This is it. The last weekend of Summer of Jest. Monday, Sept. 2, is the last day on the Reading Schedule. After that point all spoiler-related concerns will no longer be Entertained. However, we’re definitely going to stick around on the Facebook group to keep talking about #InfiniteJest and all things #DavidFosterWallace — so come hang out!

In the meantime, an offshoot group has started to read other books and socialize without any limitations as to staying “on topic.” I’ll be there too and we’ll be reading The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, starting on Sept. 23. It’s called the Misfit Readers Book Club — check it out.

Back at Summer of Jest, we’ll be reading David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (one of Wallace’s favorites), starting Oct. 23. Then we’re planning a ‘Pale Winter’ (i.e., reading Wallace’s The Pale King) starting Dec. 21.

Thanks so much to everyone who participated this summer! Thanks to you, I’d say the experiment has been a success

When I read the last line of Infinite Jest the first coherent thought I had was: “well, I kind of wish I had been wearing pants for that.”

Was I angry? At first – yeah, I think I was. After months of reading, referencing, looking up words, having intelligent discussions (and some not-so-intelligent ones), THIS was the ending? This was what it had all come down to? Why, it was hardly an ending at all.

And then that thought began to grow roots that spread. It wasn’t an ending. The book didn’t end. Instead of tying up loose ends, of concluding character arcs, of showing you what it all meant, Wallace did what seems to be the inverse of all this. The one nod he gives you to conclusion is at the beginning of the novel when we see what Hal has become, and read that cryptic line that makes no sense about he and Gately digging up his father’s head – but even that isn’t near a conclusion. It’s merely an incomplete epilogue as a prologue. A misnomer. You believe (if you have ever read a book) that this one will come around and leave you right back where you started, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t even come close.

When I realized there was no conventional ending I had to go back and mentally check in with each story arc, with each scene, with each character. I had to begin to put the pieces together myself.  I found after some mental heavy lifting that I had ALMOST been given the tools to do that, and for a moment that made me even angrier.

What had I expected? That the book would tie itself up in a neat little package and tell me what it had all meant?

Well, if that’s what I was expecting – and I don’t think it’s too far fetched after a lifetime of reading books that do exactly that – I was sorely, sorely disappointed.

But why?

The book, as it stands, is more true to life than anything else I’ve ever read. Sure, coincidences happen, narratives and people and lives are momentarily intertwined. We have thoughts, moments, experiences that lead us for a time to believe that it’s all leading somewhere, that there’s an epic conclusion in store where the suffering and joy and borderline insanity we’ve felt will coalesce into one, meaningful moment that will illuminate the past and make it all seem worth it.

But that doesn’t happen. Life is messy, stories go unfinished, things happen for no reason at all. You’re left, most of the time, with a collection of these moments that seemed to mean something – left wondering if you have the time or the will or the inclination to fill in the blanks between them until it all makes sense.

At first I wondered if it had all been a waste of time. I had what felt a lot like an existential crisis about my time and the value of reading about all these people’s pointless lives when it wasn’t ever going to like, LEAD anywhere.

But after that thought fizzled out, I had another – possibly more optimistic – thought: When untethered from the conventional idea of an “ending” these stories were free to mean whatever they had meant individually. The floating ideas that never materialized into plot were free to be judged on their own merit. The pieces that did fit could be puzzled together to make approximate sense with a little imagination. The beautiful and meaningful moments could stand alone as separate and beautiful and meaningful without having to be functional as a means to an omniscient end (unless you wanted them to be). The pointless and tedious times could be written off without the feeling that you were wrong to have hated reading them because of their later importance to the overall story. Well, most of them, at least.

That being said, of course there are dots to be connected. Of course there are ways to finish the story. Do I have theories about how it all came to be? Of course I do. What sane person, after spending 3 months of their life reading this book, wouldn’t try to make some sense of it all?

