Infinite Jest
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between December 26, 2015 - January 12, 2016
43%
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He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were
Tom Quinn
N-WORD - why, DFW? Why include this? It's become a pain point for many in these contemporary times.
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north of Central Square’s clot and snarl Prospect St.’s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery tickets in what isn’t quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars triple-parked, an all-out full-cast crèche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony,
Tom Quinn
DFW doing his best James Joyce, giving Boston a close-up as Ulysses did for Dublin
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and one piece of the debris Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainent’ 203 on the street’s east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle,
Tom Quinn
Much has been made of this scene's "cinematic" nature. A sweeping generalization, but when you think of hyperdetail and hyperrealism, Wallace is your man.
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He could and does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking at alien traffic and commerce. He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.
Tom Quinn
This is an oddly stirring sentiment.
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though they were unlabelled save for a commercialed slogan in tiny raised letters of IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR—which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch—each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person’s bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag of their storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond static, to the satisfaction of Lucien’s disgust. 205
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The broom’s bristles say ‘Hush, hush.’
Tom Quinn
Also have read critical theory linking this scene expressly to "The Broom of the System" and philosophy of language, with what happens to poor Lucien with his beloved broom making for a very unpleasant argument.
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Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed skull below. It is the worst possible scenario;
Tom Quinn
See, now, it's really a very silly image - contrasts with the extreme violence to come, though, so there's probably something to discuss there. But "wheelchair assassins" is not a meta-commentary selling point to anyone above middle school and is a weird flagship mascot for your anti-irony stance.
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the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien’s teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned;
Tom Quinn
Yikes, like I said: when you want hyperdetail, Wallace is where you turn.
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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.
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the minor-D shriek of the vacuum below.
Tom Quinn
See earlier the "Things You Learn" section at Ennet House, when a vacuum is described the same way. Evidence in favor of JOI as narrator.
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obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications
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the particularly nasty excess production of saliva—several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins—the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread,
Tom Quinn
See, now, I've never heard of this reaction to pot and quitting pot use. And he makes it into a fairly big character point of Hal's, this saliva as some sort of measure of his wellbeing or something.
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Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it.
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‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’
Tom Quinn
Another scene that sticks with me and sometimes I'll exclaim: "We done motherfucking surrendered our will in here."
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Hercules’ head, this head was square.
Tom Quinn
A lovely literary connection between Gately and the strongman hero of legend.
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The following things in the room were blue.
Tom Quinn
Ugh, I hate it.
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Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.
Tom Quinn
Recalling the "jumping off place" described in the AA section prior?
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You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn’t know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.’ ‘Don’t have to tell me.’ ‘Well I don’t know you, Joelle, am I right? I don’t know what you seen or know.’
Tom Quinn
If the story of her mother and the garbage disposal is to be believed...
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U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’
Tom Quinn
Overt references to cycles and annular/annulation cannot be ignored.
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‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’
Tom Quinn
Personally, I like to believe this is true.
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It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.
Tom Quinn
Cue one of the more chilling sections. If you've reached this point, hopefully you care enough about the generalities of addiction and the Ennet House characters that this will prompt some kind of rising feeling of dread.
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Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House’s Community Meeting Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he’d done a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he’d refer to only as ‘The Madame’ he’d gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer’s off,
Tom Quinn
Did Glynn drop DMZ and live to tell the tale?
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Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.’s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building’s whole grid.
Tom Quinn
:)
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He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either ‘Total worry total worry’ or ‘No don’t worry no don’t worry’ and c.
Tom Quinn
I really like this line for some reason.
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It’s an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn’t feel very well.
Tom Quinn
This is a great little imagery.
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If he got high, he’d have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it’d give his spirits a voltage that’d more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody.
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Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth—Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.
Tom Quinn
Highly true-to-life description of addicted thinking
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Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in a minibike chain once and how but within days of intensive concentration the finger had grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard’s tail, confounding doctoral authorities. Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own unusual life-force and energois de vivre and knew and accepted that he was somehow not like the run of common men, and began to accept his uniqueness and all that it entailed.
