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.
Today’s quote straddles the spoiler line, so consider yourself warned if you haven’t hit 568 yet…
‘I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was wearing the blindfold to play.’
‘How’d it go?’
‘Not as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently judged the intensity of balls struck on adjacent courts as ran onto adjacent courts, intruding play.’ (568).
Combine shadenfreude and tennis and I’m yours. Better even that the Eschaton’s aftermath because nobody really gets hurt. That’s my kind of slapstick.
Gately and P.G.O.A.T/former P.G.O.A.T interface front office, Ennet house 0450h, 11 November, culminating in:
‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was i just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn’t you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?’
….
‘You want to see my professional Staff face here’s my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face I’m going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like Where’s the net.’
‘Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe, I know.’
‘See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds log: “six extra-strong-kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who things she knows everybody else’s issues.’
‘What position did you play?’
‘…that the Staffer wonders how come she’s even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’
Teehee. This is like high school love. Splendid. Just top notch, the whole conversation.
Do yourself a favor and go read Infinite Jest.
Regarding the Moms’s profering of her apple to a starving Hal:
“Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario—the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot” (523).
I read this 12 years ago on Hal’s side. Now I totally vote with Avril. She wants him to eat and doesn’t want him to starve of politeness. *sigh* What a difference a little life experience makes.
Happy halfway through Infinite Jest, peeps who are still hanging in by a “dento-dermal layer.”
One of my favorite scenes of the book.
“Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’
Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bon-hommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’
By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression:
‘You think I fucking like to go around and hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said….I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked, he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-weartng-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass'” (506).
One of the reasons I’ve loved Wallace’s prose since I found it in 1997 is his mastery of words that often send the less confident amongst us scrambling to a usage guide. To wit:
“I looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather that somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous” (498).
I love (capital L love even if that bastardizes the word meant to encapsulate feelings you deem more worthy, it’s still what I feel, and it even borders on slurping, my affection) love proper use of the word nauseous. I’ve blogged about it not just once but twice, and waxed both philosophical and self-righteous about it. The short version, for you Wallace fans just stumbling upon Himself’s story about how the terrifying mattress scene inspired to “become interested in the possibilities of annulation” (503), is that nauseous is something that inspires people to vomit. Similarly, something nauseating beckons us to relieve the contents of our stomachs. That’s because nauseated is when you feel as though you might feel better through hurling. Something nauseous makes you nauseated.
Anything makes me nauseated right now, except parsing the grammar of the master.
If you haven’t, go read Tense Present, Wallace’s impeccable tract on the usage debate between prescriptive and descriptive linguists, and the successes and failures of various usage guides. (Thank you, Harper’s for posting his work in one place for us. Damned decent of you.) If you don’t want to read online check out one of the best non-fiction collections I’ve ever read: Consider the Lobster. For those who love his math geekitude, there are also wondrous gleams of genius in Wallace the grammarian.
I really can’t pull deeply from Lucien and Bertraund hearing the squeak, because I still shudder at the description. I wanted to use some quote about angles and soupe aux pois but just can’t.
The most I can tolerate is: “The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t help but be misinterpreted, probably.
Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?
Sam vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.
Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?” (487)
Some day when I’m thinking clearly again, let’s talk language confusion and wordlessness and communication and comprehension and deadly result in Infinite Jest, shall we?
And some day when I have the energy, let’s pull all of the malalexical* fumblings of Orin and Lentz and others, mmmmkay?
Until then, make the broom and police lock images go away.
*I know there’s a real word for using the wrong word, but other than aphasia 9the word, not my own condition, though, haha, now that’s funny) I can’t think of the real word and I’m not trying to be clever, I swear, I’m just trying to get a quote of the day on the books then go to bed. Malapropism? Something? Shows how far I’ve fallen that I’m not leaping into the OED to find out. And kind of don’t care. For now.
For nostalgia’s sake:
“Gately has decided to buy the newcomers’ omelette stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal slap at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like microbiotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc” (478).
Two things: first, the Fresh Pond Bread & Circus was closer, Pat M. just so you can note in it the log of staffers sans license driving needlessly to Inman (except that he drives past Antitoi Entertainent (sic) in the process, which is the whole plot-driven reason for him to drive way the hell out past the Storrow 500.) First plot point that felt forced, but first time we’ve really had intersection of otherwise unrelated characters.
Second, this quote reminds me of Amy Poehler in Baby Mama saying of the underprocessed organic groceries, “That shit’s just for rich people who hate themselves.”
“None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone’s full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems to need no over-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing” (469).
Everybody loves a bad-cook joke. Especially a bad-cook-with-jailhouse-tatts joke.
Can anyone tell I’m just posting Wallace quotes because I can’t think any clear thoughts of my own lately? No? Good. Just checking.
“Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection” (460).
If it’s not prescriptive linguistics with this guy it’s math. He’s so dreamy.
“Sober, she called him Bimmy or Bim because that’s what she heard his little friends call him. She didn’t know the neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all proportion, though with nothing especially Estonian about it. He’d been very sensitive about it, the head, but never told her not to call him Bim” (448).
How can anyone not love Don Gately?
Infinite Summer hits its mid-point this week. Join thousands of readers in enjoying/dismissing/loathing/patiently wading through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Hey, looky. We’re at post 30, and page 450ish. We’re just trucking along, aren’t we? And by we, I mean me, because I don’t think there’s a single Infinite Summer reader out there checking my whiny-ass blog for quotes.
Nevertheless, here you go, of legions of followers who aren’t reading David Foster Wallace’s book and don’t care:
Page 445 Bob Death, the South Shore biker, wields the joke about the old fish: “this wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘what the fuck is water?'”
This, of course, is the zen proverb (though the profanity might not be standard proverb text; not sure) Wallace uses in his Kenyon speech, the one reproduced now as a book, This is Water. This quote made me cry, again, about this sweet, thoughtful man and his intense pain. He seemed so aware, I find in each page of Infinite Jest, of intense human suffering. I hope to heavens it wasn’t his water.
“The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws right out of there at 0801h. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged” (435).
Um, yeah he does. I longed for my own Green line ride out of the head space the shelter put me in. Infinite Jest often jolts me out of complacency with the Hitting Bottom stories and the in-need-of-medical-intervention episodes and the dysfunctional-family-goes-off-the-deep-end sadness. But the Shattuck Shelter for Homeless Males is a bit more affecting that I can handle right now.
Join the conversation at Infinite Summer.
“Steeply’s movement of smoothing the wig and twisting fingers thrrough the snarls of hair became perhaps more abrupt and frustrasted. Steeply said, ‘Well whose soup is it legally? Who actually bought the soup?’
Marathe shrugged. ‘Not relevant for my question. Suppose a third party, now unfortunately deceased. He appears at our flat with a can of soupe aux pois to eat while watching recorded U.S.A. sporting and suddenly is clutching his heard and falls to the carpeting deceased, holding the soup we are no both so wishing'” (426).
I really want pea soup right now.
I am so enamored of Marathe’s twisted Quebecois English. And Steeply’s discomfort in his female operative second-but-not-fitting skin. And i laugh every time the subhead reads, “Outcropping of Northwest Tucson, AZ, U.S.A. predawn, still.” Because seriously, are they going to be on that outcropping when we hit page 1000?
Ah, Infinite Summer, what have you done to me?
NaptimeWriting 