Jason’s
Comments
(group member since Aug 06, 2012)
Jason’s
comments
from the Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace group.
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Liking it, Dustin?
I don't think Hamlet rapes Ophelia. I think that discussion between Ophelia and Polonius is meant to portray Hamlet as despondent or whatever. Polonius takes this to understand that he is "love sick" but we know that there are more complex reasons for his madness.I don't know what you mean about politics. Refresh my memory?
I love the play within the play! It is so well executed.
What was my offer? Talking about it? That is my favorite Shakespeare play. I would definitely talk about it!
I think he escapes because don't they have a flash-forward in the beginning of the book that suggests he does in fact escape? I can't remember specifically but I think if you read the beginning part again, where Hal has his breakdown, it mentions Orin, and I think that happens after the events at the end of the book.
He was the one who liked to squash cockroaches, right? The older brother? Yeah, I think I remember him being trapped in a giant tumbler, bargaining with some woman (Helen?) to be released in exchange for handing over the Entertainment.Or something like that.
You can use this thread to discuss it as you go along, if you want. I'd love to talk Hamlet!
Nope. It is not essential. But it is super fun if you already know Hamlet and then you pick up all the references in Infinite Jest. And there are a lot of references.Plus, it's Hamlet, which is the greatest Shakespeare play of all time, so you should read it regardless.
Nathan's probably just numbing your brain with his comments. That's the "calm" you feel.:)
Wheeeee!
Ok, I finished. (Finally.) Yeah, the ending was annoying, but I was kind of prepared for that so I don't think it's bothering me as it might have otherwise. It was kind of like a Sopranos cut-to-black.
Suzanne wrote: "I think I may now have anhedonia."Ha! I'm about to finish it tonight!
The sudden shift into first-person from Hal's perspective was a little weird.
Whitney said: Save the arrow wood for hull and the sling for sail, build yourself a boat to float and prevail.Brilliant!
So you're saying it's an intentional decision to showcase a devolution of language? I guess I'd buy that except in the case of Infinite Jest it seems like just the opposite. Don't you think a lot of these characters speak with a way higher degree of...I dunno, eloquence? (for lack of a better descriptor) than the average person does in your daily encounters?
Fascinating, no? And considering the anhedonic state as a corollary to the catch-all "mid-life crisis" condition wherein people become despondent at what little they've achieved in life (note the conspicuous absence of anhedonia in carefree youth), I don't think it's such a stretch to remark on its causal relation to suicide, either.Am I talking to myself here?
“It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novacaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and...well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but no connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.”
Enfield Tennis Academy Members:• Michael Pemuluset al.
• Ortho Stice
• John Wayne
• Jim Troeltsch
• Ted Schacht
Instead of talking about overt depression, I want to talk about anhedonia.Definition of ANHEDONIAI think the concept of anhedonia forms almost the basis for this entire novel, doesn't it? And I think it ties into all its other themes, too. It's an understated root of unhappiness and a remarkably common co-symptom of depression and something that can be linked to almost every character. Hal suffers from it, James suffered from it, Marathe wants to exploit it, Gately and Joelle understand it, and it's something nearly everyone can relate to at one or another point in his life.
: a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts
— an·he·don·ic adjective
In terms of thematic connections, I think the whole concept of entertainment—which to me, includes Entertainment (in the form of the arts) as well as sports (i.e. TENNIS)—relates to man's attempt to suppress his anhedonic state. This is something that has always existed but becomes hyper-realized in DFW's over-commercialized, near-futuristic world. I think the story of the M*A*S*H addict comes close to exemplifying this theme of Entertainment-as-a-remedy-for-anhedonia. Don't drugs do the same thing? Can't we relate anhedonia to addiction, as well, then? I think so. In Infinite Jest, the Entertainment is simply a stand-in for non-drug-related addictions, but we're scratching the same itch here, right?
Don Gately and the P.G.O.A.T. have their own threads:Don — http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Joelle — http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
