Incandenza, who committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven.

The article reports on a 46-year-old Boston accountant who had received an artificial, exterior heart, which she “probably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse.” The story’s writing is purple. We are told the heart’s recipient was window shopping in Cambridge when a “transvestite purse snatcher” with a “tattered feather boa..tore the life sustaining purse from the woman’s unwitting grasp.” The accountant gave chase, shouting after the thief, “Stop her! She stole my heart!” Alas, the lady was ignored by the people she passed because they “presumed [this] to be yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship gone sour.” The woman maintained her pursuit of the transvestite purse snatcher for four blocks before collapsing. The heart was later found smashed outside the library by Copley Square.

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – ONAN

We now get a list of separatist groups in Canada and their characteristics.

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarmet (2009) – ONAN

This section describes the reasons for the sharp rise and precipitous fall of videophony in ONAN culture. We are given three reasons for the reversion from videophony back to old-fashioned telephone use: “(1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the macroeconomics of consumer high-tech.”

The key source of emotional stress came from the unrealized reality that old-fashioned telephones allowed users to indulge in the fiction that they were engaging the full and undivided attention of the other person on the other end of the line, while at the same time only selectively giving the other person on the line their own attention. In this sense, the advent of videophony raised the stakes of long-distance communication – in terms of commitment to your interlocutor – to roughly that of in-person interaction.

Physical vanity compounded this stress. Not only did videophony require users to prepare for their video calls, but callers were also able to replay the calls, later, in a format that allowed them to see both faces interacting, an ability they found both irresistible and intensely stressful. This ability to see one’s self in-call provoked the development of High Definition masking technologies. These began as cosmetic manipulations of the digital image of one’s self-image, but the combination of high-costs and steadily increasing consumer demand for masking soon lead to actual, wearable masks of persons’ own improved digital image.

The masks succeeded initially, but entrepreneurial instincts seek to satisfy all consumer demand and people have a hard time seeing themselves in a fair light. This led to the production of video masks that were far more attractive than the wearer’s actual faces. The masks so far outpaced the wearer’s actual appearance that people began to be reticent of even leaving their homes. The previously mentioned consumer anxiety and entrepreneurial zeal, now combined with technological advances in home video recording, led to the development of full-body masking, basically 2-D cutouts of a person’s aesthetically augmented self. Finally, cost and the logic of techno-culture produced digital stills that were not unlike lens caps, essentially creating a return to non-visual interfacing between callers.

Looking at videophony from this side of its rise and fall, we can see that it conformed to an “annular curve” shared by many “advances” in technology. Beginning with the move from aural-to-video calling, there was an initial excitement for the new technology; this was followed by anxiety, several remedies for that anxiety, and an ultimate remedy that cancelled the original purpose of videophony. In fact, when culture returned to its Bell-era telephone state, most people congratulated themselves on their preference for old-fashioned telephony over the gauche and outmoded videophony with its attendant masks and tableaux.

15 October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Four times each year, ONAN’s tennis association sends a toxicologist to all accredited tennis academies with an attendant junior ranked in the top-64 continentally.  It is that time of year at ETA.  The students have formed long lines that snake to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms, where they will be handed little cups to pee into so their urine can be scanned for forbidden substances. The narrative contends that a full quarter of students over the age of 15 cannot pass this test.

Enter Michael Pemulis. He not only sells most of the illegal substances the students are scanned for in the test, but he and Trevor Axford also offer clean urine for “ten adjusted dollars a cc” four times a year, when the toxicologist comes around.

Pemulis and Axford collect the urine from sub-10s at ETA. The urine is stored in discrete little Visine bottles, which, after each of the quarterly sales days, Pemulis convinces Mario and the younger ETAs to play the game of “Who-Can-Find,-Boil-,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-In-A-Three-Hour-Period-Without-Any-Kind-Of-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You’re-Up-To.” Despite its manipulative qualities, Mario likes the game because he is good at it and it is nice to be particularly good at something. Pemulis and Axford hide their urine supplies in the tow truck Axford, Pemulis, Hal and Struck had all gone in together on. The truck carries the seal of the ONAN:

In this scene, Mario films the line of students as they wait to be tested, as well as the urine transactions. Pemulis and Axford apparently don’t mind being filmed because Mario will be the only one to see the film and, because of his interest in conceptual film (an interest that comes from Himself, presumably), he will “modulate and scramble the vendors’ and customers’ faces into undulating systems of flesh-colored squares, since facial scrambling will heighten whatever weird conceptual effect Mario’s usually after anyway.” Pemulis and Axford do brisk business, we are told.

Pemulis’s backstory is that he comes from Allston, is a great net man, and has a strong lob. He is at ETA on scholarship, coming from “low-rise Greek and Irish housing projects.” The product of an inner city tennis program for children, he was actively recruited to ETA. We also learn that his parents won’t hesitate to cash in on their son’s potential career in pro tennis.

Apparently, Pemulis doesn’t take practice seriously and psyches himself out in matches. He could be higher ranked. Schtitt contends he is the only student who knows how to truly “punch the volley” currently at ETA. Pemulis is also immensely skilled at Eschaton, which, endnote 53 informs us, “is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the Endstat® ROM-run nuclear-conflagration game.” Pemulis has a very high Stanford-Binet and is on academic probation. Hal tutors Pemulis in grammar and literature. But he is phenomenal at math and science, holding the JOI Geometrical Optics Scholarship. Mario and Pemulis share an interest in optics, and they help each other out with projects in Himself’s underground work space.

Hal, seventeen-years-old, used to describe himself as a lexical prodigy who was good at tennis. He is now asked to consider himself a late-blooming tennis genius. If he goes pro, he will be the second professional sports player of the three Incandenza brothers.

Pemulis worries about getting busted for selling drugs, which is why he makes his potential customers ask him to, “Please commit a crime,” when they call. Kate Gompert, from the psych ward, must have called Pemulis at some point.

Winter, B.S. 1960 – Tucson, AZ

This scene presents a monologue given by Hal’s grandfather (James O. Incandenza Sr.) to his son, Hal’s father, outside their home in Tucson, AZ. James Sr. is telling his son how to open a garage door. He says that bodies outside the self should be treated with respect, that Jim should use just the appropriate amount of force when opening the garage door, that he should get to know the door and use it accordingly. Jim’s mother does not treat bodies outside herself with respect, according to the father. He says this disrespect of objects is a trait that was made popular by the actor Marlon Brando. Hal’s grandmother was an extra in one of Brando’s films and, apparently, was in love with him, distantly. Brando, James says, was “the archetypal new-type actor,” the actor who ruined two generations’ relations with objects because Brando taught people not to respect them. Yet, James argues, Jim’s mother and most of the rest of her generation never actually understood Brando; “she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects.” It is clear to James that Brando spent hours practicing with objects, learning how to, for instance, perfectly lean back in a chair. He argues that the slouching style of Brando was not, in fact, disrespectful, but, rather, that Brando had learned to behave as though the world were a living extension of himself. Watching Brando is like watching high-quality tennis.

James then asserts that his son will be a great tennis player, that he himself was near-great, but that Jim will be truly great. James assures JOI that he watches and he sees Jim’s understanding of objects and tells him he will be “poetry in motion.” They open the door to reveal the family’s 1956 Mercury Montclair:

James speaks about the car as object and its need for a competent driver to bring out its excellence. We learn that Jim is ten-years-old and 5’11″, a “pituitary freak.” James tells Jim, “Head is body.” He points to a spider and calls it “Latrodectus mactans,” a black widow. He tells Jim to kill the spider with a tennis racquet and is afterwards gratified by the spider-free portion of garage. The conversation goes on and James says that the way a person hits a tennis ball reveals their character. He then takes out a two-pint flask (surely this is an absurdism) and offers the young Jim a drink. The flask cues another soliloquy on the flask itself as an object in relation to a body. The flask has been well handled and its shiny metal cap has the oil from James’s fingertips on it.

Thinking again about Jim’s future tennis greatness, he says that Jim will be a “machine in the ghost.” He tells Jim to put his book, Guide to Reflective Indices, down. The young JOI does this, but when he does he drops it to the ground and raises a cloud of smoke. James remonstrates his son for not giving the book due care and Jim starts to cry. James tells him not to cry and starts talking about the snick of the flask’s lid, how it signifies the quality of the object. He talks about the Montclair’s engine snicking. And then he reveals that the family (he, JOI, and Jim’s mother) is moving back to California so James can take his first and last stab at an acting career since his son was born. Jim starts to get upset as James tells them that they are moving away from the librarian who has shown an interest in Jim and his interest in optics. James sees the librarian as arrogant and he tells Jim that his frequent crying is having less and less an effect on him, his father, though they can both be sure that the crying will always work on Jim’s mother.

The narrative now becomes more and more about James’s wasted talent. He gives an account of himself as a tennis-playing youth. He was good. And after several years of playing, his father had never come to see him, though his mother was there every single day, which made her attendance meaningless. Until one day, out of nowhere, his father appeared with a client whose son James was playing. It was hot. The men were dressed heavily (though James never saw his father, Mario Incandenza Sr., sweat). James says he was playing so well that day that his head was “pounding like a heart.” He was in the zone. He was simply destroying the boy on the other side of the court.

At one point during the match, Mario’s client complimented Mario on how good James was at tennis. James’s father agreed, but said his son would never be truly great. James heard this, but initially insists to Jim that he heard it after he started to fall. Regardless, he went down, perhaps because he slipped on a rotten palm frond or a cursed spider, but he went down on his knees, skidding toward his opponent’s lucky drop shot. The incident was made worse by how badly James was beating his opponent; he says he could have let the point go, that he was beating the client’s kid so soundly that the lucky drop shot could not have mattered in the greater scheme of the game, but that a player who seeks to “wave a hankie from the vessel of his limit” gives due care to every single point and guts every single point out.

James is excessively drunk at this point, having emptied his two-pint flask. And he admits to his son that he may have betrayed his body out on the court that day by listening to and countenancing the words of his father. He betrayed himself by acknowledging his father’s betrayal. James further confides that he is scared of dying without being seen.

Finally, we get a vivid description of James destroying his knees as he skids across the court. The description is cast in a religious light. James says he slid in a “parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer.” His father, Mario, passed judgment on his son and he, the son, punished himself, revealing to himself “the religion of the physical.” James closes, saying that it is “a pivotal, seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny in the same moment.”