My point is that these theories and the conclusions it’s possible to draw from the book aren’t the point of the ending. I’m not going to post mine because they aren’t any better than yours, or any more complete. The bottom line is that we don’t have all the information, which means everyone’s version of what happened is just as valuable as everyone else’s. The leaps we have to make to fill in the blanks are our own narratives, our reactions and conclusions a kind of litmus test.

The bottom line is: we all bought our tickets to see a blockbuster and we ended up just watching ourselves on the screen.

The purpose of this ending is that it truly makes the book “infinite” (said every single blog about the end of Infinite Jest, ever). We spend the whole book practically begging Wallace to play God, and in the end he refuses to do it. He gives the book back to us and challenges us to be more than drooling passive consumers of entertainment. The end isn’t a conclusion, it’s a diving board to re-enter the book and see what we missed, what we glossed over, what we lost in translation.

So yeah, you can get mad and just light the thing on fire or you can google “what happened in Infinite Jest” and let someone else do the work for you. But to me, that would be intentionally missing the point of the narrative, which is to go deeper and challenge yourself to be more than a spectator.

For about five minutes after I read the last word of this book I fervently wished I had never wasted my time. But after a few days of digestion I find I’m now a member of the cult. This was truly one of the most eye opening, game changing pieces of literature I’ve ever read and I don’t regret a second of it.

The novel has ended; the meta-novel has begun.

“I am in here.”

I turned the last page of Infinite Jest around two weeks ago.  I hadn’t meant to get so ahead of the group’s schedule; up until the mid-500’s I think I was on target (or not far off anyway), but there comes a point in the book shortly after the big hoo-haa outside Ennett House, all guns and punches and stiletto heels, that’s like sitting in a homemade go-cart at the top of the steepest hill in your town, you haven’t got a clue what a mess you’ll be in when you get to the bottom of the hill but you know that one way or another you’ll definitely get there, and fast.  It wasn’t long after the “Gately versus the angry Canadians” scenes that I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from whizzing down that hill and reading as much as I possibly could each night.  I had to know how things would end…

…Of course, if you’ve also made it to the end of the book you’ll be painfully aware that it’s not the end of the story.  Far from it.

I’ve seen lots of reviews of Infinite Jest that focus on the size of the book, the physical weight of carrying it around with you and the mental weight of it on your shoulders, like it’s something on your to-do list to be put off or worried about (spoiler: it’s really not).  I don’t see the size or total page number as something to be intimidated by, rather as something to be soaked up and enjoyed.  This isn’t a wham bam thank you ma’am one-nighter of a book, and it’s not a book that leaves you wanting at barely ten pm, waiting to be excited, waiting to be entertained.  Infinite Jest is a book that consumes your thoughts, your time and a book that as a reader you have to physically interact with.  It forces you to concentrate hard on the tiny 8-pt text, flip the leaves of paper back and forth from the point you’re reading to the back pages of over three-hundred footnotes, all the while keeping up in your mind with plot lines and narratives that, at least initially, don’t seem to have any connection to each other at all.  Glimmers of links of chains of knowing start to appear, making attempts at forging connections, hidden between the lines of text and under the rocks of David Foster Wallace’s made-up words.  Names not mentioned for tens of pages suddenly pop up once more; you realize that one of the residents in Ennet House is the same guy waiting for his dope drop near the beginning of the book.  That mysterious woman who tells stories on the radio, with the voice that keeps Mario Incandenza company long into the night?  She’s someone very special, keep a note of her.  The housebreaker who accidentally suffocates the sick guy who owns the house he’s broken into?  Why, he’s the fixed point all the other characters radiate from and towards – yes, even the closed-off troubled tennis prodigy from the first section.  Even him.

It is suggested that James Incandenza made “Infinite Jest” (aka “the samizdat”, aka “the Entertainment”) as a way of drawing out the personality and feelings of his emotionally closed-off middle son, Hal.  Hal’s passivity and detachment affects every aspect of his life, highlighted by the way  he plays his tennis game.  He forces whomever he plays into making costly mistakes on the court; Hal doesn’t win so much as his opponent loses.  Himself saw this detachment in his son and felt desperate to crack Hal open and make him truly alive, and thought the Entertainment was the way to do so.

