Page 764: Hal is Sad

And this feels ominous for both me and the Moms:

(Moms To Mario:)

"Is there someone specific in whom you're intuiting sadness?"

"Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?"

"And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?"

"Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o"

'Well, love, but you know the idiom "not yourself" - "He's not himself today," for example,' crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. 'There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them."

Sometimes you read and you fall asleep

And loved ones find this humorous and snap secret pictures of you then email them to you as if they've got something on you. But they don't. Because napping is not a crime. Especially in the summer time:

String and glue and paper:

It's starting to accumulate as I finish up the gruesome job of dismembering this (much celebrated/apparently/cult-followed) "novel".

The Secret World of Book Batches:

I've just torn off a fresh batch of pages. I'm getting better at tearing. I've figured out that it's easiest to first tear off the batch "in toto". It seems that books are bound according to batches of specific numbers of pages. In the case of IJ these batches seem to consist of 30 page batches. These 30 pages batches are glued then sewn together. After I tear my batch, I then carefully tear apart all of the individual pages - which leaves them loose (free!), light and easy to handle. I then fold the whole batch of loose pages in half, making the batch pocket-sized and beautifully mobile and concealable. As such I can - in theory - read the pages, the book, the novel, the incandescent light - anywhere.

Page 756: Fit Schtitt:

"Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit."

> Photo

Page 754: From the Academy to the Halfway House:

"E.T.A.'s a private school. We (Ennet House) usually get some residents on up there, part-time. It's just up the hill."

Page 750: Spines:

Marathe doing surveillance at Ennet House:

"...Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges' spines."

Could.

I look across the room at the spineless carcass and wonder how it will look on the Abbot's bookshelf once I am done dismembering it.

I wonder if the Abbot will eventually be able to do what Marathe did and scan along his library of other precious Works and see IJ nestled there?

What will it be like for the Abbot when he has to deal with a dismembered, tortured, spineless "novel" when he gets it back?

But I do not feel guilt. I just wonder. For I am a bold and disciplined reader. I believe in how I read.

I do acknowledge however, that without a spine, the book could eventually just lose form, flop, fall away, it's pages dispersed, lost - eventually fragmented, devoid of complete meaning.

And I wonder, will the novel, still be a novel, if even one page goes missing?

Because I do know that this book is a novel whose every page, every scene, every obscure vignette, every crazy line, is heading toward one final, brilliant, incandescent message and conclusion. And without even one page, all this meaning will fall apart. It's light will fragment as has been demonstrated by the "Investigation of Light Fragmentation Products and Pecularities of Nuclear Fission at High Energies of Incident Particles" (P.A. Goritchev et al, Radium Institute, Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, USSR).

Incident particles...

A novel !

It says so right there on the front cover.

From Answers.com:

Novel:

n.
A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
The literary genre represented by novels.
[Ultimately from Italian novella, from Old Italian, piece of news, chit-chat, tale, from Vulgar Latin *novella, from neuter pl. of Latin novellus, diminutive of novus, new.]

Still Reading:

Page 740: No Narrative Movement Toward A Real Story:

Joelle's initial take on Himself's film work:

"Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness - no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward a real audience."

I wonder if the same can be said about the first 740 pages + notes + errata of this Failed Entertainment?

This is certainly what The Playwright thought of Infinite Jest before abandoning IT.

But I won't abandon IT. First of all because I love IT.

Second of all because I cannot judge IT until I see the end. IT has an end right? There is an end right? Or not?

Or will the end be some kind of joke - on the reader? - A jest? - As the exploded brilliance of David Foster Wallace continues to expand out - toward - a limitless universe?

Footnote 304: Struck Plagerizes A Paper On Quebec's Separatist Wheelchair Assassins:

For Ms. Poutrincourt's History of Canadian Unpleasantness:

"What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just write up an assignment from conceptual scratch."

Page 705: Mean Streets Of Toronto

(God there's a lot of Canada in this "novel".)

Toronto - setting for James O. Incandenza's Blood Sister: One Tough Nun cartridge:

Where sisters of the cloth go toe to toe brandishing weapons like Champlain-era tomahawks.

