(The System craves talent, captures talent, re-educates talent, gives rules to talent, takes away freedom of talent and uses up talent. But what does talent get?)
Luckily I am these days part of The System and I use my keys to unlock the steel that holds my pages hostage.
I sit on top of the steel and read on page 40 about Hal's prodigous tennis talent. Post-match, his brother gets religious:
"...I was going to ask you if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there when you were so on, making that guy look sick."
I look up from my pages, the steel mesh now starting to embed itself into the skin of my bare legs (the gymteacher wears shorts), and - sitting alone in an empty, old gymnasium during my "prep period" - think back to that brief period when I too was young and on top of my game as a soccerfootballplayer. And I do recall that that period coincided with my religious period: I believed in God then and on the pitch/field often felt like God. My, my, my, those were heady times. No greater drug than that: a player on top of his game...
My legs start to sting a bit as my waffled leg skin now has goose-bumps with little hairs spiking up - from the memory of those beautiful days of a talent still free...
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ReplyDeleteJust occured to me that your reading methodology prevents you from being able to flip to the footnotes. DFW is a bizarre, hilarious footnote-iste. You are approaching the absurdly lengthy #24. That'll cost you a night right there.
ReplyDeleteAs my first comment on this brilliantly imagined blog, I'll throw my opinion behind the enigmatic and witty Mr Ashdale: IJ simply cannot be read w/o the frequent, ridiculously detailed, often hilarious, and occasionally frustrating footnotes.
ReplyDeleteDFW brought this technique to full fruition in IJ, though you can see it--the technique--at work in other less daunting works (viz the Harper's essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"). I don't know why the problem with missing the footnotes didn't occur to me when you first proposed your singular method of dissecting DFW's magnum opus, Vivant--but at Mr A's prompting, this issue now comes crashing down on me.
What to do? Could you disembowel the Carcass from front and back simultaneously? What if you carved off the entire footnote section from the back, strapped it to your forearm with, I don't know, a tensor bandage (of which you likely have some mouldering in the basement, left over from your days on the pitches of Oakville and Ottawa)? Then you could continue your pecking away at the book's front (the book Prometheus, you the hungry vulture returning daily for a meal of liver...which, considering that the liver is apparently so integral to the processing of drink, I find reassuringly apropos).
One way or the other, you'll have to grapple with this footnote thing. If memory serves, once DFW really cranks things up and gets deep into, eg, James Incandenza's film oeuvre, the politics of the wheelchair assassin Quebec separatists, and the habituees of Ennet House and their struggles with drug & alcohol rehab...well, by then the footnotes dot the pages' prose so abundantly that if you were reading IJ a slightly more conventional way, you'd want to have the forefinger of your right hand sort of permanently buried somewhere in the last 200 pages of the book...ie, in the midst of the footnote section.
Reading your posts, Vivant, and also now those written by Mr A, tempt me into taking down my own (structurally intact)copy of IJ and setting sail once again. But as I crane my neck around to see the multicoloured spines of my basement bookshelf, I note that IJ is nestled hard up against one of my own literary white whales not yet completely harpooned, despite a couple of valiant tries: The Brothers Karamazov.
It's a Thick Book with many Long Names. Maybe it needs some disembowelling.