Infinite Conversations – Episode 1
Recorded on July 11, 2013

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Infinite Jest was published in 1996. The book spawned a massive and sprawling response, spanning articles, books, blogs, websites, list-servs, forums, dissertations, theses, reviews, parodies, films, and even a music video—not to mention countless discussions among the novel’s readers (and non-readers). One could say the ongoing conversation around the novel constitutes another layer of the book—beyond the 1,079 pages of David Foster Wallace’s text—a social, creative, and dynamic layer that has evolved over time, with each new wave of readers. An infinite conversation, if you will.

In this first of a series Infinite Conversations hosted by Summer Of Jest, we explore the history and trajectory of the conversation surrounding Infinite Jest (and David Foster Wallace’s work more broadly) with two individuals who’ve contributed significantly to that conversation.

Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University. His forthcoming book is called Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion.

Nick Maniatis is the founder and maintainer of HowlingFantods.com, which has collected David Foster Wallace news and resources since 1997. He is also an English teacher in Canberra, Australia.

Your Host: Marco V Morelli

Call Format: 30 minutes interview-style, 30 minutes Q&A with live callers

Links:
What’s Changed Since Last time? – by Matt Bucher
Wallace-L List [ignore browser security warning] Oblivion Kickstarter Campaign

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

We return to Steeply and Marathe. The temperature has dropped in the desert night and we learn that Steeply is recently divorced. Marathe remembers making fun of Steeply’s cross-dressing costume.

Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (2005) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We learn that there was a night when James O. Incandenza went to Lyle drunk, freshly sweating from the sauna, and complained to him that avant-garde critics were complaining his work was not entertaining. Even the critics thought Incandenza was terrible at plot. The idea Incandenza took from this night with Lyle was that he would get his revenge through “Found Drama” and “anticonfluentialism.”

Endnote 145: 3 November, YDAU (2009) – Pheonix, AZ

This endnote gives us a “Transcript-Fragment” of an interview with Orin Incandenza, conducted by Helen Steeply.

The fragment focuses on the artistic work of James O. Incandenza. In general, Orin says JOI’s serious work got less and less abstract as his career progressed. Though most considered his work avant-garde, Incandenza’s style was out of fashion when he really started making movies. He was actually apres-garde, Orin says. The highly abstract nature of Himself’s Found Drama phase served a non-artistic purpose.

Orin claims that Himself grew angry with critical attacks on his formalism and decided to make a new genre, Found Drama or “neorealism,” in order to take revenge on his critics. From the start, Found Drama was a giant prank. Several filmmakers were involved and the effort became so popular in academic circles that Incandenza actually received grants for the work and was invited to give “turgid” academic lectures on what he was doing. One of the examples of Found Drama we are given is that Incandenza would throw darts at names in a telephone book and the subsequent film would be comprised of an hour and a half of whoever’s life the dart hit, whether that person could be located or not, or, even, whether they were still alive or not. According to endnote 24, there were eleven of these projects, at least three of which were “conceptual, conceptually unfilmable,” and, thus, unreleased. The joke was that neorealism took realism to such an extreme that it involved no work on the part of the filmmaker. The protagonist didn’t know that he or she was in the drama and nobody controlled the scene. After the hoax was revealed, Incandenza refused to return the grant money, though Orin says he did not keep it.

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

We return to Gately’s discussion of causality at the White Flag Group’s Interdependence Day meeting. For AA, the question of causality is a question of where “the arrow of responsibility points.” It should point to the self, AA contends. The final speaker serves as an example of a recovering addict who points the arrow of responsibility at herself. The speaker says that she suffered an addiction to free-base cocaine. She could not stop the cocaine, even after she became pregnant. When her child was born, the infant was already dead, dry, and withered. She could not even tell the child’s gender because development had long ago stopped in the womb. The speaker says she immediately entered denial and used the rest of her cocaine. When she had used it all, she ventured out with her dead baby still attached to her by an umbilical cord, swaddled as if still alive. She carried the infant around, turning tricks in order to buy more cocaine. Eventually, the baby’s body began to seriously decompose and people realized she was carrying a dead body. Her prostitution business dropped off and people came to her and tried to tell her that her infant was dead. She refused to accept reality and continued to carry her child around with her. Finally, a cop walked by and smelled the infant and called DSS. DSS took the baby from her and had the infant buried. It turned out to be a boy. The speaker then spent the next four months in a hospital going insane. When she came out, she did not want cocaine anymore. She started drinking and drank herself to that final moment of death or surrender, which is when she called AA.

Gately reasons that the woman could make it. The whole crowd fully IDs with her. And Gately thinks that life is just a tragic adventure that nobody signed up for.

Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (2005) - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We return to the relationship between Lyle and JOI. They are described as “the odd couple of libations.” The pair spent many nights in the weight room. James would drink his Wild Turkey and Lyle would drink a Caffeine Free Diet Coke. Mario waited on standby for getting more ice when they ran out. On these nights, JOI opened up to Lyle. One night in particular, he told Lyle that he would give his marriage a C-. Mario was present.

8 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This scene begins with a discussion of Mario’s film history. His first finished entertainment is a puppet show and has become popular at ETA, which the school screens every year on the evening of Interdependence Day. Endnote 147 tells us that the screening is happening today despite the day’s earlier injuries during Eschaton only because Tavis and Schtitt were gone all day and have not heard the bad news. Also, we learn that Avril helped convince CT that Helen Steeply can come in for a soft profile because Avril knows that Orin has directed Steeply here. Hal thinks about the fact that the upperclassmen will be in trouble for what happened in today’s Eschaton, since they are big buddies, but the actual repercussions of today’s events are still very unclear. After the endnote, we learn that everyone is gathered in the cafeteria and can eat all the sweets they like and that everyone wears a unique hat to this international holiday’s celebration.

Before the film, Mario gets to thank everyone for coming and tell them that he hopes they like it. This is Mario’s big moment, which he neither likes nor dislikes. Mario’s piece remakes Himself’s ONANtiad, which endnote 24 describes as an “[o]blique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration.” Though Mario had help with the script, most of the film’s work belongs to him.

Mario’s film opens with a quote from President Gentle about how a generation has “torched” the future. Gentle, manically terrified of uncleanliness, used to be a famous singer. He entered national politics on a platform of a cleaner national life. Gentle’s party, the Clean US Party (CUSP), was able to unite unlikely elements of both the extreme left and right of American politics and put both Democrats and Republicans in the background. CUSP promised to throw away the dark past of the US and to literally clean America’s streets. American renewal, we are told, was aesthetic for President Gentle. He promised that the US would no longer be a world policeman, but would focus solely on cleaning up after itself. Further, Americans would not have to make tough choices because he would make them for us. He also claimed there were sources of revenue for the nation that previous administrations had failed to use and that under his leadership Americans could stop blaming each other for their problems. He swore he would not sleep until he found an Other to reunite the nation against.

Historically accurate in parts, an early part of the film presents the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada as new Secretaries to the reconfigured ONAN. In a scrap of the film’s dialogue, Gentle and the Prime Minister of Canada discuss the dissolution of NATO. In exchange for getting rid of NAFTA as well, Canada requests the removal of “NATO ICBM frappeurs from Manitoba.” After the discussion, the two celebrate the uniting of the North American continent with a round of “It’s a Small [Continent] After All.”

As the film continues, the narrative joins Lyle down in the weight room. We are told that no guru can be held 100% exempt from human pain. Lyle is thinking about Marlon Bain and how he produced so much sweat. Marlon was always in the shower, trying to stay clean, and wrote poetry about his interior life. He and Lyle spent much time together.

Lyle spends his nights in the weight room waiting for students to come down and ask for guidance. They use the sauna and then enter to ask Lyle’s guidance in important ETA matters. Sometimes Lyle tells the students, “The world is very old” or something else. The important thing is that he listens. Tonight, he has a conference with Lamont Chu, who says he wants to be a famous tennis player very badly. He says he often clips pictures of famous players out of magazines and imagines that he is the one performing the actions in the photos. The anxiety of Chu’s desire to win hurts him in competitive play, he confides. The narrative says Lyle has a way of listening that shelters the speaker from judgment. He asks Chu why he wants to be in a magazine. Chu says he feels it would give his life meaning. Lyle asks if Chu thinks the players he clips out like having their photos in the magazines. Lyle concedes that the players probably enjoy the photo experience the first time, but after that the magazines and the other publicity that comes with being famous raises their sense of their personal privacy and they feel invaded. The players fear that their photos will stop appearing in magazines and their lives will lose meaning. To this, Chu says that such a thought is awful, as it means achieving his anxiety-fueled aspirations will only lead to more anxiety. Lyle asks Chu if Chu can listen to something about what is true. Lyle then says, “The truth will set you free, but not until it is done with you.” He suggests Chu has been “snared” by the untrue. The mistake Chu has made is that he assumes that his envy has a positive corollary that Chu will be able to enjoy if he can only get his picture in a magazine. Lyle tells Chu that this is a mirage. Fame is not a feeling. Lyle then reminds Chu that the world is very old and that he seems to suffer from one of the world’s first lies. Chu says, then, he is in a double-bind, caught between an envy of fame and the possibility of achieving fame and then suffering more. He sees no way out. Lyle replies that escape from the cage requires “awareness of the fact of the cage.”

Other students visit. Lyle dispenses results-oriented advice to them. Eventually, we return to the cafeteria and Mario’s film. The room smells of tobacco and sweets. The film now offers a history of the US under Gentle through variously real and fictionally hyperbolic newspaper headlines: NATO dismantles itself after 55 years; North American Nations consider an alliance; hygiene takes on national importance as a political issue; subsidized time begins. A parody of TelEntertainment ads appears. Headlines return: an AFR assassination occurs, leaving the Prime Minister of Canada dead; Gentle pushes for a solution to pollution; Gentle decides to turn a large swathe of New England into the waste dump that will become the Concavity/Convexity.

Returning to Lyle, we find him stressing the importance of not underestimating objects to Ortho Stice. For unexplained reasons, Stice’s furniture keeps moving around in his sleep. Though he at first suspected his roommate, then others, he now realizes that there has been no human involvement. His bed moves without human physical contact. His theories are that he is telekinetic, that someone else at ETA is telekinetic, or that he has turned into a severe somnambulist. He knows he has a shot at pro tennis and does not want to ruin that with a late-night sleepwalking incident. Lyle reminds him not to underestimate objects. He tells Stice the story of a man who went to crowded areas with a chair and bet people that he could lift the chair off the ground while standing on it. And then he would do it. After winning a bet, he always walked off with the chair still in the air.

Returning to the cafeteria, we learn that Hal craves both nicotine and sugar. As the sugar high begins to ebb, Hal thinks about JOI’s phase when he explored the relationship between performances and audiences. Hal specifically recalls The Medusa v. The Odalisque, which was set in the historically famous Ford’s theater in Washington D.C. In this film, the mythical Medusa fights the Canadian Odalisque. Both figures are able to turn those who look directly at them into stone – one because of her hideousness, the other because of her beauty. In Himself’s movie, the two battle for over 20 minutes, trying to turn the other to stone without suffering the same fate. As the cartridge proceeds, the members of the audience, who are actually filmed characters in the movie, slowly become petrified as they see the faces of the two mythical figures. Actual audiences of the film did not like it because they never got to see the combatants’ faces, for obvious reasons. This was not Incandenza’s least popular film though. That honor belongs to a movie called The Joke. The advertisements for The Joke literally warned prospective movie goers against seeing the film, but people went to see the movie anyway, thinking the ads were just clever anti-ads. Once inside, they found the film was merely a projection of themselves on-screen, waiting for a movie to begin. Eventually, they would get angry, tire of looking at themselves in the theater, and storm out. After the last person left, Incandenza and Mario would hastily pack their gear and hurry to the next showing.

Returning to Mario’s headlines, we learn that someone died trying to change the Statue of Liberty’s advertisement. Gentle continues to push for a cleaner US. Feral animals begin to appear in the Northeast. And then Mario’s movie shows an ad about toxic substances appearing in NH. A headline says that children are beginning to be born deformed in New England. Another declares that because of people leaving the Northeast, moving companies’ stocks are skyrocketing. And, finally, federal disasters are increasing in the Northeast.

Mario’s movie then presents a fictional meeting that takes place in the Oval Office of “The Concavity Cabinet.” During this dialogue, Gentle is high on oxygen, Rodney Tine has taken control of the meeting, and the Prime Minister of Canada is absent because he is giving press conferences. Tine urges the cabinet to take immediate action with regards to the rising levels of toxicity in New England. Someone reports that the cost of actually detoxifying the area would be “staggering.” Tine suggests getting rid of New England, altogether. He says the US will give the area away, as the startup of annular fusion will only create more waste. In endnote 156, we learn that Mario’s puppet show operates on a common theory that Tine really runs the Oval Office and that President Gentle merely acts as a puppet for Tine’s larger goals. JOI’s original ONANtiad, we are told, did not go so far as Mario’s film on this point. Returning from the endnote, Tine asserts that territory has become the US’s greatest resource and that the US will gift the territory to Canada, according to Luria P’s suggestion. We might remember that Marathe and Steeply previously discussed Tine’s love for this insurgent from Quebec. Everybody acknowledges that this gifting will lead to a huge evacuation from New England. The cabinet fears that the media will become obsessed with the image of New Englanders as a people in exodus. They decide the goal will be to turn the moving populations into heroes, not victims. Lastly, they discuss the need to keep the gifted territories open for waste displacement, despite the fact that the property will soon be Canadian.

More headlines appear: the US transfers the territory; Canada says “no thanks;” Quebec threatens secession; the US is accused of experialism. A news clip says that Gentle has gone into seclusion. Eventually, Gentle threatens to fire nuclear weapons into the ground and blow the radiation north into Canada if the Prime Minister continues to refuse to accept the Convexity/Concavity.

The narrative now informs us that this suicidal final strategy of Gentle is actually a reference to Eric Clipperton. Clipperton was a junior player who would go to matches and threaten his opponents with the suggestion that if he lost, he would kill himself there on court. The Clipperton Brigade became the collection of those who had to face him and surrendered to his threats. Because everyone knew what Clipperton was doing, wins and losses in his matches became statistically irrelevant for USTA ranking. One day, a player named Ross Reat attempted to play Clipperton despite his threats. This lead Clipperton to play the remainder of the match with his Glock 17 at his temple. Reat threw the rest of the game and was permanently damaged. Nobody challenged Clipperton after Reat and he mysteriously continued to appear and disappear before and after matches. His only sort-of-friend was Mario Incandenza, who actually treated Clipperton as if he existed. Endnote 160 tells us that some footage of Clipperton was buried with JOI, along with other cartridges.

Hal smoked several times on this Interdependence Day and has entered a funk. He finds both the film’s references to his dead father and the manifestation of post-Reconfiguration advertising deeply depressing. Mario’s film is now exploring the birth of subsidized time (which he, again, credits to Tine) and the burgeoning relationship between Tine and Luria P. As he watches, Hal remembers a paper he had written on television advertising. Part of the reason for shifts in advertising, particularly television advertising, he had argued, was that new technologies could ferret out the idiosyncrasies of advertising and block them. After that, cable appeared, offering lower costs for certain advertisers outpaced by the costs of running ads on the big four. In particular Nunhagen Aspirin ran ads depicting characters in tremendous cranio-facial pain that were so effective that Nunhagen Aspirin sales went through the roof, but the ads also scared everyone from the networks that ran them. After the aspirin, liposuction ads put another nail in the coffin of television advertising. But the worst was an ad for tongue scrapers. In one tongue scraper ad, an attractive man would take a proffered ice cream cone from an attractive woman and and when he licked the cone he terrified both her and the avuncular ice cream vendor with the giant pile of white on his tongue. Hal’s paper argued that these ads sunk the big four, already threatened by the increasing power of cable, because they killed their partner in televisual product packaging by scaring the customers away from future viewing. Television died, but out of its ashes arose Noreen Lace-Forche, who began Interlace TelEntertainment. This service provided “empowerment” to consumers by giving them unlimited choices. Lace-Forche wondered: what if viewers could choose whatever they wanted out of all the entertainment that had ever been created and then have it mailed or streamed to their home entertainment systems? It would be self-selected programming. It was a success and entertainment became an end in-itself, rather than an end-for-advertising. There are no ads with Interlace TelEntertainment. In fact, advertising ended up being the true loser in these technological shifts. As a result of their being shut out of television, ads flooded the public space of North America. They appeared on buses and on personal automobiles, but ironically US consumers wouldn’t buy a Ford corrupted by an ad for laundry detergent.

Image source is here.

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

Returning to Steeply and Marathe, we are told that Marathe’s wife has been in a coma for fourteen months. Marathe observes that Steeply needs to humiliate himself in ridiculous disguises in order to feel whole. Eventually, Steeply resumes the conversation by saying that what really disturbs the Office of Unspecified Services about the AFR is the AFR’s disinterest in anything but harming US citizens. Steeply’s Office cannot find an agenda behind the AFR’s actions. And they feel the wheelchair assassins are unique among the various Canadian terrorist groups on this point. What is their motive?

Marathe thinks about Steeply’s motives for opening this line of discussion. He replies that the US has long been hated by many peoples. Steeply says yes, but those people all had discernible reasons for hating the US, whether it was oil or religion or imperialism. Steeply wants to know the goal that mediates the desire of the AFR. He then talks about how Americans want choice and he lists various classic American freedoms such as speech and the pursuit of happiness as well as what he calls “the little things” like sunsets and waste removal. Marathe replies that this sounds utilitarian. He says, in this equation-based thinking, a thinking that calculates pleasure based on each individual person’s desire, whose pleasure and pain ends up being the most important in American philosophy needs to be acknowledged. Steeply replies that the US long ago realized that “each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone’s good…[He calls the US] a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual’s choice. The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain [is] utterly sacrosanct.”

Marathe replies by asking what happens when one man’s pleasure creates pain for another person. Steeply misunderstands the question and says that this is what disturbs the Office of Unspecified Services about the AFR, their interest in deriving pleasure from another’s pain. Marathe says, “No, but not another’s pain as a pleasurable end in itself. I did not mean where my pleasure is your pain. How to say better. Imagine there arises a situation which your deprivation or pain is merely the consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.” Steeply begins to understand. Marathe continues by laying out a scenario where both Marathe and Steeply want to share a bowl of pea soup. There is only one serving between them, a half-serving being unsatisfactory. How should they decide who gets the soup? Marathe says, why should I, as the sacred individual, give you half of my soup? My own pleasure over torment is what is good, for I am a loyal USA, a genius of this individual desire.” Steeply says they should bid on the soup, the winner will have expressed his desire most emphatically and the loser can take his money and go buy more soup. Marathe denies bidding’s relevance to the question. Steeply then says that Marathe wants to ask the question of limited resources. He wants to ask “what prevents 310 million individual American happiness-pursuers from all going around bonking each other over the head and taking each other’s soup. A state of nature. My own pleasure and the hell with all the rest.” Steeply says Marathe’s ignorance on this question reveals the divide between Quebecois and US culture. US culture requires, Steeply insists, an interest in other people’s wishes and not just an interest in personal satisfaction. Steeply then anticipates what he thinks Marathe will say next, something about how Americans may respect one another but are perfectly happy to take advantage of, say, their Canadian neighbors to the north. This assumption of what Marathe would have said annoys Marathe. He says, “You are not false, maybe. But I think I am asking less for nations’ arguing and more for the example of you and me only, we two, if we pretend we are both of your USA type, each separate, both sacred, both desiring…I am asking how is community and your respect part of my happiness in this moment with the soup, if I am a US person.” Steeply again fails to understand. Marathe continues: “In my mind I know it is true that I must not simply make a bonking of your head and take away the soup, because my overall happiness of pleasure of the long term needs a community of [no bonking allowed]. But this is the long term, Steeply. This is down the road of my happiness, this respecting of you. How do I calculate this distant road of long term into my action of this moment, now…if the most pleasure right now…is in the whole serving of [soup], how is my self able to put aside this moment’s desire to make bonk on you and take this soup? How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?” Steeply calls this delayed gratification. Marathe agrees. He asks, what helps an American to sacrifice the imperative of immediate gratification that his desire demands? Steeply suggests the term “enlightened self-interest.” He says you can’t train moral sensibility as you would a rat. Steeply then says education must teach Americans how to make knowledgeable decisions. He acknowledges there are problems like crime and poverty and actual murder, but these are “the price of free pursuit.”

We learn that Marathe’s wife was born without a skull. He asks, if US persons have the sort of maturity Steeply describes, how can the samizdat be a threat? Are the Canadians the only ones who see the US as lacking choice-making powers? Steeply says that the Entertainment is not like “candy or beer.” It is unique. Marathe ends the section by saying that the initial choice to watch the Entertainment must still be a choice and implies that if Steeply is right about US persons, they will be able to make the responsible choice in the face of the Entertainment.

Year of the Whopper (2002) - Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This scene tells the rest of the Eric Clipperton story. After tournaments he would attend ceremonies without his gun and then disappear to wherever he had come from. The USTA never acknowledged a single one of his victories as legitimate. They refused to treat him as real, until the Year of the Whopper when a “Mexican systems analyst” became a part of the new ONANTA. Clipperton was all of a sudden ranked #1 in the ONAN. This surprised everyone and people began to speculate what Clipperton would do next, since he had apparently accomplished what he set out to do. Shockingly, he appeared at the gate to ETA. It was Mario of course who requested that he be let in, despite the rules about non-ETA players being forbidden from entering ETA’s grounds. Clipperton sought a meeting with JOI, presumably on the suggestion of Mario. So, Mario, Himself, and Clipperton all went to an empty on the “top-floor room in Subdorm C” for a conference. Then, in front of both Mario and Incandenza, he pulled out his Glock 17 and fired a bullet into his right temple.

It turned out, Clipperton was from Crawfordsville, Indiana. His parents did not know where he went on weekends and were ignorant about where the tennis trophies came from. Mario never told Hal or Avril what happened in the Subdorm C room. But after the cops had come and gone, it was Mario who insisted on cleaning up the mess. Now, the only person with a key to this room is Gerhardt Schtitt who invites complaining students to “go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.”

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Shattuck Shelter, Jamaica Plain, MA

This scene gives an account of Gately’s second job cleaning the Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain, a shelter for homeless males. He does janitorial work there, scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, and cleaning showers. The shelter is disgusting. He finds excrement in the showers because many of the residents are incontinent. It takes three hours to clean, which Gately’s boss, Stavros, pays him for under the table. Gately only gets paid for three hours, even though the state gets billed for eight. The residents of the shelter are badly addicted and largely schizophrenic. Gately uses his experience here to help him appreciate the gift of sobriety. Some of the guys Gately sees in the shelter he used to know and he tries to help them as he can, but for the rest of the residents he shuts down and ignores them. Gately observes that though Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, he “has private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved” because of how Stavros behaves toward the residents and his ambitions to open a shoe store, ambitions derived from Stavros’s foot fetish.

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

Returning to thoughts of Eric Clipperton, we learn about a young male from Fresno, CA, who upset two top seeds to win the Pacific Coast Hardcourt Boys 18′s. That night this same boy who had just unexpectedly won a serious tournament drank a glass of cyanide-laced chocolate milk, which left a residue on his lips that precipitated the deaths of his entire immediate family as they each tried to resuscitate their fallen family members and drew the cyanide onto their own lips. This tragic story is identified as a reason for the requirement that “all accredited tennis academies have…a PhD-level counselor on full-time staff.” ETA’s counselor goes by the name of Dolores Rusk. The kids regard her as useless. Veteran students know to avoid her.

The narrative then considers that serious jr. players go crazy as they move to the top, are already crazy, or lack the mental equipment that fails when a person goes crazy. Focusing again on the Interdependence Day film, we are told that Wayne remains stone-faced as he watches Mario’s movie, the plot of which is dully caught up in the Tine-Luria P. liaison mentioned previously. Endnote 176 tells us that this aspect of Mario’s film is derivative of his late father’s film, though that liaison involved Gentle and “the wife of Canada’s ‘Minister of Environment and Resource Development Enterprises.’” In the older Incandenza’s film, the minister spoils Gentle’s affair by giving his wife, also obsessively hygienic, a yeast infection that drives her to throw herself in front of a train. As a result of his lover’s death, Gentle unleashes revenge on the Canadian minister in the form of intercontinental politics. Returning from the endnote, we learn that subsidized time was intended to offset the costs of the continental giveaway and subsequent exodus.

More headers come on screen: Gentle tours the “new new-new England Border;” a giant wall is built just south of “Syracuse, Concord NH, Salem MA;”Gentle watches a football game between Clemson and BU; cranially anomalous babies are born; and, lastly, Gentle and his cabinet conceive a new budget to handle Reconfiguration costs.

After the headlines, we get another scene of dialogue. Gentle recounts his experience of the Clemson-BU game to his cabinet, which is the BU game of the now famous first-in-game-punt of Orin Incandenza’s collegiate career. Gentle tells his cabinet that he dislikes football normally, it being such a dirty sport, but that at the BU game he had a vision. This vision was a solution to the unmet costs of the ONAN’s recent Territorial Reconfiguration. The costs of Reconfiguration were high. Gentle introduces his cabinet to Mr. P. Tom Veals, an advertising executive, and Rodney Tine follows suit by introducing the pulchritudinous Luria P. Gentle then says that the American voters have made demands that conform to the classic “Democratic Triple Bind:” the electorate demands actions and services (see Reconfiguration) and also demands these services be provided without increased taxes (a.k.a. revenue enhancements), both while the fiscally-minded demand that these demands be fulfilled within the context of a balanced federal budget. To violate any of these three imperatives will result in upset citizenry, which is unacceptable. Gentle says that at the football game he realized that what he thought was named the Forsythia Bowl is actually called the “Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.” This realization paved the way to subsidized time.

July, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Braintree, MA

This scene begins with Don Gately’s memory of a commitment at the “Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group,” in the southern extreme of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area. At this commitment, he had admitted to having “no real solid understanding of a Higher Power,” which he felt he needed for AA’s 3rd step that suggests that AAs “turn [their] Diseased will over to the direction” of some type of god. Though there are no rules about who or what his Higher Power should be, he still cannot imagine a god that feels what Gately is going through. In fact, he has reached a point where he wishes the Crocodiles would just give him a god-image for him to turn his Diseased will over to. When he does conceive of a Higher Power, Gately feels a great “Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.” He imagines his nightly prayers heading out into a universe without anything to hear him. After he talks, the room explodes with applause. They tell him to Keep Coming.

The “Tough Shit Group” is largely comprised of sober bikers. After it ends, one of the bikers pulls his motorcycle up to Gately outside and tells him a story. The biker says, “This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.” [Wallace's speech to Kenyon College's 2005 graduating class uses this same parable.]

On his ride home in Ferocious Francis’s car, Gately felt angry. He considers that when AA’s tell you it will get better, they omit the fact that this progress only comes through the suffering of great pain. Because Gately had used substances to get away from something, and the process of sobriety involves the reacquaintance with whatever it is you were avoiding, Gately has suffered many memories of his past. For instance, at eight months in Ennet House, he began reexperiencing pain from his childhood. He began by remembering his mother’s addiction to vodka. His biological father had disappeared when Gately was very young and his mother’s live-in boyfriend used to beat Gately’s mother nightly. Gately remembers her struggling beneath the alcoholic boyfriend, trying to ward off his blows, but the boyfriend was too strong. He lifted weights and drank daily, meticulously making records of both activities in a little notebook in a show of self-control. His mother has, as of YDAU, been in state care for years now, but Gately has never visited. Gately had begun his own drinking career by finishing his mother’s bottles after she passed out, but he always left a swallow in her glass so she could get off the couch in the mornings. Gately’s nickname had been Bim, for Big, Indestructible, Moron. His mother had a cirrhotic hemorrhage and was then taken to the state place over ten years ago.

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

Hal Incandenza has a recurring nightmare, where his teeth splinter when he chews and he squeezes a tennis ball in his hand. The splintering teeth cause everyone to make excuses to get away from him. The last few nights, Mario has been staying at the Headmaster’s House, mourning the loss of Madame Psychosis. Though WYYY had tried to put other people in MP’s place, nobody could replace her.

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

We learn ETA, at maximum capacity, can hold 148 junior players, a majority of whom are male. Staffing and filling ETA with students is incredibly complex. Because of this, Charles Tavis sleeps little. On this morning of 9 November, he looks out from a window in the Headmaster’s House at the top boys heading to the tennis courts for their AM drills while he drinks decaffeinated hazelnut coffee. He then looks at Mario, who has been sleeping in the house and who is potentially CT’s son. He refers to Mario as “thing” and “it.” Mario disgusts him. As CT turns his attention back to the boys outside stretching, he begins worrying about the complications of the day. He then feels superior to JOI because, to him, administrating at ETA requires the cultivation of a state of total worry, which he assumes Himself never did.

The perspective then shifts to Hal outside who is cold and wet as he runs and performs drills. The sky lightens with dawn. Students vomit from all the sugar they consumed last night. Schtitt is up in his tower. Coyle complains about the cold. Drills begin. The top four boys begin by hitting backhands down the line on court one; they do forehands on the second court; court three is for butterflies, where four players move the ball diagonally and then directly across to each other; on court four, volleys are practiced in several ways, then lobs. Schtitt uses his bullhorn to tell everyone that Hal is compensating for his ankle’s pain. On court five, the boys serve to corners; on six, they practice returning serves; on seven, they practice finesse drills, which are physically undemanding, and play microtennis, Hal’s specialty; and, finally, on the eighth court, the top four boys do wind sprints. After these drills, they drink Gatorade. Schtitt comes down from his tower. And we learn that Otis P. Lord returned from the hospital last night, still with that monitor attached to his head. Schtitt stands at Parade Rest and points out strengths and weaknesses in the boys’ games. Finally, the boys do conditioning, aerobic exercises to improve their stamina.

After conditioning, Schtitt gives a speech to the boys. Today’s theme: using the cold as an excuse to not give a total effort. He asks Chu if it is too cold to give a full effort. Chu affirms that it is cold. Then Schtitt asks about hot days. Chu says they will have to learn to adjust to conditions. Schtitt says no, that is not the point. His point seems to be that to give the total self to something, one must be able to shut out external distractions. He says that great players always stay the same on the inside. He goes on, “This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no?” He continues: “You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To make for you this second world that is always the same: there is in this world you, and in the the hand a tool, there is a ball, there is opponent with his tool, and always only two of you, you and this other, inside the lines, with always a purpose to keep this world alive, yes?…This is not adjusting. This is not adjusting to ignore the cold and wind and tired…No cold wind where you occur…Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.”

Schtitt rhetorically asks who wants to leave ETA because it is too cold, too hot, and too hard. He then encourages them to be here in total, in the game. He gives them final drill directions. And, finally, he asks Hal where one applies for citizenship to the second world of consciousness. Hal replies, “Head, sir…The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I’m going to occur as a player. The game’s two heads’ one world. One world, sir.” Schtitt laughs and tells them to play.

Image source is here.

9 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA

A couple components of Gately’s job as an Ennet House staffer are to run errands and to cook meals. This means that twice a week he gets to go shopping in Pat Montesian’s 1964 Ford Aventura, which is in mint condition. Gately loves driving the Aventura, which Pat lets him do even though he lost his license before getting sober. Gately’s rap sheet is long, his biggest crime being the accidental killing of the Canadian VIP, DuPlessis. We remember that Gately stuffed a dishrag in the man’s mouth when he was sick, preventing him from breathing. This case was taken, Gately has heard, from the remorseless ADA whose toothbrush he had soiled, very much against the ADA’s will, by the Office of Unspecified Services. Unspecified Services are not interested in Gately. They suspect DuPlessis was murdered for political reasons, which is a suspicion that does not point them toward Don Gately. The rest of Gately’s crimes have been, for all intents and purposes, closed, contingent on his satisfactory progress with sobriety and good behavior. The only thing outstanding is the issue with the driver’s license. If he gets caught driving, he will have to serve ninety days in prison, which Gately isn’t worried about as long as he can get to a couple AA meetings a week. Demerol and weed are readily available in prison and returning to substances has become Gately’s largest fear. This fear reveals to Gately how much he has changed and he tells new residents that AA is so powerful that “he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.”

When Gately first Came In he was hopeless, which fact Pat recognized and liked. We then learn that before Pat Montesian started running Ennet House, she was a wealthy, married alcoholic living on Cape Cod. After her husband left her because of her drinking, she began drinking even more, eventually having a stroke that left her disabled. She Came In to Ennet House when its founder was still alive; she got sober; and then she married another rich guy with kids. Pat takes a special interest in Gately, going to his court dates and standing as a character reference. Gately remains unsure why Pat likes him.

Don Gately’s first months in Ennet House frustrated him. He was told not to ask questions, but to follow the directions of those in AA and Ennet House as if he were reading a box of cake mix. He distrusted this analogy, but did what he was told anyway and after a few months he found he was no longer consumed by a desire for substances: “He was, in a way, Free.” He was off substances for the first times since he was ten. It drove Gately crazy that he could not understand how AA worked, until Ferocious Francis told him that “maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn’t going to be major-league enough to save Gately’s addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?” Now, Gately cares little for understanding. He just does what he needs to in order to stay sober. Though Gately is Ennet House’s chef, we are told that his cooking is terrible. For example, he boils the pasta for his spaghetti for over an hour so that it becomes mushy. But nobody says anything directly to Gately about the quality of his cooking, partly because of his size and partly because they can see that he truly wants them to like his food.

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

Returning again to Marathe and Steeply, Steeply asks Marathe if he remembers an experiment with “electro-implantations in the human brain” that took place in Canada a few decades back. He says, the idea behind the experiments was that the scientists hoped small stimulations of the brain could prevent seizures. What they found though was that stimulations of certain parts of the brain resulted in profound pleasure. These sites of pleasure ended up being called “p-terminals.’ Soon, the scientists began experimenting on the p-terminals of animals and found that if they attached the stimulation to a lever so that if the rats pressed the lever they would be stimulated, the rats would press it “over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.” Steeply then says that the scientists eventually moved to larger and smarter animals, always finding the same result. The animals would become so single-minded about the stimulation, they would die. Finally, the scientists wanted to experiment on humans, which obviously involved legal difficulties. Still, Steeply says, word got out about the experiments and suddenly there was a giant wave of volunteers who wanted to experience this pure pleasure, despite the fact that it would lead to their deaths. Steeply’s point here is that the volunteers were all Canadian and had still freely chosen to volunteer to experience this death of pleasure. Eventually, he says, the US and Canadian governments intervened against this threat. Steeply’s ultimate point is that the p-terminal experiments are very much like the samizdat and that Fortier, the leader of the AFR, “might be induced to see just what he’s proposing to let out of the cage, if he considered this example.”

9 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA

The promise of tonight’s scheduled hot dogs has caused two newer residents to announce certain dietary restrictions that necessitate Gately’s driving across town. Accommodating the needs of newcomers strikes Gately as a mistake, but Pat is in charge. Even so, Gately thinks that this “looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict’s claim of special uniqueness that it’s supposed to be Pat’s job to help break down,” but he keeps his own counsel on such matters. Gately loves driving Pat’s car and takes indirect routes wherever he goes, the extra time for which he makes up by driving like a lunatic. Leaving Ennet House, he takes Commonwealth Avenue toward “the big triangular CITGO neon sign,” passing several of his old haunts, bars and liquor stores. He drives by Boston University and Fenway. He thinks about the college girls as he passes BU and we learn that Gately has never had sex sober and, now, doesn’t remember how to even talk to a girl outside the environment of AA. He then turns onto Storrow Drive, deciding to buy his food at the Bread and Circus, “a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers” in order to punish Pat’s indulgence of the newcomers. Gately then gets off Storrow at Prospect street and drives through Inman Square, a Portuguese part of town that also has Brazillians and Canadians. Gately, we’re told, is “pro-American.” As he passes Antitoi Entertainent here in Inman, a “piece of the debris Gately’s raised…is blown all the way to [Antitoi Entertainent's storefront]…and hits…the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle.”

Inside Antitoi Entertainent, a large Canadian emerges from a back room and checks the door. He has an X of ammo across his chest and a .44 revolver. His name is Lucien Antitoi. He and his brother Bertraund run the store. They have apparently just been having a meal of pea soup and bread. The narrative tells us that Bertraund and Lucien are a small and incompetent terrorist cell in Boston, formerly protected by the DuPlessis Gately accidentally killed when robbing his home. We might remember Antitoi (Against-You) Entertainent as the site Poor Tony headed to for relief of withdrawal before his seizure and also the site of Pemulis’s DMZ purchase. Since DuPlessis’s murder, Bertraund has been idiotically scheming against the ONAN without anyone to tell him how bad his ideas are. One such scheme involves dealing drugs to US persons – an echo of the far more lethal AFR’s dissemination plot. We also learn that they recently purchased a large bag of unmarked read-only cartridges and some psychedelic lozenges.

Lucien wages a constant war against dirt in their shop, which is why he is always carrying a broom, the tip of which he has sharpened to a lethal point in order to turn the broom into a sort of domestic weapon. Lucien is not a smart man, we a are told, but he is able to find beauty everywhere in the ordinary world. As he daydreams, Lucien keeps hearing squeaking noises, which he assumes are coming from the hinges of the front door. The Antitoi Brothers’ store is filled with toys from ACME (such as Blammo cigars), glass trinkets, and film cartridges. And it turns out that the brothers probably have several copies of the samizdat with them there in the store. The bag of cartridges Bertraund recently purchased came from the Back Bay, where Himself formerly lived and where he filmed the last version of Infinite Jest. Bertraund also told Lucien that he took a couple cartridges from ads like the one Joelle van Dyne saw when she went to her former apartment to have Too Much Fun at Molly Notkins’s post-comprehensive-exams party. We now learn that these cartridges have “IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR” etched into them, which may mean either “You Must No Longer Pursue Happiness” or “It Is No Longer Necessary to Pursue Happiness.” Lucien does not understand French, so the words signify nothing to him. Endnote 205 tells us that the reason Lucien has not watched these videos is because he has the wrong type of player. Endnote 205 then directs us to Endnote 301, which tells us that Lace-Forche had made her disseminated cartridges read-only and that master copies were designed to run at a different RPM than the read-only cartridge. Thus, Lucien’s inability to play the cartridge there in the shop probably means that he has got his hands on a much-coveted master copy of the samizdat.