Tom Quinn
My Kindle claims this is the exact 50% mark
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a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and the total head had like conformed to the inside of the containing box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly square in overall outline, the head,
Tom Quinn
I always found the skull-less infants and the metal helmets certain afflicted must wear to be a great symbol that nobody seems to talk about.
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the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly,
Tom Quinn
I remember this is a joke that stuck with me my first reading. I can remember exactly where I was reading it (my lunch hour at the office) and the context of that time in my life (returning to work after a hiatus for school)
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‘But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’ ‘Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.’
Tom Quinn
Here's another interesting postmodern tic - dialogue translated from accent to unaccented, but then corrected as if still accented. From what I hear, DFW's first novel "Broom of the System" plays with dialogue even more so than IJ (those conversations where everybody's lines read "..." and you've got to recontextualize every couple lines to keep track of who's speaking)
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‘Joelle, you’re maybe about the last person to be taking somebody’s inventory about weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.’ ‘Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’ ‘Remind me to Log how it’s real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’
Tom Quinn
What might pass for flirting, among these tough-to-crack nuts. But an interesting debate would be how positive a feminist icon Joelle might be argued to be, or not to be.
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all the nightmarish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport
Tom Quinn
This is pretty darn accurate - I've gotten lost inside the boundaries of the Phoenix airport way more than once. But, to their credit, they have made significant improvements in the 20+ years since this was written.
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all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right.
Tom Quinn
Dangerously close to a Mitch Hedberg joke
51%
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The city of metro Boston MA at night. The ding and trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm. Ave.’s hill, west. Street-drunks sitting with their backs to sooted walls, seeming to study their laps, even the mist of their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows distending with headlights’ passage.
Tom Quinn
Precise and evocative imagery here and to come. The other place that gets this much attention is the SW meeting of Marathe and Steeply
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Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said, so I took her to Allston, unquote.
Tom Quinn
A direct repeat of an earlier line. Intentional? And what would be that intent?
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Lenz now rises and his movements in the yard have a melting and wraithlike quality in the different shades of shadow.
Tom Quinn
Probably NOT a JOI wraith sighting
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The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment hangs there distended like that
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He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s states of mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him
Tom Quinn
Significant details towards unraveling Hal's condition by the end of everything. Maybe.
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a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia.
Tom Quinn
Mario is the kind, empathetic soul of the book
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Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
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Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way.
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Almost all of it’s picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant.
Tom Quinn
Another line that seems applicable to the book and to life itself.
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‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’
Tom Quinn
DFW is on record in several interviews as both adoring and despising big blockbuster mainstream movie entertainment.
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At the blade’s sound the situation becomes even more automatic and Gately feels adrenaline’s warmth spread through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track. Having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. Gately’s just one part of something bigger he can’t control.
Tom Quinn
The Gately fight rumbles on like a steam engine working up momentum and provides a much needed shot of energy to this wordy stretch.
55%
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He remembers how he’d stay in luxury furnished North Shore apts. with G. Fackelmann and T. Kite and they’d gradually strip the place and sell the appointments off until they were sleeping in a totally bare apartment.
Tom Quinn
This type of interweaving of future info (itself actually a flashback) is part of the distinctive disorientation this book and it's intricate chronology raises.
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Tom Quinn
Roughly speaking this is about the 2/3 point, if we're including footnotes as part of the page count. And so if "Act 3" follows the same cyclical template, we'll see it open in an uncomfortable stasis, hear about the empty effects of living without empathy, learn the value of discipline in one context or another, and see a sudden rise of action and violence. (At this time, I remember "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun" is coming up, and several confessional vignettes at Gately's bedside, plus several backfilling details re: the Entertainment, and Marathe in particular.
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InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there,
Tom Quinn
Word for word repetition of earlier text. Why? Surprisingly little discussion of this online.
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But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice. Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching.
Tom Quinn
Another cultural extrapolation that is resonant though not 100% accurate
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Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, E.T.A.’s 16’s A-1, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.’s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the way to 7–5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement
Tom Quinn
Much has been speculated upon with this Hal/Stice "rivalry" compared to Hamlet/Laertes, but I've never found the two to directly line up.