Discombobulated again by how I managed to stay ahead of Infinite Summer’s schedule and yet behind its emotional and intellectual curve.

So though I have more quotes of the day for you from the novel itself, today I give you a pastiche of the Guides’ synergy at the end of this fascinating, compelling, and comforting summer of reading…

“By giving us the ‘shave and a haircut’ and foregoing the ‘two bits’, Wallace leaves us feeling like we’re perpetually in the middle of the novel, even after we’ve ostensibly finished” –Matthew Baldwin

“You know what the ending made me think of? That E-chord at the end of the Beatles’ ‘A Day In the Life’ — that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the piano bench creak under John’s butt. That’s what reading Gately on the Beach felt like.” –Eden Kennedy

“I think the fact that he pulls that ending off (at least to my mind) shows he is about as attuned to the reader as any writer I know.” –Kevin Guilfoile

“I think that he was attuned, or that in writing this novel he was trying to attune himself, to the human heart, almost desperately sometimes.” –Eden Kennedy

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen.

Oooh, I’m in big trouble. I’m way behind on my quotes. In my own defense, the last 100 pages of this novel read like trying to hike down a sheer cliff that’s been greased with WD-40. Talk about payoff.

The speedy descent of the novel, Wallace’s deathiversary, a precocious preschooler (when, when will the waiting list dwindle so he can actually *be* a preschooler?!), and two new clients who have deadlines this month mean I’m reading IJ but not posting.

No spoilers, though. Finished the book twice, read all available scholarly work published on it, working on a conference paper, and reskimming for quotes but I won’t spoil your last 5%.

So, though not much can touch Mario’s concern that nobody can be sincere about emotions, and Gompert’s narration of a whole ‘nother Dantesque level of Hellacious Depression, and Gately’s defense of the indefensible, here goes:

“Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these second—he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it….A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat’ (859-60). Freaking gorgeous prose enveloping intense ideas. Every page. Damn.

“He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed” (861).

Seriously? That’s genius. Welcome to my head. it’s too busy hopping the wall to check out the potential and make shit up to scare me for me to be actually living right now. That has blown my mind for the past week.

Hal similarly living in his own head:
“It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the subject seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, or to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into” (900). And he goes into his metaphor about rooms full of meat and feces, the sheer volume of a life’s work laid before you in disgusting subtotals.

That one I’m letting lie for a while. I can’t deal this week with the thought of escapism and avocations and rooms full of meat and shit. I’m noticing more and more that huge momentous lessons of honesty and philosophy and reality from IJ are getting pushed to the corners of my mind, compartmentalized, labeled, and stored for much, much later. I’m clearly not doing my job. But with all due respect, I think letting all this sink in at once would cause the black billowing. You know? So bite-sized Wallace creeps in and the rest comes later.

Finally:
“The parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it” (921).

I love this book, and I love Don Gately. And his sternoclastomastoid is the least of his problems, right now. In fact, given the size of his melon, his SCM is probably a really meaty part of him, holding up his head and turning it and whatnot.

I’m pretty crushed we’re finishing soon, but I do have a life to get on with. I have three careers and a human to gestate while raising a small person. But this chance to reread IJ with a group of open minded people has been such a gift. Thanks.

Mario and the Moms.

I know Orin argues vehemently, as does his old buddy, the recluse whose name I don’t feel like dredging up, that Avril is manipulative or absent or something other than human and trying her best. And I’ll tell you something, as a mom, that scene 761-769 is touching and sweet: two damaged people trying their best. It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s evidence that human beings need to find a better way to communicate than using words. Let’s move toward Heinleinesque grokking.

La Mont Chu, worried about the Eschatonial consequences for the Buddies, tries to get info out of Mario. And after nine full back-and-forth where filmmaker is talking like a director and Chu is staying in character, we hear:
‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’
‘This is going very well!’ (759).

hi.larious. And probably very important from a narrative-metanarrative standpoint, but for now I’m hopped up on Ben & Jerry’s and just find it touchingly funny.

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.

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.

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.