Lucien, staring out his shop’s window in reverie, now sees a man in a wheelchair. Thinking little about it, he  goes back to sweeping and hears rattling in the back room, which he assumes is his brother moving around. Looking outside again, he now sees a whole line of men in wheelchairs coming up to the store. He hears more loud squeaking, which it turns has not been coming from the front door’s hinge as he had assumed, but from the sound of men pushing themselves along in their chairs. Lucien finally becomes scared. Men in wheelchairs are entering the room when he turns around. Wheelchairs are everywhere. The legend of the AFR comes back to Lucien and he tries to draw his gun. As he removes the gun, his pants fall and he struggles to get into the back room so he can warn Bertraund that the AFR have come. As he stumbles forward, the .44 fires and shatters glass. He finally finds his brother in the back room with a railroad spike jammed into his eye.

Somebody behind Lucien knocks him to his knees. He is now looking directly into the masked face of the AFR leader. The leader wishes him a good evening in French, which Lucien cannot understand. The leader continues in French: “Sadly, your colleague died. He made an excellent pea soup, no? Or did you make it?” Lucien understands nothing. The leader takes the gun, regards Lucien, and then strikes him on the side of the head with it. He tells Lucien that they, the AFR, have come for a certain cartridge. He asks if Lucien understands. Lucien just stares at him uncomprehendingly and then tries to speak. The leader says Lucien is useless to them; the AFR will find what they have come for. Finally, they tilt Lucien’s head back and slam his pointed broom handle down through his throat and into the floor below him. Lucien loses consciousness and his life as his mind returns to his homeland.

Image source is here.

Image courtesy of Poor Yorick Entertainment pooryorickentertainment.tumblr.com

I’m just past the point in Infinite Jest describing Randy Lenz’s nocturnal adventures in animal cruelty—his compulsion to kill small animals (cats and dogs mostly), to watch them die, to effectuate a termination of life and thereby counteract his feelings of personal powerlessness. The section ends with Randy coming across an old homeless man and feeling tempted… tempted to satisfy his need to kill on a bigger and more legally/morally consequential scale.

Lenz’s progression from rats to cats to dogs to… X is one of the creepiest sections in the book thus far, IMO. Though it’s not the most grotesque. To my mind, that honor belongs to the manner in which poor hapless Lucien Antitoi “hears the squeak” at the hands of the wheelchair assassins. Though a minor character, his graphic demise was perhaps the most, um… difficult-to-swallow.

Meanwhile, in the Tennis Academy, Hal, Pemulis, Axford, and Kittenplan—have just been admitted to E.T.A. Headmaster Charles Tavis’ office, where I’m expecting them to face the disciplinary music after the Eschaton debacle. But we learn that there is an O.N.A.N.T.A urologist present, which suggests that a much more serious jig is up for the E.T.A.’s druggies and performance enhancers.

I’m just over halfway through the book and there is so much going on—Gately, Joelle, et al struggling with recovery in Ennet House; Marathe and Steeply discussing the pursuit of happiness on the desert ledge above Tuscon; the story of Johnny Gentle and the political absurdities of O.N.A.N.T.A.; the pursuit of the master copy of the film, Infinite Jest….

At the same time, we’re just over halfway through our Summer of Jest group reading, where most of the (inter)action is taking place on Facebook, with some interesting exchanges also occurring via our Support Group calls, Twitter, Goodreads, and  in person. In terms of my overall experience of reading Infinite Jest, this social dimension is turning out to be as significant as the book itself. Not only am I having discussions about Infinite Jest that are expanding my understanding and appreciation of the book—but I’m also getting to know some of the people I’m reading with, and this social experience is becoming its own phenomenon, a kind of story interweaving with the story in the book.

It’s as if everyone is a character (myself including) in a meta-novel—a novel outside the novel. The ostensible action of this meta-novel is the process of reading Infinite Jest and talking about it… but often what we’re really talking about—what we’re signifying—is ourselves as real/fictional human characters: our obsessions, our delights, our ridiculousness, our structures and habits of meaning-making in the world—which is interesting in whole different way. I speak as a “reader” now. The characters in this meta-jest are not just talking about a book through some abstract form of discourse—but also sharing of themselves: their likes, loves, hates, annoyances, petty grievances, and passions; their struggles with issues of sex, gender, race, privilege, addiction, social anxiety, and pretense/fraudulence; their curious senses of humor; even their baby and pet pictures (obligatory on Facebook). Not to mention the new photo-tagging hashtag required: #gpoij (‘gratuitous picture of Infinite Jest’). See below.

Slideshow by Mark Jabbour w/ pictures uploaded to the Summer of Jest Facebook group

Halfway through the summer and some of the meta-novel’s “characters” have become central, others have dropped out, and new ones are making their entrance—it’s like we’re all living in a literary halfway house (or tennis academy?) together—not a kumbaya circle, but some kind of transitional housing for the soul (metempsychosis? Madame Psychosis)—a funhouse, a haunted house, the House That Wallace Built. Moreover, since everyone is their own narrator, this is a multidimensional novel, an intersubjective fractal of intersecting texts, with no central, singular author and yet a chemistry of chaos held in common. And there is the question, at least in my mind, of where this is all going….

As far as my own intentions for these last 6 weeks—I know I definitely want to do more blogging and encourage others to write Infinite Jest-related blog posts that go deeper and reveal more than fleeting social-media exchanges usually can. I also want to have more “infinite conversations” with “featured guests” and support group calls, which let us talk and listen in real time and connect on the level of the voice’s modulations and the ear’s sensitivity. I have avoided using the word “community” w/r/t this group because I don’t know what that word means when everything in the world is so complex and in flux… but there’s definitely a sense of connection and resonance developing that feels valuable, even rare. I want to feel this more fully.

I just hope I can keep up with it all. Between work, family, world events, and the other demands of life, to read a big, difficult work of literary art and talk about it—and talk about life, and talk about what strikes our fancy, and philosophize and critique and joke and bullshit and speak from the heart—sometimes feels like a bit of a luxury, dare I say privilege. Which true enough, it might be that, on one level. At the same time, if you believe, as I do, that literature is essential to human life (or essential to your life), and that literature is all these things, that THIS is literature, that this brings literature to life, then it’s simultaneously (this whole social reading experiment) a total necessity—a useless and crucial thing, an indispensable waste of time. A fellow reader, C.S. Samulski (@cssamulski), tweeted the other day: “It’s movements like @summerofjest that keep literature alive.”

I hope that’s what we’re doing.

Wallace on different communication techniques to get at the root of things—to figure IT out. [pgs. 528 – 567, to include EN # 234 ( Don’t skip this one.)]

In the pages referenced above, there are four conversations happening between four sets of two people each, or dyads. They are listed below with a brief, very brief, synopsis, as the conversations themselves aren’t the point of this analysis – Wallace’s overarching inquiry is, along with his motivation, maybe. Simply, my thoughts for consideration w/r/t to the novel Infinite Jest.

1)    Joelle van Dyne (aka madam Psychosis; PGOAT) double-talking Don Gately (Staff counselor) about hiding out of shame and side-ways talking to avoid self-analysis and discloser. (see also, ‘Second order vanity’ in The Broom of the System.)

2)    Cocaine induced yammering. Randy Lenz (Anti-social personality) explaining to Bruce Green, the ways of the world, to include Rush Limbaugh & wacko right-wing conspiracy theories.

3)    Dr. Dolores Rusk analyzing Ortho Stice (The Darkness) w/r/t  “magical thinking” and possible sleep-walking, via Freudian theory & Inner Child theory concerning Mother/attachment issues.

4)    Hugh Steeply (of U.S. Special Services undercover) using the lure of media/magazine exposure, a person’s own vanity, and the promise of sex; and Intelligence services’ interrogation techniques (silence) – to get a subject, professional footballer Orin Incandenza, to open up and talk about things OI doesn’t want (but really does) to talk about. (Mother/Attachment issues.)

And all things point to the Freudian precept that “Childhood Decides,” especially the relationship to the mother (Attachment.); and Wallace depicts all mothers, and but especially Avril Incandenza (OCD, and/or OCPD) unfavorably as she is caught acting out sexually w/ John Wayne (no relation to the movie star), the star tennis prospect of the Tennis academy.

This all comes after great action and violent scenes with a very humorous brief interlude. (pgs. 400+/- 500+/-). The humorous interlude is the huggy scene in NA (pgs. 503-507) btwn Roy Tony  (a huge black man) and Ken Erdedy ( a white ‘“James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’” person.) Also a communication dyad that followed a triad communication scene, somewhat humorous, within a family in 1963: Father, mother, & son [James O. Incandenza Jr. as boy, (Orin’s father) and his father ( JOI Sr.) & mother] situation where it’s as dysfunctional as any of the dyads that follow in the year 2009. (pgs. 491-502)

So what Wallace does is demonstrate four types of interpersonal communication between two people – all of which are dysfunctional w/r/t forming honest, healthy, and loving relationship. I, myself have been engaged in all four in my life (many times) and have functioned in seven of the eight positions, the only position I haven’t been in is that of Don Gately, the extremely overmatched and dull and out-witted staff counselor, who has only the clichés of The Program (AA) to rely on.  There are power differentials in each dyad with no real communication going on, but personal agendas and egos are being served, only. Manipulation is the agent to get agreement and affirmation rather than full-honest and truthful and heartfelt disclosure (aka, in other words, as vulnerability in relationship) – because there is no trust. Of course, Wallace wasn’t out to demonstrate health and wellness here, he was critiquing American society and culture w/humor and precision. And he did it brilliantly. (What else was going on w/r/t his personal relationships remains an unknown.) And also, I think, the four dyads he shows are far more common in everyday American Life than the one I proposed – of honest disclosure and then affirmation. (The distinction between the interpersonal dyad & the sharing/Iding in AA is just that with the tete-a-tete there is true vulnerability. There are no “rules.” It is an egalitarian relationship and the possibility of being hurt is always there. It resembles “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” in game theory, where at any point a Player can sell you out for personal gain.)

I think, at this point (a little over half way through my second reading); I think what Wallace was attempting was to figure out why—why do people treat each other and themselves so badly. Why are we (humans) so messed up. Why can’t we treat each other more kindly, with more compassion and respect? Why can’t we love better?

One more thing – there is one line (A habit of Wallace’s – he just drops these one-liners in): “Not and never love, which kills what needs it.” (m. p. 566) This idea, as I recall resurfaces a couple more times. Hard to determine if that is Orin’s thought, or the narrator’s, but it does come back through other characters also … as I recollect. This one line then discloses the inability to trust – that if one does trust (a belief that if one discloses, no harm to self will come of it) you are in essence, killing yourself. Trust just doesn’t exist. Love kills.

I reserve the right to change my mind, as more evidence presents. This is merely food for thought –   brainfood.       

PS

Please keep comments, and please do comment, within the context of pages 0 – 567. I’m sure we’ll revisit after we’ve finished.

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

Back at the outcropping, Steeply asks Marathe if he ever thinks about viewing the samizdat. Marathe says no. They talk about copies of The Entertainment, who has read-only copies and who they know have master copies. Steeply expresses disbelief at Marathe’s not wanting to ever watch the film. We learn that both the AFR and the USOUS are experimenting with viewings of the cartridge. And we learn that the Office of Unspecified Services suspects that it may be Incandenza’s use of holography in the film may that makes it so lethal. Steeply continues,  say the the theory is “that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you’d get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take.”

Winter, B.S. 1963 – Incandenza Home, Sepulveda, CA

This scene is narrated by James O. Incandenza Jr.

Jim’s father and mother call him to their room where they are trying to figure out what is causing a squeaking sound in their bed. Jim Sr. is drinking a Bloody Mary while Jim’s mother smokes a cigarette and watches Sr. as work with the bed and complains about how much the bed squeaks. He describes the squeaking as rodential. The younger Jim asks how he can help. His mother silently folds their sheets. Jim Sr. thinks the frame may be what is squeaking, so they will need to take the mattress and box springs into the hall in order to examine the frame. Jim Jr. thinks that, unlike him, neither of his parents are interested in hard science. James Sr. hopes that the squeaking is coming from the frame because frames are relatively inexpensive, compared to the replacement of the mattress or the box springs. The younger Jim explains that his father is the spokesman for Glad Sandwich Bags and is still in costume. Eventually, the Jims lift the mattress, and Jim Jr. notes that the mattress tag claims that it is against the law to remove the tag from the mattress. From Endnote 24: Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed is about a boy who “helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion.” Returning to the narrative and back inside Jim’s parent’s bedroom, the exoskeletal figure of the frame sits in the room, covered in dust. James Sr. asks his wife when the last time she had cleaned under the mattress. Jim observes that his father’s mood surrounded him like a field and tells his parents that his bead squeaks too. James Sr. says they know, that they hear it often. James then asks Jim’s mom to go get the vacuum, if she can remember where it is. Finally, James points to what might be a squeaking bolt, the phone starts ringing, and his father gets sick, throwing up his Bloody Mary. Jim tries to give his father privacy and James Sr. faints, causing the frame to crack. Jim’s mother returns with the vacuum, which her son helps her with. Jim then leaves the room, goes up to his own room, and jumps onto the bed. The jump knocks his lamp over. It falls to the floor and shears off his door’s knob. The rolling of the knob, spinning on two axes – described as like the movement of someone turning somersaults with a hand nailed to the floor – inspired Jim to see the possibilities of annulation.

9 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – NA Beginner’s Meeting, Boston, MA

We join Johnette Foltz, Ken Erdeddy, and Kate Gompert at an NA meeting focused on marijuana. Everyone sits in a circle and takes turns raising their hand to share their stories. In the stories, they rehearse their cycles through the disease and share their pain of having been addicted to pot, which is considered “the benignest substance around.” Erdedy notices that depression, the true fuel of marijuana addiction, goes unmentioned in the meeting, but hangs “fog-like” over the room. Boston NA only goes for an hour and does not have a break. After the meeting, everyone mills around and hugs each other. Erdedy is afraid of hugging, a fear that is exacerbated by a “tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle peel[ing] away from a sort of group-hug” and approaching Erdedy. Erdedy begs off, instead proffering his hand for a shake. This offends the man, who turns out to be Roy Tony. Erdedy explains to Roy Tony that he doesn’t like to hug. Roy Tony menacingly asks Erdeddy if he thinks that he, Roy Tony, likes to hug. Erdedy offers a handshake again. Roy Tony picks him up and says that he has been charged to hug by NA, he now hugs as he has been asked, and now Erdeddy has embarrassed him in front of his fellow NA members.

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

Returning to Marathe and Steeply, we find Steeply confiding that the Office of Unspecified Services has already lost a couple agents to the samizdat, one of whom was named Hank and was a good friend of Steeply’s. Hank, since viewing the cartridge, has become obsessed with viewing, continually begging for more time with the film. Hank had originally went in to pull someone else out of a room with the film showing. Steeply then asks Marathe if he ever thinks about what the Entertainment would be like to view. Marathe replies that the AFR thinks about how the film might be useful not what it would be like to view it. He then observes that the Quebecois are not tempted by the samizdat as Americans are, but they respect the film’s power.

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

We join Michael Pemulis and Hal Incandenza in the Headmaster’s waiting room, where almost everything in the room is blue. In fact, the narrative proceeds by describing the various blue objects in the room. Hal and Pemulis are waiting for CT who is in his office. Endnote 209 gives us descriptions of various photographs that hang on the waiting room’s walls – mostly action shots of students playing tennis, peppered with other scenes from ETA activities and trips. After the endnote, we learn that Lateral Alice Moore used to be a helicopter pilot who gave weather reports. A crash left her with several chronic conditions, one of which is that she can only move laterally. She entertains students by imitating her old reports. Both Avril and CT have offices that open off the waiting room. Because Avril does not have doors on her office, Hal can hear Avril talking to the younger contingent of the ETA girls, trying to find out if they have been sexually approached, threatened, or abused by anyone at ETA or elsewhere. Endnote 211 informs us that “Pemulis’s deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection” because he does not want to have to return to Allston a failure. This is why he has the picture of the king and the caption that reads, “Yes, I’m Paranoid – But Am I Paranoid Enough?” Pemulis hates Dolores Rusk, who is probably in the office with CT. When he was 15, he connected electricity to her door knob hoping to shock her, except it was not Rusk who opened the hot knob. It was a cleaning lady who was sent to the hospital. Comments drift into the waiting room from Avril’s meeting with the younger girls, most of the girls complaining about things that irritate them about adults but are not actually abuse. Everyone in the waiting room is anxious. They contemplate what kind of punishment is in store for the big buddies of the students who were hurt in the Eschaton two days ago. Pemulis and Hal have rehearsed the story and explanation they intend to give Tavis. Hal contemplates the way he does not think about himself as someone who has family at ETA. He then goes into a long memory of the last time he was summoned to the Headmaster’s office. We get an explanation of CT’s previous architectural career, his most famous building being the Toronto Blue Jays stadium with hotel rooms that open onto the outfield. Hal was suffering substance withdrawal while he waited for CT to finish with the newly matriculant Tina Echt. We learn Hal dislikes being around CT. What’s unsettling about him is CT’s openness. Stice had entered the room. He and Hal acknowledged each other, as CT described to Tina Echt how ETA will be breaking her down and putting her back together. This caused Tina to cry. Hal decided he would sneak down to the pump room in order to get high, as soon as his meeting ended. Eventually, Avril had entered the room. Orin calls her the “black hole of human interaction.” She and Hal have a complex way of greeting each other. She held orientation packets. Hal had not eaten, which she intuited and gave him her apple which was to be her meal for the day. She often visibly suffers in order to provide for her children. Avril and Hal discussed Tina Echt, who they say is unbelievably young and small. Starting at seven at ETA, she could potentially be at ETA for a decade. Avril invited Hal to dinner that evening, but Hal had to be at dawns in the morning. This was all three months ago. Returning to November, Hal thinks about the fact that he was at the dentist’s earlier today. As the students continue to wait, they think about Tavis when he loses his temper. He seems to grow and rush in on you in these moments. The meeting between the girls and Avril is starting to break up. Finally, they are buzzed into the office. For some reason, Clenette from Ennet House is in there with CT. Rusk is also in the room, as is Otis P. Lord with the monitor still on his head, now with eye holes cut into the black plastic of the monitor’s side. Lastly, there is a urine expert in the room.

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

We rejoin Marathe and Steeply, with Steeply claiming that the attraction to the samizdat is not an American thing. He tells about an “Oriental” myth that tells of men coming across a hairy woman combing her body and hair and the men being irresistibly attracted to her. The sun begins to rise and life begins moving in the desert. Both the AFR and the Office of Unspecified Services looked forward to the meetings between Steeply and Marathe, besides the fact that they accomplished very little. We are told that Marathe loves his wife more than the AFR, and so he has actually betrayed his comrades of Quebec. They discuss the myth of the Odalisque, “a Medusa in reverse.” Marathe raises the myth of Leda and the swan.

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

We join Don Gately and Joelle van Dyne discussing their experiences on substances. Don tells a story about going to a bar in a group, when one of his friends, Chuck, hit on a girl with a boyfriend. The boyfriend didn’t like it and Gately’s crew beat the guy up. He left and the Gately’s crew started playing strip darts with the girl. Soon enough, the girl’s guy came back with a gun and shot the guy that took his girl in the back of the head. Gately’s crew grabbed hold of their friend and walked him around the bar while he had a hole in the back of the head. The barkeep used the bar’s gun to keep the other guy behind the bar and called the cops. Gately’s crew did not take the guy to the hospital, they just walked him around because they were too drunk to think clearly. Finally, the barkeep called an ambulance, but the guy was dead by the time it arrived.

