Page 838: Wraith Tried To Concoct Conversations With His Son:

"Games hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solIpsism, anhedonia, death in life. "

Page 838: The Hidden Boy, The Bottle and The Unrealized potential

I am recalling the Brando scene now. Hundreds of pages ago. And am now - with about a hundred pages to go - going to make a call on this book, this novel - been thinking about this for days: this book is at it's core about talent. We'll see...

Page 837: The Wraith's Horror:

"No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing coming out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, the son's retreat to the periphery of life's frame. "

Page 835: Gately speculates briefly about the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors

Page 791: Avril's Wild Turkey Gift One Possible Cause Of Auteur's Suicide:

"-That it did not striker her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whisky-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse's widow-to-be--who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willig to give up spirits quote 'for' but had apparently been willing to give them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus."

Page 788: Kitchen Appliance Suicides:

Madame Psychosis's mother had killed herself four months before the film's (IJ) auteur.

Reading Footnote 321

It's 4 pages long.

It starts on page 1063.

And I am hurrying through it thinking, "I've got to get through this so I can get back to the "book", the "real" story - when the reality of course is that the footnotes are part of the story; and it's maybe beautiful (and cruel) (beautifully cruel?) how the "author" (never called him that before (usually it's the affectionate and familiar Dee-Eff-Double-You)) bounces you from page 785 (origin of the endnote) to page 1063 (actual endnote), then back to 785 - making you feel like the "book"/"novel" is never going to end: like the "author" is drawing a sideways-eight plot for me (on my hind-quarters?) the fading, weak, conventional reader - and all I have to do - all - is keep going. Keep going.

Page 778: Marathe Tells Kate How His Act Of Love Helped Him Conquer His Cage:

Gompert:

"Hang me upside down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of clinical depression by being a freaking hero?"

Marathe:

"In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my own thinking of my life. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation."

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.

Or...did reading ornate, immaculate, impeccable, beautiful, brilliant and incandescent books...

..Become the foundation of my depression - since the real world could never match up with the glory of Shakespeare or Tolstoy or those other guys?

Are books actually the problem?

Did books cause me to hate that suburban ceiling?

And what about the disease of writing, of thinking too much - never mind obsessively handblogging?

(And yes I am blogging while driving - in the rain.)

I Don't Think I'm Ever Going To Finish Reading Infinite Jest:

Summer breeze, well it makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, it makes me feel fine
Blowing through my…making me feel-right
Making me feel, making me feel fine, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Page 508: Rooms and Colours:

I love coincidences - I think.

My recent posts have compared the white sprayed stucco ceiling of my Mom's suburban house with the beautiful blue ceiling of my house downtown.

This post is about the IJ chapter which begins: "The following things in the room were blue."

The room in question is the headmaster's waiting room:

"Charles Tavis liked to say that you could tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room."

The room has wallpaper with a blue-sky motif which Hal hates:

"...Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting."

Hmm - I wonder if this is similar to the sky motif of the book cover?

The cover that I just recently posted.

How did my mind anticipate these nuances?

It's just a coincidence right?

Tell me that I'm not trapped inside IJ, living IJ, thinking like DFW.

I always thought this way.

I wasn't changed by a book, a writer.

I haven't started thinking like the writer, talking like the writer, writing like the writer - have I?

We all muse about rooms and colours don't we?

All of us are deeply emotionally affected by rooms, spaces, environments - aren't we?

You all understand don't you why those suburban ceilings depressed me don't you?

But the depression wasn't bad though. I mean I wasn't suicidal or anything. The sight of those ceilings (and rooms, and houses and streets and people) was just very, very painful and I just felt trapped is all. Not suicidal.

Besides, I had books. Books over-rode the monstrous sameness of the burbs. Books got me out. Gave me hope. Entertained my brain. They were The Entertainment - and the hope. For if I had been forced to spend my time in those horrendous suburban rooms without books - wait a minute - I wouldn't be alive today.

Wait a minute - books saved my life.

But I wasn't suicidal.

