Having fun with writing

Dfw uses the word "candent" on page 306 to describe the intellectual prowess of the ETA prorectors. He perhaps reveals himself too much but anyone who'd be reading IJ past page 300 wouldn't be too bothered and readily admit that the book (while it is a "story") is shaping up to be just a game dfw is playing and that indeed fiction in general (while it is "art" too) is just a game that authors play. I'm not a literary expert but I do know that Nabokov was like this too. (I love Nabokov.)

And so we have "candent", as in "Incandenza" (Hal, Orin, Mario, James (so candent his head ends up in a microwave))...this is all autobiography (and perhaps self-analysis/psychotherapy (and storytelling!)) because already I have felt in a "mere" 300 pages the incandescence of the author: ie: his brilliance. He has written this book to show us his talent. The tennis is about talent. It is a vehicle for dfw to show us his real gift. Dfw was good at tennis and clearly the game touched him deeply but there was a deeper game inside our man. And he played that game brilliantly. But you know he seems to be saying that it was - as great and beautiful as it all was - too powerful, too bright - something a person - a mere mortal - could not sustain...

I haven't read the whole book yet but what a suicide note this thousand pages potentially is: he is saying that "it" is too much, that even he is too much for himself. And the follow-up book he couldn't finish was just going to be more of the same...intense...incandescent...and he'd already demonstrated that; so how does one man live with all of that brilliance? His head can only explode.

Man it's complicated and painful because the New Yorker piece (The Unfinished) talks about how the drugs that were basically keeping him alive were preventing from writing well enough for him to finish the next big novel idea he'd taken on. The drugs were a wall that separated him from his own incandescence...f*uck...he couldn't win.

And that gentlemen is the crux of depression: feeling trapped, no way out, one way out...

And yet the guy was a genius, he'd made it as a writer, and we celebrate him now in his death...

It's crazy...

It's an eternal joke...

An infinite jest?

I guess I'm going to have to finish this f*ucking book/game/suicide note - to find out...