Me: Are you up for doing dishes?
Spouse: Nope.
M: I cooked.
S: I got the groceries.
M: I read the stories.
S: I did the bath.
M: I did the songs.
S: We both did.
I did laundry.
And the cat box.
M: I swept.
S: I have an early morning.
M: Growing a whole person.
S: Aw, crap.
What can I say? Baby wanted pancakes for dinner, and now baby wants Spouse to clean the stovetop, too. Mama’s messy with batter.
Many well-meaning people keep telling me that having two children will not be as tough as I think because my son will be old enough to help. So I’ve put on my happy face and devised a list of things that I remember being daunting about a newborn so that my then-four-year-old can help:
Take over the nighttime feedings. Or at least one. You’re hereby assigned the 3 a.m. shift.
Please wash the laundry. We’re almost out of diapers, clothes, and hand towels. Well, maybe not, but the hand towels are your fault, so do it all, please.
Make Mommy a snack, please. I’m about to pass out from hunger. Sure you can make yourself one, too. Remember: protein and veggies and fruit. Yes, ice cream is fine, as long as it has strawberries in it.
Hold the baby while I pee, please. Hold its head. Not like that.
Watch the baby while I shower, please. Make sure to entertain, cuddle, chat, and nurse baby, who always seems to want all of those when mommy has soap on her.
Please read Mommy a book. My eyes won’t stay open long enough to see the words. Yes, we’re in the middle of Absalom, Absalom.
Read the baby a book, please. I’ve already covered all these lame-ass texts with you, so show that it was worth it to read the same book 4,812 times in one month.
Please change the baby’s diaper. Mommy doesn’t like poop. It’s very special and wonderful when you make it, but gross from anyone else.
Please also clean the litter box. See above reason. Poop is never cute from cats. Oh, there’s some over there, too? Yes, please. Clean that, too.
Please suck the snot from the baby’s nose. I know it’s screaming like its limbs have been severed. That’s why I’m going in the other room.
Please talk to the baby in a high-pitched voice. Singsong talking makes Mommy want to gouge her eyes out.
Please vacuum.
Please mop the floors.
Please do the dishes.
Please clean the bathroom.
Please change the sheets.
Please change the sheets again. Baby puked.
Please do the laundry again.
Please change the baby’s diaper again.
Please pack the diaper bag so we can go to the playground. Why? Because you deserve a little swing time for all your help, little dude.
[Those thoughtful “friends” were right that it’ll be easier this time. That tiny list certainly seems manageable for a four year old. Can you think of any more of the daunting newborn stuff that can be done by a preschooler? Other than attending to his own physical, mental, developmental, and emotional needs, of course. It would just be silly to ask him to do that.]
So far behind. Have no idea what to focus on. Thinking through pudding. Mmmmm. pudding.
Anyway. highlight quotes from the days and days I’ve missed…
Poor Tony pathos at a new low:
“Krause whimpered raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotiating broken glass the the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop!, with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go!” (721)
Derision of the ignorant at a new high:
‘Did you hear what she said?’ the ironic man on the divan laughed. ‘Potable means drinkable. It’s not even the same root. Did you hear what she said?’ (734)
Orin’s psychological issues turn a corner:
“The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family’s pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely existed, parentally” (737).
And the whole Joelle-at-the-Incandenza’s-for-Thanksgiving-scene: you thought Home for the Holidays was classic Americana lovable weirdness…this scene makes the Incandenzas undisputed next door neighbors to the Addams family.
Gotta tell you…I’m running out of steam on this quote of the day bit. I have used way too many tape flags and folded too many corners and I have stuff to do and…and…and I just want to read it, not blog it. But, sigh, these are the posts nobody reads anyway, so I might as well keep going.
Meh.
We went to the guitar store today to restring Peanut’s awesome little 1/2 scale SX guitar. He earned it potty learning, when he got 20 dry days in a row (and therefore 20 stickers) at 21 months. He bought himself a guitar with the stickers. You’re damned right, kiddo. Not yet two and dry all the time? Guitar? Fine.