Joelle responds with a story from AA about a lady with two legs, both shorter than the other. Gately asks Joelle why she wears the veil. Joelle responds that it is from the UHID. Almost everyone in UHID wears a veil, she says. Joelle explains that when members of the UHID receive the veil, they “recite that the veil they’ve donned is a Type and a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always – a day at a time – both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others’ gaze, and as with both strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it withdraw. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight.” Gately asks why you would join a fellowship just to hide. He says that what AA offers is a place to “be accepted by people that know just what it’s like, and like in AA they say they’ll love you till you can love yourself and accept yourself, so you don’t care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage and quit hiding.”

Joelle responds that the urge to hide is offset by the shame of wanting to hide. She says that even if one is deformed, they are still human. Joelle cannot help how she looks, yet she is expected to not care how she appears to others. Part of UHID, she says, is supporting others who choose to hide and not to be ashamed of their hiding. She says that she sees that Gately is self-conscious about not being as smart as other people, which UHID would say is totally fine. But she also says that she can see that Gately is actually not not-smart. Gately reveals that he failed English in high school. Joelle says the veil is about hiding openly. Gately asks how she’s deformed. Joelle evades. Gately calls her out on the evasion, saying that if she doesn’t want to answer the question then she should just say so. Joelle counter-accuses Gately of hiding, saying the best offense is a good defense. She finally confesses to Don, “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.” Gately thinks she is messing with him, using sarcasm.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Boston, MA

We learn that people suspect that Randy Lenz “has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.” Lenz has a car and only leaves Ennet House after dark, even then in a ridiculous disguise. He never drives his own car and always walks home alone. He says he needs the air. One Wednesday, it takes him two hours to get back from a meeting; he gets back at 2329, which is one minute before curfew. As Lenz walks home each night, he moves through neighborhoods with various animals: cats, dogs, rats, and even raccoons. One night, coming back from East Watertown, he had been strolling through a neighborhood and saw a dumpster. Rats were inside. He crept up on them and smashed them with a large object. One particular rat made a crunching sound that Lenz enjoyed. He began killing rats every night and developed an addiction for killing them that became a substitute for his usual substance abuse. Eventually, he began capturing cats inside Hefty garbage bags and sealing the bag so that the cat made various forms with the bag as it slowly suffocated. When he killed these animals, he liked to say, “There,” when they died. His need to kill cats became more and more baroque each evening. He learned cats are more drawn by anchovies more than tuna. He then needs thicker bags to contain more energetic cats. Lenz has also used organic cocaine several times since coming to Ennet House, but his usage now compared to what he used to ingest is so much less than it was that he considers himself basically sober. Eventually, he grew to enjoy taking the captured cat’s bag and swinging it against a nearby immovable object. One night, after lighting a cat on fire and running away, the cats began to chase him through the street. That night, he resorted to his store of organic cocaine. Unfortunately, the coke did not unwind him but tightened him further. He spent the night mute, his mouth twisting and writhing, pretending to be asleep.

Lenz eventually began carrying a large knife and slitting the throats of dogs he passed by. He would remove a square of meatloaf from Don’s leftovers, feeding it to dogs that he walked by, and slitting their throats when they came up on their back paws to eat the meat. The challenge is getting behind the dog because of the amount of blood. He began imagining killing homeless men, but never went through with it. One night, Bruce Green asks Lenz to walk home with him. Though Lenz likes Green, he cannot satisfy his desires to murder animals with Green present. Lenz likes Green because he does not talk, but is a great listener. Lenz, on the other hand, is a great talker. Not only does Green not talk too much, but he pays attention to what Lenz says and inserts “affirmatives” as Lenz soliloquizes. He does not want to insult Green, but he needs to get away from him so he can kill more dogs.

Early November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Connecticut Avenue Northwest, Washington DC

This section joins Rodney Tine. We are told that the only thing Tine could be blackmailed for is his daily routine of measuring his penis and recording its length in a little notebook. We are given a description of what Tine understands about the samizdat, which is that it has popped up in several locations, causing people’s lives to be ruined by their need to view the video again and again. We also learn that Gentle had to be strongly discouraged from watching the video. Attempts to get someone to describe the cartridge’s content have failed, except they know it begins with a shot of a veiled woman going through revolving doors. Monitoring of brain activity has also failed to determine what happens to exposed persons, but they do know that the cartridges are coming from either Boston or the desert Southwest. Canadians may be involved.

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

Pemulis walks through the Admin building at ETA and hears Stice talking to Rusk late at night. He doesn’t understand why, but Rusk speaks to Stice about moving objects and explains her understanding of psychoanalysis. She claims Ortho feels abandonment. He has come to her because his bed continues to move around while he is sleeping late at night. Pemulis leaves Rusk’s office and heads into the waiting room outside Mrs. Incandenza’s and CT’s offices. Pemulis sees light coming from Mrs. Incandenza’s office and can hear Tavis running on his Stairmaster in his office. He can also hear odd sounds coming from Mrs. I’s office. He strides into the room and sees her and John Wayne. Mrs. I is performing the splits with pom poms raised in the air and with a whistle in her mouth while John Wayne wears only a jockstrap and helmet. Pemulis says, “I predict this’ll take about two minutes at most.”

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

Rejoining Lenz and Green on one of their now regular walks home from a meeting, Lenz tells Green that he gets calm in tight situations. Lenz thinks about the fact that he likes Green, which Lenz dislikes because it makes him uncomfortable. How can he tell Green to leave him alone for a while without insulting him? It would be easy if Green was a girl; he would just tell Green that he liked him and that would be that. Lenz has tried random acts of cruelty to animals around Ennet House, but he remains unsatisfied. Eventually, he decides to just take some of his cocaine so he can tell Green he likes him but needs some private time. He does the cocaine off the toilet at the Wednesday night meeting they attend together.

After the meeting, Lenz has taken about five lines of the coke and now prefers to have Green with him so that he can share his thoughts with Green. He tells Green about his fear of watches and tells him about the books that he has read. Lenz also claims to have a special life force and a great proficiency for martial arts. He describes to Green a party he attended where someone had brought one of the infamous feral infants, which makes him claim that AA and NA are certainly cults, which goes to show how badly he and Bruce Green have messed up.

Image source is here.

Lunchtime, 11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

We join Hal Incandenza, lying on his bunk. Several people poke their heads in. Hal says very little to his visitors.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Boston, MA

Rejoining Randy Lenz and Bruce Green, they continue back to Ennet House from their Anonymous meeting. Lenz continues to soliloquize at Green. Eventually, Green says what Gately often says, which is that if AA and NA are cults that brainwash you, then he guesses his brain needed a washing.

Up to 2329 hours, 11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Enfield, MA

Gately and Joelle speak in the Ennet House office.

Next, Foss comes in to tell Gately that residents are asking each other if their higher power can create a suitcase that he (the higher power) cannot lift. This quandary has Dingley hiding in the linen closet.

McDade complains about the reversed water handles in the men’s showers.

Yolanda is complaining because Randy Lenz has told her that she should use his penis as her higher power.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Phoenix, AZ

Orin “stands embracing a putatively Swiss handmodel” who he has just met after dropping Helen Steeply off at the airport.

Endnote 234: November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Phoenix, AZ

This transcript of a Q&A between Helen Steeply and Orin Incandenza begins with Orin saying he will not talk about his relationship with his mother any longer. Nor will he talk about his father’s therapy. He, again, compliments her on her appearance. Despite saying he would not, Orin proceeds to talk about his parents’s respective relationships with insanity. Both are crazy, but both have succeeded in being highly productive despite their insanity. The Mad Stork had a film career and founded a tennis academy when his alcoholism was at its worst. Avril designs the curriculum for ETA, writes books on prescriptive linguistics, attends conferences and conventions, and is an active member of the militant grammarians. He claims his mother has OCD. He then describes his old friend Marlon Bain’s struggle with OCD, which Orin believes may have been started by Bain’s unusual . Bain paralyzed himself with his compulsions, where one of Avril’s compulsions is to get much done with great efficiency. This efficiency has been partially engineered to spend much time with her sons. Hal and Mario, Orin believes, will not be able to come to terms with Avril’s insanity until they move away and get perspective on the situation. JOI, he notes, was also the “victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played” in Orin’s opinion. He then relates an anecdote: Orin was in the 12′s class of USTA Juniors and the family still lived in Weston. Orin interrupts the story to say Himself is buried somewhere in a family plot in Quebec. Orin remembers Avril was tilling the garden in the backyard and Orin had filled the tiller with gas because Avril thought petroleum products caused cancer. Then he was leading the way for Avril and the machine, performing “preemptive rock- and clod-removal. All of a sudden, Hal appeared in his Winnie The Pooh pajamas and smiley-faced slippers; he was carrying a giant clod of moldy substance that he must have found in the basement and said, “I ate this.” Avril curiously took the mold and retracted in horror and cried out, “Help! My son ate this!” She ran around in a square, with Mario and JOI watching from the screen door, and Hal trying to follow her, crying, until the neighbor came over and hosed the mold away.

Returning to the encounter between Orin and the putative Swiss hand model, Orin feels that their sexual encounter is not about escape or love, but about hope: “He has her.” She loves him too much to stand it, he has fully absorbed all that she is. He needs multiple partners because he cannot dissolve into a relationship again, as he did with Joelle. And so he must make his Subjects dissolve into him.

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

Outside the weight room, a blindfolded Idris Arslanian literally bumps into Ted Schacht. He says that Anton Doucette is inside, clinically depressed, and speaking with Lyle. Idris needs directing to the bathroom because Coach Thorp told Idris about the blind Dymphna who plays through anticipation. Idris also wants to be able to sense without sight the direction and power of his opponent’s shots, but he tried playing with the blindfold today with bad results. Thorp abandons Idris in the hall, still needing direction to the bathroom. He next runs into Mike Pemulis. Pemulis says Doucette is depressed in the weight room because he cannot wrap his mind around Tex Watson’s class on annulation, which he fears will shut down any chances he has of getting to play professional tennis. Idris admits to not understanding annulation either, which prompts Pemulis to give him a mini-lesson. Pemulis says Incandenza’s major contribution to waste disposal was that he helped “design…special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.” We might note that holography is also the technique that Steeply suspects makes the samizdat so effective. Pemulis goes on to say that the process of annulation comes from medicine, and gives an example of giving cancer cells cancer in order to cure cancer. This, environmentally, creates an incredibly lush region, which has obviously become the Great Concavity/Convexity, with its overgrown vegetation and feral wildlife. The catapulting of waste into the Concavity/Convexity is an effort to limit the super-growth of what used to be the American Northeast. Also, in this area, time enters flux, such that the first week of each month in the Convexity/Concavity is barren, while the last week of the month is incredibly lush. Idris grows more and more needful of the restroom. Pemulis hints at the idea of Idris, a muslim, giving him a sample of his drug-free urine and presumably leads him to a toilet.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Phoenix, AZ

Orin observes that when he met Helen Steeply, his “legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies” disappeared. But now that she has left, they are back again. And they have the same accent as the putatively Swiss handmodel.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield, MA

Lenz and Green continue their journey home. Lenz complains about symptoms created by coke-hydrolysis and shares painful memories of his childhood. His mother died a few years ago. She was a large woman and one day she was using a bus restroom when the bus hit an unmarked construction area and his mother’s bottom ended up wedged in the lavatory’s window. She sued Greyhound Lines because of embarrassment and injury and won a huge amount of money that she used to quit her job and stop leaving the house. She soon died, choking on a mouthful of peach cobbler. Her will left Lenz without an inheritance, despite her immense wealth.

Lenz goes behind a dumpster to pee while Green gives him some privacy and lights a cigarette. Green surveys the area by Riley’s Roast Beef. As he looks around, the narrator tells how his parents died near Green’s fifth Christmas Eve. Shortly before that Christmas, Green’s father’s legs had started to grow uneven, such that he could not be the aerobics trainer that he wanted to be any longer, and had to begin working at a gag company. This made him very unhappy. That Christmas Eve, he gave Bruce a can of nuts with a springing snake inside to give to his mother. When Green’s mother opened her son’s gift, the snake sprang at her, causing her to have a heart attack. She died. Green did not speak again until the end of grade school. Soon after, Green’s father loaded several cases of exploding cigars with explosives that killed several people. Green’s father was lethally injected. His aunt took Green to protest the death penalty and raised him after his father’s death.

As Green comes out of this revery, it occurs to him that either he or Lenz has blown the other off. He wanders toward some Hawaiian music he hears up the hill from him. Suddenly he sees Lenz ahead of him who nears the house playing the Hawaiian music out its front windows and that has a Canadian flag flying. There is a party there. Lenz makes furtive movements, holding something out to a dog in the house’s yard.

Green then remembers crashing parties with Mildred Bonk. One particular party they crashed had had the floor covered with sand and girls shimmying around the room in grass skirts. Mildred was pregnant and quickly joining the party, leaving Green to sit by the keg and drink until he defecated on himself. In the bathroom, cleaning himself up, he snatched a grass skirt, escaped the party, and drank Southern Comfort for the next several days.

Green’s attention returns to Lenz, who is still in front of the house with the Canadian party. The dog is eating whatever Lenz is offering it. Green then sees that Lenz is feeding Gately’s meatloaf to the dog. The music gets louder. Lenz throws the meatloaf to the ground and creeps behind the dog, giving him another chunk of meat. Finally, Lenz grabs the dog and lifts it up off its front paws and slits the dog’s throat. Somebody in the house’s window has seen Lenz do this. Green pauses between a couple chairs across the street, not wanting to be seen. Lenz jumps the fence and charges up the road, with Canadians coming into the yard after him. They check the dog and examine the meatloaf. Green sees a man in a wheelchair at the window and hides behind a tree. The Canadians give chase to Lenz. A car peels out from the house toward Lenz.

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

We join Mario who we learn is suffering more and more as Madame Psychosis continues her absence from WYYY. We also learn that Mario cannot feel pain well, which is very dangerous. He has been listening to another station, trying to fall asleep, but to no avail. Screams issue from Avril’s room above because she gets night terrors. Mario prays frequently and wonders if Hal is sad, feeling a growing emotional distance from his brother. Some nights, he wanders down the hill toward the Ennet Marine units. At Ennet House, the head lady sometimes lets him in to have a soda and chat. He likes it there, people cry openly and can say “God” without irony and with a straight face. He walks by Ennet House tonight and hears the sound of Madame Psychosis coming from an upstairs window. He does not realize that Madame Psychosis is living in Ennet House right now. He thinks about the woman listening to MP’s tapes and wonders about her. Mario thinks that it is “increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real.” Ennet House residents pass by Mario, returning for their 2330 curfew. Finally, he begins to climb the hill back to ETA. The last thing he sees in the Ennet House window is Don Gately writing in the staff log.

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

Don Gately works in the staff office of Ennet House. He dispenses meds and figures out chores for residents. He prints out Pat M’s schedule for tomorrow. Gately is well liked by the residents, but occasionally has to report them when they threaten him. He notices that his meatloaf has a secret admirer, as giant squares keep getting cut out of the leftovers. Another aspect of Gately’s job is figuring out what people are doing by listening to rumors.

11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Pheonix, AZ

We rejoin Orin and the Swiss handmodel in the hotel room. Orin contemplates that he can only give pleasure in sex, not receive it. The pair talk about the handmodel’s husband. Someone knocks at the door. The Subject asks Orin not to say that she is in the room and dives under the covers. The man at the door is in a wheelchair. He says he wants to give Orin a survey and Orin thinks that the man has come to be in close proximity to his leg – a member of his legless fan club. Orin then pretends to be excited to take the survey, taking pity on the legless man. The AFR asks Orin what he is nostalgic for. Orin tells the man that he misses broadcast television because it was not a format that offered choice. Luria Perec continues lying under the bed’s covering, grasping her pistol.

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

Gately waits as residents come in for the curfew. Lenz slips in at the last possible moment. Green comes in six minutes late, which Gately gives him a “Full House Restriction” for. Green is so sedate when Gately gives him the restriction that he gives Green a urine test, which Green produces without complaint. Gately then has to rush around getting residents together in order to move their cars to the other side of the street because Boston switches the side of the street you can park on at 0000 hours every night. If the cars are not moved, residents will get expensive tickets. Tonight, as he herds people, he thinks about denial and how it manifests itself in various ways, such as in jaywalking college students and in addicts who don’t think their cars will ever get towed. This is why addicts learn “everything the hard way,” Gately considers. Lenz won’t answer Gately’s call to come down and move his car. He goes up to Lenz’s room and grabs Lenz and spins him around and tells him to go downstairs. Then he notices that Lenz is on some sort of substance and he is excited to give him a urine test. Gately finally gets back downstairs and opens the front door and watches the residents head out to move their cars, but then he sees Doony Glenn’s VW bug. He has to go inside and ask someone to move Glynn’s car because Doony is sick upstairs. He asks Green to move the car, who gets his jacket, but Gately still has to go up and get Glynn’s keys. Glynn’s has a serious fever. When Gately talks to him, he fears Glynn might need to go to the hospital. The sounds of screaming and screeching tires come from outside.

Gately rushes downstairs and out the front door. Two very large Canadians are chasing Lenz around his car while a smaller guy with a gun holds the other car-moving residents at bay. Lenz tells the guys that he did nothing wrong and insults the Canadians as he dodges around the car. Lenz eventually sees Don and cries out to him. This causes the guy with the gun to turn and point his weapon at Gately. The Canadians tell Don to go back to wherever he came from. Lenz leaves the car and stands behind Gately. Gately’s senses clear. A knife appears. Gately thinks that he’s “just one part of something bigger he can’t control.” He tells them he is responsible for the people here. They tell him that Lenz killed someone, the name of whom Gately cannot understand. A fight begins as Lenz shoves Gately forward toward the Canadian. Gately breaks several bones of the big Canadians, then gets cut by one guy’s knife, and breaks his toe kicking the knife guy in the head. Then the guy with the gun shoots Gately in the shoulder. Bruce Green grabs the guy with the gun and gets him in a half nelson as another shot goes up in the air. Nell Gunther kicks the man Green is holding. And Randy Lenz, with the situation ending, appears and starts wrestling the guy Green has in the half nelson. The residents begin beating the three Canadians. Joelle van Dyne appears calling Don’s name. He goes to another Canadian and stomps on his head as he starts to lose strength. He bleeds heavily and sits down. JvD tries to absorb blood with her robe. Gately is now lying on the ground. Lenz says he doesn’t know what to say. They debate whether to call an ambulance. Gately starts to go into shock and they decide not to call the ambulance. Gately realizes that JvD is Madame Psychosis. A drunken security guy appears. Finally, he residents lift Gately to take him back in the house.

Image source is here.

Hello, Summer of Jesters’
I just want to say something w/r/t to wtf is going on as I am way older than most of you, granted, ok?