Finishing Infinite Jest raises almost as many questions as reading it answers.  Who was the narrator?  Where is the master copy of the Entertainment?  Who does Orin mean when he screams “do it to her!”?  Is CT Mario’s father?  What the hell happened to Pemulis?  For some of these questions, my own vague ideas are slowly beginning to form but I fully expect that it’ll take at least another full read to have any substantial answers.

At the beginning of our Summer of Jest someone whose writing I admire told me to relax and enjoy it, that Infinite Jest wasn’t a challenge to be won or lost but just an immensely readable and rewarding book.  At that point I was one of those who saw the mountain ahead of me and didn’t have a clue how I would get to the top, never mind all the way to the other side.  I saw it completely the wrong way, as something to cross off from a “things to read before you’re thirty” list, or maybe I saw it like a test to be beaten.  Something to be achieved rather than something to be enjoyed.  It was only once I put thoughts of “the challenge” to one side and really concentrated on the words in front of me that I began to immerse myself in the many stories contained on its pages and love the book as a whole.  The experience I had reading Infinite Jest was unlike any other book I’ve read, and while I’m not sure that reading it for a second time will have the same effect I really can’t wait to go back to page one and find out.

(Originally posted on my scrappy, badly maintained blog).

Courtesy of the inimitable Mark Jabbour, using images uploaded to the Summer of Jest Facebook group (Jul-Sept 2013).

Slideshow #1, aka “Global Chaos,” can be found here.

by Zachary Warner

Last words…

So, you just finished reading Infinite Jest and now you’re trying to make sense of the much lauded comedy. It’s likely that you’re confused and just bursting with disappointment. You read the last page and you sat for a few split seconds contemplating Bimmy’s indestructible body sinking into the rain-soaked beach before you hawked a loogie on the book’s cover. However, IJ is NOT about the plot; it is a meta novel about ideas. This is the true genius of the gargantuan tome; it was purposely written in a manner that does not allow a clear ending to be extrapolated from the 1,079 pages of data.

Unsurprisingly, the Samizdat (J.O.I.’s Infinite Jest VI) was a blatant metaphor for Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Neither the plot of Infinite Jest nor the plot of the Samizdat are ever fully explained. The novel’s symbolism is overt and the themes are heavy handed (abuse, addiction, annulation, depression, entertainment/mass media, solitude), just as J.O.I.’s films are described as having a thematic bluntness (depression, entertainment, grief, infidelity, pain, solitude) by the fictitious critics of the novel’s universe. Both Wallace and J.O.I. use anti-confluentalism and are regarded as virtuosic in their respective arts. Trying to make sense of IJ’s expansive realm and to formulate a fitting conclusion is tantamount to writing an ebullient review of Incandenza’s “found drama.” DFW’s prose is technically golden, but he is an ineffective storyteller; just as Incandenza was a technical genius with optics, but was criticized for his plot development. Infinite Jest can be opened from any page and enjoyed as if the book were a series of short stories that happen to have common characters. This is why Wallace seemingly makes errors with dates and certain near-homophones that do not appear to be on character’s behalf; it makes no difference because the abundant details and incongruities serve only as an elaborate ruse formulated for confusion. Readers are supposed to believe that they missed some hidden key to unlock the meaning of IJ; this inspires a rereading. This book is simply too long (and let’s face it, silly) for more than one reading.

In the novel, individuals that view the Samizdat are consumed by its euphoria-inducing properties and become trapped in a cataleptic state continually re-watching the film until they slough their mortal coils in front of the screen. IJ was designed to dupe the reader into believing that it needs to be reread. The Wraith is a red-herring deviously concocted to allow the mental gymnastics, on behalf of the reader, that make this book the genius achievement that it is. The Wraith functions as a deus ex machina to be contemplated by the reader. Wallace wrote IJ with the intention to make the reader believe that the story must be reviewed to be fully understood, yet all the reader must understand is the hilarity of IJ; it is little more than a series of crudely linked jokes within technically superb sentences.

What then of the various theories that claim to unify the 1,079 pages of brilliant and excruciating detail under a decisive conclusion? Under close examination, none of the theories that I have encountered are complete. Even the best theories that I have read lack the elegance and lucidity required to properly explain this novel. Thanks to all of the poor souls that hashed out absurdly esoteric theories regarding the novels denouement, I was able to devise this theory with only one reading under my belt.

The concept Wallace intended to confer with the title is that the entire plot is a meta-joke — a phantasm that can only be interpreted to make sense once an individual internalizes the book and theorizes what could have happened. Almost everyone that reads IJ can find a unique conclusion to the plot beyond the last page. However, there is too much missing information to confirm any plot theory that fills in the gaps.

Readers should understand from the start that IJ is a massive novel (seemingly Infinite during one’s immersion) and it is all a joke (Jest). I believe that DFW crafted the novel as such to instill the feelings of isolation experienced by most of the characters. The book is analogous to a drug that beckons the user back with the illusion that something more will be experienced upon the next use. This book really has no message beyond its representations of comedic anguish, only motifs and information; a nod to the confusion about patterns in life, which must have wracked Wallace’s (likely manic) brain before he committed suicide.

That’s a goddamned lie.

“Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.”[1] Or, “… no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.” (p.201)  That, I think, about sums up all the chatter about David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, especially when it comes to the ending, which is not an end, but a part of a flashback from a maybe dying man, Don Gately – dying of pain because he won’t allow the doctors to give him pain medication because he has been told that, despite his enormous size and strength, he’s a weak man. He believes all the clichés that are the heart of living a life of recovery from substance abuse. The end of the story is actually the beginning of the book, or the beginning of the book is actually The END; and, again, is not an end to the story, just a pause in the life of Hal Incandennza.

This is my second reading of IJ and I’ll stand by the review that I wrote 2¹/₂ years ago. (read the review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/143264921) but I’ve come to recognize some things that I missed earlier, details, that came into focus maybe because since that first reading I’ve read so much of Wallace’s other work, and read about his life, and watched clips of and about him on YouTube; so some little things jumped off the pages, this time. Here’s one: “He [James Orin Incandennza, the Mad Stork, Himself.] stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn’t take it but he’d made a promise.” (p. 940) Those are the words of Joelle V. Dam, Madam Psychosis, star of the rumored-to-be-fatal entertainment, which it turns out is nothing of the sort. In fact it was never finished and doesn’t exist. It was all a “goddamned lie.” Turns out, that’s the main theme of the book, I think. That everything is a lie and you cannot trust anyone, not and especially your parents – to tell the truth; and not even the author David Wallace, because he knows that if he tells the truth he will lose that which he so desperately craves, that which we all do – the love and affection and respect – for just being who you [“… ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché.” (p.204)] are by the people you want so badly to love and trust and respect you – your parents, a lover, those in authority … and but what the fucking hell happened – they’re all goddamn liars. So Wallace hides the truth in the pages of text, the pages & pages of endnotes in very small print, and makes you, the reader, work, and work and work, and guess and wonder just what the fucking hell is going on, here, in this massive masterpiece of contemporary experimental fiction.

We readers are introduced first to the idea that lying is the way of the world in the beginning scene where Hal is accused of falsifying his academic credentials to get into university. We are introduced to special agents and assassins whose jobs’ entail lying and deceiving over and over again to everyone. Everybody lies about everything. That sentiment is maybe best articulated in endnote 324, which is not attached to anything – it just appears all by its lonesome surrounded by blankness and white, on page 787 – by a 13 year old boy, Todd Possalthwaite, aka ‘Postal Weight’ who declares to his big buddy, Mike Pemulis, not only a drug user, but also a seller of drugs and an almost flawless liar, who is perhaps the healthiest and most well-adjusted of all the characters … Why? Because he understands the game and how it’s played. He (Pemulis) doesn’t care, he, “… didn’t consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.” (p.805) “It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or worry that you might think ill of him.” (p. 907)