Well the trip to the guitar mecca coincides with a midlife crisis I’ve been contemplating, based in part on the nausea I’m feeling at life, my choices, and the impending and rapidly growing BOMB that will descend on my already precarious situation. My midlife crisis today looked a LOT like a $2660 twelve string guitar. Then it looked like an $80 used and totally awesome used natural ash wood bass for the band my newest peeps and I are starting. Then my midlife crisis looked like a miraculous $3200 keyboard that sounded honest to goodness like a well tuned piano.
And then my midlife crisis reminded me what end was really up. Because besides not having even the $80 for a bass, I don’t have time for a new hobby. I have a novel to edit. Again. I have a paper to submit, another paper to write, and a PhD application to ponder for next fall. I have to find a babysitter and a preschool.
I grabbed an Atwood at the library, because there’s nothing to counter balance 32 picture books like an Atwood. We got home late and I had to wash dishes and make dinner. Peanut was in a lovely mood and tried to dump out a whole canister of ground flax. Sealed, luckily, but he was willing to test Oxo’s sturdy seal.
I asked him nicely to put it down, and he did. Sweetly. In the dining room. I continued thinking about whether, really, cowboy boots would serve the same purpose as a guitar, as midlife crises go. Maybe I’d need them for the band (blues, I think, but whatever. Everything goes with buckaroo boots.)
I went into the dining room to give Peanut some carrot sticks. He had dumped all the flax neatly on the table and was sorting it into piles. I took a deep breath and told him to get down. I asked, as I gathered the placemat parking lots, what he was trying to do. He was making pretend smoothies. Sure. okay. As I brought the soapy sponge back and forth from the kitchen, I explained that while pretend is a good idea, his pretend kitchen is a better place for pretend juices. And that using real food for pretend food isn’t a good idea. And that I understand how he wants to help, so he can make a real blender juice with my help. But real food always needs a yes from Mommy.
Okay?
Well, kind of. Except that now, at the dining room table, he has his face burrowed into my brand new, 64 oz. jar of organic kosher pickles. tongue fully extended, licking the brine in the freaking jar. i collapsed on the floor. Took a deep breath. Contemplated a good cry and realized that I already had his cold, so, no harm no foul. I mean, really, really foul, but I’ll be done with the pickles in a few days, so…meh. I told him how not okay it is to put hands or mouths on containers of food. I try to explain, I try to be forceful but casual. I remember a gorgeous burbinga wood guitar and take another breath.
So we make a smoothie together. He’s happy and proud of his blueberry pouring skills. I’m almost ready with dinner. I turn away to get cups for the juice. I pour the juice. I turn away to get lids for the juice.
And now I need one fewer lid because he’s poured all of one juice on himself, trying to get to the purple one first. “you can’t have thee purple one,” he began, before getting really wet and cold.
Here’s the thing, people. I’m barely hanging on. And now the flax-y sponge has to sop up 12 ounces of blueberry smoothie. WHY CAN’T PREGNANT WOMEN DRINK, AGAIN?
I don’t think a late night trip to the pawn shop to trade my wedding ring for a guitar is too much to ask.
There isn’t a line, really, from 694-699 that I didn’t star or underline or flag or highlight or take a deep breath and read again.
Kate Gompert narrates the difference between anhedonia and psychic depression. As it relates to happiness, to the world becoming a map. As it relates to Hal’s understanding of his father’s suicide. As it relates to millennial U.S.A. hipness. As it relates, specifically to cynicism and irony and, really, postmodern fiction, which Wallace seems to argue, kills humanity.
“We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete….the last true terrible sin in the theology of millenial America” (694).
And Hal notes what I’ve heard Wallace articulate in interviews: “that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclittically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. 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” (694-5).
Here’s the thing. This is why I read Infinite Jest. Not for this statement, though I believe it is the key to the post-postmodern literature we’re all alive and lucky enough to watch take shape. But because it took Wallace 700 pages to get the reader to a place where she could hear this. Read it without a sarcastic roll of the eyes. Until you see Ennet House and E.T.A. and Marathe and Gompert and Poor Tony and Matty Pemulis and Lenz and Gately and Mario, for heaven’s sake Mario, this section is just a throw away. Prosthelytizing. But we’ve earned it, reading this far. And it’s more intense than I can articulate. Maybe you can help me.
But here’s the kicker. It gets worse. When Gompert is done with Hal and his relatively petty problems, we get to the realization that “dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain” (695). That “the person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise….It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames” (696).