My son called me yesterday (he’s your age, most of you, born late 1983); and we talked, as we do maybe 2xs a month (if I’m lucky); and he was worried, sort of, b/c he’s teaching Summer School to a batch of “Special Needs” kids & we had had talked about it earlier, and “They”  (=Admin) that were taking advantage of his nature (which is so accomodating, unlike me.) [fuck spelling at this point.] And he told me what he is doing, which is making them THINK!! He gives them thought experiments as in DFW’s stuff and Chuck Klosterman stuff (please read if you haven’t)  and they RESPOND!! Like, oh God, somebody actually gives of a shit about what I think!!!; But of course he’s worried, that the shit’s gonna hit the fan, that someONE will complain and then Admin will come down on him b/c they are part of the MACHINE; and he will lose his job and get fired and then what will he do and I tell him: “FUck Them. Children need to learn to think, of and for themselves. And he said,

“Thanks Dad.” And so I just wanted to share that.

So the point is: He asked me, “Why fucking bother?” and I told him to look no further than his own essay w/r/t to Infinite Jest that he wrote: That the impact won’t be immediate, you can’t measure it .. but for the having opened up a mind(s) there will be consequences, and they will be for the greater good. And then we symbolically clinked glasses and will talk later.

Infinite Conversations – Episode 2
Recorded August 1, 2013

Sacha Z. Scoblic is the author of Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety—and a fellow reader of Infinite Jest. She found @summerofjest on Twitter and has been reading along with us for the past few weeks. We talked about Sacha’s book and life, about drinking and sobriety, about American culture, and of course about Infinite Jest.

* * *

When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world… and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand…

Sacha Z. Scoblic is a writer and editor. She is the author of Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety, which is based on her popular essays for The New York Times blog “Proof: Alcohol and American Life.” Currently, Sacha is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental health journalism through the Carter Center in Atlanta. Among other things, she writes about mental health, addiction, and pop fiction. Sacha is a columnist at The Fix, where she tackles the science of addiction, and a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. She is also a contributing editor at The New Republic. Formerly a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, Sacha has written about everything from space camp to pulp fiction. Sacha lives with her husband, Peter; son, Theodore; and terrier, SciFi, in Washington, DC.

* * *

Call Host: Marco V Morelli

Call Format: ~30 minutes interview-style, ~30 minutes Q&A & discussion with live callers.

Links:
sachazscoblic.com

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

We get another account of teleputer technology and some of the medical conditions that arise when over 50% of a city’s population works from home at a desk. From the disorders caused by so much sitting, we see the rise of a booming home exercise video market. And we learn that 1/3rd of those who actually go into an office could work from home if they so chose. The narrative observes that complaining about these major changes in culture would be tantamount to complaining about the weather. This is the culture now, and that’s that. We also learn of a rising tension in the ONAN that compels people to get outside as much as possible. They come outside to look at anything, from car wrecks to insurgent attacks. They just stand there and watch. Technology and American choice-making has created a nation of spectators.

One particular event that draws spectators is the annual cleaning of the “Public Gardens’ man-made duck pond” each November in Boston, MA. The pond is drained, long shiny trucks appear, and a large crowd forms around the spectacle. This year, Rodney Tine watches from the “eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts.” Apparently, James O. Incandenza came to watch every year, when he was alive. As Tine watches, Unspecified Services operatives sit behind him in a meeting. Steeply is present.

At the same time, the grad student engineer from “60 Minutes More or Less” is trying to “give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill’s chap…on the Public Gardens’ far hillside.” There are only homeless men and frisbee throwers on the hill with the engineer. After a few moments, a van with a handicapped license plate appears and waits at the curb at the bottom of the hill. We learn that the engineer no longer goes to the roof of the student union to listen to the “60 Minutes” time-slot because he has to maintain mic levels with no one in the booth doing the show. Strangely, another white van appears above the student engineer at the top of the hill and we learn that Molly Notkin came by WYYY a few days ago and told the engineer that Madame Psychosis was in treatment. Now, a ramp appears from the side of the van uphill and a man in a wheelchair comes wheeling down it. He speeds down the hill. His chair is equipped with what looks like a snow plow that he uses to scoop up the student engineer; he finishes his journey down the hill and they disappear into the van with the handicapped plates still waiting below. Both vans now disappear.

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

ETA is at dinner in the cafeteria. Steeply is here. We learn that Stice and Hal had a match today and that The Darkness nearly upset Hal, only losing because he did not yet believe he could beat the upperclassman. People whisper about the match, but Stice ignores them. We learn that Stice grew up in Partridge, KS and enjoys regaling his fellow ETAs with stories of his parents’ rocky romance. It seems they met playing a bar game where contestants would put their forearms together and place a lit cigarette between them until one of them could not take the pain and jerked away, thereby losing the game. Neither of the Stices jerked away and they fell in love. Since then they have divorced and remarried several times. Their relationship has ups and downs, obviously; these ups and downs are also experienced by their children.

At the upperclassmen’s table, Troeltsch and Pemulis argue about whether ETA uses powdered milk. Troeltsch feels strongly they do; Pemulis feels very much the other way. Troeltsch claims that he had powdered milk at home when he was younger and knows what it looks like. Pemulis asserts that they have seen them put the bags in the machine, which would mean they have to mix the milk and then put it in bags, a complicated process merely to imitate liquid milk. The narrative notes the mysterious movement of the giant squeegees that hang on the wall of the cafeteria. The milk discussion continues. Troeltsch combines his claims about the milk with the mysterious tripod, Stice’s moving bed, and the ball machine appearing in the females’ sauna in order to imply that all is not well at ETA.

The narrative then mentions the women Hal’s brother preys upon, a practice he picked up after “the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured.” This is clearly JvD. We then get a catalog of who among the upper class boys have had sex. Hal apparently has no interest whatsoever in sex. He thinks about how he should have lost his match with Stice earlier today. And Hal also thinks about handing in clean urine in a month and about the fact that he will no longer be taking substances. Stice remains distracted by his moving bed and objects more generally. Hal and Troeltsch go over to Ingersol, who has arrived back from the hospital in a cast. Returning to sex, we learn that Keith Freer thinks most of the female ETAs are lesbians. Stice stares into his salad bowl and tries to mentally move a cherry tomato with his mind. He thinks about the excellence of his play out on the courts today, when it seemed as if his hits defied physics. Hal had looked like he was falling apart on the court, which is repeatedly connected with the post-Interdependence Day events in CT’s office by the others at the table. Hal and Mario know the milk has been powdered since CT took over.

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

We rejoin Steeply and Marathe. Steeply tells Marathe that his father became obsessed with the broadcast television program M*A*S*H when Steeply was a teenager. He says it started simply with an attachment to the show. His father liked to have dinner on Thursdays in front of the television and watch the show as he ate, which his wife found endearing. Eventually, the show entered syndication and Steeply’s father became obsessed with seeing all the reruns every time they ran, in addition to the new episodes still being produced. He even began taking a television to work. As Steeply talks about his father, he asks if the AFR knows that Steeply’s father worked for a “heating-oil distributorship.” He wants to insure Marathe has more and more to put in his report to the AFR so he can shore up the appearance that he is in fact gaining information from the Office of Unspecified Services, rather than vice versa. Steeply, continuing his story, tells how his father started making notes on the show. He kept a notebook that was hidden whenever he was not holding it. The father’s obsession grew and grew, the family always adjusting to new changes and suffering for them.

After a while, Steeply’s father began quoting lines from the show that he saw as apposite to his conversations. The family’s kitchen became a mess tent, the den a swamp. His father then began recording the show off the TV and organizing his tapes in complicated systems that were unconnected to when the shows were originally aired. Steeply’s mom one day found letters in the trash addressed to Major Burns, one of M*A*S*H‘s characters. And the old man’s theories about the show grew more and more complex: “One theory involved the fact, which the old man found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the UN lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that M*A*S*H itself was by then into something like its seventh year of new episodes.” Letters began to appear at the house, returned from the fictional addresses his father had mailed them to. Then Steeply’s father stopped going to work, refusing to leave his den as he continued to watch and rewatch the show. Finally, just before his 60th birthday, he died of a heart problem in his recliner, watching Alan Alda suffer from a sleepwalking disorder. Steeply uses the story to describe how his friend Hank Hoyne looked after viewing the samizdat. Hank’s and his father’s eyes both looked like they were opposite of inanimate, they seemed “stuck in some way…pulled apart in different directions. As if there was something he’d forgotten…Misplaced. Lost.”

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

0245 hours: Gompert, Day, Erdedy and Green are watching cartridges in Ennet House’s living room. We learn the house is still “spiritually reeling” from the confrontation between Gately and the Canadians that Lenz provoked. Day and Gompert talk, she says that Day doesn’t actually care about something they have been talking about while Day tries to describe something from his childhood. He had played the violin when he was young. One day, he played a note that combined with the nearby sound of a running fan and, Day says, “it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind.” He says, “It was total horror.” Day put down the violin and left the room, but soon returned and made the sound again, only to have the shape reappear. After that, the shape began appearing on its own. Gompert becomes interested in what Day is saying because she is beginning to relate to his story. Day says of an episode he had in college that, “Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me.” He says that since that night he understands hell. Gompert is fully relating now. Day finishes by saying, “From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not, I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves.”

Let’s start with this: David Foster Wallace was a genius – insomuch as intellect and the ability to construct words into sentences like no one else has ever before or since. And to do so he had to have had a mind/brain that was extremely open to the world around him, to see it in ways that we others could not see, or in the least, find the words to attach to what we saw/see in such a way as to invoke thought and an opening up of others’ eyes. As in: Oh, now I see.

What seems to me to have disturbed him so much as to devote 1000+ pages to it was expressed, almost nonchalantly, in endnote 278: “Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty “awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Matty curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.” In other words, it’s as if there’s a conspiracy. At the least, the other parent and society as a whole are complicit in that they maybe know it’s going on, but do nothing to stop it. I’ve seen that over and over again, now that I can see. See below.)

That was i/r/t the sexual assault/abuse of a young boy by his father, as the victim’s younger brother (Mike Pemulis) lies in a bed in the same room. (pgs. 682-686) Good question. And one I ask myself over and over again ever since I had my eyes opened, which did not happen until I started to read the same books Wallace did at the exact same time he began to read them, in the early 90’s —books by John Bradshaw & Alice Miller, and then others, also. I was forty years old and had no idea child sexual abuse occurred. And then later, in the mid-90’s, I went back to college and studied Psychology and got a degree and then entered into the Field of mental health, specifically that of children, and my mind was blown again. These weren’t cases in a textbook, these were real live human beings, as young as six years old and many crazy as crazy can be – schizophrenic, bi-polar, multi-personality’d, depressed, oppositional defiant, conduct disordered, paranoid. You name it, call it whatever you want. The diagnosis shifted and changed with the drugs they were given. But there was a constant – a fucked up family of origin, or birth family, if you like. And once you go there – The Family – the truth just disintegrates completely because everybody covers their own ass – It’s not my fault! They insist.

But so when your eyes have been opened you start to pay attention to people around you, and you see how awful things are and just how sick people can be – are. You start to talk with people and to listen to their stories and they open up to you and that question just won’t go away: “Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time?” Where was the other parent? Where was the neighbor? Somebody! Doesn’t anybody give a shit?

And let me tell you, once a kid is in “The System” the odds for “success” are really small, although it does happen. There are success stories. That being said, I want you to consider this: Every single person on this earth, all Seven Billion (7,000,000,000) have one thing in common – they each and everyone had both a mother and a father. Everyone. So what happened? Somebody didn’t do their job is what. It takes exactly zero (0) skill or talent to have a baby, a child — to fuck someone. Yet people, mothers especially, think this gives them some kind of status, some kind of authority. No. What counts is what happens after, for the next twenty years as that baby grows into a person. And yes, fathers, too. Don’t come at me with that shit ‘cause no one is harder on fathers than me.

I got street cred, here, boys & girls. I took the responsibility of taking on someone else’s handy work, two-girls, and then had a son of my own, and raised him (not the girls; but OMG, try being a step-parent) as a single, meaning w/o anyone living with us. The ONLY thing that really matters is how the parents treat each other. Do they respect and love each other? The answer is: mostly, No, they don’t. Then you can get into, well why not? And so it goes. Wallace was trying to make that point, sideways, yes. This is often in endnotes (see #269 for example) & with the conversations btwn Steeply & Marthe, also; and he doesn’t even get into the historical realities. How could he? He didn’t study History or Anthropology or Psychology or Sociology (And what if he did? Where IS the truth?) – he studied Philosophy and Literature and was born into the family and circumstance he was.

I’ll close this with this: All this bullshit about “Service” giving back – the only service that matters is that a parent give service to the child(s) they bring forth into this world. If every parent took that service seriously, everything else would be easy. Not that that is easy. It’s really hard, because each baby/child/person is different; and what “works” for one won’t necessarily work for the other. Ya just got to PAY ATTENTION and yet at the same time, GET OUT OF THE WAY, and let the baby/child/person be who they are. “Permutations of complications.”

Got it?

PS

And this ain’t even what’s got me pissed off today.

[A guest post by Jake Jabbour, originally posted on his Tumblr blog. — ed.]

It took me 26 months, give or take a week, to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in its entirety.  Depending on what you know about this book and me, that either comes off as nerd boasting, or a sad confession by an idiot.  I prefer to think of it as a column A, column B situation.  It only took 24 hours to watch season one of the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black.  On the merits of devouring, it would seem as if OITNB was more enjoyable, but that’s if your analogy is baked goods.  Think of it as booze.  I hit the ground running with OITNB, and binged on it like an ice-filled bucket of Pacifico. Infinite Jest I soaked up in small strong sips like a long pour from a 15-year-old Kentucky Bourbon. Both have their appeal, both can be abused, and both have kept me from making something of myself.  This essay is about three things:

1. A book I think is great.
2. A writer who Nostradamusized Netflix
3. How Orange is the New Black might be arsenic-laced brain candy.

Reading Infinite Jest was a profound experience.  It was difficult.  I had to restart reading it three times.  In order to fix my mind on it for the first 300 pages, I had to give my brain no other alternative.  Early on, if I was at home with the book, I would find myself drifting to something that demanded less of my cognition.  Perhaps an episode of The Office, or a bag of chips, or masturbation, or when compared up against that book, solving the national debt.  I had to find the equivalent of blinders for my brain. So I brought the book to the gym, hopped on an Elliptical machine, cued up the soundtrack to Drive, and set the timer for 20 minutes.  20 minutes was as long as I could run my legs on the machine, and my brain on the book.  In theory I would shape and smarten up.  Unfortunately outside of the gym, I was eating Pop-tarts and watching youtube videos of polar bears shitting in pools.  I was undoing all my hard work. But not really.  At least not the reading work.  Because the strength in a good book is that it will seep into the depths of you.  It may not float on the surface for easy recall and pontification, but it will alter the way you feel and how you think.  Infinite Jest is the literary equivalent of the gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into a hulking monster.  It’s alteration of you is pretty fucking cool, but no one wants you showing off at a party because it’s invasive and no one likes a story topper, or a room killer.

I eventually weened myself off the strict parameters and was able to read the book anywhere.  Well not anywhere.  If you take that book into public you’re a) kidding yourself if you think you’ll be able to follow along and b) kidding yourself if you don’t think everyone in that coffee shop doesn’t hate your smug guts.  It weighs like seven pounds.  You might as well be lugging around one of those big dictionaries found in libraries you self-important jerk! In the time it took me to read Infinite Jest, I only read one other fictional book—Life of Pi.  I had purchased dozens, but buying a book is as much a guarantee that I’ll read it as finding a woman attractive guarantees I’ll sleep with her.  I’m better off just hitting up the internet for the good parts. Not surprising, I didn’t really need another book to read.    I prefer non-fiction, usually personal stories, pop-culture pieces, memoirs, but IJsufficiently spanned gamut of my interests. It struck more true to life than most non-fiction I’d read.  I’ll feel like a fool trying to summarize it, as it is both a difficult task and one I’m unqualified for.  However, I feel belittled when I ask someone about something, and they say something like “I can’t even explain it to you.”  It feels dismissive even when it never is.  So in the splintered remnants of a nutshell, the book is about a tennis academy, it’s founder’s suicide, his family, a halfway house, wheelchair assassins acting on the directive of Canada’s distaste with America, the future, and a thousand other things.  The title is in reference to a particular rumored movie that exists that is so entertaining that people cannot turn it off or stop watching.  They view it on repeat until they starve to death. We’ll get back to this hauntingly prophetic plot point later.

It’s great storytelling (i.e. a bloody brawl outside the halfway house), and some not so great storytelling (he catalogs some sixty fictional art films and gives detailed descriptions of all of them).  It’s peppered with, or more aptly, marinaded in heartbreakingly honest and thoughtful ideas about human nature and the social and moral responsibility humans experience and cope with.  And if you’re like me, those really sad moments that hit home are reassuring.  I always assume I’m crazy until I find evidence that someone else behaves the same way.  All you need is to observe a second occurrence, it’s no longer crazy, it’s a pattern, and it’s just what some people do.  Here are just a few declarations and notions.  I also listed many more in an earlier piece.  See here.

“you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.”

“females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.”

“loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

“try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth.”

On pot smoking: “the so-called munchies that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against the kind of loss of practical function (smokers abstract thinking questions practical function), since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food.”

“It is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off.”

On parenting: “I saw upscale, educated, talented, functional, and white parents…conforming to every last jot/tittle of a good parent…who raised kids who where (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing…

On consumerism: “viewers had been conditioned to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.”

“‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

“trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.”

“everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.”

Out of context, and accompanied by a very spotty summary, none of that may make a lick of sense, but I would suggest that if there is any spark of curiosity from anything you’ve read, try the book.  Don’t get hung up on understanding everything, because I don’t know that you need to.  At least I didn’t. There’s probably two books worth of stuff I didn’t pick up.  Like good television, you can enjoy singular episodes without grasping the long arc, or conversely look at the bigger ideas, and ignore the minutia.  It’s all good son.

In addition to the waxing about life and suffering and meaning, Wallace’s foresight into the future (the book was written in 96, but takes place in 2009) also contributes to the reality of the novel. He predicts DVRs— “VCR recording advances that used subtle volume  and hysterical-pitch-sensors to edit most commercials out of any program taped.”  He essentially envisions Netflix and it’s impact on Blockbuster and it’s competitors— “choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff…”  Those are the Netflix genres for The Expendables 2, Food Inc., 30 on 30, The Wonder Years, Orange is the New Black, and Ted Talks. GQ recently published an article on the founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings.  They write “ he figured that the best way to keep customers was to personalize the experience.”  In Infinite Jest, Wallace writes for the founder of his fictional company “what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director/ what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?”  It’s like Hastings read this book as a Entertainment CEO for Dummies manual.

Wallace does a whole lot of crazy shit with his bizarro world that when you consider how accurate he nailed streaming video, doesn’t seem that crazy.  In Wallace’s dystopia, politics get elevated to high entertainment because people begin to crave being witness to life. Streaming programming becomes so abundant and personalized that people don’t leave their home.  They work from home and watch precisely what they want.  It creates a void for being part of a live experience, witnessing something unpredictable, even if it’s not that exciting. Wallace extrapolates this to elevating the interest in politics, which our society has done, but he also inadvertently sort-of kind-of explains the boom in reality television.  It’s this weird hybrid of personalized entertainment and live, unscripted (less and less I suspect) events.  There is no way reality television is objectively (I realize objectivity is likely dead) better or even comparable to Shameless, Friday Night Lights, or The Wire.  And yet reality TV continues to expand and spawn like a mold, or that protein that causes mad cow disease. None of this is in Infinite Jest, but that’s what the book does.  It gets you interested in ideas that are only tangentially tethered to the plot lines and characters.  It’s all incredibly fascinating, but it’s not why I sat down to write this. Let’s get back to my love of entertainment, and my and your inevitable downfall.