Postal Weight sobbing, “‘Nothing’s true.” (p. 1067)

And so for 7+/- pages in EN 324, 17 year-old Pemulis tells his young charge how the world is (= unfair and full of lies and liars) and but that math is true – you can trust math.  People you cannot trust, but you can trust math. Finally we are introduced to Eugene Fackelmann on page 912, a feckless man, a drug-addict and sadistic enforcer for a book maker, who lives by lies (Fackelmann) and who then meets his end via torture by a tortured entertainment, not the rumored one, but a readily available one, none of which is fair – it was all a mistake, a lie. EVERYTHING IS A LIE! “ ‘s a goddamned lie,” Flackelmann repeats over and over in an illegal high and piss and shit covered stupor. He feels no pain. And so then the torture is administered by a man “C” who was himself killed horribly in the very beginning of the novel, because of lying and stealing – so, ah, a little bit of justice but ass backwards. [eg. This gem by DFW: “This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap measure …” (p.888)] You/we readers have to work like hell to make sense of it, everything. Everything is flipped. Everything you thought you knew about writing and storytelling is turned on its head. “Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of clinical depression by being a freaking hero.” (p.778) 21 year-old depressed-doper Kate Gompert exclaims to the assassin, the legless Canadian, Remy Marathe, in a bar, who himself declares that love is nothing more than a decision – that you in effect can love anything, even the most grotesque thing, if you choose to. Yikes! That desire and the pursuit of happiness is a dead-end and is the cause of all suffering. Yikes! And the depressed, suicidal Ms. Gompert tells the assassin Marathe, you are one sick motherfucker, in essence. (Which is true.)

“Don’t grudge me a little feeling good.” (p. 781) Says, Gompert.

The final scene, which actually happened way before, is of Flackelmann being un-narcoticized and his eyes sewn open[2] so that he can watch what is a horrible sound being made by a famous woman in a concert who has no reason for her fame and stage, other than her association (marriage) to a famous singer/songwriter/musician. Then as he, Fackelmann, presumably dies, he screams about lies. At the very end of the text, the witness to that horror, Don Gately, now nine months clean and sober, lies dying in a hospital bed and drifts off into a dream about beaches, and cold sand, and rain and the ocean.

What do I think? I think Wallace was trying somehow to make sense of world that, for all his genius, he couldn’t make sense of because everyone he loved and trusted seemed to lie to him, and/or to live in denial, especially the woman he had fallen in love with, who had just published a memoir titled, The Liars’ Club. (read the review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/274262110

I was going to post a separate post devoted to Wallace’s killing himself, but since this post is about endings, I’ll just go to this article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/05/22/why-suicide-has-become-and-epidemic-and-what-we-can-do-to-help.html It is the best I’ve ever read so far on suicide. It’s very current and makes so much sense to me. Briefly, the author of the research has found that killing yourself is a confluence of three factors: 1) Feeling alone/isolated [“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.” (p.202)]; 2) Feeling as though you are a burden to those you love; 3) Being unafraid to die. With Wallace, it’s easy to imagine how they all came together at that particular time in his life.

I am seeing now, in the re-reading of IJ just how angry and alone Wallace was, but he could/would not let that out. He couldn’t say what he really thought so he wrote this book. Some have said depression is “Anger turned inwards” –directed at the self. It’s easy now to see all his frustration was finally turned inward towards himself, and that he felt a burden to those around him, and that it was his fault. If I was forced to pick only a few words to describe his writing style, I’ll choose: Passive Hostility. Not passive-aggressive because it wasn’t aggressive, but it was definitely hostile – the hostility hidden behind humor, which is a very high-level, pro-social ego defense mechanism, humor. But that that finally failed him also. “Things” were just no longer funny and he “chose” to eliminate his map to, “‘self-erasure.’” (p. 791)

(…)

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The “I” is for the first reading. Funny how I knew I would be re-reading The Jest before I even started the first time!