Holy f—ing….I can’t imagine the pain. I can’t stand to think some people are in that pain. And after narrating the civil engineer’s treatments and the shrugged statement, “This happens sometimes. some cases of depression are beyond human aid,” I cried for Wallace’s wife and his mother and his sister and his father. Intentional fallacy, nothing; nobody’s saying autobiography. But Jesus, people. This book is full of hope and humor and terror and violence and gripping pain. And I can’t believe more people don’t read it.
Thank you, Mr. Wallace for giving the coward, the weakling in me this out:
“She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not” (698). Because this is the kind of stuff, with Poor Tony and Matty’s childhood and Gately’s childhood and Lucien’s murder and the decaying baby and everything else in this novel, all of the psychic pain, to say that there’s even worse pain out there…how the hell are we supposed to sleep at night?
How did he make it as far as he did?
Wallace’s scene shifts often represent ripping the reader out of one state of mind and cramming her into another, and as such require masterful transitions.
Two such transitions rock my world:
“Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T” (299) is possibly the best transition in the whole novel, because it sets the stage for the whole scene, effectively rips us out of the HmH at E.T.A., and yet doesn’t really give anything away.
The second best, I feel, is:
“the Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three” (682).
Yes, it helps that these two transitions, PT Krause and Matty Pemulis set up what are, for me, two of the most visciously and viscerally disturbing scenes of the book. Randy Lenz stayed with me over 12 years, but in this reading both Poor Tony and Matty lept from their pages, slapped me in the face, ripped out my entrails and threw them on the floor before retreating to anonymity in Boston’s dark streets.
Another of the most moving sections has the single worst transition of the novel, thus far. We go from Krause’s release from Cambridge City Hospital to the genesis of his garb to walking by Matty in pursuit of Gompert to Lenz “brandishing the Hog” to “And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:”
Appropos of nothing. Out of the blue. And not artful. In the way I suppose the whole anhedonia versus psychotic depression topic is often awkward and forced and uncomfortable.
But Gompert’s depression section is a whole ‘nother quote of the day. Talk, if you’d like, about how Wallace transitions from channel to channel in IJ, how the characters and scenes and triparite narrative objectives work in the jump cuts he offers.
“Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth” (674).
Love the whole Poutrincourt/Steepley/deLint scene. But really love that sentence.
[Cast of characters: P=Peanut, age 3; M=Me, Mama, age considerably older than 3; S=Spouse. age considerably advanced during the course of this week]
S: Please sit on your knees or bottom
P: [screaming] I get to do whatever I want!
S: Tonight we wash hair, P.
P: After I get out of the bath, I will hit you.
M: Honey, do you need help with the scissors?
P: No. [tries, tries, tries] These won’t work on paper. Now I will just cut you, Mommy.
P: [beating on his friend] We share! Did you hear me? We share!
M: Let’s go, P.
P: If you put on your shoes, I will hit you.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it’s a dang good thing we named him with the following criteria: must work well after ‘Supreme Court Justice’ AND ‘recently indicted.’ Take a guess which one will probably apply.
Been a while. I’ve been captured by the great apathy monster and could not give a flying fig newton about blogging or quoting.
But, it seems time to sink into the depths with Wallace, to the description of what an intentional fallacy argument might suggest was a reality in Wallace’s life. Here’s the first heart wrenching discussion between psychotically depressed Kate Gompert and generally bedridden Geoffrey Day. The latter is telling her how his depression felt.
“‘As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can’t be more more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.’
‘But it was inside you, though.’
‘Katherine, Kate, it was a total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey….It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted’ ” (649-50).
A guy who writes a thousand page novel, within which lie four distinct objective and plotlines, further within which are sierpinski’d convolutions and fissures and faultlines of meaning and intertextual references to classics and postmodern and popular culture alike, and in which the he presents odes to the novel’s forebears as his text mocks those predecessors and commits violent patricide and seeks to move beyond them…this author—who announces in interviews that the text exists between the reader and the words but not with him, the author, for once he is done he might as well be dead—was also reportedly tormented by a depression that goes far beyond the anhedonistic depression most of us think of as debilitating. This man uses a fictional character to explain in detail how every moment and every cell is pain in Gompert and Day. He chronicles others’ moment to moment conundrum of staying in the flame or jumping.