The source for these great images by Tim Porter is here.

4 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Inman Square, Cambridge, MA

Michael Pemulis is taking a complicated route back to his truck after purchasing a rare and powerful drug called DMZ. We get a description of the picturesque Inman Square. DMZ’s effects on its user are described as “temporally-cerebral and almost ontological.” We are told that DMZ is formed from a meta-mold, a mold that grows on other molds and the experience of taking it is described as mystical. Endnote 57 says that an “Italian lithographer who’d ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.” The drug is also known around metro Boston as “Madame Psychosis, after a popular…cult radio personality.” As Pemulis returns home to ETA, an Ennet House resident opens the gate for him and we are told that he (Pemulis) has a strict policy of not dealing to residents of Ennet House because their urine is subject to great scrutiny. Once he gets back to his room, Pemulis phones Hal and lets him know that the “turd emergeth.” When he calls, Hal  is reading the Riverside Hamlet so he can help Mario with a project based, in part, on the play.

April, Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-to-Install Upgrade for Infernatron/Interlace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile (2007) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We are told this section takes place “almost exactly three years after James Incandenza died. What is described is a film by Mario Incandenza, made with the help of his younger brother, Hal. The section describes how to live young Hal’s life at ETA. We are given a list of sentences that direct us to certain activities. For instance, “[h]ere is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a log.” And, “learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It’s a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.” Perhaps most profoundly and apposite to the larger novel and is a portion that bears on Hal’s relationship with his father: “have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.”

13-1500 hours, 4 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Enfield, MA

This section gives us a series of monologues delivered to Pat Montesian in her office at Ennet House. The people delivering the monologues are residents of Ennet House but are largely unnamed at this point in the novel.

The first resident complains about a man drumming his fingernails on the dinner table and how irritating the complainant found the drumming. It irritated her so much she “sort of poked him with” her fork. She is now curious just how much trouble she might be in for this.

The next asks Pat to define alcoholic and queries her with, “How can you ask me to attribute to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term’s meaning?” He contends he is not denying anything; he is not in denial. Certainly he is sick. But how can he deny what he doesn’t understand.

The next person says that all he remembers is seeing Nell fly across the table brandishing a fork at him. He says it took Gately and Diehl both to pull the fork out of his hand and the table beneath his hand. He says they offered him Percocet at the hospital; that’s how intense the pain was. And he says that, yes, he was tapping his fingers on the table, but that “that specimen [Nell, who stabbed him with the fork] goes or I do.”

Another resident comes and says, “I’m awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.”

Yet another says that he does not deny that he is a drug addict. His name is Alfonso and he has known “powerlessness since the period of Castro.” He asks, “Is hope of power the bad way for Alfonso as drug addict?”

Somebody pops in to say “Division called again about the the thing with the vermin.” Division gave Ennet House an ultimatum about the vermin, apparently.

The next resident says he was upstairs trying to clean the men’s bathroom and there was something terrifying in one of the toilets. He has repeatedly tried to flush it, but it won’t go down.

Someone says they put a pudding cup in the resident fridge at 1300 and at 1430, when he came back down to eat it, it was missing. McDade conveniently offered to help him look for the cup, which was when the resident noticed that McDade had a big drop of pudding on his chin.

Another person implores Pat: “how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop the coke?” He shows her his missing septum. Everything points to him wanting to stop, he says, “[b]ut then so how come I can’t stop, if i want to stop, is the thing.”

We now get Bruce Green describing Tommy Doocy and his foul smelling snake tanks. Green thinks Doocy couldn’t smell the tanks because his hairlip probably covered his nose. Doocy had a thing  for Mildred Bonk, Green’s lady. He also never washed and had sex with chickens. Mildred eventually left Bruce Green for a man who claimed to have a ranch in New Jersey. She took her and Bruce’s daughter Harriet with them.

The next resident dislikes that AA calls alcoholism a disease and then tells residents to pray. He asks, “I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify?”

Randy Lenz says he is happy to be here. He asks what tooth-grinding Pat refers to? He can’t find a job, but he has been trying, he says.

Another: “I said where’m I suppose to go to?”

Another complains about being put on restriction for having mouthwash.

Somebody has annoyed another resident with their farting.

The next resident says that requiring someone to attest to facts that don’t apply is to hold them under duress.

The mouthwash guy asks if it is a misdemeanor to gargle.

The thing in the toilet has returned, allegedly.

And the last resident begins, “First just let me say one thing.”

Late October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – MIT, Cambridge, MA

A student reads an account of seeing Orin Incandenza punt for Boston College in the clumsy voice of Elmer Fudd. He is reading for WYYY’s radio show, “Those Were the Legends that Formerly Were.” This show gives diminutive math and science students a chance to get a modicum of revenge for the ideals the preceding generation raised them with.

The late-shift, student engineer for WYYY goes down the back wooden stairs of MIT’s student union. The union looks like a head with an exposed brain. The engineer is a grad student on work-study. He sound-checks Madame Psychosis, who does her show after “Those Were the Legends” and from behind a triptych screen that doesn’t allow the student engineer to see her. She is the only “paid personality on the nightly docket.” For sound-check, she says, “He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long things swinging.” This description of music will be repeated several times.

Madame P. gets five minutes of dead air before her show. She begins, “And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And we said: ‘Look at that fucker Dance.’” The name of the show is “Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis.” As MP does “Sixty Minutes,” the student engineer ascends to the roof of the union to listen to the broadcast, look at the sky, and smoke cigarettes. For this broadcast, Psychosis says she is reading from a pamphlet for the Union of the Hideously Deformed (UHID). It invites all those who are self-conscious about their appearance to come join an AA style recovery group. She invites “[t]hose with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks…[to c]ome on down.” She also invites those who are so beautiful they are deformed.” UHID is a common topic for Madame Psychosis, as is professional sports (particularly football) and avant garde film.

The narrative follows the transmission from WYYY to the top of ETA’s hill, straight to the Headmaster’s House, where Mario and Hal are visiting their mother and CT for dinner. Mario is obsessed with MP and listens religiously. He props himself up on a table with his head right up to the speaker and turns the volume down very low, so his listening does not disturb Avril. The others eat in the other room. We learn that ETA is a compromise between Avril’s “academic hard-assery” and the tennis philosophy of Schtitt and JOI. ETA’s curriculum, we learn, is based on the Oxbridge trivium and quadrium curricula of old England, though serious compromises have been made, in light of the students’ need to focus on tennis, modern pedagogy, and more general shifts in ONAN culture.

We are told Mario likes MP because “he’s somehow sure MP cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow.” Madame Psychosis’s background music is both “predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it’s periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.” We also learn that when Avril is polite to someone she dislikes, she becomes faultless and brittle in such a way that it raises the room’s tension to an extreme.

After dinner, the Incandenzas have a routine, which is that Hal suggests to Mario that Mario can just stay at the Headmaster’s House for the night and says that he (Hal) is going to “blast down the hill” for a while to “make trouble.” It is a family in-joke, the conclusion of which is Avril’s warning against Hal having any fun whatsoever. Mario always finds this exchange devilishly funny.

As of Year of the Depend Adult Under Garment (2009) – Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, Enfield, MA

Ennet House is the sixth of seven “exterior Units” that satellite the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital. The hospital was built during either the Vietnam or Korean War and is now used only by aging veterans of those wars that took place at least 40 years ago. The hospital building itself is now defunct, but Enfield Marine maintains the small exterior buildings that used to house VA doctors and staff.

Unit #1 counsels Vietnam vets and dispenses meds to them. Unit # 2 is a methadone clinic. Patrons of Units 1 & 2 both arrive very early in the morning. And both groups look angry when they arrive, the former congregating and gesticulating wildly, the latter keeping their distance from one another.

Don Gately likes to watch the groups from his smoking spot on the fire escape of Ennet House before Units 1 & 2 open. When he was new at Ennet House, he had teamed up with a methedrine addict and attached a sign to the methadone clinic’s door that read, “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.” Panic ensued, as the early-arriving addicts began to lose their patience for the relief that wouldn’t come until the maddeningly relative further notice came. While Gately and the speed addict watched, she (the speed addict) dropped the binoculars they had “borrowed” from the House Manager onto the roof of an arriving Ennet House counselor’s, Calvin Thrust’s, Corvette. Gately and the speed addict were nearly kicked out of Ennet House and were put on house restriction. Two weeks later, the addict went back to methedrine. She was discharged, picked up on an old warrant, and murdered in jail – all of which was related to Don Gately in the form of a parable about the very tenuous nature of his own existence.

Unit #3 is unoccupied, but being prepared for lease.

Unit #4 is “a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. They drive Ennet House’s residents crazy. One of the patients, a retired nurse from the Air Force, “does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window.” Residents recently placed a “Help Wanted” sign under the nurse’s window as a kind of grim joke. Gately was supposed to run an investigation on the joke’s perpetrators but didn’t have the heart to really prosecute the person he suspected because of his own history with jokes involving signs.

Unit #5 is used to house catatonics and is referred to as The Shed.

*Endnote 67:

We are told some of the Enfield Marine security staff know Hal from working as extras in a couple of Himself’s cartridges that needed police figures. The officers sometimes go down to the bar Hal and his friends frequent, The Unexamined Life, and tell Hal about the residents of Unit #5, which is called The Shed because the residents seem to be literally stored there. They refer to the catatonics as “objay darts,” which Don doesn’t understand. Hal finds the objay darts fascinating. The officers tell him about one lady who is “psychotically terrified of the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both.” Thus, she holds her eyes closed at all times, unable to handle the anxiety of possibly finding herself actually blind and/or paralyzed. This lady turns out to be exemplary of “the common unifying symptom of most of The Shed’s objay darts,” which is “a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror come true.” On warm nights, a woman sometimes wanders out of The Shed wearing glasses and a sheet and lays her hands on a maple in The Shed’s lawn; and when Gately wakes up, he will watch her there and feel a “chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz” in his childhood.

Unit #6 is Ennet House.

Unit #7, about to fall into a ravine, is boarded up and used by Ennet House residents to secretly take substances, which is why entering #7 is grounds for immediate dismissal.

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Weight Room, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

It is 1610 and the students of ETA are exercising. The students yell at each other and make funny faces as they work out. Lyle dispenses advice: “Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?” Radar, the student Lyle is engaging, responds he would try every one. “Then,” Lyle says, “you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.”

After Kornspan lifts an incredible amount of weight, Pemulis leans over and calls him a pussy.

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Enfield, MA

The narrative now takes us back to Ennet House and informs the reader about several things he or she might learn, should he or she find his- or herself in or around a recovery house like Ennet House. For instance, once social services has taken a “mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again.” Or that serious acne often accompanies recovery.

The perspective of this portion of narrative is both male and white and is not lower-class. The observations range from small to large. A larger example being, “once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and p.m. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.” Also: “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.” And: “That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.” Eventually, the narrator comes to see that “a person – one with the Disease/-Ease – will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended.”

This leads to the realization that Tiny Ewell is the narrator of this portion of the text. It also leads to a description of his investigation into a culture comprised of people who have done something that can never be erased. They have been tattooed. For Tiny, tattoos are “potent symbols…of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.” He divides the tattooed into two categories: 1) younger rough-types who are proud of their tattoos and (to Tiny’s mind) are not sensible enough to regret getting the tattoo and 2) the older people who show their tattoos to Tiny with a kind of stoic regret, which he likens to the way Purple Hearted veterans display their scars. After a couple weeks into his investigation, Tiny realizes he needs to open a third category of tattooed persons, which is the biker, who shows you their tattoo as if they are showing you their finger or elbow, as they wonder why you would want to see their tattoo or their finger or their elbow. We learn that Bruce Green has a “MILDRED BONK” on his tricep.

Eventually, Tiny’s discussion of prison tattoos segues into the anxiety Gately experiences when he talks to Tiny. The anxiety is caused by the fact that Gately doesn’t ever understand what Ewell is saying and therefore feels insecure about his own intelligence. Gately reflects that his jailhouse tattoos are small potatoes “compared to some of the fucked-up and really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately’d made as an active drug addict and burglar, not to mention their consequences, the mistakes, which Gately’s trying to accept he’ll be paying off for a real long time.”

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Subdormitory, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Pemulis received the DMZ and is displaying it on his bed for Axford and Hal. They rehearse the power of the drug, talking about its effects, entertaining the idea of putting it in Port Washington’s Gatorade barrels, and eventually determining that they will just try it first by themselves. Hal asks Pemulis if he went to the library to research the drug. Pemulis says he has not, but he found some information on the internet. Of particular interest was an article from Moment that talks about a convict at Leavenworth who was injected with DMZ. The ex-soldier apparently “lost his mind” and was later found “in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.” Despite joking about the story, it strengthens the trio’s resolve to take the truck to an actual library and do some hard research on the DMZ.

Over the next day, the DMZ is stored in the ceiling of Pemulis’s room, his long-time hiding spot for illicit substances. As they watch others practice, Hal and Pemulis work out when they will try the drug. Doing it in Enfield is difficult because Axford doesn’t have a solid way out of his 0500 dawn drills. We learn also that the Port Washington meet is tomorrow (7 November) and that Tavis rents two buses to take the ETAs to “the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies.” There will be a meet, buffet, and dance, as there is every year. And there are a couple wagers between the two schools each year, one of which is between the two schools’ headmasters and is both secret and very painful for the loser. Given the need to still get to the library, Hal and Pemulis determine the weekend of the 20th and 21st of November to be their best chance. It is the weekend of a big fundraiser, where the main tennis activity will only involve John Wayne and the Vaught twins. One of their primary concerns is the hangover DMZ will cause, which makes them think about the severity of several substances’ after-effects. Hal feels that “after a night of involved hallucinogens…the dawn seem[s] to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence.” This takes us to endnote 76.

In endnote 76, we are told that as a toddler Hal was thought to be ADD, as thinking that about children was in vogue at the time. But further observation revealed he was actually Borderline-Gifted or Gifted. He felt driven to perform for his parents, particularly his mother and worked hard to excel in language and book reading. The narrative says that in spelling bee competitions he would extract “what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounce it before certain persons” such as Avril and the moderators, and feel “almost the same sweet pale aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.”

What Pemulis doesn’t mention and Hal doesn’t talk about but certainly thinks about is that Pemulis is not a lock for the Whataburger in Tucson. And he will only get Saturday night classes off if he is going to the Whataburger.

7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Molly Notkin’s Apartment, Boston, MA

Joelle Van Dyne sits in a chair at Molly Notkin’s post-oral-exam party. Joelle plans to kill herself at this party.

Joelle used to live in this apartment. The narrative tells us that people about to commit suicide are incredibly self-directed. This suicide meditation is set within a heavy satire of graduate school parties. Joelle, as always, wears the veil of the UHID. She thinks about Molly Notkin who is still wearing a Marx mask from her oral defense the day before. She considers that she “and poor Molly Notkin are just the same…seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine – sisters, sororal twins.” She asks herself, “What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.”

She thinks about her walk to the party when someone asked her what the “deal with the veil” was, a brusque questioning she prefers. The narrative describes suicide as the “most self-involved and self-cancelling act.” She thinks about her addiction to freebase cocaine and the cage that is her addiction. The metaphor she uses is that being inside the addiction is like she sees the exits to her cage and goes to them before realizing they are actually the bars of that cage. She thinks about Himself’s Cage III. She hates her addiction. She wants to stop. She can’t. She is powerless.

As of Year of Glad (2010) – ONAN

We now get a chronology of the years of subsidized time. People have taken some time to figure this out and the best theory, to my mind, is that the Year of the Whopper is equivalent to 2002 in unsibsidized time. This is the timeline used in these summaries. For more discussion of this, go here.

7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Molly Notkin’s Apartment, Boston, MA

We rejoin Joelle as she thinks about her former boyfriend, Orin Incandenza, and his collection of “husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off.” She walks down Boylston Street. She sees an advertisement, really an anti-ad, that pictures a man in a wheelchair, his lap blanketed, staring at the sky in ecstasy, with his hand extending an unmarked cartridge to the passerby. Joelle considers the ad, takes out the cartridge, and then returns it again. She is done with film cartridges. She thinks about Himself; “Infinite Jim” she called him. He died 4 years, seven months, and six days ago. He died “after the acid,” but it is unclear what this means at this point. He died after Orin left, after Jim had come over to her apartment (Molly Notkin’s apartment now) and filmed his last film. Jim had also made her sit and watch his penultimate Sorry All Over the Place.

James O. Incandenza died on 1 April (April Fool’s Day), Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (2005).

Joelle had liked to get high and seriously clean her apartment. Jim had been “her heart’s one true friend.” She got high this morning and went to her dealer, Lady Delphina, one last time. Joelle purposefully overpaid. And she is still on her way to the party when she meets an elderly black gentleman who asks about the veil and the UHID on Joelle’s T-stop’s platform.

As of Year of Glad – Erythema, AZ

We are given the “putative” CV of one Helen P. Steeply.

7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Molly Notkin’s Apartment, Boston, MA

We rejoin JvD on her journey to Molly Notkin’s party. We learn that Notkin does not realize Joelle has her addiction. When she arrives at Notkin’s apartment, we learn that they had bonded over thick juices several years ago and that Notkin thinks it is still Joelle’s biggest vice. Molly does not realize that her friend and Himself were never lovers, though endnote 80 tells us that Orin knew.

Inside the party, the grad students are doing a minimal mambo, merely suggesting the actions of a real mambo. Notkin displays art: framed picture frames. The style of delivering the various conversations of the room that Wallace employs is clearly stolen from William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. We again hear about the cage’s door and we learn that JOI took his life by sticking his head in a microwave oven and turning it on. Two men talk about Jim’s last film. They also talk about JOI”s drunkenness in the making of The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.’ An American and a Canadian get in an argument about whether the Great Concavity/Convexity is a concavity or a convexity.

Joelle eventually goes into Molly’s bathroom to have Too Much Fun, to freebase an extraordinary amount of cocaine. She thinks repeatedly about Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa at the Vittoria in Rome, which she never got to see. She prepares the cocaine, a process the narrative describes in extreme detail. It says that Joelle likes cocaine more than anyone can like something and still live. The only other experience that has made her feel this way was going to entertaining movies with her father, her own personal daddy – a low PH chemist – where her father would tell her she was prettier than the women on the screen. She felt fully taken care of at these times. Part of what she liked about these movies was the fact that “entertainment is blind.” She thinks about how Orin used to call his own father “The Mad Stork,” one time slipping and calling him “The Sad Stork.”

As Joelle takes the drugs she observes that the room is made of facts. Someone begins to pound on the door, complaining to Notkin that someone is making an awful noise in her bathroom and that there is a queer smell coming from the room. The end of the scene describes Joelle as “knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.”

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Enfield, MA

We are told Enfield, MA is composed “almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities.” The EWD catapults are described and we are told about ETA’s exceptional beauty for its area.

5 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Subdormitory, Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We join Hal in his messy dormitory. The phone rings, Hal answers, and it is Orin on the other end. Hal tells Orin he does not want to answer anymore separatism questions. Hal is clipping his toenails into a wastebasket. The clippings are flying into the basket with a high frequency. Hal tells Orin this because he knows the sound of clipping nails gives Orin the howling fantods. They talk about the can’t-miss feeling that athletics can give someone who is on their game in sports.

Hal brings up the Discursive OED‘s description of the Ahts of Vancouver, who, he says, “used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors” in order “fill up [their] bodies completely with virgin blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote ‘The sated ghost cannot see secret things.’ The Discursive OED postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.” Hal continues, “After a burial, rural Papineau-region Quebecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin to let out the soul, if it wants out.”

Orin presses Hal to pay attention to him. He wants to tell Hal about the wheelchaired people he thinks are following him. They talk about a trailer where one of Orin’s “Subjects” takes him after they meet at the post office. Hal makes fun of Orin’s careless behavior towards women and conjectures about the trailer through stereotype. Orin recalls the bird that fell into his Jacuzzi recently. Hal suggests that maybe a wheelchair fan club has emerged in honor of Orin’s impressive punting leg.

Orin also raises his relationship with Helen Steeply, the soft profiler from Moment, who, he guesses, is trying to write a tribute to Himself through the perspectives of those who knew him. Helen, Orin says, is very large but not “unsexy.” This leads Orin to ask for details about JOI’s felo de se  with the microwave and the funeral afterwards. He doesn’t want to tell Helen he wasn’t around when everything went down.

