“Lyle, who sometimes would start to get tipsy himself as Himself’s pores began to excrete the bourbon, often brought some Blake out, as in William Blake, during these all-night sessions, and read Incandenza Blake, but in the voices of various cartoon characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep” (379).
Clearly Book of Job. Very theatrical text, with drawn curtains and dramatic optical angles Incandenza would groove on.
“The most hated Incandenza film, a variable-length one called The Joke, had only a very brief theatrical release, and then only at the widely scattered last remains of the pre-InterLace public art-film theaters in art places like Cambridge MA and Berkeley CA” (397).
Having lived in both, I can tell you that audiences in each city would still “shell out for little paper theater tickets” even after they’d heard from friends what the film was.
Sweater vest or no, go read Infinite Jest with us at Infinite Summer.
A third political party finally achieved viability “the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear” (382).
Oh, well, we need not fear that future for a while, eh fear-based politics?
*sigh*. Go read Infinite Jest. With us at infinite summer.
“How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? Because ever one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal, Gately admits to residents” (358).
Fifteen pages after children running around catching snowflakes as they pretend to annihilate the planet:
“…finally it’s impossible to get high enough to freeze what you feel like, being this way; and now you hate the Substance, hate it, but you still find yourself unable to stop doing it, the Substance, you find you finally want to stop more than anything on earth and it’s no fun doing it anymore and you can’t believe you ever liked doing it and but you still can’t stop, it’s like you’re totally fucking bats, it’s like there’s two yous; and when you’d sell your own dear Mum to stop and still, you find, can’t stop, then the last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it’s midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what’s become what you are—” (346-7).
I’m so behind on quotes, y’all. But here are the selections for the three days I’ve missed.
re: Eschaton’s rulebook
it “is about as long and interesting a J. Bunyan’s stupefying Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger pointed at him and were under compulsion to try, he’d probably start by explaining that each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead” (322).
[Bonus points for knocking Pilgrim’s Progress, for the dental anesthesia, and for the narrative framing trope of ‘if the character had a gun to his head’. Silliness. Part of the beauty of this text is that it bounces from gut-wrenchingly depressed to silly in a couple of pages.
To wit: in the middle of the roll-playing thermonuclear war that is geek-athlete Interdependence Day frivolity, “a couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow” (332).
Quote nothing. The whole Poor Tony detox and DTs and seizure scene left me shaking. Physically shaking. I had to read on into relatively light ETA stuff just so I wouldn’t go to sleep with his terror in my mind.
As I read beyond Poor Tony, the page number started crawling across the page like a spider. And the hand holding the book all of a sudden looked like a wax cast of a hand, like something inhuman and dead.
That might be the best writing I’ve ever read. I’m exhausted from feeling that deeply.
“…even though Schtatt deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings has got to be a temporary thing, that there’s like a psychic credit-card bill for Hall in the mail, somewhere, coming and is sad for him in advance about whatever’s surely got to give, eventually” (270).
Boy, oh boy, even within the spoiler limits we can say foreshadowing…like foresmacking us up against the head, given the opening scene.
Know what I don’t like about parenting? That even the awesome stuff lasts about 12.5 seconds before it pivots violently and bashes you in the nose.
Know what I like about revisiting Infinite Jest this summer? The AA aphorisms about one day at a time and one minute at a time and that it’s okay to want and that any moment no matter how unbearable, is really only one moment and is, actually, bearable.
Is there a 12-step program for parenting? Other than getting a nanny or day care sitch or stun gun?
That’s right. Incredible book full of intensely memorable quote, but this is our first quote of the week.
“Pat M. encourages newer staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as valuable teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint” (271).
Why quote of the week? Because the painful suicide stuff I’m tucking away in the deep recesses of “I hope I never need to access this.’ And because Gately’s perspective via Pat M. grants the insight that working at a halfway house is like parenting a small child. ‘Cuz that patience and tolerance and restraint stuff? I didn’t have that before the small terrorist took over our Ennet House. But clearly I’ve developed some of each, because I’m not constantly feeding The Spider.
Mazel tov on being 25% through Infinite Jest. To those of you not reading, go do it. 10 pages a day, friends, and you’ll be granted brilliance and patience and a restored sense of humor. Or suicidal thoughts. You know. One or the other.
“That golly something smells delicious was my first reaction!”
Awe-some.
Even with all the wrought Joelle text, some really rough and painful stuff as well as some terribly important bits vis the Entertainment and the suicidal thoughts of the addicted, the quote of the day is from the ‘Putative CV of HP Steeply’:
“5 months, Newsweek (11 small features on trends and entertainment until her Executive Editor, with whom she was in love, left Newsweek and took her with him)”
Stop. I can’t take it. Snorting masticated nectarine through my nose already. Seriously. Stop.
For my own personal nostalgia: “Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting” (213).
And for those of you who have no such nostalgia: “there’s a deep and temendously compelling dignity about the old man’s demanor w/r/t the PUSSY on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship, if and when he feels it’s appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it’s germane in his case” (210). What with Pat’s refusal to define addiction specifically enough for him, and all.
“Concentrating on anything is very hard work” (202).
I think this quote is a day behind. But seriously, who’s counting?
The section that most pleases me in the book, thus far, is the selected transcripts from drop-in hours of Pat Montesian. Laughed out loud. Laughed so hard I shook the bed and Spouse awoke, grumbled something about “that f—ing book” and went back to sleep. Then I read the next line and laughed again.
“So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I kind of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though” (177).
“So I’m sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there’s a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here’s Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl’s body is literally parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea” (177-8).
NaptimeWriting 