Page 695: The Great White Shark Of Pain: IT:

Clinical depression.

"Instead of just incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is ITSELF a feeling. It goes by many names - anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia

or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression-but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as IT."

Page 692: Kate Gompert's Anhedonia

"...a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss trauma that reaches way down into the core systems..."

Bjorn Borg's Retirement:

Accoring to Wikipedia:

When he retired, he had a choice of homes, a penthouse in Monte Carlo, not far from his successful pro shop, and a small island off the Swedish coast. Borg's marriage to the tennis player Mariana Simionescu ended in divorce, he fathered a child by another woman, and he was briefly married to the Italian singer Loredana Bertè. There were rumors of a drug overdose and an attempted suicide, both of which Borg denies, and he narrowly averted personal bankruptcy.

He later bounced back as the owner of the Björn Borg fashion label, whose most noted advertising campaigns asked Swedes (from the pages of a leading national newspaper) to "Fuck for the Future." His label has since become second only to Calvin Klein in his home country.

P. 681: Syndrome of the Endless Party:

Steeply:

"Or the other possibility of doom, for the etoiles who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal's hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so."

And play is always suffering. And play is always suffering...

Just so.

Page 680 Ideation?:

Poutrincourt:

"One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years."

"We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton."

P. 677: Ideation

Poutrincourt and Steeply talking about how pressure effects young tennis players:

"Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you..."

"Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage."

The passage is truly about pressure in tennis but I wonder about the pressure on the writer, DFW - for there is yet another mention of suicide. I had promised that I would log the mentions of suicide but then I kind of stopped, thinking that the subject would spoil the book for me - that the book and the talent of the writer were bigger than the writer's suffering and death.

But here it is again. DFW spoke of the monitoring of "ideation" at Ennet House (p.594). I wonder about the depth of ideation in DFW's work.

I have asked this question before - even though I don't like the question (I sound like the playwright whose narrow view is that the book is one big marijuana trip): is the whole book ideation?

I guess I won't really have this answer til I get to its end.

P.660: Learning To See:

DeLint speaking to Moment Magazine writer Helen Steepley's request to interview Hal for background on Orin the football star:

"These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt's thinking is self-transcendence through pain. These kids -' gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that stopped rolling well insde the service line; mild applause - 'they're there to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a junior's head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn't come here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe."

P. 649-651: The Black Shape

The horrible black shape of Geoffrey Day.

Produced by the combination of electric fan and viloin.

First in his bedroom then in his college dorm.

"I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophmore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings...From that day on, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not, I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself."

Page 635: Asexual Academies and the Progression Toward Self-Forgetting:

"It's the same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don't have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court go slack and pale at the thought of appraoching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting..."

So - given the asexualness of academies (and even sport) - according to DFW - the question is then should a parent put their son (and especially their daughter) in such an environment? To protect them? To get them to develop as much of their talent - athletic, academic, artistic - before they lose complete control of themselves?

Page 618: Her Kimono Smells Good:

Heroic, powerful Moose Of A Man, Gately, gets shot, is losing blood and strength, and all he can think about is Woman. Pussy. As in Joelle. As in Madame Psychosis.

So true DFW. So true.

Love this scene. This sentiment.

Page 594: Gompert's Suicide Contract

"A resident at Ennet House had hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple of years before Gately arrived, and there are now baroque proceedures for monitoring ideation among residents with psych issues."

Page 582: Depressed Residential:

"...through neighbourhoods Tiny Ewell had described as Depressed Residential, unending rows of crammed-together triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural differences that seem to highlight the essential sameness..."

Page 578: Randy Lenz: The Urban City Is One Big Commode:

As you can see from prior posts, just yesterday I was at a cottage. Today I am back home, in the city - happily. But there is a four week old garbage strike here and the raccoons are getting more brazen than usual. I figured out the whole raccoon-garbage problem long ago with handy little bungy-cords. But while I was away at the cottage, one clever and strong and determined raccoon got to my green garbage. The bungy is still there but the food garbage has been pulled through the tight-springy lid and the container has been dragged 20 metres. Must have been some tasty stuff in there: truffle oil pasta?; oyster shells?...to cause such a determined attack on my Bungied Green Garbage Container.

I am POSTING about my garbage because coincidentally I was READING about garbage in Infinite Jest this morning. And while I don't believe in g/God I might believe in coincidences.


Here's part of the paragraph I started to read after I walked past my garbage (without cleaning it up (maybe Don Gately can come by and do it for me?)):


Page 578:


"Dumpsters' garbage doesn't have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer to Green as 'brother.' Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice thing about the urban city is that it's one big commode..."

Wonder if that raccoon took a piss after it ate my garbage? Mind you, I shouldn't be one to talk: I've been know to use this beautiful city as a commode before...

It's Still Summer And I'm Still Reading:

(Back in the City now)

It's Still Summer And I'm Still Reading...

...despite the fact that a friend of mine who is a playwright and former broadway actor thinks that IJ sucks; is unreadable; has no thread to follow; that David wrote all of it while he was stoned. The Playwright stopped reading about a third of the way through.

Me? I'm gonna keep going. There's a lot I like about this book. But am I reading it in such scattered, stuttering fasion - literally chopping the book up into bite-sized pages - because the book itself is scattered?

Another question: given my friend's complaint of a lack of a thread, a theme, should we ask: is this book even a novel?

The Playwright thinks that the book is more one big form of masturbation.

Could he be right?

I really want to get to the end at some point to find that this book that everyone is raving about is in fact a novel; but maybe I will find that Infinite Jest is just one big jest/joke played on the readers and that when DFW talked about ONAN he was talking about his own writing.

In reading the pages of IJ am I then just watching (and taking part in) a really brilliant guy (incandescent) - wacking off?

And therefore could IJ actually have been a better book (and a novel) if as the Playwright says, it was shorter and had a common thread running through it?

I suppose I've got to get to the end of it before I can get close to answering these questions.

Trouble is that - while I have left behind the mosquitos of the cottage, the summer breeze may continue to get in the way...

Reading Page 565 At Pre-ONAN Canadian Cottage

Hard to get any reading done....

With the kids constantly asking questions...:

"Daddy can you help me hunt for snails?", "Daddy what's for breakfast?", "Daddy why is the lake so cold?"...

But I don't know if the questions from my Talkative Little Dependents are the big distraction...

Or the f*ucking mosquitos...

Slap!

Read. Daddy. Bite, bite. Slap, slap. Read, read, read. Daddy, daddy. Bite. Slap. Read. Bite...

Blog, blog, blog...

Read.

Bite.

I wonder if the mosquitos survived the Great Concavity? Whatever that is...

Read, read, read...

Rain drops keep falling on my pages

Just back home now in backyard Torontesse Piazza - post-son's-guitar lesson (sans spiclatinobassthumps) - smoking a monte cristo cigarillo with dusk settling in - and the rain starts. I know the pages should have been in my hands. Not sitting ignored by my side. But I was "reading". I was reading the smoke as it rose up from the tobbacco cylinder in my hand and met the friday evening sky. I was happy. Content. To be reading the smoke. But now I feel guilty as I see my pages drenched in tears. The pages want to be in my hands. The pages want to be rising up, drifting, wafting, soaring up to the sky. The pages want to be read.

Reading footnote 234

On Star*ucksCoffeeHouse patio while hiphop bass thumps out of LatinoSpicMobile (pictured) and son is taking guitar lessons.

Orin is being interview by pantsuited woman and keeps referring to GrammarNazi Moms.

I'm feeling aroused.

Is it the coffee? The fresh air? The SpicBass? The fantasythought of getting whipped for bad-grammered handblogs by the Moms?

Or is it the reading?

I like reading this "book".

These pages.

Page 534: Reading Under Nouveau Riche Pre-ONAN Cottage Ceiling

No sprayed stucco.
No stucco.
Just paint.
White.
Tidy.
But obviously quite a glare from those potlights.
So - bright but still a good place to read.
Quiet here too.
And a lake to dip into.
I could sleep a lot here.
I mean read...zzzzz.