Hal tells Orin that JOI had just been in detox. Joelle had apparently given him the ultimatum of either stopping with the drink or she would not be in the last film he was working on.

On the day Incandenza killed himself, Hal had lost a practice match early and needed to do some laundry. He went inside and found Himself exploded all over the kitchen. Hal looked for someone to help him know what to do and found Schtitt, who he says was just the right authority figure for the situation. There was a bottle of Wild Turkey, half-consumed, in the kitchen with JOI’s body. It had a ribbon on it.

This event unsurprisingly traumatized Hal and he was soon sent to grief therapy that he did not want to attend. Hal struggled to figure out the therapy process in order to give this world-renowned grief therapist what he wanted so he could stop going. He read books for students of grief therapy. But nothing worked. Hal became obsessed with the fear of failing grief therapy. He feared not being able to give the therapist what the therapist wanted, as he had been doing for Avril his entire life. His ranking and schoolwork suffered, which made everyone around him happy because they saw it as evidence of genuine grief over the loss of his father.

Cornered, Hal visited Lyle who told him he was looking at it backwards. According to Lyle, who was reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for his own grieving process, Hal was looking at it as a student of grief, which was the wrong way to see it. He needed to ask himself what the professional was required to want, which, Hal says, was key. Hal immediately went to the library and studied what therapists want. He then gave a performance in the therapist’s office, getting angry about the fact that nothing about the situation was his fault and he told the therapist that he was not going to get mad at himself for coming into the house to do his laundry after a match and smelling the aftermath of Himself’s last work and thinking “That something smelled delicious!” This revelation signifies Hal’s full recovery for the grief therapist.

In his parting gesture, Hal holds out his hand for the therapist’s hand. The therapist has been hiding his hands under the desk through all Hal’s sessions and Hal wants to know why. When the hand comes out, it is a four-year-old child’s hand, attached to the therapist’s giant male body. Hal reels out of the office and into the bathroom laughing hysterically.

During this description Orin comments that the advice Lyle gave to Hal does not really sound like the usual Lyle. Also, earlier in the novel, Hal thinks about the fact that he always lies to Orin on the phone and wonders if Orin does the same to him. The scene ends with Hal’s clippers about to clip a nail and Hal “holding the phone down next to the foot, his expression terrifically intense.”

7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

Hal, we are told, has trouble parsing the Quebecois-Separatist mentality, particularly from a US perspective. Endnote 110 begins with Hal in his room, naked, thumbing through a shoebox of Mario’s keepsakes, and soaking his ankle. Hal is done with practice early because his match against C-string opponent, Hugh Pemberton, was cut short after Pemberton took a ball in the eye and could not continue. After the match was cancelled, Hal went down into the pump room, got high, showered, and went up to his room to soak the ankle before he heads to The Unexamined Life with his friends. Tomorrow is guaranteed all-day R&R for the Interdependence Day holiday. When he got back to his dorm, Hal found that Orin left a message on Hal’s machine saying that Emily Dickinson’s poetry was written in ballad-form and can thus be sung to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Avril Incandenza, we learn, did her “Honor’s work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons in Emily Dickinson.” The phone rings.

We are now given an example of the letters Avril has written Orin since the suicide of her husband, Orin’s father. The letter is written in the late-Spring, 20 June, YW-QMD. The ETA’s flora is in full bloom, Avril says. She goes on to write that it is quiet at ETA because the A-squads are in Milan on a “European junket.” It seems Avril has been attempting to run an editorial that advocates for supermarkets changing the wording on their checkout express lanes in several periodicals today, but she is encountering resistance. She wants ‘Fewer’ to be the standard numerical modifier instead of ‘Less,’ as in “10 Items or Fewer.” Finally, CT’s cholesterol is up. She concludes her letter by saying that she was glad to hear about Orin’s new contract, the news of which was in the paper recently.

In response to Avril’s letter’s, we are shown a copy of one of the form letters Orin always uses to respond to his mother. It indicates that he does not have time to respond to all of his fan mail and actually implies that he has not read her letter at all. He also sends an autographed photo of himself. Note that Orin deliberately inserted several typos into the form letter in order to irritate Avril.

The scene then returns to Hal as he answers the ringing phone from above. Orin immediately begins to describe to him “Seduction Strategy Number 7,” which involves Orin pretending to be terrifically in love with his fictional wife. This pretended love is then used by Orin to assert his fictional astonishment at being attracted to his chosen Subject, despite the fact that he is usually blind to all women because of the profound love for his wife. Hal responds that this 7th strategy is even more sick than strategy number 4, “where [Orin pretends that he] supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings [he] hadn’t even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until [Orin] just now this very moment laid eyes on the Subject.”

The conversation changes as Orin says he might come down to see Hal at the Whataburger in Tucson. Hal is surprised. Orin then says that this is actually a serious call. He has been having deep conversations with a certain “Subject” and as a result has two questions to ask Hal. The first is what the word ‘samizdat’ means. Hal gives its literal definition as self-publish. The actual definition, Hal says, is closer to naming politically-charged materials banned by the “eschaton-era Kremlin.” Generically, it means “any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby.” Hal doubts anything under that name is running around the US, given the free speech element of the first amendment, except perhaps “ultra-radical Quebecois and Albertan stuff.” But it would have to be stuff advocating violence, he cautions. Apparently, according to Orin’s Subject, JOI’s name has come up in connection with this ‘samizdat.’

The larger question this Subject has raised for Orin is why groups traditionally advocating for Quebec independence suddenly and all at once became obsessed with Reconfiguration and the return of the Concavity/Convexity to the US. Hal wants to know the source of Orin’s continued interest in separatism lately. Orin presses further, ignoring Hal. He says, the various groups of Quebec’s independence movement have historically battled for their separation. It wasn’t until the Reconfiguration came that, all of a sudden, separatist groups unified to create what initially appears to be a broader Canadian alliance. Hal says that he doubts that there is actually a substantive shift in separatist thinking through the pre-to-post-reconfiguration history Orin is talking about. He argues instead that Quebec separatists have always demanded their independence and any seeming alliance with Ottawa is probably more strategic than it is heart-felt. Orin agrees. He brings up Helen Steeply, who seems to have young children.

Hal connects Orin’s continual seductions of young mothers with Orin’s anger at Avril. Shortly after, Orin inadvertently echoes language from Avril’s letter when he says, “Chortles are good. We like chortles.” This causes Hal to grow angry and lose his temper at Orin’s pressing him about separatism and not owning up to Orin’s interest in separatism and Subjects with children having something to do with Avril. Hal asks, “Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone.”

Pemulis pokes his head into the room. He and the others are ready to head to the bar.

Hal waves off Pemulis and points out for Orin that the Concavity/Convexity, though not officially Quebec’s, does share most of its border with Quebec. And, also, Quebec takes most of the damage from EWD catapult activity. And in all other respects, Quebec is suffering the worst of the Reconfiguration’s negative consequences.

As Pemulis becomes more demanding, Orin says that the thing is that the separatists have very little hope of getting Canada to officially come out against the Reconfiguration because of pressure from Gentle and because their activities have not been large-scale enough. The consequence of this is that the “Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little anti-ONAN campaigns and gestures down here [are] basically just hopeless and pathetic.”

Hal finally begins to actively try and extricate himself from the call with Orin. Pemulis becomes more animated. Orin says he just needs to ask Hal one question that Hal can think about for the night and call him back tomorrow about. Orin goes on, saying that Helen asked him why the separatists don’t just pragmatically go to Ottawa and say they will take the blot of land that is the Concavity/Convexity off Canada’s hands in exchange for allowing Quebec to secede? Why doesn’t Quebec trade for its independence?

As Hal tries to get off the phone again, Orin continues by asking why the separatist groups, if they are still interested solely in Quebec’s independence, always commit their terrorist actions in the name of all of Canada and not just Quebec itself. Further, Orin asks, “What if it’s that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the ONAN administration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment, Gentle and Unspecified Services’ boys in white can get together with Mexico’s Vichified puppet-state and make things really unpleasant indeed for Ottawa. They could make Canada sort of the black scapegoat of all of ONAN.” The ultimate goal in this theory’s thinking would be that once Ottawa has been turned into the lower nations’ scapegoat, they (Ottawa) will excitedly, finally, give Quebec its independence, in exchange for the separatist groups desisting with calling their activities pan-Canadian. In fact, when Quebec’s independence happens, Helen posits that anti-ONAN terrorism will escalate, but that now Quebec will take full credit for the attacks, as part of the larger exchange for their independence. This would give ONAN the ability to unite against a true Other, the sovereign nation-state of Quebec.

Hal has doubts about the theory. The anti-ONAN resistance has not been large-scale enough to even hope for any such political bargaining, he argues.

Orin begins to agree with Hal, saying that this was exactly what he said, until, he says, Helen raised again the question of the samizdat and its connection with JOI. Orin is cut off as Pemulis kills the power to the phone.

Correction:

This post originally credited The Fiction Advocate’s “David Foster Wallace” page with the image above. It is actually by Chris Ayers and can be found here. Regardless, you should go visit The Fiction Advocate and take a look at their reading of Infinite Jest.

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Port Washington Tennis Academy, Long Island, NNY

We join the annual meet between Port Washington Tennis Academy and ETA. It is large. A and B squads for each category play on 36 courts. Each junior team has six members, with the best players competing against each other, and second-best against each other, and so on. This meet will be played for the best of 108 matches between the two schools. The losing school will have to sing a silly song at dinner.

ETA lost to Port Washington last year, but they now have John Wayne and the erumpent Hal Incandenza. We learn that John Wayne is the son of an asbestos-mining father in Canada. Wayne was recruited to ETA by Schtitt and deLint on the promise of free tuition and a pro career at 19. He is currently ranked #3 in ONANTA Boys’ 18s. Hal’s #6 ONANTA ranking is a bit more surprising than Wayne’s, as last year he was ranked 43rd nationally. We are told that nobody talks to Hal about his improvement “sort of the way you avoid a pitcher who’s got a no-hitter going.” The strength of Hal’s tennis is that he works angles. He jerks his opponents around, using strategies that plan multiple shots ahead of time. Himself had first seen John Wayne when he was “doing an early and coldly conceptual Super-8 on people named John Wayne who were not the real thespio-historical john Wayne,” but Wayne, it turned out, was not in the film for legal reasons. See endnote 24.

Both Wayne and Hal are destroying their opponents. Schacht is kneeling with M. Pemulis as he throws up into a ball bucket. Pemulis always has pre-match nerves. Back on court, the narrative tells us that Wayne is all-business when he plays. We learn that his father is hoping to live long enough working in the asbestos mines for Wayne to go pro and take his father away from the mines and into retirement. Schacht watches Wayne and wonders how Wayne feels about the US and his citizenship status. Canada was not excited about Wayne’s decision to come to ETA. Eventually, Pemulis begins to recover and he and Schacht are the last two on the courts. Pemulis questions why he always has a weak stomach before matches, saying he never takes drugs on the days before.

Schacht is a pleasant player whose desire to win has mellowed to a preference over the last years, since his knee blew out. His inability to attain a pro-career makes it possible for Schtitt to like him, since Schacht is no longer a project for Schtitt to work on. Instead of focusing on tennis, Schacht has dedicated himself to a dental career.

Schacht suspects that Pemulis’s stomach issues are caused by the sudden halt in Mike’s chemical schedule on the days before matches. He looks down to the court where Pemulis is playing and thinks that he “is looking oddly sanguine and confident after a couple minutes futzing with the cans of water, rinsing out the oral cavity and so on.” Schacht has also noticed how invested Pemulis is in getting to the Whataburger, for which this match against the Port Washington boy is a must-win if Pemulis is to get to go. Schacht buys urine like the rest of his friends, but Pemulis thinks that he “ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor.” In fact, Schacht is actively creeped out by the way his friends take drugs.

By Schtitt’s metric of measuring a good tennis player – someone who cares deeply about winning while not caring at all – Schacht probably doesn’t care enough anymore, we are told. The leveling off of Schacht’s competitive drive is regarded in different ways the ETAs. For some, it is profound; for others, it is a sign of weakness. For Hal, it is a weakness on one level, but brave on a deeper level. This second level is the level of Hal that wants to stop surpassing limits and fulfilling the promise of his talent. Yet, Schacht’s lack of passion undeniably bothers Hal in the same way Hal’s growing substance dependence bothers Schacht. Ultimately, the two boys have an unspoken agreement that they just don’t talk about it.

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House

Inside Ennet House, Geoffrey Day is teaching Don Gately patience. Day drones on about his problems with cliches. Charlotte Treat looks to Gately for help shutting Day up that Gately cannot provide. As Day talks, Gately reflects on the deepening quality of  the cliche “I didn’t know that I didn’t know.” He thinks about Ennet House as a place whose primary responsibility is to give residents time without their particular substance.

Day continues to talk. The room starts to get tense as the other residents become more annoyed. Geoffrey Day has been at Ennet House for six days. The narrative mentions that he is here because of an addiction to wine and quaaludes and reminds us that Day is the author of the essay on The Cult of the Next Train from endnote 304. He is having a hard time with recovery and we learn that it is “the newcomers with some education that are the worst…They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.”

Endnote 90:  Up to 2329H, 11 November, YDAU (2009) – Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House

In a dialogue between Day and Gately, Day is questioning the philosophy of AA, accusing it of totalitarianism. He contends that AA hides behind formal reasoning that contradicts itself. For instance, he complains that AA says that if you come in to AA and think that you don’t have the disease (an addiction to alcohol), then you definitely have the disease. Day rightly asserts that this would seem to universalize the disease to everyone who did not think they had the disease in addition to those who admit that they do, in fact, have an alcohol addiction. Day claims AA is full of these contradictory little axioms and forces residents to follow strange rules that are delivered in the form of trite cliches. Gately corrects Day, saying that, “You can analyze it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.’ That is, Gately says Day does not have to follow the rules. He is free to head back out and go it alone. This irritates Day and he responds that “AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.” Gately asks, “You honestly don’t see what’s whacked-out about what you’re saying about Denial?” Day then complains about the patience of those in AA who put up with his complaints, saying it makes him want to scream. Gately says, “So scream. They can’t kick you out…This is a thing I do know. They can’t kick you out.”

After the endnote, we return to Ennet House’s living room. Gately thinks about the sense of loss he feels in the mornings without his substance. He is waiting for Day to break down and beg for relief, which will give Gately a chance to tell Day about the depth he continues to find in AA’s cliches. He thinks about the fact that Day will likely crack in a month or so and go back to his wine and quaaludes. But then Gately remembers he doesn’t get to say who will recover and who won’t. Gately has been sober for 421 days today.

We now get a description of several of the residents, including Burt F. Smith who was beaten up outside a bar by Poor Tony and his crew last Christmas Eve.  We learn that Gately likes the new resident Bruce Green. Randy Lenz is an organic coke dealer in deep trouble since he “lost control” and freebased 100 grams of his product that was intended for a DEA sting. He is now wanted by “both sides of the law.” We are told that Lenz is deeply vane and carries a knife. He is teaching Gately reserved politeness. Lenz is here to hideout and wears a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero. He walks home from NA meetings by himself, a practice that is frowned upon. Charlotte Treat has HIV.

Gately is almost 29. He is large. His size is why he was offered the staff job at Ennet House, which pays poorly. He owes restitution in three courts. Gately prefers AA to NA because of AA’s insistence on service and its self-awareness about the way members miss their substance. He admires the Crocodiles of AA who have “geologic amounts of sober time” and thinks about the three newcomers who are due in today. They will be told to pet Pat’s dogs who are covered in “suppurating scabs,” which, if they pet the dogs, will serve as evidence of their desire for recovery. Gately reflects that if Day breaks down and comes to Don for help, he will tell Day that cliches “are (a) soothing and (b) remind you of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease.” Unlike Tiny Ewell and Geoffrey Day, Gately thinks the trick of spelling ‘Disease’ ‘DIS-EASE’ “sums the basic situation up nicely.”

There is a tension between Geoffrey Day and Randy Lenz because Lenz feels challenged by Day because of Day’s intellectual credentials. Lenz thinks of himself as smart, which is why he spent his first days at Ennet House pretending to read an upside-down book. Time is palpable in Ennet House. Lenz repeatedly asks people what time it is. Gately reflects on how he felt every second as he went through Ennet House. Lenz’s questions about the time annoy Day and he tells Lenz to “get a watch.” They almost get in a fight.

6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Bus ride from Port Washington Tennis Academy that ends at the Denny’s next to Empire Waste, Enfield, MA

On the return from a massive victory at the Port Washington meet, we learn that Hal and Wayne only lost “five total games between them;” the Port Washington Tennis Academy had to “sing a really silly song;” Coyle, Troeltsch, and Schacht all lost; and Pemulis got a victory by default after his opponent began acting very strange, claiming the tennis balls were “too pretty to hit” and eventually, at the dance, telling his headmaster’s wife that “he’d always wanted to do her from behind.”

As they drive, many of the students read. Charles Tavis is very happy because of something very unpleasant the Port Washington headmaster had to do. We are told that after meets, Schtitt does not ride the bus home, but gets back in some mysterious way. They end their trip by having breakfast at Denny’s.

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Boston University, Boston, MA

This section describes Orin Incandenza’s movement to his career in professional football.   It begins with a description of the difficulties of becoming an adult at ETA when you are not going to go pro. There are several possible avenues, none of which are particularly stable or promising.

Orin decided to attend college. Having peaked in his tennis rankings at 13 because he was cursed like his father by a late puberty, Orin’s later years at ETA were not very ambitious. He was a baseliner, relying heavily on his lob because of evenings spent playing Eschaton. Though Orin was mediocre for pro-bound players, he was actively pursued by many college teams. We are told ability is relative and many college teams were excited by the prospect of having Orin on them. He ended up at Boston University. Avril’s relationship with Orin’s decision making about college was obsessively non-interventionist, which made Orin feel manipulated by her.

CT was not yet at ETA at this time, but he knew BU’s tennis coach. He arranged a meeting and Avril, CT, Orin, and the coach all got together. The coach was stunned by how strong Orin was, as a player. He destroyed BU’s number one man. Then, the coach saw Avril in a black skirt and was again stunned. Orin ended up with full ride to BU and a fake job where he was required to turn automatic sprinklers on in the early morning.

The narrative shifts to a justification of Charles Tavis’s behavior after Orin went to college. It is given from CT’s perspective. Tavis capitalized on his role in Orin’s college ride in order to get a job at ETA, slowly usurping the role of headmaster as Himself began to travel more and more for his films and fell deeper and deeper into his Wild Turkey addiction. Orin resented CT for this and eventually stopped returning to ETA. But CT justifies his behavior by naming all the bureaucratic operations he took responsibility for as JOI became more and more divorced from the world. Somebody had to take control, he reasons. We are told that CT promoted himself to the students of ETA in a special address given on 31 August YDPAH. As CT delivered his speech from Schtitt’s tower to the students on the courts below, ETA’s choir sang “Tenabrae Factae Sunt” in low voices on courts 30-32. This was when the flags were still at half-mast and students still wore the black armbands in memory of James Incandenza. CT explained to the students that Salic Law had nothing to do with the fact that no one else could assume responsibility for ETA’s helm. N.B. Wikipedia says Salic Law “provided written codification of both civil law, such as the statutes governing inheritance, and criminal law, such as the punishment for murder.” CT feels he has been ballast to both Avril in the wake of her husband’s suicide and the rest of the ETA family through the death of their patriarch.

The narrative then switches back to Orin and we learn that he quickly decided to quit tennis at BU and started playing college football after he matriculated. He was burnt out on tennis. He had finally decided that he would never be able to make himself want to be a better tennis player. This was understandable to his family. It was the shift to football that was confusing. He lied to Avril about the switch, telling her romanticized stories of pep and the crash of pads. What had really happened was that he had developed a crush on a certain baton twirler. Orin and his doubles partner called her the PGOAT, an acronym for The Prettiest Girl of All Time. She was so pretty that nobody could approach her. Her name was Joelle van Dyne.

Through the connections of his doubles partner, Orin was able to get a tryout as a walk-on for BU’s football team, but he was terrible at football. The coach told him to get off the field. And then, we are told, destiny grabbed Orin. As he was leaving the field, BU’s punter was tackled in practice and his leg was ruined. The ball bounced to Orin at the other end of the field. Orin picked up the ball, which the head coach wanted back immediately. He couldn’t throw it back because the distance was too great. He decided to kick it instead. This kick gave him a new reason to exist. He could punt 60 yards in days. He was a natural.

Orin fell in love with the crowds of college football games. He also loved the renewal of his desire for self-improvement. Schtitt, on the other hand, did not think that Orin was improving himself. After watching video of Orin in a football game, he quickly declared that Orin was still merely lobbing. Schtitt went on to posit that “Orin had stumbled by accident on a way, in this grotesquely physical and territorial US game, to legitimate the same dependency on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to develop his weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and weakness for long-term gaining had been the real herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza’s tennis.” Schtitt says he has a bad feeling about Orin’s future.

Orin’s exploding talent grabbed the attention of Joelle on the sidelines. After his first game against Syracuse, his first-ever in-game punt was likened by a petroleum jelly salesman to the sound of the bombs exploding below his plane when he was in the marine corps. This account of Orin’s punting is the same account that was recounted in the voice of Elmer Fudd on WYYY’s broadcast of “Those Were the Legends” that preceded MP’s “Sixty Minutes More or Less” in October of the YDAU. Besides being athletic, Orin told JvD, when she approached him for an autograph, that punting for him was spiritual. It was a “denial of silence.” He saw it as summoning the voice of god, as when he punted the stadium’s voices were united into one voice. He felt that he transcended himself when he kicked.

Orin and Joelle were soon in a relationship, spending holidays together. Joelle had trouble with Avril; Orin had trouble with Joelle’s low-PH father. On the last evening before subsidization (31 December 2001), we are told that Joelle had her first experience with cocaine,  just as Orin was giving up substances. She ended up majoring in film cartridge theory and production, which is why Orin introduced her to avant garde film and his father, The Mad Stork. Joelle gave up baton twirling and started to act in Himself’s films, though her ambitions were not for acting. She wanted to be behind the camera. She made little videos of Orin punting, experimenting with the techniques of film production. Orin liked watching himself on film, slowly becoming more and more engrossed by his own ability. Finally, we get a description of Joelle’s increasing ability as a creator of films given in terms of the film’s increasing ability to represent Orin’s greatness to Orin himself.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Armenian Foundation Library, Watertown, MA

Poor Tony, we are told, had a seizure on a Gray Line train to Inman Square. This scene gives an account of the weeks leading up to that seizure.

It turns out Poor Tony was the assailant who stole the woman’s exterior heart from Helen Steeply’s report from before. Since allowing Bobby C to OD and betraying Woo and since Lolasister died, Poor Tony couldn’t trust any of his old friends and connections and he did not have anyone to get heroine from or to get high with. Thus, he began to suffer withdrawal. He had not been without heroine since he was 17 and he found that he was no longer attractive. As he withdrew, Poor Tony became more and more ill. He lived in a dumpster for a couple weeks until his incontinence forced him to relocate to an “obscure Armenian Foundation Library men’s room in Watertown Center.” To stave off total withdrawal, he drank bottles of codeine.

After two weeks, time raged in Tony’s mind. He continued to lose weight. The word ‘zuckung‘ echoed in his mind as he had flashbacks of his father and his father’s funeral. Eventually, he began to withdraw from the cough syrup’s alcohol and codeine. He headed for the film and trinket shop of the Antitoi brothers because they were the only people left in the world he could imagine who owed him a favor. He hoped to find some heroine. He was on the Gray Line’s platform when he shat himself. In three weeks in the dumpster and men’s room, he had become someone people sidle away from on trains.

Finally, he had a seizure accompanied by flashbacks of Bobby C’s death and of his father.

7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We return to ETA and are given a description of the role of prorectors there. They teach one class per term. They are mostly low-level, touring professionals. Their classes are easy. The scene begins by focusing on Mary Esther Thode’s “The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopatholigical: The Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds.” Thode is regarded as insane by most ETA students, but she’s said to be a strong tennis coach. Blacklisted off two female tennis circuits for trying to organize female players into an “early-Interdependence-era Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx,” she returned to Schtitt and ETA. This fall, her class focuses on “pathologic double-bind-type quandaries,” which Schacht finds “weirdly easy.”

We are given an example of one of her midterm exams. In the first question, Schacht is told he is a kleptomaniac, who “must steal.” The student, though, also suffers agoraphobia and “cannot leave home.” Living alone, the question asks how the student is to satisfy these competing compulsions. Schacht’s answer involves mail fraud.

At 1435h, Troeltsch came over ETA’s intercom to announce the score’s from yesterday’s meet with Port Washington. Troeltsch is obsessed with becoming a sports announcer. He takes announcing these scores very seriously. And he’s always searching for new “synonyms for beat and got beat by.”

The narrative zooms out again to return to classes taught by prorectors at ETA. We refocus on Hal’s struggle with Thierry Poutrincourt’s “Separatism and Return: Quebecois History from Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence. Because of his struggle with the issue, Hal is becoming more and more engaged and is “actually developing something of a layman’s savvy for Canadianism and ONANite politics.” Part of Hal’s problem with the class is that Poutrincourt teaches it in Quebecois French. Hal doesn’t think Orin knows he is taking the class, but, nonetheless, Orin keeps calling with questions about separatism. Poutrincourt hates Troeltsch’s broadcasts. Hal also observes that Poutrincourt gets more and more quiet when lecturing as her class progresses to the current state of ONAN politics.

Endnote 110 gives a conversation between Hal and Orin about the politics that follow.

The anti-ONAN insurgents make Hal nauseous. They appeared after the Reconfiguration and the “gifting” of the of the Concavity/Convexity. At that time, most Canadians went along to get along, with the exception of the irritable Quebecois separatists who have long tried to separate themselves from the larger Canadian bloc. The first attacks on ONAN were performed by the AFR. They placed large mirrors across US highways near the southern border of the Concavity. Cars would see headlights ahead of them in their own lane and would assume the other car would swerve before contact. They obviously never did and eventually they themselves would have to swerve. “Scores of drivers were killed this way. Eventually, a suicidal woman just drove straight at the headlights, which caused her to drive through the mirror, smashing the illusion and revealing unrest in the ONAN.

As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Incandenza Brownstone Apartment on the Back Bay of Boston, MA

Mario Incandenza is the second son of James and Avril Incandenza. His birth was a complete surprise. Avril did not show during her pregnancy and her period continued until Mario’s birth. When her water broke, her and Jim were walking up the stairs of a Back Bay brownstone. JOI was drunk, but fortunately CT was upstairs on the Stairmaster. He rushed down and took control of the situation.  Mario was born early and incredibly deformed. Named after his grandfather on his father’s side, Mario grew to be extremely slow in breath, movement, and in all things physical; though, contrarily, he was also able to use this slowness to develop careful and considered manners of thinking and feeling. His thought is described as refracted.

Mario does not feel pain. This fascinated the older Orin, who enjoyed exploring what he could do to Mario’s body without Mario feeling it. The narrative continues to describe Mario’s absurdly handicapped appearance and physical ability. For some reason, Mario shares the same hair as Charles Tavis. Despite his out-of-place existence as handicapped at a school of physically gifted children, Mario etched a role out for himself as a helper to his father, becoming the son that his father most loved. Learning to film in this capacity, he became the official recorder of ETA practices and matches.

After Himself died, he willed a Bolex camera attached to a helmet to Mario, which launched the young man’s career. It has taken Mario five years to develop a facility with his head-mounted camera. After Orin left, there was nobody around ETA to treat Mario cruelly. He enjoys walking around and visiting local businesses. He also shares mentoring responsibilities with Lyle, who refers students to him on matters of making the most out of a difficult situation. And the trainer, Barry Loach, loves him because Mario saved him from seminary. CT, on the other hand, experiences Mario as a “weird attracto-repulsive gestalt,” which is why Mario goes out of his way to avoid CT. Hal admires Mario and fears that Avril sees him as the real prodigy in their family. But Hal does not understand Avril as well as he might.

Image source is here.

It was 4am when I first heard about Infinite Jest. I (a history major), an English major, a philosophy major and an undecided were on our second (or maybe third) cup of coffee and after deconstructing the universe, offering tips for world domination and debating labor strikes, someone happened to ask about our favourite books.

The undecided quit itching for a cigarette long enough to extoll the beauty of a book he was only halfway through but completely smitten. The English major jumped into proclaim it the “Greatest Book Ever Written” and the two of them attempted to explain it, a back and forth comedy routine that stumbled between topics and seemingly unrelated plots and made it sound like both an undesirable mess, yet something incredibly intoxicating.

“I stopped smoking because of it” The English major added. Earlier we had talked about drugs, and him and the undecided bonded over their [one past, one present] need to be high all the time, floating through life in a numb daze. The philosophy major took every hallucinogenic put in front of him, not bothering to ask what they were and I had gotten into mild age-related legal trouble as I liked my whisky straight and in Hemingway quantities, two factors that can get a smallish 18 year old girl into trouble.

So we were a crew unable to handle the substances we all adored. I was intrigued that this book, of all things, was what helped one of us realize it. This kid could go from lighting up once or twice a day, unable to face the world unless he was high to appreciating the thrill of sobriety all because of a book.

University brought me not only substance-abusing coffee swilling DFW-diehard friends but also my very first actual relationship. He barreled into my life a talkative, happy, violently moshing burst of energy with bleached blonde hair and tshirts with the collars cut off. He knew everything about film and music and literature and it didn’t matter I didn’t because he could carry on about three different conversations without anyone’s help. If you stood next to him at a party long enough you’d meet the entire town’s music scene because he knew everyone and everyone adored him.

As I got to know him I began picking up on little aspects of his personality, some I found a bit cute, like how he was so talkative and in public but had a kind of lonely air when he was just with me. Some were annoying, like how he would drop off the face of the Earth for long periods of time or ignore me at parties, instead sulking in corners or sometimes smoking so much he was later found passed out in a chair. Other quirks I just noted without any emotion, like his constant joking of “godammit I just want to kill myself” every time something went slightly wrong.

I probably could have put it together myself but one night he confessed it all to me, how he thought he was depressed, how he had attempted suicide in the past, how he had never told anyone any of this before but felt he had to.

So the next time I saw him, the day I had to go back home for the summer, he hugged me in his car, a hug of desperation, of clinging to something, anything. And I felt terrible and guilty that he had entrusted me with his desperate cry for help and I had done nothing with it, but squeeze his hand when he said he felt things could get better and cringe at his statement that a band he was going to see in the fall “would give me a reason to live until then”. Because I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what it felt like. I was hurt by his tendency to ignore me and then mad at myself for my inability to be there for him. I cared a lot about him but I had no idea what he was going through.

I went back home and started Infinite Jest.

I didn’t form emotional connections with the characters, at least not at first. I liked them, watched them with fascination, but I didn’t feel any deep bond or sympathy with them. Until I got to Kate Gompert.

Her few pages of dialogue summed up so eloquently the mental struggle I couldn’t wrap my head around. Here she was, so calm, serene, yet so broken. Her sadness a deep, ever-present one, a depression that wasn’t triggered by past events or steeped in romance and drama or was darkly poetic or artistic- it was real, it was more of an absence than a sadness, more of a vacant inability to connect. As I read and reread her passages, I felt it was the closet I could come to understanding my own beautiful, drug-addled and depressed friend.

Because of their similarities, I felt fiercely protective of her and was thrilled just seeing her name causally mentioned in the dense prose.

I couldn’t begin to understand his battles with his own mind and the drug he admitted he smoked too much in a failed attempt to dull the pain, but Kate did. And Kate could explain to me what he was going through, better than he could explain it, better than cold, clinical medical websites with headlines like “how to take care of someone with depression” could.

There were passages I underlined and sought solace in, there were bits my English major friend starred and saw himself in, and there are pages you’ll bookmark and think about weeks, days, months later. With a book this huge and expansive, filled with so many characters and plots there is something in here that will help you understand your current situation, that will help you understand yourself, that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Who knows, maybe people read this whole book and hardly give a second thought to Kate Gompert and maybe people will skim the passages that impacted you the most. But there is something in there for everyone. And that, I suppose, is the magic of Infinite Jest.

30 April/1 May, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Outcropping in Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ

This scene returns to Marathe and Steeply’s conversation outside Tucson. It is fully dark now.

Marathe and Steeply speak of the samizdat, which was made by an American. Marathe characterizes the desire to watch such a film as American. He asserts, “choosing is everything” and asks Steeply how a nation threatened by something like the Entertainment can hope to survive for long. How can a nation of people who cannot choose not to partake of a profound pleasure that will kill them continue to be a sovereign nation among other nations of people who can make that choice? After speaking, Marathe wonders “why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying what he believed.” Steeply clarifies Marathe’s thought, saying that Marathe is saying the Administration wouldn’t even have to be concerned if American culture weren’t so unable to resist the temptation of the Entertainment. Marathe says yes, the AFR will not force the Entertainment on anyone. They will merely make it available to Americans. Steeply criticizes Marathe and the AFR for wanting to kill Americans. Marathe replies that people who cannot exercise agency in choice-making are already dead.

The conversation broadens again to the Reconfiguration, which Marathe asserts Gentle needed to serve a larger purpose: the creation of an Other. US culture, Marathe contends, needed a group to hate and band together against because US culture desanctified everything that was seen as greater than personal pleasure in the name of “Anything is going.” Steeply responds that personal freedom is far better than the totalitarianism that Quebec extremists advocate for. He calls the idea of an independent Quebec “Cuba with snow.” Steeply further claims that people are not human without freedom. Marathe excitedly exclaims, “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual USA selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.” Marathe then juxtaposes this negative freedom (the freedom-from) with positive freedom (the freedom-to), claiming the freedom of cultivated personal strength to choose is far greater than the freedom to be satisfied.

Marathe then compares the relationship of the US and its citizens to that of a rich father and his little girl. If the father gives the little girl freedom, she will eat only candy to the detriment of her health. Steeply responds that the US does not regard its citizens as children. Marathe wonders, if US citizens are not like the little girl in the story, why would the US feel threatened by the samizdat.

8 November (Interdependence Day), Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This scene describes the annual Interdependence Day game of Eschaton at ETA.

The scene begins by describing Eschaton as “the most complicated children’s game anybody around ETA’d ever heard of.” This year’s game-master is Otis P. Lord, “a calculus phenom from Wilmington, DE,” though Michael Pemulis, “the greatest Eschaton player in ETA history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of correction over Lord’s calculations and mandate.” Eschaton requires 8-12 players, who use 400 retired tennis balls on four tennis courts. It is a complex game of political imagination in which each of the tennis balls represent a “5-mega-ton thermonuclear warhead.” For the purpose of the game, the tennis courts become a global map. On this map, each country and alliance have sites of military interest which the players attempt to hit by launching top-spin lobs. The game’s rules of play and process fill a large rule book and it requires a computer, manned by the game-master, to calculate its progress. Players are divided into groups that represent world powers: three players make up AMNAT (the US and NATO nations); another three form SOVWAR (the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations); one-to-two become REDCHI (China); one or two make up IRLIBSYR (Iran, Libya, and Syria); and the remaining players can be distributed into any number of other political organizations. The tennis ball warheads are distributed to combatants via the “Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals.”

Endnote 123:

There is no need to pretend I know what is happening here. According to people who are good at math, there are problems with what Hal writes down from Pemulis’ dictation, perhaps because they are high when Pemulis is speaking and perhaps because Hal does not fully understand what he hears. You can read about the errors here. There is discussion of those errors’ significance here and here.

Returning to the main text, we learn that because the action of the game comes from the top-spin lob, the games’ best players become very good at lobbing, which is the primary reason ETA admin hasn’t found a reason to outlaw the game. Most combatants play conservatively with their tennis ball usage, working through Spasm Exchanges (SPASEX) of missiles until the need to begin Strikes Against Civilian Populations (SACPOP) is necessitated by game theory. The winning team is the one that gains the most Infliction of Dead, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response (or INDDIR) in ratio to their own SUFDDIR. The amount of damage inflicted and suffered by each of the combatants in their various sites for each tennis ball hit varies wildly according to geographical factors. Lord succeeded Pemulis as game master because he is both a tech-wonk and compulsive. Before each match, the combatants sit at a table and hold a forum on the days game. At these forums, players negotiate their relationships for the upcoming match. Alliances are formed. Advantages are gained and lost. Pemulis, apparently, often won his games before a single ball was lobbed.

In today’s game, things go smoothly as low-grade events occur on the world-historical stage. DEFCONs adjust accordingly. As hoped, the game slowly becomes more tense as world-events become more and more serious. Enriched uranium disappears. A vessel is sunk. Italy invades another country. Everybody goes to DEFCON 5. Repressive regimes change places. SOVWAR and AMNAT go cold against each other.

As the students play, a green Ford Sedan idles nearby.

The game continues to escalate. IRLIBSYR’s Kevin Ingersol starts firing at SOVWAR. Major Metropolitan Areas are evacuated. Things are still going well. Lord moves his computer cart from continent to continent. He becomes the busiest person on the field, adjusting the board to his judgments of each country’s hits and misses. He plays god. At a nearby pavillion, upperclassmen drink and smoke weed. They comment occasionally on the game. As Troeltsch calls the game into his fist, Lord calls for Pemulis to help him distribute some damage. 1/2 the day’s megatonnage has been fired. Neither SOVWAR nor AMNAT have gone SACPOP, yet. There is a call for a conference between combatants. Hal smokes pot in public, despite planning not to. Peace terms between AMNAT and SOVWAR seem inevitable. Lord dons the white beanie that means that AMNAT and SOVWAR are talking. Other players can pursue their interests. AMNAT and SOVWAR meet at Sierra Leone’s place on the map.

Some of the players and Pemulis debate about the snow that has begun falling on the tennis courts. Does the snow land on the map or in the fictional world of the game? And how might this affect damage distribution? The map/real world question intrigues Hal. Pemulis gets more and more annoyed, as he believes a confusion of the map and the game’s fictional world threatens the very existence of Eschaton. The snow increases.

Eventually, IRLIBSYR’s Kevin Ingersoll decides that if he doesn’t do something, SOVWAR and AMNAT will push him out of the game because of their forthcoming peace terms. They are the two world powers. The longer they both remain the more difficult survival will become for smaller nations and alliances. Ingersol therefore takes a warhead, with only Hal watching, and fires it directly at that back of Anne Kittenplan’s head, scoring a direct hit. This is a major event, unprecedented in Eschaton history. Kittenplan is pissed. Lord does not know what to do. Ingersol claims that he has basically destroyed the world’s two superpowers in one shot. Pemulis and Kittenplan howl out against Ingersol. And, shockingly, Otis P. Lord dons the read beanie of “Utter Global Crisis,” which has only been donned once before in Eschaton history. Pemulis grows angry because Lord has honored the confusion of map and territory that was at stake in the previous argument about the effect of snow on the game’s map. Ingersol celebrates the confusion and claims that the white beanie was on Lord’s head when he shot Kittenplan and so he was free to bomb the gathering of so many dignitaries of SOVWAR and AMNAT. Pemulis claims that Lord’s even considering Ingersol’s renegade shot as perhaps legitimate is threatening the very existence of Eschaton as a game. He claims players are part of the map, not part of the world that the map represents.

The situation on the tennis courts deteriorates as the snow increases. “Players’ exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it’s like preaxiomatic.” Kittenplan continues to be angry. The upperclassmen watch and comment on the events on the courts. Finally, Kittenplan fires a ball at Ingersol, causing him to exclaim that she has been removed from the game and therefore cannot fire valid missiles. But now she has several balls and is chasing Ingersol across the map, firing at him. Other kids join Kittenplan. Hal watches as Ingersol takes several shots to various parts of his body and begins crying. Pemulis is dumbfounded. Lord tries to make a ruling, but nobody pays him any attention. Now, a couple kids start firing at Kittenplan. The court turns into a battlefield. Armageddon descends. All rules are suspended. And we are reminded of the Ford sedan watching the situation.

The students begin tackling and punching each other. Lord starts heading for the fence with his cart. The upperclassmen continue to watch. Hal feels anxiety and considers where it might be coming from. The snow gets thicker. Pemulis claims the situation is  a direct result of the map/territory confusion that he warned them against. And all of a sudden, Otis P. Lord collides with another running student. The cart’s contents fly through the air. Lord also takes flight. The monitor lands. Lord lands shortly after, his head buried in the monitor.