This guy breaks. my. heart.
It’s not what you think. Not my gypsy wanderlust or my refusal to realize that geography is less my problem than the reality of my personality being located deep in the heart of F—ed Up Head Case Land.
No, the problem is that our choice of Northern California, land of the local, slow food movement, means there’s no crappy high fructose craving food for MILES. My favorite, a confection involving soft serve blended into a grittle-y ice granule and syrup concoction, is available 14 miles away, if I’m willing to drive into the center of the solar flare that is the east East Bay. My second favorite, an ice granule and syrup concoction (one more toothsome that then whirred popular stuff the consistency of cold mashed potatoes, and where, at least in my childhood, you could control your own application of syrup which unleashed possibilities of flavor mixing and sugar comas the likes of which thrilled a younger me), is nowhere nearby. I emailed the company, which is still in business 20 years after my last craving, to find out where they sell my sugary ice crystals. Two states over, it seems, is a safe bet…
So we have to move. Because mama needs a blue raspberry something, and I don’t want that ubiquitous air and mashed potato frozen nonsense from a convenience store.
What do you NEED from your childhood that is nowhere nearby? Wanna borrow my wayback machine when I’m done with it?
And then your lids flutter
and sighs betray you.
Cells decompress and
the world levitates off my sternum
where it resides every moment that you’re awake.
No more fire-cured creations will shatter;
no shrieks at passersby,
friends,
pigeons.
No more protecting society from all you would unleash
nor you from all its ills.
As long as those lids press and
breath comes softly
I am at peace.
I should kiss your brow
but I stick out my tongue and
scowl at you.
I’ve stifled it all day
and now is the time to
catch up.
“Gately shrugs at the Nucks like he’s got no choice but to be here” (611).
Oh, Don. Of all the mythological pathos. Really? For Lenz? I haven’t read a character in a long time that I actually believed was a damned fine human being.
While we’re at it, in the damned fine human being category, I need to address what I feel is the book’s most important (spoiler-line-limited) line. Sorry to all the Infinite Summer participants who’ve seen this from me on the forum. But in light of the novel’s purpose for locating a post-postmodernism in the heart of something anti-ironic and genuine and human and painfully real, and in light of This is Water and the Kenyon commencement, 592 strikes me as intensely important.
“The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. it’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy” (592).
Between Gately’s honesty about hitting his knees every night to beg the ceiling for something because he can’t believe in anything but the ritual and Mario’s transcendental human beauty, I am even more moved by this novel the second time than I was the first. Because the drugs and the Entertainment and the tennis and the horrible demappings are all secondary to the intensely important project of moving beyond poststructuralist dehumanizing Lacanian Derridean postmodern posing into art that is, at its core, a beating heart.
Hey. I found a way to add two hours to my day. I don’t blog, I don’t read, I don’t clean, I ignore my kid as much as possible, and I don’t work on either my novel or client work.
Voila. Two hours to loll about and stare at the ceiling, asking it what I ever did to deserve so much energy.
Don Gately love fest continued from quote 42
Endnote 249
“It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.”
Seriously. Mr. Gately. The offer I made yesterday to tuck you into bed with homemade soup and let you relax and clean up nothing for a year stands. Spouse knows. He’s cool with it.
[Randy Lenz, I’m boycotting you. Don’t think I didn’t flag like 312 quotes from your nonsense, but don’t think for a minute I’m blogging any of your skulking as a quote of the day.]
“Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen and then not cleaned up after themselves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out who’s responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting among the residents is such that you’d think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit” (594).
Okay, first, I want to take Don Gately home and make him a pot of soup ad tuck him in after a long day and tell him he doesn’t have to clean anything for a year. I think I need an “I Heart Don Gately” bumper sticker. He would be the best sponsor ever. EVER.
And Mr. Wallace, you’d better be pretending to find those Rice Krispie things disgusting; this had better be a narrator or Gately himself balking at the mess because, really, I might forgive you the horrors you’ve created in Randy Lenz, but I don’t think I can continue to be enormously enamoured of a SNOOT who doesn’t like Rice Krispie treats.
NaptimeWriting 