#fuckyeahdfw

"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.

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.

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.

"This is a technologically constituted space."

"--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."