Unbound growth

Done no reading this weekend. Took this picture though. Just now. Drinking some wine. Laying on my back. Thinking about reading. And I realize that binding really limits pages. Makes them small. When they are unbound, 350 pages looks as tall as 700 bound. And yet if we didn't bind pages we wouldn't have books. What should we do?

Eschaton ends in disaster

Sitting on park bench drinking BigCoffeeCorp coffee instead of inside bar drinking beer while son does guitar lessons. It's a beautiful day but the beauty brings out thousands of screaming kids to this little urban parkette. The kids run around chaotically playing made-up games and I am reminded of Eschaton. I am now on page 343 about to start on what appears to be an Ennet House chapter but am still finding it hard to forget that Lord has planted his head inside the computer terminal in the previous chapter. Classic stuff. You know the made-up game of eschaton itself is fascinating but I was intrigued by the way dfw positions Pemulis. What does Pemulis represent as he watches his beloved war game unravel? Are there really rules to war? Is discpline really necessary even though you've got big bombs? Does immaturity, ignorance and a disregard for rules lead to war? Is violence of the kind that errupts between the younger ETA Eschatoners actually uglier than a delibrate and organized war? F*uck- you know what? I am beginning to feel like Pemulis here. These little runts are starting to piss me off as the Moms gossip and let them run free. I've got to get out of here. Can't think. Can't blog. Can't read. Whence beauty?

No good can come of this

It's been a long enough day. But now that I've been pumped up by a powerful dose of Canadiansport plus post-canadiansport hydration and carousing - untop of it all I have poured a very full glass of nectar, sat in front of "my precious" Blogmachine and - no! - yes! - selected some muse-ik to pump into my ears and soul (Keith Jarret God Bless the Child). I'll never sleep. Ever. But that's alright. This is important. Life should be important or not at all. Not at all.

Just in the middle of first Eschaton game...

..and i finally break out in laughter:

Page 327:

"Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK, who today is JJ Penn - a high-ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire - dumps three poorly tied jockstraps' worth of MIRVs on Israel, landing most of the megatnnage in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn't look much different before the blasts."

Dust-bunnied wire

In endnote 110 we get a lot of detail about a lot of stuff which Mr. Ashdale says became endnoted because it was deemed unnecessary. On the one hand I agree, for the most part the long endnotes do not leave gaps in the novel proper. However, I must be getting addicted to DFW and all of his detail and riffing - and could argue (despite my complaing about the book's Thickness) that the details are necessary and add to the reading experience and are not to be missed. For instance if I hadn't kept reading through endnote 110 I would have missed out on the great descriptions of the technology in Hal's dorm room: "Hal's voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of dust-bunnied wire to find something." I know from personal experience what it's like to clear those wires which - as you will remember from an old (but pre-O.N.A.N.) wpbhl email - in my case were also coated in countless layers of gizz stuck to various brittle kleenexes.

The Effect of the "End"-notes

Just sitting here during Education Ministry sanctioned lunch hour staring at at the 1-0-1-3 at the bottom of the page I am reading. The page is part of the 18 page Errata 110. It's genius. One moment you're on like page 311 cursing the length of the Thick Book, the next moment Errata 110 has taken you to page 1013 and you have the sensation of being close to the finish line. I wonder if that's how infinity feels? One moment there is existential angst and the next moment a black hole has taken you far far away. Not to the end maybe - but far away. Transported. Through and past the Thickness, the density, the mass of a universe. Genius I tell you. Can't wait to get to the "end" to see what exactly The Creator really intended by his use of time.

Footnote 110 and Theories about Emily Dickinson

This footnote is 18 pages long and I'm in the thick of it and I'm wondering and Hal is wondering why Orin (DFW) is fixating on Emily Dickinson.

Could it be the morbidity of her poems?

"Morbidity. Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death.[135] Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage".[135] She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail.[135] Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide".[135] "

Source > Wikipedia

Note: Emily herself did not kill herself as "Himself" and DFW did.

Composed on my Blogmachine on the Infinite Network

Gift for the Abbot

As recommeded by DFW.

Come by anytime to collect it.

I give this Gift to you to thank you for turning me into a serial book killer and Handblogger addict and for stealing from me at least 10,000 hours of life which I could otherwise have spent on f*cking the Blonde Woman or drinking the Wines of the World.

Picture of addiction

Walking back to the arena the pages are in my back pocket but I can't escape IJ as I stop in front of a big green metal box outside the rink: Clothing for addicts. I am thinking about that character I was just introduced to who is Withdrawing from Heroin and shitting himself on public transit and how he wears a paper towel scarf. And I am reflecting on the Incandenza grandfather who I was just told went from being a golf addict to a Wild Turkey afficiando and dropped dead on a flight of stairs. Hmm - I struggle up stairs these days too. But I don't drink Turkey. I might be more like the prof at Ennet House who mixes Chianti and Quaaludes. But what sport was he addicted to before he became addicted to substances; became a Professor of the Oral Professions?

