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.

“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).

Holy Mary, mother of my cousins: the grandaddy speech to young JOI is aboslutely excruciating. In a Chris Ware, father to son,”here are the defining moments of my life’s failures and why my father was ten times the asshole I am now” kind of way. Guacamole.

So today I leave you with the same thing grandpappy left us:

“A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation conteplative prayer, sliding forward” (168).

No wonder himself was afraid of black widows. And palm frond pus.

You simply must read Infinite Jest.

Appropos of Hal as narrator, by Hal as younger academic:

“We await, I predict the hero of non-action, that catatonic hero, the one beyond the calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines” (142).

Though Wallace disdained postmodern irony, and especially ironic distance that created a lack of humanity, he sure gets the self-referencing joke of postmodern lit pretty well…

And but so, this day of reading gave us the lethal purse snatching, the bricklayer’s accident clarification letter, and the page  long question that ends, “And but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning?” after a huge surge toward video-TP conferencing.

Aces reading assignment, today. Stitches, from the on-the-inside laughing.

Go read Infinite Jest.

the whole scene, really with Poor Tony and C and yrstruly, but here’s a snippet, all sic

“I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station once more, you get wicked super station in this fucked up kindof shit life because its’ a never ending chase and you get too tired to go by much more than never ending habit and super station and everything like that so but I dont’ say any thing but yrstruly I have a cold super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and takes a piss and the piss steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back turned away and isnt’ looking around with interst or anything like that you never turn your back on the skeet when its’ partly your skeet” (134)

‘Urine!’
‘Clinically sterile urine!’
‘Piping hot!’
‘Urine you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’
Trevor Axford handles cash-flow. Pemulis dispenses little conical-tipped Visine bottles of juvenile urine, bottles easily rendered discreet in underarm, sock or panty.
‘Urine trouble? Urine luck!’

p. 152

“This city is made of all glass and light. The windows are like high-beams coming at you. The air has that spilled-fuel shimmer to it” (136).

Character of the day: U.S.S.M.K.

Oh, dang it! Today is pp105 max, and I’m dying with some quotes for tomorrow.

So, here you go, with apologies to Craig Kilborn and Jon Stewart (that’s right, punks, I’m *that* old because Daily didn’t use to mean Stewart and I know it), today’s moment of  Zen:

After Mario’s father Dr. Incandenza passed away, the new headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, either Mrs. Incandenza’s half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the version, C.T. had taken down Incandenza’s founding motto—TE OCCIDRE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST¹—and had replaced it with the rather more upbeat TE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE” (81).

¹ [really, 32, but wordpress didn’t think we’d be blogging Wallace and the footnote characters only go to 3, which is laughable, considering this project]

¹ Roughly, ‘They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.’

Um, had Tavis left himself’s motto and added the newer, allegedly peppier aphorism, the sum would basically say, “if you know there are legal implications to said consumption, you can get around them, so then there’s *really* nothing stopping you.”

Also, the Latin translation is really more like “they can kill you but they can’t eat you because it’s illegal,” but as we have all noticed, Wallace puts things much better than anyone (I almost said “anyone out there,” but damn it, he’s not anymore. shit fuck piss.)

Well, at least we get to reread endnote 304. Twice in two days. Fecal deposits and all.

So we end where 304 begins, thematically:

“Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible  storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he’s not trying to find some new resource in the piles that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt  having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile” (1055).

Cop-out quote all of note 304, sub.

Slightly less cop-out, since it picks a favorite passage: all the anti-academese of note 304.

actual quote of the day, unofficially, according to only me and nobody else at infinitesummer.org:

“‘…the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.'” (1056)  [within the spolier line limits because it’s a note referenced way back in the 80s. As in page 80 or so, not as in pre-subsidized time 1980.]

Come on, folks—giant babies depositing gargantuan shite in the area forced upon Canada in order for Americans to export refuse? It doesn’t get much better. Except in this book.

Oh, the fans. If only we had the fans, those of us who do encounter such outsized scat…