Other people are suicidal.

And suicide is a very obvious thing that hits you quickly like a bolt of lightning or a car accident.

You know what they say in newpaper code: "He died SUDDENLY".

Boom. Quick. That's suicide. A nuclear bomb.

Like when my brother died. Like when DFW died.

It - suicide - is not a long, long period of pain that wears you down until you got nothing left.

No.

It's got nothing to do with feeling trapped. Like in a cage.

No.

No, it's sudden.

Out of the blue.

Right?

Blonde Woman - AKA Canadiansport Mom - With Requisite Latte

Also basking in pagan evening sun as son is about to do battle

Year of the Home Depot

Caged canadiansport players basking in pagan evening sun - year of the home depot

A Better Ceiling To Read By?

A more beautiful ceiling to read by.
Today.
In the Big City.
In the old city.
Not new.
Like yesterday's ceiling.
None of that lowbrow, suburban, sprayed-stucco sameness.
Back in the day doing a ceiling was a craft.
Handmade.
Not spit out by a hose.
A hose, a nozzle can spew out only the same craft.
But in a hand there is differentiation and the unexpected.
A hand can shape and spread and swirl stucco.
My ceiling is also painted blue.
Like the sky.
Like the sky of the Infinite Jest book cover.
And it has a decent light fixture -
Which not only provides light to read by but also lights my soul.
This ceiling is decidedly happier than the one in my mother's burbs.
But it is distracting me from my "reading" isn't it?
Is it perhaps too beautiful?
Am I reading less now because there is too much beauty and happiness and success and knowledge in my life now?
Does a beautiful setting defeat the need to find beauty and inspiration and knowledge in reading?
Why read when you can just lay back and stare at a ceiling and get lost in your own thoughts?

Page 505: Back At It?

Am on my back in my old second floor bedroom at my Mom's place ready to nap/"read".

I can hear my Mom's footsteps downstairs as she scurries around the house like a hamster.

Yes folks I do have my pages with me and hope to resume my reading career now that my Education Ministry "sabbatical" is in full effect.

Am pleased with the 505th page since it puts me back into touch with Ennet House. I need that bit of drug and alcohol recovery perspective since this morning I am once again feeling the effects of a late night and unfettered drinking.

I went to see the Abbot's band play last night. Thankfully though I didn't close out the place as I usually do because this dutiful son had to wake up early to drive his stroke-addled Mama Vivant to a hospital in the hideous suburbs for an MRI to confirm that yes both of her carotid arteries are blocked x number of percent.

Can't wait to get old.

The photo you see captures one of the most depressing aspects of my youth: the dour white sprayed stucco ceiling. I read a lot when I was young and idealistic and wifeless and kidless and mortgageless and wanting to escape the depressing burbs. It was quite a painful paradox: I needed to read to dream of escaping those suburban sprayed stucco ceilings and yet that was the only backdrop I could ever have as I read day after day on my back. My room and that ceiling was part of my "cage".

I really should do some reading now...

I'd like to finish reading the IJ by the end of the summer.

But I'm not tied to that "goal".

I really don't want to be tied to anything this summer - except maybe the Blonde Woman.

I'd like to have a lot of long, slow orgasms this summer and not worry about having a reading "goal".

Tying myself to such a goal would perhaps make my summer painful, whereas I want it to be languid.

I don't want to create a cage for myself (after having only yesterday escaped from the Education Ministry) - like the fool who is incarcerating himself (and his unfortunate followers) inside an "Infinite Summer" reading project (Thanks for the link to that crazy-assed story, Pinot). I repeat - that guy is a fool and needs help.

THAT is no way to "read" a book or live a summer.

Come to think of it, I don't think people should read books. They should live them.

And if you're living a book, you gotta really just take it day by day, page by page, orgasm by orgasm. It's the moment that counts - not the calendar. Not a checklist. F*uck that.

Man, I'd forgotten how tiring handblogging can be. I really should be reading instead of "writing"...zzzzz....

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind"

...zzzzz....

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind"

...zzzzz....

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind Summer breeze, makes me feel fine Blowing through the jasmine in my mind"

...zzzzz....

New York Times Tennis Blogger Pays Tribute To David Foster Wallace:

The piece, written by Geoff MacDonald, is called:

Reading List: ‘The String Theory’ by David Foster Wallace.


It focuses on tennis player Michael Joyce and the legendary DFW tennis article called The String Theory:

"The writer’s death hit Joyce pretty hard. While recuperating from surgery for a blood clot in his leg, Joyce received a text message at 3 a.m. from a friend informing him of Wallace’s suicide. Although the two had not stayed in touch over the years, their fates were intertwined because of the immense popularity of “The String Theory” among serious tennis fans." (Source)

It's funny that I stumbled upon this article today. As you can see from my lack of handblogged posts I haven't been doing much "reading" lately.

Somehow I got a link to the article through my daily Google alert for "best footballer in the world".

I guess Google is not perfect.

You might wonder why I am generating Google alerts for "best footballer in the world" instead of "reading" Infinite Jest.

Well, I have become a little obsessed with a new project on the Best Player In The World, which focuses on soccerfootball.

I also generate a daily Google alert for "best player in the world" and while in my mind the term belongs in the soccerfootball world, it is also in wide use in the world of tennis.

Some days I get as many "best player" alerts for tennis as for soccerfootball.

This is very annoying as I am then reminded that I am not reading Infinite Jest and I hear the Abbot's voice asking, "So, are you reading...?"

Questions From The Couch: What Is The Purpose Of Fiction? Why Read? Why Write? What Is Infinite Jest? What Did DFW Do For Us?:

Peter Brooks:

"One can, then, resist the notion that psychoanalysis "explains" literature and yet insist that the kind of intertextual relation it holds to literature is quite different from the intertextuality that obtains between two poems or novels, and that it illuminates in quite other ways. For the psychoanalytic intertext obliges the critic to make a transit through a systematic discourse elaborated to describe the dynamics of psychic process. The similarities and differences, in object and in intention, of this discourse from literary analysis creates a tension which is productive of perspective, of stereoptical effect. Psychoanalysis is not an arbitrarily chosen intertext for literary analysis, but rather a particularly insistent and demanding intertext, in that mapping across the boundaries from one territory to the other both confirms and complicates our understanding of how mind reformulates the real, how it constructs the necessary fictions by which we dream, desire, interpret, indeed by which we constitute ourselves as human subjects. The detour through psychoanalysis forces the critic to respond to the erotics of form - that is, to an engagement with the psychic investments of rhetoric, the dramas of desire played out in tropes. Psychoanalysis matters to us as literary critics because it stands as a constant reminder that the attention to form, properly conceived, is not a sterile formalism, but rather one more attempt to draw the symbolic and fictional map of our place in existence."

P. 43-44, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling

Psycho Bookmarks

Got time to read now. Education Ministry reports done. But feeling like I want to resume with the psych+storytelling book. Non vs the fiction of IJ. Don't know why this is. I am also lying on my couch with CbcRadio2 pouring out of my blogmachine. In my nest. Heaven. Hmm. On my back? Peter Brooks is invoking lots of Freud in his search for the psychoanalytic basis for literature. Or is he searching for the literary basis of psychoanalysis? Whatever. Nice to be on my back "reading". I'll get to the fiction of IJ eventually. The muse will rise up and the pages will be more than bookmarks.

Helping Son "Write":

This is one of many reasons that I haven't been "reading" or handblogging Infinite Jest lately: being a father: chauffering kids around, doing "homework".

On top of this of course I have been using my precious time to blog soccerfootball, play canadiansport, pursue winedrinkingmoments around town and - of course - shag the Blonde Woman.

In the photo my son is writing his homework. Writing a response. For a grade 4 class.

We have written numerous versions of this response and my son has become visibly angry with the writing and with me.

Should I be encouraging him in this pursuit? Isn't writing dangerous? Doesn't writing put people over the edge?

Why on earth do people write? Why do they read?