Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Certain people find people like Mario Incandenza irritating or even think they’re outright bats, dead inside in some essential way.

Jim not that way Jim.

James incandenza's father The very first line can be interpreted as how his father is always disappointed in him.

She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way.

Perhaps the father is venting to his son. Maybe he is not happy with his marriage. This could say a lot regarding James' relationship with his mother.

Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie.

The word "suffering" shows unhappiness

I’m predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing.

This prediction does not hold up as James excels in catridge filming.

Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I’ll… tear the ball… open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential.

It’s glo… gloriously painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it with due care. Feel its shape.

His father introduces him to alcohol

he never acknowledged I even existed as I was, not as I do you, Jim, not as I take care to bend over backwards way, way out of my way to let you know I see you recognize you am aware of you as a body care about what might go on behind that big flat face bent over a homemade prism.

His father's problem arise from being unnoticed by his father.

And the other point is I started to fall forward even before I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great.

I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen.

The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine but really it looks to Pemulis from his slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM’s monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class, way more powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.-ingestible DMT (or Ololiuqui or datura’s scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. ‘Jackie-O.’),

Michael Pemulis drives all this way to purchase this new drug called DMZ

The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye.

the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese opium, which forget it.

DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis,after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’ which Mario Incandenza and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to almost religiously.

TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN11.5-MINUTE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CARTRIDGE DIRECTED, RECORDED, EDITED, AND — ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM — WRITTEN BY MARIO INCANDENZA, IN RECEIPT OF NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT’S ANNUAL ‘NEW EYES, NEW VOICES’ YOUNG FILMMAKERS’ CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD-EASY-TO-INSTALL UPGRADE FOR INFERNATRON/INTERLACE TP SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (SIC), ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE

This is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve. You still, years after the man’s death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.

Hal's fatgher is training him like his father trained him.

Here is how to do extra individual drills before the Academy’s A.M. drills, before breakfast, so that after the thousandth ball hit just out of reach by Himself, with his mammoth wingspan and ghastly calves, urging you with nothing but smiles on to great and greater demonstrations of effort, so that after you’ve gotten your third and final wind and must vomit, there is little inside to vomit and the spasms pass quickly and an east breeze blows cooler past you and you feel clean and can breathe.

Just like James when he was young, Hal does not seem to enjoy these sessions either.

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.

This shows that James was a success but he didn't like it. He ended up like his old man and this leaves Hal in conflict.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.

Philosophical aspect: to avoid pain and suffering keep doing what you are doing and live with it.

The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

This creates more problems because now you have to keep doing it. It is a vicious circle of life and suffering.

Reaching at least the round you’re supposed to is known at tournaments as ‘justifying your seed.’

This is the kind of pressure that is put on you

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be constantly focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard.

The system teaches you to be afraid of losing your external and materialistic worth because it says that's all that matters in the end. This largely speaks to modern-day society.

Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks’ strings and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.;

This objectifies 'talent' as materialistic gain.

SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C., 58 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300–1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

‘But there’s this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin.

So but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for occupying space. And then she ever so magnaminously says she’ll apologize if I will.

This may be a continuation of what just ended.

I did not come here to get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping. I’m dangerously close to saying either that… that specimen goes or I do.’

Perhaps this is Don Gately?

‘I’m awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.’

But I think I already want to stop. How come I’d even be here if I didn’t want to stop? Isn’t being here proof I want to stop? But then so how come I can’t stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.’

Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza’s was an evolved product of concordance and compromise, and the scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product of negotiated compromises between Avril’s academic hard-assery and James’s and Schtitt’s keen sense of athletic pragmatics.

that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition, 64 and thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory.

Shows Enfield Academy is a tough institution where surviving and studying is not easy. Perhaps this is the reason why students are drawn to recreational drugs.

Some E.T.A. twists Avril’d allowed into the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects of the T and Q are mixed and not divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic; that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty much ignore the study of closed figures (excepting rectangles) to concentrate (also except for Thorp’s Trigonometry of Cubes, which is elective and mostly aesthetic) for two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution and expansion of bare angles; that the quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at E.T.A. become a two-term elementary optics survey, since vision issues are obviously more germane to the Game, and since all the hardware required for everything from aphotic to apochromatic lenswork were and are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel.

Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant.

Comparison between athletes and entertainers

Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. Entertainment Dept. offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll from the Winter Hill Special School in Cam-bridgeport for cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read, explaining he’d way rather listen and watch. And he is a fanatical listener/ observer.

Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general. One of the reasons Mario’s obsessed with her show is that he’s somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow.

Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but would be scared to try. The word periodic pops into his head.

Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe.

Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L’Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before bed.

Madame Psychosis’s cued musics stir very early memories of Mario’s father.

Prandial music holds little charm or associations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog.

The dessert Avril serves when Hal’s over is Mrs. Clarke’s infamous high-protein-gelatin squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids. Mario’s wild for them.

Avril always brings some hell-Jell-O squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it’s been reasonably nice to see him outside les bâtiments sanctifiés. The whole thing to Hal sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the post-prandial farewell routine.

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy’s hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet.

The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex’s grounds — buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services.

Unit #1, right by the lot in the hospital’s afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying medications.

Unit #2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House.

Customers for the services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup...

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2’s methadone clinic.

over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it’s the same at all other Boston halfway houses

Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease; it’s not boarded up, and the Enfield Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple days a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket.