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the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith’s entertainments’ public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism.
Another very favorite quote of mine.
The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son’s end, the wraith clarifies. Gately wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes refers to it mentally as it. The wraith opens and examines the used hankie just like an alive person can never help but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own
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The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse
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Another hugely significant passage, and if we consider Hal as representative of a generation and this whole book as a critique of postmodernism's poisonous effect on communication and empathy I think we'll arrive at the real main point.
What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P. passed out, can’t mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But
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This little vignette sticks with me too. Gately, sorrowfully trying to remember whether or not he helped the weak...
After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer,
Just casually slipped in the fact that Marathe appears to have double-crossed the AFR
‘What’s the matter?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What’s the matter?’ My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. ‘I’m not crying, Orth.’
I still do not grasp what's happening to Hal and his speech and emotional displays at this point, and having read through 5 times now it's very frustrating. Am I missing something, or did Wallace not clarify well enough?
A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there.
Who the fuck is this???
‘Your forehead’s stuck to the window?’
I also don't see the need for this bit. It's not especially funny, nor is it especially symbolic or poignant.
‘But that’s Axhandle’s single. What would Troeltsch be doing sleeping in Axhandle’s room?’
A detail too distinct to be itrelevant but too miniscule to be memorable.
‘Somebody did come by before,’ he said. ‘There was somebody standing back there about maybe an hour back. But he just stood there. Then he went away. Or… it.’ A full-body shiver.
Who??? JOI's wraith is a popular theory. I have suspicions it's John Wayne.
There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of elastic from hell.
Seriously? Hyperbole? Drug-induced hallucinatory distortion of reality? Sigh. I wish we had more to go on, or at least that the stuff we have to go on were more mature.
Kenkle said, ‘but why the hilarity?’ ‘What hilarity?’ Kenkle looked from me to Brandt to me. ‘What hilarity he says. Your face is a hilarity-face. It’s working hilariously. At first it merely looked a-mused. Now it is openly cach-inated. You are almost doubled over. You can barely get your words out. You’re all but slapping your knee. That hilarity, good Prince atheling Hal.
Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he’s discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn’t think he can stand it one more second.
‘Now I must tell tell, I would make the personal first choice of titrated hydromorphone hydrochloride, in this case—’ Christ, this is Dilaudid. Blues. Fackelmann’s Mount Doom.
Another flash-forward that is meaningless on first reading but extremely important with hindsight. Gately's literally being tempted by and reminded of his worst binge ever. In the addict's mind, which could win out?
And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again Gately won’t resist. And who the fuck’ll be able to blame him, after all. Why should he have to resist? He’d received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot with a professionally modified .44 Item. He’s post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain. This was a trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney heard him; what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him?
But surely if Ferocious Francis thought a medically advised short-term squirt suspect, at all, the old reptilian bastard would say something, do his fucking job as a Crocodile and sponsor, instead of just sitting there playing with his nostril’s little noninvasive tube. ‘Look kid, I’m gonna screw and let you settle this bullshit and come back up later,’ comes Francis’s voice, subdued and neutral, signifying nothing, and then the rasp of the chair’s legs and the system of grunts that always accompanies F.F.’s getting up from a chair.
I love Ferocious Francis.
Gately’s good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.’s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy’s balls and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn’t rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he’s powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and
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Yes, yes, yes! I love it! Hands down my favorite memory of this whole mess.
I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don’t know where it came from. It was some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match. I’d never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant.
Speculation online holds this means the dose of DMZ he's alleged to be dosed with is kicking in. But when, how, and who would've done the dosing?
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.
Again, a hugely significant conclusion and the thrust of the book summed up well.
It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
There may be some symbolism or thematic purpose to this, but it feels forced and bizarre.
The worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the hydromorphone’s transit across the blood-brain barrier created a terrible five-second mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung. Fackelmann would loosen the belt and stand back and watch Gately’s eyes roll up as he broke a malarial sweat and stared up at the delusion’s respiritic sky while his huge hands throttled the air in front him just like a toddler shakes at the bars of his crib.
Now, why the direct repeat of this here? Did DFW forget he'd used it already? Was he tying the two experiences together, but came across too overtly?
The winter daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the viewer’s big flat screen and made the players look bleached and ghostly. Through the windows off in the distance was the Atlantic O., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter was a hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an inspirational story that had never played a major sport until college and now was already one of the finest punt-specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the
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This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I teared up a little at this. Gately is just remarkable.
Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor—some broken in that incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric-content gets broken—including the relevant panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts’ lattice.
Confound this mystery! Was it the wraith or what?
it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head.
Does everybody get it yet?
even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communiqué. He felt slightly better.
I like to read the wraith as symbolic of the Author's Voice, the way a really good book and very fine language will linger with you, maybe bubble into consciousness now and then. Reading and writing, for DFW, seemed to be the most exacting way to communicate his actual inner workings and thus the one he favored.
Dr. Robert (‘Sixties Bob’) Monroe—the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary’s original circle of mayonnaise-jar acid-droppers at T. Leary’s now-legendary house in West Newton MA,
I guess this would put the timeline somewhere in the 2010-2030s range, roughly speaking.
He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it.
Another really on-point exceptional and tight snippet of writing that is in danger of being swallowed up by the bulk of text all around it. Sometimes I would like to see DFW have written something tight, spare, economical. Because he really can hit these traditional writing styles and systems perfectly well.
He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth
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People spend a lot of time parsing this out - is it a hallucination? a premonition? both at once? A wraith-implanted fantasy or directive? But it's one of the more well-known Hamlet allusions, seemingly with Gately cast as Hamlet himself (since he's the one saying "I knew him") which is, again, weird and confusing. But we could connect this back to Hal's essay about the hero of inaction pretty convincingly.
when he did start a binge he might as well have been strapped to the snout of a missile for all the control he had over length or momentum.
An oblique reference to Gravity's Rainbow, given everybody's desire to label Wallace the Pynchon of his generation? Or is that wishful thinking on my part?
Lenses were Jim’s forte. This can’t be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case full. He paid more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera. His other son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses. Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.’
Again, somewhat symbolic of the author and the "lens of perception" or something
I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing.
Aw, this is disappointing - I like to imagine she really is so beautiful it's become a deformity. There's a heartbreaking poetry in that.
Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving.
Himself honors this convention, though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention.
the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplice!’s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word—way, way longer than is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings.
Accomplice!’s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man’s face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge’s real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’ for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the
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I could barely recall the ’98 blizzard.
Another small detail to refine the date estimate. If Hal's 17, then barely remembering the 1998 blizzard suggests we're in 2010-2013ish
His record up until then indicated that he remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else. From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film.
The chilling framed print of Lang directing Metropolis in 1924.
If I had to guess, I'd say this is "chilling" because it's representative of an overeagerness to control, to exert one person's will over the outside world and the people in it. This desperation for control is a big no-no in AA.
A surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane.
No clue.
Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of maniera greca porn: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc.
My eating mold and the Moms’s being very upset that I’d eaten it—this memory was of Orin’s telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.
Much can be said about how the narrative is filtered and re-filtered through various people before being relayed to us. How much can we trust any of the information we're being told?
The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one’s Moms begin to age makes you feel inside. Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.
This is a stinging bit of hard truth, therapy-wise.
But that Orin was old enough to make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he decided he wanted to watch the thing…. And so on. But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin’s father—though he wouldn’t forbid it—would rather Orin didn’t watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn’t ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having
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I just now connected this to Marathe's question of which is the good father, the one who imposes limits or the one who says do what you please.
I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn’t yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.
Could be an intrusive wraith thought?
Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms’s eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing—these encounters were
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Strongly suggesting, to me, some revenge motive on JOI's end to incapacitate the people who slighted him -- that, or Orin in a misguided show of post-mortem loyalty?
He says ‘I’m Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I’m saying?’
This has frustrated me to no end - we're so invested in finding out what's happening with Joelle and still in the middle of Gately's memories and Hal's unraveling and instead DFW introduces an entirely new character. Are we supposed to make some thematic connection here? I've always said one of my big takeaways from the book is that everybody's story is, deep down, more similar than different.
‘It’s Tooty,’ the A.D.A. said. He did a pause with his eyes closed and then smiled, still with his eyes closed. ‘It is, rather, me, and my enmeshment-issues with Tooty’s… condition.’
This resolution to the long-open Gately/ADA conflict is also surprisingly tender. (But once again, it reinforces the expectation that we're going to get a closed end to every thread open so far, and that just isn't so)
The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness in their sharing.
Another reference pulled directly from before, further enhancing the "mirroring" aspect we are coming to expect
‘I don’t expect help or counsel. I already believe I have to do it. I’ve accepted the injunction to do it. I believe I have no choice. But I can’t do it. I haven’t been able to do it.’ ‘Willing, maybe.’ ‘Haven’t yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet.’
