Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.

‘Boo, I kicked a kid’s ass is all. End of story. I don’t think it’s good to rehash it when I’ve kicked somebody’s ass. It’s like a dignity thing. I think we should just let it sort of lie in state, quietly. Speaking of which.’

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

bitter singsong.

a smile empty of all affect, as

is Bob in town.

“Hope springs eternal,”

dispenser of abstractions

leptosomatic

Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response,

c’était la guerre,

air of careless intimacy,

that implacable-herd expression.

Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around;

seems shaky in terms of resolve,

legendary sangfroid

‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What

You are what you love.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING?

This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody’s complete attention without having to return it. Regarded

videophonic stress.

i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer

combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face

Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (or OMM)

return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another.

Pemulis, who claims he sees every third word upside-down, actually just has a born tech-science wienie’s congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems.