You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. … How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
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Shameless plug for a short film I made that was (very very) partially inspired by the passages about James O. Incandenza in Infinite Jest. Other inspirations include Brakhage, Kierkegaard, Malick, and other cool things/people.
"and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspe, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother's linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face's noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspesie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock's canted angle to hold him upright on his knews, completely skewered, and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois' sad insurgents' lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole,clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues."
I must be in that dreaded period of reading Infinite Jest where you start feeling fatigued right around halfway through (I'm around the 475-485 range, I think, so pretty much exactly halfway through counting endnote pages). From the sound of it this is where people are like "yeeeah I'll get back to this someday" but I think I'm just gonna have to power through the boredom and hope to come out on the other end engrossed again.
But since I'm around halfway through, (very) brief notes thus far:
I think it's safe to say that This is Water is the thesis statement for most of DFW's fiction* and definitely lends a significant hand in figuring out what he's going for with all this stuff. Throughout the first half there are several major passages, basically monologues, from characters such as Schtitt, Hal and Marathe that critique the average American's lack of objects of worship that are larger and therefore more permanent and perfect (in a sense) than the individual. Schtitt and Marathe refer specifically to the State as an essential object, something that serves as a solid thing--abstract but also weirdly practical--for individuals to "worship" (in a really broad sense) and provide them meaning. Hal in the Big Buddies chapter talks about Schtitt and the prorectors as intentionally producing tension and animosity in their students so that the students in turn can complain to each other about their ill treatment and in a sense bond as a community of hatred. By creating this community, however minor, Schtitt & co. allow their students to briefly escape from the harshly competitive and individualistic nature of their sport. And Hal, though joking about this theory at first, comes to see truth in it.
So a few points with regard to all the above.
- the conflicts of nearly all the extensively developed characters thus far seems to stem from this issue; that is, facing that choice of what to dedicate one's life to, and choosing the impermanent self (pleasure, athletic prowess, fame, etc.) over something larger and more permanent. This hasn't been pushed too hard in what I've read just yet, but I have a good feeling Joelle's backstory and her transition from almost hypnotic beauty to almost hypnotic hideousness (which is my presumption, maybe I'm just falling into a bait-and-switch DFW is setting) is a literal embodiment of this concept of impermanence. Beauty doesn't last, etc. etc.
- Like with many of his other works, DFW relates tennis to larger concepts exceedingly well. So far his greatest accomplishment in the novel (for me) is this allegorical ability.
And now to finish, much more broad, quick thoughts:
- the "horror" chapters, if you will (Joelle's OD, Poor Tony's withdrawal, the opening chapter), are great applications of Kafka and Lynch.
- I've read a great deal of criticism lately regarding DFW's treatment of addicts; I find these criticisms bizarre and almost ill-informed, because I haven't seen such a level-headed, humanistic treatment of the subject in any of the works said critics are using as comparison (Requiem of a Dream, for example; and one person writing about the introduction to the Ennett House as like literary bum fighting).
- DFW's foreshadowing and callbacks are pretty incredible. Introducing a character and then finally focusing on them or revealing something fundamental about them like 200 pages later is nuts, and can be infuriating but also really amusing. I've laughed on several occasions when arriving at a mere sentence that makes sense of something that was completely incomprehensible a hundred pages back.
- Accusations that DFW is "talking down to" or "intentionally alienating" with his vocabulary I can understand somewhat--I don't believe he was actually intending to make people feel stupid, but he's clearly excessive and self-indulgent on occasion. That said, his vocabulary, "technical" terminology** and long, winding passages seem more like idiosyncrasies and stylistic decisions that can be faced and overtaken by sheer brute force than actual literary challenge ala Ulysses. If you don't understand a passage, make your way through it--chapters or even pages, like the work as a whole, elaborate on themselves, making oblique segments contextually clear later on or repeating points altogether in entirely different language. That sounds cheap, but I know people wouldn't call IJ such a challenging novel if they used this strategy and saw how clear and coherent things became in the process. And the more clear the book becomes later on, the more likely you are to see what DFW's getting at upon re-reading the more difficult sections.
* This isn't to forget E Unibus Pluram, which is probably equally important in understanding DFW's entire method and philosophy. I'd say these two works are the most essential in grasping DFW's bibliography.
** Some of the criticism I've read points out DFW getting certain pharmaceutical stuff blatantly wrong, among other things; so "technical" in the sense that it has an appearance of technical but is there more for pure aesthetic reasons than accuracy/realism, elaboration or advancement of technical knowledge.
Robert F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance he's heard the one about the fish. Glenn K. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course he's got to put his own oar in, and breaks in and asks them all if they've heard the one What did the blind man say as he passed by the Quincy Market fish-stall, and without waiting says He goes "Evening, Ladies." A couple male White Flaggers fall about, and Tamara N. slaps at the back of Glenn K.'s head's pointy hood, but without real heat, as in like what are you going to do with this sick fuck?
Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, "What the fuck is water?" and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shruge and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back.
Infinite Jest, something like page 444 or 445 in the print edition. The pages are all different in my ebook version.
This isn't the most mindblowing excerpt but obviously it's interesting for being the supposed origin of This is Water.
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that awkward moment when you're trying to post the most memorable excerpts from Infinite Jest but 300-400 pages in there are hardly ever passages that aren't memorable
Seriously. The Eschaton chapter, the Boston AA meeting, any and all Marathe & Steeply exchanges, The Mad Stork's suicide, any section about Gately and the Ennett House, Poor Tony's withdrawal, the story of Orin's transition from tennis to football...all of this and not even halfway done with the damn thing.
'Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.'
Breathes in and out like a savvy diver and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helcopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.
The Joelle segment of Infinite Jest...probably not the best thing to read if you're feeling depressed.
"--thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b&w, straight full-frontal shot in this grainy b&w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the f-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera, no attempt to disguise he's reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying 'Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal "Ich bein ein Berliner" was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political,' at which point he aims his thumb and finger at his own temple at which point his TA doubles the focal-length so there's this giant--"
"I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one case you--"
"They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down."
"No no I'm saying that this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, is a technologically constituted space."
"A du nous avons foi au poison."
"It's good cheese, but I've had better cheese."
"Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here's in pain, he's been telling me about it and now he's like to tell you about it."
"--complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn't show, it's known she reupped for the part, the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who had to be wheeled out under nurses' care, my God and Peter, looking as if he'd eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and skakeskin boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence on continuity through time that was the project's whole magic and raison, you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here's this entirely incongruous middle-aged black woman playing Jan!"
"De gustibus non est disputandum."
"Balls."
"An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been ineluct--"
"The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered."
"Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar."
"You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that."
"--so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket's fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won't stay put."
"Fucks with the emulsion's gradient so that all the tesseract's angles appear to be right-angled, except in--"
"So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn't have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down practically on the man's knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what--"
"--more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, whether space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept."
"It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like--"
"Because they're so emotional more labile at that stage."
"'So get dentures?' she said. 'So get dentures?'"
"Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?"
"--wat it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone."
"I don't think anyone here would dispute that they're absolutely fetching tits, Melinda."
"We had blinis with caviar. They were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. We said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl."
"That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini."
"Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember your Charles was cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin's-egg blue."
"I think you mean the Great Concavity, Alain."
"I mean Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant."
"And then it turned out he'd put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you've ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I'd heard the term projectile vomiting but I never thought I--you could aim, the pressure was such that you could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole staggering spouting groaning--"
"This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor's been going around like a lazy toilet since Dishmaster, for Christ's sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing's alleged to be out in. Have a look. See that it's doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that's only entertaining after it's over, on reflection."