Replacing the incandescent light bulb in my six-year-old daughters bedroom closet before bed

Is this the age of illuminated closets?

If so, is there more "wonder" or is there the same wonder, in the age of incandescent bulbs?

Whence incandescence? Whence wonder?

In children? In new? In beginning?

Or is incadescence even bigger than kids?

Kids worship the closet. The light inside the closet. What are they after? That they can't sleep without the comfort that glow of the closet provides?

Why can't there be wonder in quiet and darkness? In truth?

Doesn't the brilliant light actually come from my girl?

"The Cage": Page 478

This Infinite Jest Moment brought to you from a suburban second floor bathroom where I'm having a late afternoon bowel movement. I wondered why I didn't have my usual bm in the am but now that I'm in the midst of some relaxing toilet-seated handblogging, I know: I was saving my sh*it for the suburbs. I'm sure Freud would have understood.

Anyways, enough about that sh*it. On page 478 I have noticed another reference to "the cage". It is Gately talking about how he has embraced the Surrender and Denial of AA Living and reflecting on "what it used to be like Out There in the cage."

So the Out There is The World of Drink I suppose. Hmm. And that is where the cage is? Drink is a cage? Isn't it supposed to be an escape?

I guess of course unless you become a "slave" to drink.

And here I sit/sh*it trying to escape the cage of this suburban birthday party.

I guess "cages" are relative to what we all want to escape.

But I still can't figure out why I was initially inspired to put those cages into a page- all those handblogposts ago. I mean pages into a cage. Maybe it was just for effect. I still like the photo of those cute, early, little pages smiling behind the metal mesh, snuggled up to those orange basketballs...

New denim new pages new day

When I'm done this batch I'll have crossed the 500 page threshold. What does it matter though? I have just bought A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The world of reading and DFW is endless, infinite. Sideways eight. You can never get ahead. Just enjoy it page by page, day by day. Reading. Life.

New batch, New Notes and Errata: New Day

Gately Cries

One year sober. They baked him a cake the Ennet House White Flaggers did. And he cried for the first time in front of non-relatives.

Page 468.

Are we Hamlet and is DFW Yorick?

Last night I read the Rolling Stone article on DFW that the Abbot told me about and I was struck by the possibility that the ultimate jest of Infinite Jest is that we brood over the death of DFW in the way that Hamlet brooded over the death of Yorick. Hamlet held up the skull - we hold DFW's literature in our hands and ponder the death of something beautiful and the meaning of things:




Is it possible that DFW intended this all along?

I suppose though that I should finish dismembering his magnus opus before I start making such big conclusions...

Gately's Mental Cage

And what AA did for him:

Page 468:

"It was the first time he'd been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn't believe it. He wasn't grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even believe in magically let him out of the cage...?"

Too

Schtitt on complaining:

Page 458:

"Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright and hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat...Inside roof too low for the lob...A too pretty girl in the audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something. "

The old German master coach and hilarious caricature goes on and on. Funny stuff but actually stuff that makes sense.

Classic Schtitt

During dawn drills:

Page 458:

"Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards. Not meaning insults. This is fact. Motions are gone through. Barely minimal efforts. Cold, yes? The cold hands and nose with mucus? Thoughts on getting through, going in, hot showers, water very hot. A meal. The thoughts are drifting toward the comfort of ending. Too cold to demand the total, yes?..."

Promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt

Page 453

Pages Pages

I need my pages. Where are my pages? Desperate. Tired after long week. At my bed. Too tired to go down stairs in search. Yet sufficiently inspired to crave some quality DFW. Caught. Trapped. Between exhaustion and epiphany. Zzzzzz.....

Skin of the spine

So now the spine is still essentially intact but I've decided to separate the graphic skin of the spine in order to preserve it. Funny - could make for an interesting bookmark.

Book Glue Specimen

Had to pull it off (like a dry, old scab) of the latest batch as it was threatening to tear at pages and potentially make them indecipherable. And after all what are pages if not vehicles, tools for the deciphering of art, ideas, beauty and info? Therefore glue has no meaning, no value, no place in our conscience or imagination. Use glue, abuse glue. It doesn't matter. It's not a crime. Wait. Let's go back. Don't use glue, don't abuse glue (correct Mr. Gately?) - except for the also questionable practice of binding pages which may/or may not contain: art, ideas, beauty or info...

Fresh Batch: Pages 439-472

Check out the coagulated glue and fibre, ie: matted hair of the left margin.

Man - over four hundred pages and no end in sight. Most books are o-vvvver by now.

What I mean is that I don't feel really close to an ending, a resolution, even a meaning, to this clearly brilliant, incandescent book.

I guess all I really feel is the brilliance, the light, in the same way that I am awed by the sun: it is the great power in human life but it doesn't really have to have meaning to provide meaning - if you know what I mean.

This line of thinking - that maybe no plot or conclusion is necessary in IJ - makes me wish that DFW hadn't put such pressure on himself to write another great book.

He'd already written all he needed to write.

He had with one book become eternally incandescent like the sun.

Suicide in footnote 176

"...wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Quebecois bullet train..."

Unprepared Goal Attainment Trauma

Page 437:

The hillarious and Quik demise of an entire family after a junior tennis champion commits suicide through cyanide chocolate milk.

Pageless

Jestless. That's what I called it once. But today pageless. That's what I crave now. Pages. But they are locked down at an Educ*tion M*nistry site. Those pages. After hours. Early morn. Am in my home office. And I cannot access. I forgot them. It was me. Yes. But here I am alas. After a glowing night of Canadiansport. OrangeballLeague. Winners. Goal scorers. Now home. Laying on my back. KeithJarret playing. In my hand. All this hanppening in my hand. Handblogger. Handblogging. ONAN where art thou? Ah. Yes. Clipperton came on his gun. Lots of cum in IJ. Gately cleans it. Is that all we are? Men? Mere Salmon spawning. On to walls? Addicts. In the flow. Ah. Ah. Ah. Goal. Pass. Intercept. Go. Go. Go. Flow. Flow. Flow. I wish I had some pages to read. Writing is so painful. I'll send this still. And just hold onto the music that continues to come into my hand while I wait for sleep. Me. Player of canadiansport. Orange. Incandescent. God Bless The Child....

Page 433: Clipperton goes out on top

- erradicates his map after ONANTA gives him number one ranking.

Page 423 - Taking the piss out of the French and the Americans all at once

Marathe:

"Maximize pleasure. Minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. Of you."

This is funny stuff. I laugh. I laugh at this. This USAofU. This DFWofMarathe. This.

This is not entirely a book about suicide is it?

It's bigger than that isn't it? About more than that right?

This morning I am reading the New York Times - scooped with permission from the porch of Pinot Paul who is no doubt spending Easter Sunday at his bourgeois canadiancottage - and on the front page is a story about the recent suicide of Sylvia Plath's son.

Interesting little piece. Sad story. One of the ideas you're left with of course is that suicide is hereditary.

Not a new idea I suppose.

An idea I have is that suicide sometimes comes out of intensity, out of the "too much" or the "flame that burned too brightly" category.

Sylvia's writing had it. Apparently her intellectual son had it - though he seemed to devote his whole life to avoiding his mother's story and the world of literature all together.

Intensity. Yep. Not a bad theory. Intensity - Incandescence.

In the DFW magnum opus, the head of the Incandenza family and the founder of an entire tennis academy puts his head into a microwave and puts and end to the incandescence by using incandescence.

And yet DFW used a belt.

Interestingly just what Sylvia Plath's son promised to use. He always said to his friends that if he ever did it he would do it in his work shop.

That's where they found him - hanging from the ceiling.

DFW was also found in his work space.

Hmm.

What does it mean?

Probably nothing.

Because I know that this wonderful, witty, incandescent (and thick) book is bigger than suicide, just like Sylvia Plath's writing was bigger than her death - right?

(Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright (INCANDESCENT?), ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. The plot parallels Plath's experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempt. (Wikipedia))

Here we go again

Someone else "destroying their own map."

A mere 6 pages later we have Tom P. Veals' "remorse tortured" ad agency partner doing a "half-gainer" off the Tobin Bridge..." (Page 415)

Infinity - Page 418

Just back from my blogmachine. A digression. I don't know what happened exactly. I sat down to...look something up on Google and - zap ! - I ended up listening to BBC World Book Club - an interview with Umberto Eco-who spoke about the Name of the Rose. It was so relaxing. I love his I Italian accent.



Anyways, yep, I'm back now - and on my back - taking full advantage of Education Ministry (PAID!) Holiday to complete the grueling task of reading the Thick Book - And I've discovered another thing I should have been catalogging: infinity (you know - as in Infinite Jest; as in Yorrick; as in Shakespeare; as in death; as in eternity; as in math; as in DFW was an incandescent math wiz).



"...a former crooner and schmaltz-mogul who...creatively refocused blame and rocketing people's waste into the forgiving chill of infinite space."



(Why is space forgiving? Because it can be? Because it is limitless? Got a problem? Looking for a sublime solution? > Send it into space. That's what you do in soccerfootball. It's kind of like the lob in tennis or the punt in Nflfootball (Orin).)



That quote from page 418 also leads to footnote 168 which provides a delightful definition of what the sport of tennis basically is:



"...the business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return."

That must be a t-shirt out there...some where...

Someone has to have done it by now.

Sweet DFW.

Noticing yet another DFW reference to suicide

(During post-lunch reading on Education Ministry and O.N.A.N. sanctioned Religious Holiday.)

Thank g/God for a four day weekend.

Being a gymteacher at an innercityspecialeducationschool is like being an actor in the theatre of the absurd: You have to laugh a lot where I work - or you quickly discover that the acting you are doing is for real - and that is a big existential challenge.

And so what do you do on days off to escape the madness and the lies? Well - you read Infinite Jest; you keep saying to yourself: "Damn, another reference to suicide. I wish I'd started catologuing this from the beginning - since there's no way I'm ever going to re-read this Thick Book and document every reference and therefore demonstrate that while the author was a literary genius he was also masterful suicidenotewriter.

Case in point: page 409:

"...that (Clipperton) brought the gun-case and Glock 17 out on the court with him along with his towels and water-jug and sticks and gear bag, and from his very first appearance on the East Coast jr. Tour made clear his intention to blow his brains out publicly, right there on court, if he should lose, ever, even once."

Funny stuff from DFW. I laugh in the same way I laugh at work.

I want to escape "it" and yet I can't. It's good to keep laughing though, even though it's the same laugh at work and in my reading.

Stop laughing - and your done.

Bang.

Recalling the caged pages

I woke up too early - 4:30 - and am now trying to read myself back to sleep. Of course reading is good for more than just a strategy to get back to dreamland. I don't merely read to sleep. I just thought it was a good use of time as I would otherwise have been staring off into the dark wondering when or if I'd fall asleep.

Anyways, with a fresh dusting of April snow outside my Torontocanada window, I am on page 389 and Lyle is explaining to LaMont Chu why fame will never enable him to escape into a world of happiness where he - a tennis star - is featured in magazine photos:

"LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of it's oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not an exit from any cage."

Cage. Hmm. I was only going to read but I may have to get up and sit infront of my glowing Blogmachine to access my earlier post on "Caged Pages".

The handblogger just isn't handy enough for that kind of searching. Too cumbersome.

So - I am now wondering what inspired me to put those pages in a cage then handblog them.

Was it something that I had already perceived of Dfw's view of the world?

Or was I actually experiencing the reality of that world - actually myself feeling caged: a one-time athlete/dreamer now consigned to an absurd gymteacher job where I am told to lower the bar instead of asking my charges to imagine the infinite; unable to find the time to explore the brilliance of the world, the incandesence of life, just as I - as you will all know - struggle to find the time to read this apparently brilliant Thick Book?

Ah Time. Ah brilliance. Oh cages.

---

It's 530.

I won't fall asleep now.

It's taken me about half an hour to handblog a thought about one page of a thousand plus pages of an infinitely long book.

Is this book a cage for me? A cage which ensnares me not with it's mere quantity of pages but more so with its tantilizing complexity - which I obsessively and inescapably need to handblog?

Why can't I just read and be done with this cage of a book? Why do I insist on taking pointless images (just like renowned filmmaker James O. Incandenza?) of pages and then reflecting on their contents?

Why can't I be like all the other Johnnyreaders?

If you're constantly reflecting, can you ever truly live?

Am I ensnared not just by this little handblogger but also by my reflective mind?

Reading during frigid halftime of O.N.A.N. soccerfootball match - with the Abbot

F*ck it's cold. And we're down two nil.

Hair

The dismembering of the Thick book is not only getting physically harder but it may finally be playing on my conscience as I have begun to imagine the stubborn string that in vain tries to keep this family of pages and ideas together - as hair: human hair.

The photo is of page 377 with the evening light streaming in from the west window onto the diningroom table.

Reading instead of music

Played canadiansport tonight and lost to Abbot's team in final. Just back from the bar. Am very tempted to listen to music instead of reading while I have one last drink. But that's the killer combo. A good song right now would keep me up all night. So I'm gonna drink and read instead. That will surely put me to sleep soon so that I can meet Education Ministry Pedagogical Requirements at 830 tomorrow April Fools in the Year of Government Controlled Banks and American Car Makers That Haven't Made a Car Worth Driving in Forty Years - But the Economy is Going in the Shitter Not Due to Poor Car Design/Aesthetics, rather - Greed.

Now where is that IJ Chapter on the Boston AA? Oh, it's beside my drink.

(Music is the most dangerous drug.)

Zzzzzzz.....