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Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing.
He said he didn’t know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family—the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous—and so he had certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn’t so much conclude or make obligatory reference to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he’d started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking.
This man's story, about his family and the biscuits, chokes me up still.
and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever.
Ok, I confess this got a laugh out of me.
The cartridge’s closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward.
A wink to IJ itself?
His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House basement’s dryer.
Second time we've heard the heart-as-shoes-in-a-dryer metaphor. It loses a lot with repetition.
He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility.
Another stray observation that has stuck with me. The detailed but slightly askew narration in Lenz's section here is amusing.
There were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives—if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur’s cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route—to locate and secure a Master copy of the Entertainment on their own—had been exhausted.
Another important plot development buried in what seems an overflow of extraneous detail. I missed this entirely my first reading and so had no sense of foreboding about what's to come.
Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions.
Without the allusion to violence, this sentiment occurs elswewhere in DFW's work, notably This Is Water and The Pale King. I like the Stoic underpinning. You can choose your focus, which temple you worship at.
Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it.
Though it’s not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either.
Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.
Another preemptive deflection of criticism lobbed at IJ itself. This type of self-reference/-reflection makes me smile.
It was like he couldn’t help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.
Another bit of anti-irony philosophy.
Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable P.O.V.—Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an unironic, almost moral thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge:
Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating.
Tragic, and significant to understanding the motive of the wraith to show up soon.
The whole family was lousy with secrets, she’d decided, was part of the nonturkey dinner’s sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness.
Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little
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This has to be somehow significant. Schtitt is the ultimate gamesman, ecstatic in his Spartan devotion to a singular pastime. His philosophical mind is depicted as very sharp in all his previous scenes, so the fact he's sleeping amid this chaotic crescendoing opera says... something? Significant too is the confusion of language - Mario can't tell if these Germans are happy or unhappy, a confusion mirrored all through the book and especially overt in the pages to come. Also, another reference to "a high D" - the note plucked on a string in one of Himself's films.
‘That’s what I’m asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’ ‘I follow what you’re saying.’ ‘So you asked whether I was asking, and I’m asking you about it.’ Mario zooms in very tight: Chu’s complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view. ‘LaMont, I’m going to find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is so good.’ ‘So then you haven’t talked to Hal?’ ‘When?’ ‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’ ‘This is going very well!’
Mario is a sweetheart.
‘Moms?’ ‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’ ‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’ A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’ A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’
This little gesture of Mario's, so sweetly concerned for his brother's well-being, is a surprising wealth of both plot decoding and thematic resonance.
My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk.
Another really clear example of the annular cycle of addiction, and the passing down from parent to child some kind of trait (in this case a sickness or disorder, but elsewhere as innocuous as a "MMmmmyellow")
‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’ She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’ ‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’
‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’
Though not an addict, Marathe sums up and lives the AA mantras of acceptance and serenity beautifully.
‘This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don’t feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don’t know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I’m like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what I call feeling better.’
‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’
‘I am thinking: what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three streets from here and show you something with this promise: you would feel more good feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing. I am thinking of this offer: you would reply to me what?’
‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Yes, Mario.’ ‘I’m sorry if you’re sad, Hal. You seem sad.’ ‘I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel. I use Visine and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish Spring to hide it from almost everyone. Only Pemulis knows the true extent.’
‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’ ‘Then Hal?’ ‘Tell me what I should do.’ ‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’ ‘…’ ‘Do you see what I mean?’
His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who’d just lately put down the pipe and/or bong.
—Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very
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—That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden.
See, now, back on page 220 this person is said to be Molly Notkin's love interest, not Joelle's. So, is Notkin lying to cover something up for Joelle? This is the common interpretation, and seems pretty legit.
little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty.
A beloved self-referential quote.
It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.
Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Dolores Rusk’s dreaded Inner Child, Hal’d be willing to bet that here it’s some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like ‘limbic component of the CNS’ or ‘the part of our cortex that’s not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly’ or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.
This is actually recommended in the AA doctrine of Open-Mindedness. But Hal's going to have to move next into Willingness (AA Principle 3) which is a whole nother ballgame.
‘Can you share what you’re feeling, Kevin?’ he says. ‘Can you name it?’ Kevin’s voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant’s abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,’ he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater’s shoulders tremble. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars… bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.’ Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap’s bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come out of
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This is played for laughs but hides a lot in plain sight for how to connect the various threads thematically to make some kind of emotional, artistic sense of the whole. Note the mother/child imagery shared with the Entertainment and in Gately's imagination. "Nobody's coming," and you can't regress to infancy no matter what the temptation, so in truth you need to grow up.
All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain’s Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn’t automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.
At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it appears.
Hugely significant line, I am told.
The blurred figure in the next bed sat up very still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its head.
Otis P. Lord, recovering with monitor on head after Eschathon
A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately’s left, off past the blurred seated square-head boy’s bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark window.
First overt wraith sighting! Things take a turn for the weird from here.
Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of his gunshot wound immediately on admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol twice by shift-Drs. who haven’t bothered to read the HISTORY OF NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV + MEDIC. that Gately’d made Pat Montesian swear she’d make them put in italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing.
This in and of itself is a heroic act from an addict. In a position to take drugs with the approval and encouragment of society, Gately knows he's got to Be True to Thyself first and foremost.
It was totally unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or why he was choosing this particular time to share.
I assign great significance to the way these people open up and share with Gately, specifically while he is incapable of talking and can only listen.
He realized she kept asking if he was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His inability to still speak was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid.
Pretty much we're going to be bludgeoned with this "inability to speak" situation for a while. But because I came to identify with and respect Gately after all we've learned of him so far, his hospital recovery, though lengthy, doesn't seem tedious. Quite the opposite - I find it riveting.
looking not at him but more like seemingly at whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big crib,
Never caught the "big crib" until now.
and Thrust said he summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety’d blessed him with
Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound.
Chandler Foss finished out his nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for Morning Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator.
got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab,
McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to take a brody off the House’s roof.
So, this is a joke of course - movie sequels keep spawning. But is it an especially funny joke, worth including? BTW, how many Nightmares on Elm Street had there been by the early 90s? I guess you could roughly extrapolate the calendar year if you assume a new installment every year or two.
Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue of who’s cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf, for texture.
the ghostish figure that’s been flickering in and out of sight around the room finally stays in one spot long enough for Gately to really check him out. In the dream it’s the figure of a very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped, resting its tailbone against the window sill’s ventilator’s whispering grille, with its long arms hanging at its sides and its ankles casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail that the ghostly chinos aren’t long enough for its height,
Ta-da! The big ghostly reveal! Honestly, I completely missed this entire deal with JOI's wraith my first reading. I guess I was skimming too quickly for my own good. Now it's a source of much personal contention, as I can't quite decide if I like this supernatural element or not.
Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES
figurants the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen.
I was positively obsessed with this idea of figurants on my 3rd reading, and thought this "depth of field" idea of giving voice to just about every character possible was revolutionary.