On July 11th, Netflix released the entire season of their original series Orange is the New Black.  It’s based on a memoir about a woman who served 13 months of a 15 month sentence in prison.  The premise is dark, the characters are complex, and it walks a beautifully delicate line of being both heartbreaking and hilarious.  It’s not unlike the actual book Infinite Jest, and it’s not unlike the fictional film Infinite Jest in the book. Not in story, but in unintended consequences. As I said, I watched the entire series in 24 hours.  It was convenient, enjoyable, and satisfying.  I’m not going to watch the episodes over and over until I die, but I could see myself watching Netflix uninterrupted until my guts ate themselves, my bowels evacuated, and my cat ate my eyeballs.

Wallace had it so close.  But his misstep was in thinking it would be a single piece of entertainment that would rot our brains.  Instead, it seems more likely that it will be a never-ending stream of entertainment that I pay $8 a month for.  It’s a milder, equally addictive form of freebasing.  Not only is it totally personalized and effortless, it’s cheaper than going to the beach, or buying a book.  We could all die at the hands of our hands wrapped around an apple remote.

My first exposure to Wallace was his commencement speech to Kenyon University in 2005.  Here’s a link to it.

I keep a copy of it on my phone, I refer to it when I feel the walls of shit creeping in on me, and it comes with my highest recommendation. My take away from it is that you’re doing your best and at your greatest when you’re focused on helping others.  And also that it’s incredibly hard, so don’t worry if you feel depressed, and hate everyone you’re standing in line with (lines that you’re also contributing to, and making longer for others).  Basically, if you can take one encounter and make it a positive moment for someone else, you’re doing alright.

In 2008, David Foster Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself.  That’s not comforting.  It’s haunting that a man so smart and talented came to that tragic conclusion.  It invites a lot of dark questions into my head.  He observed and analyzed the world in a way that most us could not, and he articulated it with such humor and emotion that it bent the lens with which I view the world through.  Like so much of what he did, his suicide is just something I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand.

I’m not really sure what all this has to do with Netflix and entertainment.  I set out with an idea I thought was neat, not to be confused with an idea I thought was novel.  Chuck Klosterman writes in his new book I Wear the Black Hat, “I’ve never had an idea that a hundred other people didn’t have before me.”  I was going to write that here, but then I didn’t, but then I sort of did, because well, you get it.  So television will probably unravel us all, and books probably can’t save us, so what do we do?  I say let’s knock back our buckets of beer, sip our spirits neat, and on our better days be “kind in a way that costs us nothing.” -Infinite Jest

The pages’ in Infinite Jest 736 – 747 were the most disturbing and upsetting for me and they were not about drugs or alcohol, addictions; sexual abuse; depression, animal abuse, death, murder, torture – the kinds of things that get to some people, Wallace’s insanely descriptive depictions of those horrors. No. They are about his, Wallace’s, work – this book Infinite Jest, and the Incandenza’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner. The pages are written in a third person, omnipotent narrator voice, describing Joelle van Dyne’s introduction to, and reflections on/of the Incandenza family, who she met because the pro football star, Orin, the oldest son, approached her and scored, x’d her the P.G.O.A.T., the prettiest girl of all time, b/c that is what he does, he cannot love, we have been told, before. Joelle is compulsively cleaning her room in the halfway house, b/c that is what she does to distract herself – clean. (As many of us do.) So Joelle is sober and cleaning and we readers are given an account of what’s up with the Incandenza clan.

We learn that the father Himself has a disordered brain. He was, “missing the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them.” He’s described as almost non-human, w/r/t human emotionality, “ … so blankly and irretrievably hidden … like autistic, almost catatonic.” Himself was. Orin felt his father disliked him, insomuch as he was even aware of him. Mario, the last and accidental child, is a “hopeless retard” who grins incessantly, and Hal, the middle child, is “insufferable,” because he’s some kind of 10-year old genius. Orin, Joelle tells us, grew up dividing the world into people you could trust, open people, and those you couldn’t, the quiet ones who remained hidden. Joelle is, not only the prettiest girl, she is also very smart – getting an A- in Developmental Psych. So she knows of what she speaks, somewhat, anyway. She analyses the father’s film work – the work of Himself —“… the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any real communication. Technically gorgeous … oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. … more like a very smart person conversing with himself. … But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental. … Astounding technical anality. It was like he couldn’t help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.” And that the work was “moralistic.” And that, “art/religion” was a superior form of “self-forgetting” than alcohol. And finally the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’” 

And then we come to know “The Moms,” Avril Incandenza – who is described as a compulsive control freak who hyper manages the emotional & psychological state of the entire family, except for the happy idiot. There is this: “It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother.” And Wallace closes with these two potent statements: “Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.” (The leaning in refers to how she commanded people with her presence to lean towards her.)

The point of looking at this this way, by pulling it apart –stretching it, is that Wallace as writer is saying something that maybe he could not say out loud to the people who needed to hear it – his parents and any woman he might have loved (Mary Karr.) And he hid it with all kinds of vernacular and linguistic tricks. The irony of which is not lost on me, i.e. if you want/need to be heard it is best to speak clearly and simply. So maybe he didn’t want to be heard. He says, via the character Joelle, that Himself did everything he did with intention. Which brings me to this: Did he, know what he was doing?  It’s pretty clear to me that he is calling out the family as the root of problems in communication and intimacy. Which brings me to my final point in this reflection: Fear of Intimacy, it’s quite common and, in fact, is the norm. True intimacy is very rare. I say this from personal experience as well as psychological research. [See Robert Firestone & Joyce Catlett, FEAR OF INTIMACY (1999)] Firestone’s study group, like Maslow’s, was of healthy successful people. The data was collected by interview: individuals, couples, and in group, and by analysis. He was drawn to this by the conclusion from 43 years of clinical study & analysis that: “Most people seem drawn toward being deceptive about their motives, distort the motives of the other, and tend to act out defensively. They are both frightened of and tend to withdraw from intimacy.”(ix) Firestone wanted to find out why. Wallace came to the same position/conclusion saying of people as a whole that they are “credulous, frightened, and desperate.” [See Lipsky (2010) Although of course you end up becoming yourself.] Which sounds benign until you think … Frightened of what? Desperate for what? And, Willing to believe just about anything. Which is scary.

Firestone talks about “The Fantasy Bond,” which is what Wallace is describing perfectly w/r/t Avril, the Moms, and her family. Quite clearly this family, the Incandenzas, are really, really screwed up but function at a high level in society – which says … . But Wallace never says that. He never says anything directly – which is tantamount that there is a real problem. Again, did he know what he was doing? He doesn’t name anything, but describes it perfectly. One example is the defense mechanism of Reaction Formation, a particularly low-level base one (DM). Why not call it by its name? It first appears, I think, on top of page 695: “One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” (with en# 281 being of significance.)

All of this bothers me, knowing the end. If Wallace was still here, no big deal. Just another writer fucking around. But he’s not, and I miss him. And I get angry. Infinite Jest was a failed entertainment, and it makes me sad.

I quit Infinite Jest last night. Maybe for the summer, or maybe for good. At first I thought it was because I hit the Matty Pemulis section on page 684 and the rape was triggering because of my own history with that kind of abuse and I just couldn’t stomach it this time. There is no shame in that, I know, and it would have been a perfectly valid reason to put it down. But it turns out that wasn’t exactly it.

Today, I walked out of work and into a sunny afternoon when a text came my way from a dear friend who is only a few days removed from one of her best friends shooting himself in the head.

“Am I still allowed to be this sad?” She wondered.

“Yes,” I said, unequivocally.

I sent a few more words, a lot of love, and as much of my own not-a-stranger-to-grief heart as I could possibly cram into those pixels and emojis and letters.

Then I got onto the train, turned my phone onto airplane mode, and wept. I wept the entire way from Westchester County to Brooklyn, which is about two hours. Not small tears: big ones. Long unbroken streams of salt and water from the some of the deepest places in my heart. They would not stop coming, and even if I could have stopped them, I do not think I would have tried.

I wept in the direction of my friend, and this friend’s friend who is not here to receive our tears anymore. I wept in the direction of DFW, and his work. I wept for Tyler Clemente and every other teenager – gay and not – who has killed themselves this week, last week, this year, last year, and for the past 100 years. I wept in the direction of the middle aged scourge of suicide in the U.S. that everyone sees but no one understands. I wept for Japan, and how they can’t keep scores of people from jumping off of cliffs. I wept for every incest survivor who has not actually survived. I wept for the people afflicted with AIDS who chose to leave before the disease took them during the days before the drugs could keep them alive long enough to die from something else. I wept for every transgendered person who has felt that death was the best of all their options. I wept on behalf of my teenage self who saw no way out other than the pills that were taken away before she could take them, and for my self of last year who didn’t imagine a future other than jumping off that bridge but who said something to the right someone in just the nick of time. I wept for the part of myself that is still somedays teetering on the edge of not-as-sane-as-I’d-like-to be, who has a suicidal-feelings plan and pact with my therapist and closest friends.

I wept for my own still-beating heartbeat. I wept because it does not make sense that I am sitting here alive, when they are all dead. I wept because I understand what it means to need to fight for your life starting the second you wake up in the morning, and I don’t think I am smarter or have a bigger heart or have been bestowed with some magical understanding of what it means to be alive that any of those individuals didn’t have. I don’t have anything they didn’t have, in fact. The only actual difference between me and any of those people is that every time I have hit the wall, by the grace of something I have been able to wait five seconds, and then five minutes, and then five more and five more and five more and five more, before acting. By the grace of what? I do not know. There is no actual reason any of our stories should have ended up different – no reason that I am not sans heartbeat while, instead, they sit here and write about my choice to die.

Right now, I am watching the sun set over the next apartment building while I sit on my couch and type this. My tears have stopped for the moment, but I am sure they’ll come back to sit with me soon. I am listening to my laundry roll around in the washer, and feeling my dumb hipster hat hug my head, thinking about how I need to wash these jeans because they’ve made an appearance the last four days and how even though I love them and do not want to take them off, ever, they still need to be cleaned. I’m getting ready to make a smoothie and hunker down for bed while I watch a pointless TV show episode with characters who aren’t real, but who I love dearly nonetheless.

DFW is doing none of these things, will do none of these things, can do no more of these things.  He does not have five more minutes. He does not have any more heartbeats to measure the time between his end of the world feelings and whatever might be next. I still have that, still have time to figure out how to make my way through that. I still have time and a chance to wake up tomorrow and fight for my life. I still have time and many chances to find a way to be here to return texts and messages and emails from friends who are trying with all their own mights to figure out how to keep  fighting for their lives, too.

And that is why I quit Infinite Jest. That is why I might never pick up DFW’s work again. Reading Infinite Jest at this point, for me, feels like trying to learn sobriety from someone who has pledged himself to a lifelong relapse. I cannot learn lessons about how to fight for my life from someone who would not or could not fight for his own. Thus, I will type this sentence, then I will put this computer down, and I will weep about all this for another long while. After that, I will take a deep breath and count my heartbeats for as long as I can stand it.

Then, at some point, I will breathe a few words of thanks in the direction of whatever it is that has sustained my life up to now. And then, I will return to my life.

What follows is a reflection from the reading of pages 809 – 851, what we in the group have been calling “The Wraith,” but what might more accurately be called, The Fever Dream. It’s what’s going on in the mind of Don Gately as he lies in a bed in a room in a hospital, recovering, perhaps, from the gunshot wound he took defending his charges at the halfway house (601-619) from a revenge/retribution attack by the Nucks, whose dog Randy Lenz had just killed.

I think most of us agree by now that what Wallace has done w/r/t characterization is put himself, his personality, his “soul,” (p 810) or fragmented pieces of it, into many of the characters he created. In other words, we’re getting bits and pieces of Wallace in the different characters and sometimes they merge, they have similar thoughts, speak with the same idiosyncrasies, and certainly reflect thoughts that Wallace had had at one time or another.

Here, Gately is “fever-dreaming,” (p 816) and imagines a ghost-like person, a wraith, that comes and visits him. It’s described even what the wraith looks like and he resembles James Orin Incandenza, who Gately had never met. The two of them get into a conversation or “interface.” The reason for Gately’s fever-dreaming is that he refuses pain medication, b/c he fears if he takes just one hit (my words) of a narcotic-like substance, that will be considered a relapse by the crocodiles of AA, and also that he has not the will power to stop once he starts – he’ll go right back to his old robbing and stealing and druging and general stupid thuggish self, that he hates and is ashamed of (according to Joelle van D., the PGOAT (531- 538) and girl of his fevered desires.)  We learn of Gately’s childhood, a horrific affair, where he watched his step-father (?) beat his mother and did nothing to stop it. We learn that mother and son never spoke of the beatings, ever, to each other or anyone else. We learn that being sober brings memories up that he (Gately) doesn’t want to think about, or the combination of soberness and interface w/others. Gately hates himself … and then the “garden-variety wraith,” appears. (p.829) Who it turns out, might be, might, be JOI and not a  “garden-variety wraith,” which is your basic ownself as ghost before you die. No, no, no – it’s JOI because he knows about Hal and talks about Hal with Gately and how hard it is to communicate with a boy who won’t interface properly, he (Hal) was a “hidden boy,” (838)  which JOI feared for himself as well. (Thus the Wild Turkey? Is that ever made clear?) And no one would pay any attention to the mute boy, or to his father (JOI); and no one or thing was successful at getting the boy to “come out,” even fun & games and trickery. (see pgs. 27-31) And so now JOI resorts to sobriety and AA, which he hates, AA, “… he (the wraith) never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction.” (p 839) and finally to making a film, b/c that’s what he does, “The Entertainment,” some kind of sex/goddess film to get some kind of reaction out of Hal: “To bring him ‘out of himself.’” (839) Which we (readers) know from before was unsuccessful and led to JOI going back to drink and blowing himself up in the microwave. We also learn that Gately thinks the wraith can read his mind so he doesn’t have to speak, they can communicate without talking, but that the wraith insists that even really bad, “the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hidden-ness on either side.” (p. 839) Nice Dave. Nice dream scenario.

Now, if that isn’t all just flat-out crazy, I don’t know crazy. Or maybe all just a dream so not crazy at all. “Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even in the dream he knew it was a dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got so multileveled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. (p.830)

And then Death comes, and it’s Joelle, the PGOAT, and she tells Gately that you never really die, but have many lives – but that a woman will kill you – and then that woman, your killer, becomes your next life’s mother – which is why mothers love their children the way they do – because they are trying to make amends for the murder of you, which neither you nor they really remember. (850)

One thing we know now – nothing worked with Mr. Dave Wallace. Not anti-depressants, not psychotherapy, not ECT (shock treatments) not sex, not fame, or quote, loving parents, or quote, a loving wife.  What seemed to work was marijuana, and somebody, way early on when he was still a boy, before his personality had fully formed, told him, or he had the thought, that he had to quit that stuff, and drinking, and smoking, that he needed help – special care and treatment. He was a sick boy, depressed. And so Mr. David Wallace wrote a book to try and communicate but not many people read the book and those that did still misunderstood what he was saying. What does a person have to do to be heard, to be understood?   What I see in the Fever Dream is a convergence of the three elements of the human condition that predict suicide. It’s a sad, sad story. Indeed – a failed entertainment.

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

We now travel back a couple days, back to the match between Hal and Stice, which happened by an order delivered by Thode but whose true origin remained unclear. Steeply is present at the match, speaking with Aubrey deLint. Steeply claims this is the first authentic tennis match she has ever seen. Stice and Hal play. We learn Don Gately is asleep down the hill at Ennet House. Endnote 266 informs us that CT has spent this morning fending off and reassuring the parents of students injured during the Interdependence Day Eschaton debacle. After the endnote, we learn that Orin Incandenza is at this moment with the “Swiss” hand-model and having sex. Stice is double-faulting frequently, but deLint tells Steeply that Stice needs to give these up so he can get enough speed on his second-serves to fend off Hal. Constant attack seems to be the only strategy that works with Hal because of Hal’s ability to control the game. On a serve from Stice can’t be called in or out, Hal gives it to Stice. Steeply observes that Hal and Stice seem like friends on court. DeLint laughs. Steeply thinks about Hal’s beauty on the court and about Orin’s descriptions of the game.

We learn about the complexity of Hal’s game. Endnote 268 says that Steeply notices that an extraordinary number of people he has been around lately are left-handed. DeLint describes Hal’s style as that of a torturer. Steeply wants to sit down with Hal, but deLint doesn’t think it will happen. Steeply assures him that she is only here for background. DeLint tells her to talk to Tavis, but he also tells her that “they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.” He claims one of ETA’s primary functions is to hide students so they can develop beyond the scrutiny of the public. Steeply talks about Orin, but deLint dismisses him as a “one-trick pony.” Steeply presses deLint harder. DeLint responds that if the students “can get inculcated right they’ll ever be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade.”

November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – 13473 Blasted Expanse Boulevard, Tucson, AZ

This scene presents a letter from Helen Steeply to Marlon Bain. She tells him of her interest in writing on the Incandenzas and asks for his cooperation with certain questions. Bain responds, “Fire Away.” Steeply sends a second letter with a series of questions that we are not given.

Endnote 269: November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham, MA

Endnote 269 presents us with excerpts from Marlon Bain’s response to the questions of Helen Steeply. It begins by saying that Orin and Marlon were good friends in their “formative years.” They were the best 10-year-old tennis players in Boston, a fact which brought them together. Soon after, Marlon’s parents died and Bain became a regular in the Incandenza home. Bain denigrates football, Orin’s newly chosen profession. He claims, “Football is pure homophobically repressed nancyism and do not let O tell you different.” A couple things to note are the multiple typos and grammatical errors that crop up in Bain’s letter as well as the self-contradicting nature of his thought. A good example of the former can be seen in his spelling of Steeply’s name as ‘Steepley.’ The latter can be seen in his accusation that football is both homophobic and “repressed nancyism,” the use of ‘nancyism’ suggesting some repressed homophobia in Marlon himself in a way that raises questions about his feelings toward Orin.

Question 2 is either unaddressed or we are not given it. In response to question 3e, Marlon says that he cannot help Steeply “with the facts surrounding Dr. Incancenza’s suicide.” In answer to 3d, he says that Orin and Joelle supposedly broke up because JOI used Joelle in more and more of his work. It is also clear that Bain is aware of Infinite Jest. He is also aware of an incident where Avril wrote the name of a lover on the inside of a steamed Volvo window.

To question 5, Bain responds that he would not necessarily call Orin a pathological liar, but that there “can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive.”  Marlon contends that Orin has a knack for affecting openness while being the least open person Marlon knows. He says that one reason for how Orin is is that he “has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported,” which he came by “educationally.” This educational maligning Bain pins on Avril Incandenza, who he accuses of messing with Orin’s mind and to whom Orin could not tell a lie. Bain recounts a story of how he and Orin had been taking an unnamed substance and decided that they wanted to get liquor from a place down the hill from ETA. They jumped in the car and headed down. Unfortunately, the Incandenza family dog, Sam Johnson, was attached to the bumper and they dragged him down the hill despite the horrified protests of the people they passed. When they reached the bottom only a “nubbin” was left of S. Johnson. Orin later lied to Avril about the dog’s death, claiming that a hit-and-run had swerved into him while Orin and Marlon walked him down the sidewalk – which they never did.

In response to question 7, Bain claims that the “word ‘abuse’ is vacuous,” that the word’s ambiguity becomes a part of its actual existence in the world.  He claims that he has seen “parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a)….(g).” He asks, “Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?” Marlon reveals that he has been speaking of Avril. He says that her reaction to S. Johnson’s death was “furcated:” one one hand, she launched into a complex and involving mourning ritual; on the other, she acted around Orin as if S. Johnson’s death had actually in some way improved her life. Avril thinks of Marlon as “the sort o philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue.” Marlon finally accuses Orin of imitating his mother with his “Subjects.”

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

Beneath ETA lies a complex network of tunnels. At 1625, many of the sub-14 males are down under the match taking place between Hal and Stice. The children have to clear a path through the tunnel to the underground storage room of the lung, as punishment for the Eschaton debacle three days ago. They are cleaning up basic debris. Historically, the sub-14s actually have a tunnel club, whose purpose is to exclude others: no girls allowed, obviously. Kent Blott, who is always excluded from the club, is here because he claims to have seen a feral hamster. The feral hamster excites the club members because it could give their club a purpose, one other than excluding Blott and females. But feral hamsters are rarely seen outside the Concavity/Convexity, much less in Enfield, MA. Blott fears reprisal if the club does not at least find a rat and starts preparing the other kids for this eventuality. If they find a feral hamster they imagine that they will be heroes, but Avril’s hygienic fears make a rat perfectly acceptable.

As the club moves forward, they run into an odd-sized fridge that smells. The kids try to figure out what the smell is. They debate the possibility that someone graduated and left without clearing out their fridge. They decide to open it. Inside, the smell gets worse. They find rotting food and maggots. The children run away.

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

Returning to the match between Hal and Stice, Thierry Poutrincourt sits down near Helen Steeply. They talk. Poutrincourt tells Steeply they are expected to be rude to journalists, but that she herself is not. Steeply says deLint was less than helpful. Steeply offers to speak in French, if it is easier for Poutrincourt. Poutrincourt responds by talking about young tennis stars. Tennis does not require anything that an adolescent does not already possess. In fact, teenagers do not feel the pressure of competitive play adults do because their minds are not fully developed. But they develop eventually and Poutrincourt lists several young professional burnouts. Early winning creates an addiction to fame and the pressure to maintain an ability to win grows incredibly intense. Troeltsch sits on the top-row of the bleacher and calls the play, pretending to be two broadcasters. He annoys Steeply as he talks about the way the technology of the large head racket has affected Hal, who had to change his game to accommodate it. Stice on the other hand has always played with a large head racket.

Poutrincourt says Hal’s tennis brain is more powerful. Steeply claims again he does not want to profile Hal, just speak with him. DeLint returns to talking about having a “complete game.” Poutrincourt talks about the need to be able to deal with achieving one’s goals. The challenge of what one does once they become the star they want to be, they must then “transcend the success of the best.” Poutrincourt asserts that attaining one’s goals does not make everything OK and does not have the meaning you expected. This can often result in suicide, Poutrincourt raising the specter of Clipperton. Steeply begins to point his questions toward JOI. Poutrincourt talks about Jim’s interest in “not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees.” DeLint points out that the reason Hal isn’t as good as he could be because he is too emotional about matches. Poutrincourt knows Steeply is not a woman here to do a soft profile.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Man o’ War Grille, Cambridge, MA

We join Michael Pemulis’s brother, Matty, as he sits in a Portuguese restaurant. He is 23 years old and a prostitute. He waits for soup and watches an older bag lady defecate on the sidewalk. His father had come over from Ireland in 1989. He then sees Poor Tony, looking nearly dead from withdrawal. PT follows Kate Gompert and Bernadette Ruth van Cleve as they return from a meeting.

Matty’s father had molested him as a young boy. His father would come into Matty’s room drunk, late at night. He would caress his son, which would scare Matty and the boy would shrink away from his father. His father would feign outrage at Matty’s before raping him. Matty later realized that his father would have raped him whether he shrunk away or not. His brother, Michael, slept in the same room as Matty. Their father died of pancreatitis.

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

Hal goes to Schtitt’s office to ask him about his reasons for setting up the match between Hal and Stice. Only deLint is there; Schtitt’s off with Mario in search of ice cream. DeLint gives Hal his take on the match, saying “You just never quite occurred out there, kid.” Hal goes upstairs to Viewing Room 6 and watches old cartridges of his father. He cannot remember the name of the kid in “Valuable Coupon, Low Temperature Civics and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.” Endnote 24 reveals this to be Phillip T Smothergill. Hal then watches Bye-Bye twice, which film we get a description of.

In the movie, a bureaucrat has a job that he can never get to on time because he cannot wake up on time in the morning. The movie shows the man’s boss telling him that if he is late again he will be terminated. The man and his wife fill their bedroom with alarm clocks so that he will not be late, but there is a power outage. Waking up late again, the bureaucrat rushes to the train station and can perhaps make the last feasible train to still make it to work on time. But jumping steps down to the platform and near the open doors of this last train, he collides with a young boy played by Smothergill and scatters the boy’s packages all over the platform. Instead of diving into the doors to catch the train, the man collects the boy’s packages, returns to his car, and drives home. Hal still cannot think of the kid’s name. This is Mario’s favorite film. Hal likes it too. Hal plans to watch several more films this evening, including Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, which was inspired by JOI’s defection from AA.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Cambridge, MA

Poor Tony told the paramedics who picked him up after his seizure that he felt fine, in a common post-seizure sense of euphoria that deceives one into making the exact decision PT made. He then strolled through Cambridge.

He feels great. We learn that PT’s connection to the Antitoi Brothers was the result of a deal they made where PT and his friends wore red leather coats, wigs, and spike-heeled shoes, and joined six other similarly dressed operatives in a hotel ballroom. Then, an androgynous woman, similarly dressed, appeared and threw empire waste in the face of the Canadian Minister of Inter-ONAN Trade. Then, PT & CO were to allow the androgynous woman to blend in with them and then they all dispersed in different directions, offering the woman a means of escape. PT is now passing in front of the Man o’ War Grille, eyeing the purses of girls before him. He could visit Antitoi with money if he robbed the girls, rather than just going to see the brothers and begging. He does not see Matty Pemulis in the Man o’ War.

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

Day thinks about the various words residents use to describe their penises. And Day is surprised to learn that he kind of misses Randy Lenz.

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

Kate Gompert understands anhedonia as a type of deadness, a “radical abstracting of everything,” that causes life-time bowlers to drop out of their leagues. In this state, meaning drops out and words like happiness do not signify. She becomes “unable to identify.” Apparently, most ETAs think this anhedonia is what caused James O. Incandenza to kill himself. They are wrong, the narrative asserts. The reason is that the children are still divorced from the idea of their own death and subscribe to a belief in the carrot of performance. They think that the high ranking of the nation’s best tennis players correlates with those player’s well-being. Hal, on the other hand, does suffer anhedonia. He does not know joy. There is nothing inside himself. And he is lonely. The narrative then considers that US culture makes this anhedonia seem cool through cultural products, art, that lionizes jaded irony. Hal thinks this is actually a fear of being “really human.” Hal despises the fact that he is lonely for himself as an infant. Hal knows that anhedonia is not as bad as clinical depression, which Kate Gompert feels, which makes every human experience unbearable. It is indescribable. And it makes one selfish and unable to relate to others. The narrative then asserts that the psychotically depressed are those who scream out in pain that is the effect of an unseen cause.

Kate Gompert got to know a middle-aged psychotically depressed man who collected model trains. He had been depressed for the last 17 years. His wife was devoted to him. He went to work. And he checked in and out of wards. He tried all the anti-depressants, old and new. Even ECT failed to help. The idea of him building his model train networks and going to work every day and suffering from this depression was too much for Kate Gompert to understand. She sees it as stunning bravery. He dreamed of anhedonia. The man and his wife sent Kate Xmas cards each year, with water-color pictures of locomotives.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Cambridge, MA

Ruth van Cleve and Kate Gompert walk south of Inman Square in Cambridge. Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights. She sees men in wheelchairs. Before coming in, Van Cleve had abandoned her child in a Braintree alley wrapped in newspapers with the ID bracelet still on the infant’s wrist. Gompert notices that Ruth does not seem to try to move forward as she walks, though she manages to broadcast that she is all about sex. The pair are on their way back from an NA meeting, which is harder to find than AA in metro Boston. Kate does not see Poor Tony behind them.

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

Troeltsch inserts a pro wrestling cartridge into his TP viewer and dons a sports commentator’s blazer and prepares to call the action.

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

Pemulis raises a panel of the dropped ceiling in his room where he stashes his substances.

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

Lyle hovers in the weight room.

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

Schtitt and Mario lean forward and fly toward their ice cream.

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

Avril smokes several cigarettes while she dials her telephone with her blue felt pen.

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

We open with the opening credits of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Two ETA girls, Bridget Boone and Francis Unwin, join Hal in the viewing room where he is still watching his father’s cartridges. Hal wishes the girls would give him privacy. We learn that Helen Steeply is wandering the halls looking for Hal. Jennie Bash asks if Hal has a paper tomorrow; he says it is already done.

Blood Sister, we are told, was one of Incandenza’s “few commercial successes” that was successful because Interlace chose to feature it as one of their “one-time Spontaneous Disseminations.” Hal thinks that his father sometimes used abstraction to “escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges.” He made films that “became ironic metacinematic parodies” of different genres. Despite Hal’s thoughts about JOI maybe working so diligently on Blood Sister so he wouldn’t have to feel anything, endnote 289 says, “In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS:OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that MDs and counselors kept referring him to.”

Idris Arslanian and Todd Possalthwaite and Kent Blott soon enter the viewing room. All the children, except Hal, quickly become engrossed in Blood Sister. The story is that a “biker chick” in Toronto is found and rescued from the dire straits to which her lifestyle has led her, rescued by a “tough-looking older nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun.” This nun becomes known as “Blood Sister,” still riding her motorcycle as she travels between the parishes of her newly discovered faith. She soon wishes to pass on her gift and takes on her own young woman in dire straits. She finds a young woman, cleans her up, and develops a motherly bond with her. Bridget Boone cynically observes that there are parallels between the demands of addiction and the demands of the Catholic faith, an observation the narrative picks up and likens to the attitude of many who come into AA and are not ready to accept its strictures.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Enfield, MA

We learn that it is too soon to tell if Joelle van Dyne is ready for sobriety, but she is beginning to ID “more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it’s get straight or die.” Endnote 291 tells us that Ennet House does not mind members occasionally visiting a Cocaine Anonymous, but discourage those meetings as a resident’s main line of support because of the scarcity of the meetings and because their specific focus can “narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.” Joelle is at this meeting because she has been visiting Don Gately, who is lying in the trauma wing two floors up, unconscious. She has begun to develop feelings for Don Gately, feelings which endnote 292 tells us AA recommends very strongly against, as the relationships formed early in sobriety often become crutches that once removed cause addicts to fall back to their substance. We learn that MDs have been offering Gately demerol because they either don’t know his history or don’t understand it. Joelle, from Kentucky, is prejudiced, noticing the speaker that begins when she arrives tells a story full of “colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn’t seem like she cares that much anymore.” The speaker tells the CA group that he did not smoke crack everyday, but would have weekend binges when he would clear his bank account in a couple days. Finally, one weekend, his family needed every cent of his paycheck to get by. Instead of using it to pay for groceries and rent he smoked it. His wife and kid were left at home with nothing to eat. When he finally returned home, he found nobody there and the contents of the refrigerator scraped clean. He thought about killing himself, but instead went to the Shattuck Shelter and asked for a meeting. He has been sober ever since. Joelle identifies very strongly with the man’s story.

Image source is here.

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

Returning to the viewing room with Hal and the other ETAs, they are still watching Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Picking up where we left off with the film’s narrative, we learn that Blood Sister’s protege is all of a sudden found dead in the convent from a seeming relapse to substances. But Blood Sister is skeptical of the relapse; rather, she suspects foul play. Reverting to her old ways, she hits the street, starts drinking, and seeks information about the death of the punk girl she took under her wing. As the film moves on, it turns out the girl was murdered by Blood Sister’s own Mother Superior, the top nun at the convent. And it is further revealed that the woman who had saved Blood Sister had never actually been saved, but was instead “operating a high-volume retail [drug] operation out of the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission’s little-used confessionals” in order to fund her own reemerged drug habit. And, in fact, she had been the now-deceased girl’s dealer while she was still “out there.” Indeed, it was the young punk girl’s knowledge of the Mother Superior’s confessional sales that got the punk girl killed, so she would never be able to tell Blood Sister what was really going on at the convent. After Blood Sister learns these sordid details, a battle ensues that pits her and both the Mother Superior and the Vice Mother Superior against her, the latter being the woman who saved Blood Sister from a life of crime and addiction years before. In the battle, Blood Sister gets beat up and nearly dies, but the Vice Mother Superior intervenes and saves her. Rather than exacting revenge, Blood Sister leaves the convent, presumably forever. Hal finally remembers the kid’s name from his father’s movies, Smothergill.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Prospect and Hampshire, Cambridge, MA

Poor Tony has stolen the purses of Ruth van Cleve and Kate Gompert. Kate Gompert’s head hurts from slamming into a pole while in pursuit of PT. Ruth van Cleve is still chasing Tony while Gompert continues to reel and a male witness tells her that he saw the whole thing. The man smells. Kate begins suffering nausea. She had not actually given chase to Poor Tony, but had been unable to get free of her purse’s strap.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Cambridge, MA

We join Randy Lenz on the street. He has ingested too much cocaine and his sinuses are frozen. He had been following two small Chinese women, planning to steal from them, but then began to fear that the Chinese women were actually following him. He shook them. He thinks about his ejection from Ennet House, which at first frightened him, but now he thinks it may have been the best thing for him. He rationalizes how he tried living sober and it just did not work out. Lenz’s outfit is ridiculous: he wears “fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux, a sombrero with little wooden balls hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell glasses that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black mustache promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere’s in Cambridgeside.” He’s back on the trail of the Chinese women now and he imagines nobody can see him when they avoid his crazy appearance and unaccountable odor. He now begins to prepare to grab the women’s bags and sprint off.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Antitoi Entertainent, Cambridge, MA

The AFR are still here as they consider two courses of action. One, they could observe JOI’s family, perhaps capturing them for interviews. Or, two, they could find a master copy of The Entertainment here, which is why they were still at the store, viewing the store’s cartridges.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Prospect and Hampshire, Cambridge, MA

Poor Tony’s heist of Kate Gompert’s and Ruth van Cleve’s purses is now narrated from his perspective. Van Cleve is chasing him, which he had not expected. He loses his boa as they run. He had heard Kate hit the light pole. Both he and Ruth were screaming “Help!” as they careered through the streets. He cannot lose her. He plans to head to the back door of Antitoi Entertainent. He thinks about his father sitting at the kitchen table after a long day of performing C-sections. Ruth van Cleve continues to chase him.

November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Antitoi Entertainent, Cambridge, MA

We learn that the AFR came to know of Antitoi Entertainent by torturing, first, Gately’s old partner, Trent “Quo Vadis” Kite, and then a “sartorially eccentric cranio-facial-pain-specialist.” The AFR are still in the now deceased brothers shop, watching each video in the backroom, searching for the Entertainment. Finally, they found one of the FLQ’s displays – the oversiezed AFR watching something in ecstasy that both Joelle and Lucien had seen while walking Cambridge – and the cartridges they offer the passerby. The cartridges have the message, “IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’ that we associated with the AFR earlier. The wheelchair assassins found the cartridges from the display were blank though. Here we might remember endnote 205 says “this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank.” But they seem to have the proper player to view the cartridges because the AFR assumes that the FLQ’s attempts at dissemination were a prank meant to embarrass their disabled competitors. The AFR’s goal is to force Ottawa to secede from the ONAN because of the uproar created by the Entertainment, a tactic the FLQ seem to be mocking. Endnote 302 tells us that Fortier likely allowed Marathe to share the AFR’s ambitions with respect to the Entertainment with Steeply. The endnote also tells us that Fortier has long suspected that Marathe sought revenge for his brother who died in a round of jeux du prochain train. This, we already know, is not the actual reason Marathe is tripling. Either way, Fortier plans to force Marathe to watch the Entertainment before they launch their attack on the US. Fortier had to leave the search of the Antitoi shop to head to the southwest US in order to track down Orin Incandenza, who is suspected of having a master copy.

November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Logan International Airport, Boston, MA

Fortier boards his flight to the desert southwest and grows furious at the bland condescension of the US idea of equality that this self-satisfied nation expresses in its behavior toward the handicapped.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Enfield, MA

We return to Joelle van Dyne who is concerned about the damage she caused her teeth by free-basing cocaine. She dreams about Don Gately acting as a dentist caring for her teeth. And as she opens her mouth to his examination, she reveals in the mirror he wears for a third-eye rows and rows of blood-tipped teeth that fill her mouth. And “he assures her that these can be saved.”

November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Antitoi Entertainent, Cambridge, MA

By the time Fortier returned from the southwest, the samizdat Gately and Kite had stolen from DuPlessis was discovered. One of the younger AFR had been taking his turn in the viewing room and was lost, as well as the older Joubet who had rolled in when Desjardins failed to ask for more cartridges. The copy was read-only though, so they must now “interview” those associated with the maker of the original master copy, James O. Incandenza. Fortier calls the AFR to the shop and they monitor the activities of the Incandenza family. They also begin a search for Joelle, the actress in the cartridge. On the day of Fortier’s return, they had just captured Joelle’s former engineer. They tortured him for information, which led to very little except exclamations that MIT was in bed with defense and that Joelle was in a halfway house. They then strapped the engineer into a chair and showed him the samizdat, giving him the option of either viewing the cartridge again or not, but each repeat viewing him costing him one of his fingers. They wanted to see if the engineer would take of his ninth finger as quickly as the first. As the search for Joelle proceeds, Fortier himself goes to Phoenix House to check to see if she is there. She is not. On the bus back to Antitois Entertainent, he imagines the events to come: the US succumbing to the enchantment of The Entertainment, the subsequent war, and the independence of Canada after Ottawa’s secession.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Cambridge, MA

Lenz now has the Chinese women’s bags. He lurches through Little Lisbon, the bags out in front of him. He hears Poor Tony move a barrel into Ruth van Cleve’s path to finally lose her. Lenz then comes on some boys smoking something from a M. Fizzy can. After he passes, the boys laugh at him and continue smoking. Lenz needs a place to examine his bags. For some reason, there are no animals in this alley. He sees a person masturbating.