Reading on a bench outside a hockey arena waiting for sons game to begin on the second day of spring 09

At page 313. Tore off a new batch this morning though forgot to tear off enough errata. Will have to catch up on errata later. Am feeling the flow of reading just now. Question is will the flow continue when I return to the Education Ministry on Monday after a very relaxing and I should say "normal" pace of living during Spring Break?

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...

300

I've made it.

Ground control to Major Tom: Ready for lift off.

The Abbot promised that I only had to get to page 300 and then my reading would take off and the Jest would finally make sense, I'd be awash in clarity.
Hallelujah.

In this Page 300 Promised land I'm reading about Poor Tony's Withdrawl From Heroin...

I don't know Abbot...the only consistency and clarity here is addiction...

But, hey, I'm at 300. I'm 30% through the Thick Book. Not bad. Should be done by 2010 (or the arrival of the Great Concavity - whatever the f*uck that is) - especially if I listen to Mr. Ashdale and continue to live large and bounce around in reading and in life...

Oh what does it matter anyway right Mr. Ashdale? We all just go the way of poor Yorrick anyway, right? May as well enjoy whatever pops up on the bookshelf of life and dive into that moment and enjoy and laugh...and laugh, like Yorrick...

We never finish everything anyways right?

Instead it is us who get finished off.

Unless we finish off ourselves.

And some guys finish off themselves before they finish that next infinite novel...

What did you guys think of that New Yorker piece? Do you buy the argument that dfw changed his meds so that he could think and write better and that that med change took him to a point of no return and took him from this world and left his next great novel unfinished and left his legacy basically resting on one piece of work.

So was dfw unfinished? Or was IJ enough? Did it say everything he needed to say anyway? Was IJ therefore "infinite"?

Yet another reference to infinity

P.289:

"...(Orin) had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds."

Dfw has done this several times already (though it's the first time I'm handblogging it) and I'm wondering if the "infinite/y" references are going anywhere besides the obvious reference to the book's title and/or Yorrick.

Orin gives up Tennis for a Cheerleader. Orin burns out.

P.288:

"...he'd discovered that he was an empty withered psychic husk, competitively, burned out. Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his raquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be."

Hmm. Been there. Been that: "an empty withered psychic husk".

Still that?

How do I make sure that this doesn't happen to my boy/joy?

Or does he just have to avoid burn out on his own or by chance?

Reading and erotic pleasure

I know Abbot - I really should get back to the task at hand - reading IJ - but I'm really starting to get into this book I randomly plucked off of my buddy's shelf.

From this book I have for instance already learned that focusing on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis shifts our attention from "a dynamics of desire animating narrative and the construal of it's meanings to the objects of desire, specifically the human body" and that there is an "analogy between reading and erotic pleasure...".

Is that why I feel so turned on by the thought of reading my days away in this book-lined apartment in canadascapital?

All right - time for a little DFWIJ now...

A fundamental part of human existence

Sometimes I ask myself: "Why read? Why write? Why handblog? Why not just live?"

And then I hear passionate support for literature by people like the Abbot and Peter Brooks (from the back cover):

"Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence."

So there Vivant.

But Vivant has another question: should a person finish one narrative form (ie: a book (ie: IJ)) before beginning another (Brooks' book) or are all "books" just part of one big narrative anyway and it doesn't matter if you bounce around and "finish" nothing?

Psychoanalysis and Storytelling

Oral professions

"...Hal in a weird and deeper internal way almost somehow admires and envies the fact that Schacht's stoically committed himself to the oral professions and stopped dreaming of getting to the Show..."

Hmm. Is that what happened to me? Once so competitive as a player and a coach and now so happy to eternally drink wine, smoke weed/cigars, eat fine food... and go down on my wife?

How could I, like Schacht, go from one extreme to another? And why, when we lose our drive, do we build our lives around putting stuff in our mouths?

(He asked, as he put down his IJ pages and reached for - without leaving his bed - Brooks Psychoanalysis and Storytelling...)

One of many bookshelves

At my buddy's place. I could stay here forever. I'd of course pop out for a daily run along the canal and maybe lunch in the Market. But under these circumstances I really could just read forever. Not even blog. Handblog. No. Just read. Not even masturbate. Well...Maybe the Blonde Woman would be part of this Reading Heaven. Maybe I'd read a bit. I could shag her. Then read some more. Then lunch with her at the Market. Then back to the flat to read some more. Maybe a nap. Then some coffee. Maybe a run along the canal in the evening light. Then a nice meal. Then drinking wine. Then reading in bed with a lamp glowing beside me. But what would I do with my noisy, troublesome dependents? Clearly they can have no part in this Reading Heaven. Anyone want to buy Two Kids A House And A Ministry of Education Job from me? All I want is a modern well lit flat full books in canadascapital and the time to read them...would be a fine way to live and die...

Pages at out of town bedside

They're tucked in a handy wire lampstand on a night table in the spare bedroom at my buddy's well lit, modern, 6th floor flat in canadascapital. My buddy's place is lined with bookshelves full of interesting books/spines like Pascal Penses, Tolstoy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Di Lampedusa The Leopard, Brooks Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, etc, etc. A reader's paradise. So many temptations. So many distractions from my goal of finishing before I die the Thick Book. You'll see that by my bed there's Remembering Orwell. I have to admit that I read several pages of it one night instead of my pages of Infinite Jest. I clearly have no discipline. Even now I should be reading instead of handblogging... I am on page 267 of IJ. Am struggling toward the Abbot's Page 300 Reading Launch Pad.

Automatic beauty

Page 260:

"You can tell - if you play seriously - you can tell just the way a ball comes off a guy's strings whether the lob is going to land fair. There's surprisingly little thought. Coaches tell serious players what to do so often it gets automatic. John Wayne's game could be described as having a kind of automatic beauty."

Outlier?

Page 260:

"His serve, now, suddenly, after four summers of thousand-a-day serves to no one at dawn, is suddenly supposed to be one one of the best left-handed kick serves the junior circuit has ever seen."

Next book I'm going to read is Gladwell's new book.

Piles of clay and snow

Outside of dingy tennis dome.
-Canadascapital.
-Circa Spring 2009.

Dingy old tennis dome

Reading page 257 after dropping off daughter at tennis camp. This is how they do it in canadascapital in March - dusty clay courts covered by sagging white plastic bubbles. It's enough to make you want to put your head into a microwave...but it does also - to look at it positively - allow tennis dreamers to get their "outliers" hours in during A Very Long Winter so that they will more excellently enjoy and conquer the beautiful game of tennis under the blue skies of the future. Man there is clay dust everywhere here. Better put my handblogger away before it's components get compromised by floating indoor tennis particles and my beautiful blogging will have to give way to tedious reading.

Losing the Magic

Hal slips out of The Zone of toenail clipping, p.249:

"I've lost the magic by talking about it instead of just giving into it..."

Picture of Daughter at Tennis Camp

Is this the first step to an "academy"?

Spring Break

The Abbot has insisted that I use my Ministry of Education Spring Break to recharge my reading quest.



So, today, in canandascaptial, where I've taken my family (my two dependents are encarcerated in academy run sports camps: son in soccerfootball camp; daughter in tennis! camp) - I've torn off a large segment of pages: 249-278.



And yes this means that I have brought the unread part of the Carcass with me. This kind of defeats the philosophy of page by page portability but I didn't know how many pages to bring.



The photo reveals how stressed the spine is now becoming. It is starting to show hairy string, glue, remnants of pages. It's getting harder to tear at the Carcass cleanly. I worry about the state of my pages going forward. What does that matter at this point though huh? After all, all that matters is that I am able to see each and every word and get the message that dfw wanted me to get. The state of the book/Carcass - we have long ago established - doesn't really matter, does it? What matters is the end result.



Incidentally, I have just started on the chapter where Hal is in the zone in his dorm room as he clips his toenails into a garbage basket: page 242: "It's just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, de Lint calls it. Loach calls it being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated...Coordinated as God."

I promised I wouldn't do this but...

I haven't blogged about reading in close to a month - which kind of means that I haven't been reading. I know that most people can read without blogging but this is me you're talking about.

So... I post this because I plan to start reading again (and blog about reading).

I have reached this point because somehow today I came across a wonderful New York Times piece written by Dick Cavett (at work (while trying to remove myself for a moment from the insanity of an educational institution which is moving more toward being a soul-destroying edutainment institution)) through which you also get to see an old rerun of Cavett interviewing John Updike and John Cheever.

Anyway, after finishing off the viewing of this brilliant bit of old TV talkshow stuff at home this evening (and reading the always excellent comments that Times readers are capable of), I felt that I needed more and I felt like I wanted more. I remembered that at the end of the interview both writers talked about how they still got rejected by the New Yorker for their fiction submissions - despite their success and fame.

So, I went to the New Yorker site (I know, I know, I should actually have turned to my pages of IJ - if I wanted "more") and low and behold on today's New Yorker site - a brilliant piece about the life of David Foster Wallace.

I had vowed to not read about DFW until I had finished the book. But it's done now, just like the last time I promised myself I wouldn't masturbate ever again.

( Here's the piece. )

Incidently I'm currently on page 227 which contains the Putative Curriculum Vitae of Helen P. Steeply...

I'm about a quarter way through the Thick Book and there is quite a bit of Carcass still left...Notice how the Carcass is shrouded by dead flowers...Is it strange to find dead flowers to be more beautiful than live ones?...