It’s nearly October and I’m nowhere near finished with The Jest (as one of my friends calls it). I can’t remember why or when I decided to read IJ but I started May 29th and am currently on page 772. A month of debate camp (basically where you spend a month on a college campus and eat, breathe, and dream debate–kind of like ETA but for high school policy debaters) in July and starting my junior year of high school have sidetracked me major big time. But I refuse to quit for the following reasons:

1. I am too far in to quit now.
2. Strangely this is the one project/hobby that I’ve started and have not wanted to quit (examples include violin, tae kwondo, running 5Ks, taking coursera classes, etc.)
3. Although some of my enthusiasm has waned, I’m still pretty emotionally attached to most of the characters, my favorite being the P.G.O.A.T., for no particular reason
4. I HAVE to know if the wheelchair assassins get the Samizdat!
5. On a similar note, I have to know how Hal gets into the situation w/r/t his grades and college admissions at the beginning of the book!
6. This book has changed me. I don’t know how but it has. I feel like if I finish The Jest then I can finish any book, no matter how thick the book is or how dense the writing is.
7. God this book has been there for me more than anyone else has. It’s a great thing to read when your entire life goes to shit. I have notes scribbled in the margins from days when I was diagnosed with Bipolar, days when I found out about some skeletons in the family closet, and scribbles, highlights, and circles around passages that just resonate with me. Bomb a test? Best friend starts to get jealous of you and ignore you? Fight with debate partner? Read Infinite Jest and you’ll instantly feel better.
8. I like the feeling of it in my backpack at school. Yes it’s an extra three pounds but I like knowing it’s there. I’ve been lugging it around since I started reading and I’m not used to it not being with me all the time.
9. I have to have something to read while my English teacher is rambling on about nothing in class (We get it. You’re a published poet with two masters degrees. Now are you going to let us discuss our arguments about whether or not Perry Smith is a prisoner of his own history or are you going to get defensive and ramble about your credentials whenever someone I disagrees with you?).
10. I think the majority of people who ask me “why are you reading THAT?” and “are you seriously annotating it for fun?” think I’m some sort of freak or won’t finish it and I want to prove them wrong (though I’ll agree with the freakishness ) and show them that it’s possible for people to enjoy reading and re-reading and scrutinizing texts outside of English class.
11. The community of people who’ve read this Book and DFW’s other works is really amazing. The people in the Summer of Jest group are awesome. Checking out Consider the Lobster and Stephen Burn’s reading guide at the UT library during camp was ten times more awesome when the librarian, who had finished IJ in March, struck up a conversation about the book.
12. I’m addicted. IJ is about addiction and entertainment, and oddly enough it became my addiction when I started reading. There was a point where I didn’t want to read anything else and I wanted to stay at home all day and read, but at the same time I didn’t want to finish the book because it meant no more Jest!
13. I feel like I owe it to David Foster Wallace. It’s weird, I know. But his work is a comfort to me. It’s relatable. I see bits of myself in some of the characters. I got to see his handwritten questions for his interview with Roger Federer at the Harry Ransom Center this summer and they just blew me away and made me tear up a bit. I love this book. Even through the miserable parts and the disgusting parts (the only character I HATE so far is Lenz because he just gives me the creeps, plus the murder of Bertraund and Lucien was a bit much), it’s just awesome. And I think that the pure Awesomeness of this book alone is the only justification for finishing The Jest that I need.

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, represents realism as a function of banality. It’s narrative rarely resolves, disrupted by a seemingly boundless lexicon and an erratic temporality, and the impulse, after more than a thousand pages, is to start back at page one. Not contextualizing it as within a specific style makes the novel seem like a sadistic joke, but because “Infinite Jest” exhibits a tenet of postmodernism, specifically the acknowledgement of banality as a defining characteristic of artistic form, such a consideration is worth exploring.