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

A conversation about a cult takes place. Marathe is listening to the conversation between two residents of Ennet House as he waits outside Pat Montesian’s office to apply for residency. Marathe examines the living room of Ennet House. The residents are watching a martial arts film. Several handicapped people move about. Only Marathe is wearing a veil. Several people tell Marathe to pet the dogs, but he takes the phrase as idiomatic and not an actual suggestion. He tells several residents about his veil, but no one cares. We are reminded that Marathe is prepared to die at any time. The smoke of the room makes him ill. He memorizes everything around him for his report to Fortier. A man wanders up to him and asks Marathe if Marathe is real. He tells the man that he is Swiss, which the man ignores. The man leans into Marathe’s face and shares with Marathe his belief that everyone around him is not real. He goes on about it. Everyone except him and Marathe are machines, he believes. The door to Pat Montesian’s office opens and she calls Marathe into the room.

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

We return to Joelle van Dyne who used to like to clean when she was high. She still enjoys cleaning, even when she is not high. She is cleaning her room in the halfway house and remembering her relationship with Orin Incandenza. Orin used to talk about how he suspected his father did not like him. Jim did not talk much, she remembers. Joelle’s mother did not care for her either. Orin could not understand Jim’s internal life and saw him as catatonic, except when he and Orin were with Avril and the mother could mediate Orin and Jim’s conversations. Orin had called Mario a retard and had many banal feelings about his parents and other members of his family. His need for loud expressions of approval clearly aligns with his preference for the roar of football crowds.

Joelle’s father was obsessed with Joelle and followed her around the house when she was home. This drove Joelle’s mother crazy. Joelle did not like to feel alone; cleaning and drug use became fortifications against loneliness. It was Orin who originally encouraged her to act in Himself’s films, so that he (Orin) could get closer to his father. She was suspicious of Jim at first because of the way it seemed he had hurt Orin. Of Jim’s early work, she felt it was “like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, the lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness – no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.” Finally, he started to take some chances with unironic films, a direction she encouraged. When this happened, she began to see something in Jim’s work, little human flashes.

She ended up dating Orin because he “had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female way.” She had assumed that her father had deterred interested males, until a drunk lineman in Kentucky confessed that he had needed to drink himself stupid to gin up the courage to approach her because of how beautiful she was. She thinks about Jim’s Pre-Nuptial Agreement Between Heaven and Hell, how the shot of The Ecstasy of St. Theresa lasted for four minutes and came from the POV of the alcoholic sandwich bag salesman. And that the four minutes was meant to show the bag salesman’s transcendence of his position as an alcoholic and a man with a menial job. This moment was unironic. Jim was showing her something about art and reality in that scene, she thinks. It was not until after she had met Orin’s family that she came to understand that Orin’s perspective on his father was limited if not fully mistaken. Jim eventually confided that he did not know how to speak to either Hal and Orin. With Mario, who could not speak until the age of six and who shared his interest in film, things were different.

Joelle disliked Avril from the moment they met. She got the feeling Avril wanted to stab her. At that first Thanksgiving dinner, Avril orchestrated the family’s dinner to a disturbing perfection. The Incandenza home was spotless. Hal annoyed her with his precociousness. Orin kept doing a Carl Sagan impression. Mario smiled wildly the whole time. Everyone at the table smiled widely. Jim disappeared into the kitchen at some point. Avril asked everyone at the table to hold hands and the dinner ended in a kind of “explosion of good will.” Avril’s behavior was unimpeachable, but Joelle knew she hated her.

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

Downstairs, Marathe is in Pat Montesian’s office. Pat is on the phone and apologizes to Marathe. He chooses not to pet her dogs and tells Pat about his decision. Marathe logs information about the office as Pat talks to Marathe about his potential residency. He notes stacks of TP cartridges in her cabinet. He thinks one of them may have had a smiley face on it. Pat talks about Joelle, telling him that there is another UHID member in the house. He begins logging all information. He tells her that he lost his legs, nose, and mouth when he was on substances and passed out in the snow for several days.

Image source is here.

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

Returning to Joelle’s room in Ennet House, she is thinking that the reason she found the Incandenza family dinner so sad was because the “whole family was lousy with secrets.” Joelle continues to clean the room. She fears Kate Gompert will come home and see Joelle cleaning.

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

Pat ends up offering Marathe a place at Ennet House, which makes him uncomfortable. He considers his options: he could stay the night and confirm Joelle’s presence, he could immediately call and report to the AFR, or he could immediately call and report to Steeply. This decision will involve him casting his lot with one side finally, either with the BSS or with the AFR. He imagines going under the protection of the US, receiving a home and medical care for his wife. In his mind, he relates his planned betrayal of the AFR to the loss of heart that is the failure to jump in the game of the next train.

Marathe decides not to kill Pat on this trip. Johnette Foltz pokes her head into Pat’s office and Pat asks her to review the cartridges Marathe has just noted this evening. Marathe what the word ‘ETA’ means, hearing them as a french-sounding word instead of the acronym that they are. Pat explains what ETA is and tells Marathe that his residency at Ennet House will involve his finding a job. Marathe signifies that he expected as much.

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

Mario is working on a documentary at ETA this fall. With his Bolex on his head and filming, he heads into Schtitt’s room which is designed to be maximally acoustic for its giant sound system. Schtitt is asleep in the room. Mario records him. Opera plays on the sound system. Mario heads out of the room and finds the hallways mostly empty because 2100 is still mandatory study time.

Mario is bleeding from his pelvic wound but cannot feel any pain. He runs into Lamont Chu. Chu looks into the camera and asks Mario what he should say. Mario tells him to say whatever he would like. Chu can’t think of what to say, at first; then, he says he has just been talking to Lyle, which Mario heartily approves. Chu claims he was telling Lyle about Eschaton and he asks Mario what he thinks will happen to Hal. Mario reacts strangely to Chu’s question because Mario has trouble understanding when Chu is speaking into the camera for filmic purposes and when Chu is speaking to Mario himself, interpersonally. This frustrates Chu. He tells Mario that there is a rumor that Pemulis and Hal were forced to take a urine exam. Mario tells Chu that he will find Chu again after he speaks with Hal; he will find out what happened after the Eschaton in CT’s office.

Mario looks at the Clipperton suite.

Walking toward Avril’s office, Mario can smell his mother’s Benson and Hedges cigarettes. All the lights are on in Avril’s office and she is on the phone. Mario enters the office and walks up to Avril’s desk and unloads some of his equipment. We learn that Avril refuses to speak down to Mario by adjusting her syntax or to asking about his groin injury.  She invites Mario to dinner this evening and asks if he has seen Hal. Mario replies in the negative. Avril is anxious about the Eschaton fallout, about Hal’s teeth, and about his urine exam, but will not ask him about any of these.

Mario wants to ask Avril something. He wants to know how you can tell if someone is sad or not. He says he is asking about a case where there are not obvious signifiers of sadness, like crying. It is a situation where Mario merely suspects the person’s sadness. He asks what if the person acts even less sad than they normally act, wondering if there is a way to determine if they are actually sadder or less sad than usual.

Avril asks if Mario is talking about Hal. Mario replies that he has not seen Hal since lunchtime, after which Avril accepts the question hypothetically. She says that sometimes people disassociate from themselves or don’t seem to be themselves. She tells the story of her father, who missed an opportunity to invest in Coca-Cola and who got drunk four times a year and grew upset with his long-suppressed emotions, but otherwise never showed emotion at all about his missed opportunity. Her point, she says, is that many people are afraid to feel emotion, which she calls “suppression.” She goes on, “People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant.” Mario replies by asking, what if they are even more themselves than usual?

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

Hal wakes Mario up and tells him that he is glad to see him sleeping in their dorm again. He also tells Mario that he had a nightmare about his teeth. Mario asks Hal the questions that accrued over the evening with their mother.

They talk past each other, not replying to one another’s questions. Hal asks Mario if he remembers S. Johnson. Mario replies by telling a story about Avril pretending S. Johnson was a service dog. Hal says he has been thinking about Orin’s lying about how S. Johnson died on the back of the Volvo. Mario replies by telling how Avril would leave a phone by S. Johnson when she was out of town and would call the phone so that S. Johnson would know that he was loved. Orin one time picked up the phone and barked into it, threatening his younger brothers with dire outcomes if they told on him.

Hal explains to Mario that he and Pemulis did not have to surrender their urine. Pemulis convinced the urinologist to give them thirty days before they had to pee in the cup, which is why Hal has decided to sober up. Pemulis apparently talked the guy down. Mario tells Hal that he loves his brother very deeply, which causes Hal to accuse him of having a “Panglossian constitution.” Hal contemplates liars and his brother’s, Orin’s, lies.

14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Ryle’s Jazz Club, Cambridge, MA

Kate Gompert (after being robbed by Poor Tony) and Marathe (after interviewing with Pat Montesian) sit in Ryle’s Jazz Club and talk. They are getting drunk. Kate, who came in to the bar in order to vomit after colliding with a light pole, has never had more than one beer in a sitting. She tells Marathe that she feels better after a couple drinks than she has felt in a long time. Marathe says he rarely drinks, but when he does he has many drinks. Kate replies by sharing a story from AA about a salesman who enters a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk. The man is an alcoholic, but thinks that it will not hurt him to drink some liquor if he puts it in a glass of milk (this story features in AA’s Big Book, but it has been altered).

Marathe tells Kate how he lost his legs, in the game of the next train. He talks about being depressed afterwords. He remembers travelling around Quebec, “moribound.” Despite several times giving it serious consideration, he found he could not kill himself. One day, at the top of a hill, he saw a woman in danger of being killed by a large truck. He claims he was blessed on this day because he did not think of himself. He rolled down the hill as fast as he could and snatched the woman up just in time before the truck hit her. In this instant, Marathe says his life was changed because he had chosen something. Kate becomes excited and asks if he fell in love with the woman when he saw her. Marathe says no; he had already chosen before he ever really saw her; he had chosen her when he went decided to save her. What Marathe describes is a love without passion. Kate resists this idea. Marathe says he even tried to leave his wife, who is severely deformed, but he could not. He chose his wife and he claims that this choice is actually what love is, that when he tried to leave his wife he felt his depression again and had to return to her. Gompert is incredulous. He says, “My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there – this pleasure of not choosing.” Gompert resists this and tells Marathe not to “grudge me a little feeling good, of all people, Ray, asshole, shit-puddle, Swisshead.” Another member of the AFR has wheeled into the bar and is sitting behind Marathe.

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

We return to the conversation between Hal and Mario. Mario tells his brother that he seems sad. Hal replies that he uses large amounts of marijuana and that the administration is trying to get rid of Pemulis. Hal says he is unsure if Pemulis is unaware of this. He further confides that Pemulis’s lie to the urinologist was actually for Hal – Pemulis can pass a drug test at any time – but that Hal is not the one the admin actually wants to get rid of. Hal speculates on how big of a deal it would be if he were the one who got caught by the ONANTA. He says he has decided to fully abstain from pot. Hal says he knows that he has hurt Mario by keeping secrets from him, but Mario claims he actually wasn’t hurt. Hal tells Mario that it’s OK for him to get angry, that Hal will not go anywhere if Mario gets mad at him. Hal continues to think through the situation with the DMZ. This scene gives us a pointed encounter with Hal’s fear of failure. Mario tells Hal he wants to tell him something, which is that what Hal needs to do he has just done.

Endnote 321: 12 November, YDAU (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

This endnote consists of a conversation between Hal Incandenza and Michael Pemulis. Pemulis is trying to teach Hal how to find the derivative of certain trig functions  for the upcoming board exams. Hal wants to share a dream with Pemulis that he had about the soldier who took the DMZ and subsequently “left the planet.” The upshot of the dream is that Hal’s taken the drug and now continually cries out for help but the only thing people hear coming out of him are showtunes. Pemulis dismisses the dream as a basic nightmare, calling the DMZ and showtunes incidental. Hal then reveals that he has been contemplating giving up marijuana, abandoning all hope – as he and Mike call it. Pemulis applauds this idea until he realizes that Hal wants to give up all substances for all time. He tells Hal that Hal is addicted to pot and that whatever part of him needs the drugs will die if Hal stops using them. Hal is skeptical of this assertion. Pemulis tells Hal that he has seen it happen over and over again in Alston: people give up on the substance and either enter a recovery program and become evangelicals or they shoot themselves in the head (a la Clipperton) or they just go through the rest of their lives like machines.

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

Back at Ennet House, Johnette Foltz has had to take up the slack in the absence of the other live-in staffer, Don Gately. She is struggling to stay awake on dream duty. Someone knocks at the front door. She thinks it might be police who want to speak with more residents about the incident with the Canadians. It turns out to be Hal Incandenza. She lets him in and invites him into Pat’s office and appears hostile to him. He wanted to know where he could go to find an Substance Anonymous meeting. Johnette does not like the boy and much later she will remember his appearance, “the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running over his lower lip.”

Endnote 324: 17 November, YDAU – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA

The narrative in this endnote takes us to the males’ locker room and describes the space when it is empty. Soon, we are with Mike Pemulis as he enters the locker room. There are a few boys down here, including a distraught Todd Possalthwaite, who is openly crying. Pemulis, Possalthwaite’s Big Buddy, asks him what’s wrong. “Nothing’s true,” Todd replies. It seems Todd’s father had promised his son a trip to Disney Land if Todd did well either competitively or academically or both. Pemulis assumes Todd’s father’s change of heart might be Eschaton related and offers to call the old man and set him straight about how no one under the age of 17 is in trouble for that particular situation. Todd continues to assert that there is no truth if he cannot depend on patriarchs to keep their word.

Pemulis has taken a tenuate today’s match with Keith Freer, which is out of character, but he needs to win the match in order to get a spot on the trip to the Whataburger. Freer this whole time has been making fun of both Possalthwaite and Pemulis. He also is not getting ready with the speed that Pemulis would prefer. Pemulis is responding to this by not acknowledging that Freer is getting on his nerves by not getting ready and by tormenting the young Possalthwaite while Todd is in crisis. Pemulis begins to tell Possalthwaite that he can trust math, that its study offered him certainty in the world, to which Todd says that his father said that he (Todd) is not good at math.

The boys in the locker room begin to hear the sound of running. Pemulis continues to tell Todd to look to “Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey.” One of the boys says, “John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.” Pemulis tells Possalthwaite, “Never trust the father you can see.” Stice says, “Troeltsch’s got Wayne on the air and Wayne’s lost his mind.”

17 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment – Back Bay Apartment, Boston, MA

We are informed that technical interviewers who work for Rodney Tine actually “bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject.” Molly Notkin is the person being interrogated and she is telling her interviewers everything they want to know and more. She tells them that she is aware of samizdat, Infinite Jest (V or VI), and can confirm that Madame Psychosis performed in it as “some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecongnizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.” This explanation was delivered, allegedly, in a “lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. [MP] may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film’s big technical hook (the Auteur’s films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on the Bolex H32′s turret, and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant.”

Notkin then veers into Joelle’s personal life, saying that MP’s mother killed herself with a garbage disposal on Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (2003), four months before James Incandenza’s own felo de se. Notkin goes on to say that JOI hoped from a critical perspective to “introduce into [Infinite Jest] a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera – explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.” We hear again that MP was a beneficiary of Jim’s will. We also learn that Himself was purportedly buried “in the L’Islet Province of Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the Auteur’s widow, featuring an interment and not a cremation.” Notkin then begins to compare Avril to the figure of death she described in the film above, which makes Notkin wonder why Jim did not film Avril in the first place.

Molly tells the interviewers that Jim’s quitting drinking was one of the conditions on which she agreed to allow him to film her, which he took very seriously because she had recently been deformed in a terrible accident that caused Orin to abandon her. In fact, Jim stayed sober for the next three and a half months, until the day of his suicide, on 1 April, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (2004). In fact, Notkin conjectures that Avril gifted the bottle to Himself on that fateful April day. Notkin talks about the fact that Joelle’s mother died on the same day that her daughter was disfigured. She calls JOI naively post-Marxist and complains about his style and his influences. And she says the myth of a perfect entertainment and lethal cartridge is “nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal,” thoughts she has cribbed from Deleuze’s Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment (not an actual book, though Deleuze was a French theorist who wrote about capitalism).

Molly Notkin then talks about how Joelle became deformed, beginning with the close relationship between JvD and her low-PH father when Joelle was young. After Joelle hit puberty, the father became increasingly obsessed with his daughter and began treating her as if she were growing younger and younger. His unorthodox attachment was never explicitly acknowledged in Joelle’s family until a Thanksgiving dinner for which Joelle and Orin were visiting Joelle’s parents. At the dinner table, Joelle’s father began mashing up her food with a fork, as if she were to young to chew her food. She asked why he did that. He responded that he had been in love with his daughter for years, a declaration that caused his wife, Joelle’s mother, to reveal that she and her husband had not had sex since Joelle first started menstruating. The horrified and no-longer-in-denial mother ran downstairs to her husband’s low-PH laboratory and uncorked a particularly powerful acid, which, when she saw her husband coming quickly into the room after her, she threw at the low-PH chemist. He ducked, as did Orin behind him, and the vial of acid deformed Joelle van Dyne’s face forever, according to Molly Notkin. Joelle’s mother soon after committed suicide by putting her arms, one after the other, in the garbage disposal. And Orin broke up with Joelle shortly after because, according to Notkin, Joelle was no longer acteonizingly beautiful.

Image source is here.

The Sweet Spot

I’m almost finished, only 43 pages to go and I’ll probably sprint so I wanted to say something about this before we all move on. “A somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum.” (p.890) Wallace is talking about a drug cocktail for the brain, what we (my fellow Jesters, then & now, back-in-the-day – the late 60’s early 70’s) used to call “The Balance of Power.” –a perfect mix of a psychotropic drug and alcohol—that brought you to a place that Wallace described so eloquently, as he so often did no matter what it was he was describing.. He nailed it. Put the hammer on it so precisely with such force, that only the set-up first tap was necessary to set the nail, and that then was followed by a blow of such force and power that the nail was driven all the way flush with the surface of the wood. Boom! – the hammerhead leaving what we called “pecker tracks,” the cross hatched, waffle-like pattern of the steel head of the hammer, forged just so so as to not allow for the head of the hammer to slide off the head of the nail. Nailed it. Boom!

Everyone, at sometime or another, has had the feeling, maybe only once with that first perfect orgasm with that first special person you are so, SO, in love with – and then you are always chasing that high, to get it back. It’s the Walk-off home run, the winning shot, the Zone, the groove, the “Peak Experience,” – when everything falls perfectly into its perfect place, seemingly without effort. It flows. Did I mention Flow? “The highs chasing the lows,” becomes a way of life. Of course that’s not the way life is, there are peaks and valleys, highs and lows and the highs require work, preparation, practice, study, perseverance and persistence and patience. All those awful P words. Ach.

Except with that perfect cocktail, but even with that, that what seems so easy, a little of this, and a little of that – THERE! It’s just never quite the same, never as good as the first time. It’s called a pinnacle for a reason and what keeps us chasing that feeling is a good thing – it moves us off our asses, it pushes us to work. Even the junkie works hard – nothing is free, so it seems. And nothing is fair, it seems. Why is IT so easy for them and so hard for me. The deck is stacked. The boat is leaking. THE CAPTAIN LIED!

Jumpin’ Jesus, maybe there is a heaven. Maybe there is an afterlife, better than this life. Maybe I will be born again. If I die trying for that sweet spot so be it. Just don’t let there be too much pain.

August 26, 2013