8 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Provident Nursing Home, Enfield, MA

This scene explores the world of Boston AA. We are informed that most Boston AA meetings are “speaker meetings,” where AAs stand up in front of everyone and “‘share their experience, strength, and hope.’” The speakers are always from a different Group who have traveled to the host Group in order to speak at their meeting. You never speak at your own meeting. When a Group hosts, it is their job to empty ashtrays and listen, to provide the space and attention for the visiting group. The White Flag Group, Gately’s Group, is tonight hosting the Advanced Basics Group from Concord. Speaking at these meetings is called “Giving It Away,” which is AA argot for turning one’s life from one focused on the self to one that is directed toward others. Another phrase, “Coming In,” means to come into AA seeking relief from the terror of one’s addiction.

Tonight, the cafeteria is packed. A man named John L. is the first speaker. We are told that the audience’s job is to fully empathize, to “Identify,” with the speaker. Ennet House requires that residents be seen at an AA or NA meeting every night of the week or else they are discharged. Endnote 134 informs us that Joelle van Dyne has just arrived at Ennet House and, therefore, she is attending one of her first meetings. The same physician who had taken an interest in Pat Montesian seven years ago saw JvD’s face and took a special interest in her, calling Pat and having her let Joelle into Ennet House immediately, despite the waitlist.

After the endnote, “Identifying” is contrasted with “Comparing.” Where the former means truly recognizing your own experience in the lives of a meeting’s speakers, the latter consists in keeping the other person’s life and experience at a distance. Where a speaker might have lost their job because of being caught drinking on the job, a comparing AA would say that they had never been caught drinking on the job and so the person talking has an addiction that is not the same as the comparing AA’s. John L. tells the White Flag Group that he lost his job, his wife, and, eventually, his health. He also says that his substance offered ever-diminishing returns for its use. Eventually, John L. says, he wanted to stop, really wanted to stop, but couldn’t. He kept drinking and drinking until, finally, he saw the disease for what it really is and always has been, which is a living death. He says he would have preferred to die than continue to live as he was living. The substance was your “one true friend,” which at the end of the addiction removes its mask and becomes the face of your nightmare, which is you, the person with the disease. At this point, he says, he was finished. John L. could not get drunk or become sober. He hit his “Bottom.” He could either commit suicide or surrender. He could kill himself or make a phone call. When you call, he says, two guys show up at your house and you get the sense that they have been through this before. When this happens, you feel comforted because no AA is unique. They all share this movement toward the Bottom, upon reaching which, they seek refuge in hugs and cliches as their last possible effort before death.

Gately eventually found that AA might work, after months of simply following its prescriptions. That it began to work shocked him. He and others spent nights together trying to figure out how it worked. The narrative then claims that nobody has ever figured out how it works. It just does. Even the shock at AA working is universal for AA members as they realize that AA turns out to be the great friend they thought they had found in their substance. Gately thinks the success of AA lies within the concept of not relying on one’s self for guidance, but, rather, living by the shared maxims of the Group. The work of AA is learning to do what the Group says every day and coming in for meetings. Eventually, the world transforms. Interior life becomes richer and richer as members give over their own sense of self-direction to the group. The narrative claims this as a path to freedom.

The speaker that follows John L. is a “green-card Irishman in a skallycap and Sinn Fein sweatshirt.” He lists the benefits he has enjoyed since Coming In. These rewards have been material as well as spiritual. For instance, he hadn’t had a solid bowel movement for years and years because of his substance abuse. After ninety days of sobriety, he was using the restroom at home when he heard a sound that he mistook for his wallet falling into the toilet. Bending down to look in the toilet, he was surprised to find that he had jettisoned a solid piece of excrement. It was both firm and tapered. He then thanked his higher power. Everybody listening identifies strongly with this story, the older ones laughing and the newer ones going wide-eyed with envy and hope.

Gately’s strength as an Ennet House staffer lies in his “ability to convey his own experience about at first hating AA to new House residents who hate AA and resent being forced to go and sit up in nose-pore-range and listen to such limply improbable cliched drivel night after night.” He affirms their sense of AA’s limpness, but also insists that AA cannot kick them out. He assures them that they can express their frustration. And, in fact, he challenges them to shock their fellow members at AA, claiming they won’t be able to. Gately just that morning had told Tiny Ewell that when he was new, he unleashed at a meeting and spoke in an honest way and railed against AA, trying to get them to kick him out so he could go back Out There. But after he spoke, the meeting’s members cheered and told Gately to keep coming back and they all gave him phone numbers, in case he needed them. Gately did this several times, always with the same result. Even the crocodiles would hobble over and tell Gately that he might make it, if he just kept coming back.

The crocodiles don’t offer their numbers, you have to ask for them. The old AA guys are shamanic. They sit together and rule the meetings, without interfering. Becoming a crocodile “with geologic amounts of sober time” has become a long-term goal for Gately. Gately’s sponsor has taught him that he has to get “Active With Your Group,” which is where Gately is – emptying ashtrays, sweeping, and travelling around Boston and speaking at other groups. This activity and sobriety are not coincidences, we are told. Some people who come in and stop being active start to drift from their Group and AA generally, they forget the Disease and its nature. And they drink just one beer. After that, it is like they never stopped. They either die Out There or have to begin the recovery process all over again.

There are no actual musts in AA, merely suggestions. It is a “benign anarchy.” Its order is called a miracle. But Gately feels that it is, underneath, actually dogmatic. If someone slips, they are welcome back. They have punished themselves enough already. The narrative says that AA members’ wills are ruined, shot through. And unless you starve the Disease, you will eventually be forced back to the Disease. Nobody gets kicked out of AA. Addicts kick themselves out.   AA functions as an organism without an ordering enforcer.

The narrative then ponders the banal. We are given one of Gately’s first recurring sober dreams. He dreams that he is one member of several rows of people kneeling in a room together. One woman near Gately stands up in the dream and she is grabbed and thrown out of the room. Above Gately, he sees a shepherd’s hook moving above the kneeling people, grabbing those who stand up and throwing them out. The hook is held by a large authority figure who does his work cheerfully. Dreams are a big part of staff work. They sometimes have to be on dream duty to offer AA’s advice to those in recovery. Gately’s dream’s message appears obvious to him. The night of this dream was the first time Gately prayed to a higher power he did not believe in.

Gately and his sponsor, Ferocious Francis, break down the hall after meetings. Gately thinks about the fact that he likes Ken Erdedy, who strangely claims to be addicted to marijuana. He wonders how you could be addicted to something as benign as weed, “But it’s not Gately’s place to say what’s bad enough to make somebody Come In and what isn’t, not for anybody else but himself.” Joelle and Erdedy complain about AA’s use of the word “miracle.”

We are then informed that Boston AA is “intensely social.” Gately talks to Ewell, Erdedy, and van Dyne about the phrasing of AA as he surveys the room. Gately tells Erdedy that he likes how “It was good to hear you” means both that you helped someone out and that they are happy to actually be able to hear in an empathetic way. We learn that Joelle is the first resident under Gately. She just appeared two days ago. She has a private arrangement with Pat, which Gately has seen before and dislikes that Ennet House engages in such private and preferential treatment. Gately says that really hearing is what it means to ID and that comparing is what Gately came in doing, but has got better at empathizing since. Ferocious Francis says that newer members’ best contributions are their ability to ID with people just now coming in because newer members can still sincerely ID. The crocodiles live in a different sober world than newcomers.

Joelle says something and Gately realizes that her voice is somehow familiar, but he’s sure he has never met her before. She says she finds it hard to take people saying “here but for the Grace of God” because it is a subjunctive that without a conditional doesn’t make any sense. Gately stares at her and wonders about her and does not know what to say. The uncertainty makes him think that he will use a substance again in the future and become trapped again in the cage of addiction. This terrifies him.

This scene is broken up by a description of the subsidized statue of liberty who holds “what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes.”

Returning to the second half of the White Flag Group’s AA meeting, we are told it is “funny what they’ll [AA groups] find funny.” The next speaker is a new member who wants to be liked. He performs, a performance which is seen through by all present. The Group does not laugh because the guy’s speech is egoistic. He deprecates the program instead of himself. This makes the crowd embarrassed for the speaker. The applause is loud and painful and they tell him to “Keep Coming!”

The next guy tells a story about being the complaint department for a retail store. He went to work so hungover every day that he eventually brought a hammer to work with him and would pretend to work on something under his desk when people showed up to make a complaint. He stayed under his desk banging until they left. Eventually, he says, someone figured out where to complain about the complaint department and he was fired. The AA group erupted in laughter.

Speakers must speak the truth, Gately has learned. Otherwise it will not “go over.” He thinks that an ironist parallels a witch in church at meetings because irony manifests as one of the complicated structures addicts build for themselves in order to keep using their substance. Many aspects of AA surprise in this way. The program does appear as brainwashing, but Gately considers that his brain probably needs washing. Honesty has become one of Gately’s great gifts that has been created by his fear of going back Out There to his addiction.

The next-to-last speaker tells another story that’s designed to impress the audience and to deflect her own responsibility for her Disease. She has not learned to “Keep it Simple,” Gately thinks. She tells the story of being adopted into a family with a devout Catholic mother, a severely damaged daughter, and a sexually abusive father. The speaker refers to her adopted daughter as “It.” Because of the the mother’s religion, the speaker says that she was forced to take her adopted sister everywhere she went, even, eventually, on dates. Worse, her father took advantage of the adopted sister’s inability to resist him or communicate by creeping into his daughter and the speaker’s shared room late at night. During these visitations, he imagined his adopted daughter was Raquel Welch and went so far as to buy a Raquel Welch mask that he would put over her face when he took advantage of her. This terrible childhood circumstance became the speaker’s reason for becoming a stripper and drug addict. After frequently having to clean up after the father, one night the speaker went to clean up after the father’s passions and needed to turn on the bedside light. Having for the first time the opportunity to look into the face of her adopted sister after these encounters, she found a face of post-coital ecstasy that reminded her of her mother’s picture of The Ecstasy of St. Theresa that hung in the house’s parlor. This event led her to her drug addiction, she says, in an effort to forget this terrible event.

The audience stares at her in distress because, Gately thinks, her story appeals to exterior cause. Exterior causes can easily become excuses, and so they are shunned by AA. It is authoritarian on this point.

Image source is here.