Resolutions subordinate to the central narrative serve as the novel’s dominant climaxes. By explicating that Helen and Hugh Steeply are the same person and the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” is 2009, the importance of peripheral facts are effectively appreciated over those that are implied, such as whether the “Samizdat” exists, Marathe’s wife receives aid, Avril Incandenza is a Canadian spy, A.A. is effective for Don Gately, and Hal Incandenza’s decline is a symptom of neglect. The novel would seem unfinished, full of holes, confusing, without writings like Hilton Kramer’s 1982 essay, “Postmodern Art and Culture in the 1980s,” and George Kubler’s 1962 book, The Shape of Time, to contextualize the banal approach as a mimetic device.

In his essay, Kramer includes a quote from architectural critic Charles Jencks that makes a direct linkage between realism and banality. “It is realistic, because it accepts monotony, cliché and the habitual gestures of a mass-production society as the norm without trying to change them. It accepts stock response and ersatz without protest, not only because it enjoys both, finding them real, but because it seeks to find those usually disregarded moments of interest (the fantastic hidden in the banal).”[1] Kubler’s linkage is more poetic, having been published years before the term “postmodernism” became standardized. “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real.”[2]

Such banal realism is conveyed in Infinite Jest by temporal disruptions, including endnotes, a calendar subsidized by brands, and a chronology that flashes back and forward, combined with a semiotic authority that equates jargon with unintelligible symbols. But the most overt reference to the postmodern style occurs when James O. Incandenza, appearing as a wraith to Don Gately, describes his approach to filmmaking. The manifesto, especially the concept of focusing on figurants, provides an allegory for the motivations behind the novel’s style. “The wraith says that he himself, the wraith, when animate, had dabbled in film entertainments, as in making them, cartridges, for Gately’s info to either believe or not, and but in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn’t just the self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment….Which is why, the wraith is continuing, the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith’s entertainments’ public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism.”[3]

The novel’s mass promises answers, and when those answers are withheld the commitment yields either disappointment or the idea that something’s evaded comprehension. But because banality is a characteristic of the postmodernist style, Infinite Jest, a book that conjures how it feels to never reach “The Show” nor “I.D.,” sheds its sadistic stigma and illuminates as a contemporary literary achievement.

When I look back on the year 2013 three things come to mind: This was the year my eyesight could be corrected with glasses after a medical marathon, the first year of my best friend’s twin girls and the year that I joined an online group to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for the second time, together with 500 people from all over the world.

I had first started Infinite Jest in 2010 and counting all attempts and long pauses it took me about three years, due to bad eyesight before and after my cornea transplantation (…endnotes!), because I read the original version and English is not my first language and because of all the reasons Infinite Jest is a hard book to get through for everyone. So when I finished it, I was confused, but I thought it was me, I must have missed out on some important facts and connections. Where was the Master copy? What became of Pemulis? And most important: what happened to Hal? But I still loved the writing and the characters enough to be determined to read it again and not immediately sneak around the internet to look for the solutions.

I found out about the Summer of Jest project three days before it started, completely circumstantial, and joined the Facebook group. I thought the communal and more concentrated reading would help me find out about the fate of the characters of Infinite Jest. It didn’t. Instead it helped me find out about literature, tennis, David Foster Wallace’s other works, probably more English language practice than I am aware of, a little philosophy, myself and the friends I made in the process. I rediscovered my passion for reading and their recommendations made me buy a pile of books I have yet to read (plus several metaphorical piles in my head).

One night while sitting in front of the computer chatting online I started scribbling tennis balls and yachting caps without even knowing.  Drawing is another hobby I had neglected in the past years. Ultimately I started a bigger project based on my two favorite characters Hal and Pemulis (okay, I can’t help but to also mention Eric Clipperton and Schacht here) and inspired by my maybe favorite endnote 123. Although first I had no clear picture of them in mind, sticking to the descriptions in the book (e.g. page 786 for Hallie and page 169 for the Peemster) this is what finally emerged and what I have yet to contribute to this page before the year comes to its end.

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.