1 of 8: 10/10

So far, this book is astounding. Pretentious and insufferable, post-modern and casual in all the ways that –on paper– sound absolutely horrible. I love it. Elevating it from 8 to a 9 so far, are qualities which I don’t think will be dropped in subsequent portions of the book: humor, gravitas, prose (holy hell, the prose), footnotes/use of the medium, and wit. Seventy+ words requiring a google and several unforced neologisms. I’m learning, DFW knows it, and it’s massively entertaining throughout. From a nine to a ten is the fact that, despite sinking 100-odd pages into a story, much of which consists of disparate character vignettes with only a few repeat-offenders, the recurring characters so far have nothing to do with one another, but an emergent culture is unfolding without force and I give a shit. I think it’s near impossible to pull off all of these things above, and this book is clearly just getting started. 

There are a few authors who can spend so many words on descriptions and remain tolerable. Wallace commands language with mastery that rivals and perhaps exceed Nabokov. The retrospective forward to the book by Tim Bissel is so reverent and clear that it makes me want to pickup some of his novels after this. He states that Wallace is so inventive as a writer that when he died, the language became impoverished.

Delectable observations from the first hundred pages or so so far:

• “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being”
• “the I’m-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I’m-drinking-along-with-it-look”
• “carbonated silence”
• 5pg long paranoid paragraph of a pothead
• humorous that both passages referenced by the inside sleeve and forward take place in the first 30pp, really leaning into the notion that no one gets that far into this book
• Stream-of-consciousness passage straight from the lips of Benjy, seems like DFW is just flexing his range here
• DFW’s penchant for abbreviations, explained down the line, without losing the reader
• class IV drugs being about as potent as a kiss from mom
• “he took zero in the way of shit”
• use of colloquial “like,” amidst densely articulate prose. Simultaneously holier-than-thou, but also a down to earth bro. Such an immediate tone that reads just like he sounds on tape
• page long sentences, nice
• “titled and critiqued, but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy” 
• hilarious that the first explanation of the dystopian setting is made by way of archival footnotes of James I’s film career which itself consists of several hilarious Wallacean “one liners”
• also hints at the war between New England and Canada, beginning of annual subsidization and Himself’s own damaged relationship with his sons. Simultaneous hilariously self aware and unaware. Masterful
• The longest (primary) passage in the first 10% of the book is the vignette about the suicidal girl, Katherine Gompert, is brutally insightful and telling. 
• Explanation of Before Subsidization being made by way of one footnote, leading to another footnote which is only loosely related, but is comprised of one student attempting to plagiarize his term paper from an incredibly dense essay about fatal Québécois wheelchair assassins and how they lose their legs is incredible. It’s dense enough to be confusing, and humorously self-aware enough as the student –Struck– complains internally about the needlessly layered prose. I love DFW here.
• wonderful allegory of tennis as a Man v. Himself archetype, also being projected on the palestra of junior competitive sports rearing man to be a good citizen.
• Plot begins to unfold around the Saudi Prince Q–––––’s medical attache who appears to have fatally hypnotized himself (and other casualties) with the TP.
• Describing the parity of a double, triple, quadruple agent of the A.F.R as “The even-numbered total of his final loyalties” is chef’s kiss

2 of 8: 10/10

Lengthy chapters about formative years at ETA. The big brother / sponsorship sessions between the upperclassmen and ephebes are spiritually good and humorous – ranging from integrity to how to deal with possible sharts on the court.

Whereas Pynchon also relies heavily on the scattered, episodic structure that bounces frequently between characters whilst delving deep into completely unrelated tangents, Wallace in Infinite Jest seems to execute this much more enjoyably by imbuing the characters with for more personality, and unique personalities at that.

The passage about Lyle, the sweat-licking workout guru who “isn’t like a faggy or sexual thing,” perfectly captures the distinction where Wallace’s narration exceeds Pynchon’s.  The use of colloquialisms to tip us off to the perspective we’re residing within lends much more pathos to the characters. 

The aforementioned introduction by Lyle, and the subsequent 5 or so sub-sections are all dynamite. We get a several page long sentence, stream of consciousness play-by-play of a heroine user known so far only as “yrstruly” selling ass and boosting NyQuil to get his fix with his crew (C who is not 2Bedenied, and Poor Tony a transvestite) that is so unlike the rest of the sophisticated prose, it’s hard to believe it’s part of the same story.

This passage is followed by an intermission phone call between Hal and Orin (the football player) followed by a hilarious description of an Ennet halfway house and it’s founding members who are the satirization of “hard knocks old school AA,” forcing new recoverants to eat rocks to prove that they’re willing to go to any length.

Helen Steeply is obliquely introduced as a journalist via her piece of investigative journalism on a company producing external prosthetic hearts, which results in yet another death because a transvestite junkie (Poor Tony) steals her purse containing the heart, causing her to die. 

We get some prescient forecasting of the consumerist dystopia Wallace is envisioning with the description of something approximating a smart phone: “AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS [notifying them of an incoming facetime],” as well as the subsequent erosion of the adoption of videophony (FaceTime) because people get stressed since they realize that they have to pay attention. Previously, the telephone communication was optimized for 6 holes for hearing, and 6^ holes for speaking, giving the sense that one was being listened to without having to actually reciprocate. Videophony gives way to peoples vanity – the crummy camera make everyone look like Nixon in that awful debate from 1960, and so a secondary market for expensive digital masks (snapchat filters) is quickly created, and the another bargain market for physical analog masks to achieve the same effect eventually get bundled into videophone sales. After not too long, people get worried about being exposed for not looking IRL as they do on video calls, so full body Transmissible Tableauxs are created, along with their cheaper alternatives which are like clip on dioramas for your video transmitter’s camera. The Tableauxs are “the sharp end of the nail for videophony’s coffin” thus putting an end to the initially “tumescent curve” of their profits. The cherry on top is that the retro-style rolodex that quickly come back in style are also enshittified to clip neatly onto the hooks that the expensive and bulky videophone terminals came with for people to hang their analog masks on. Full circle, market win. 

Intense scene in the garage as Jim Incandenza is berated by his father about how he is destined to grow up to be a great player (despite not yet having played) as his father palavers on about how he is sorry that they live in a trailer park, tries to tear J.O.I. how to appreciate bodies (mechanical), and to appreciate his flask, and maybe even try some of the amber liquid inside. How he’s disappointed in his lanky, grotesque, and over sensitive son. And how much of a piece of shit his own father was, strung along throughout a monologue about how he injured himself playing tennis before ever having the chance to be great, which is what young ten-year-old Jim must grow up to be.

Pemulis entering on a multi-parenthetical, encyclopedic but still colloquial contemplation of one drug called DMZ, in which one parenthesis opens, containing several more parenthetical within, but never closes. Surely this is intentional 

Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost

^ Langolierish excerpt from Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, and written precisely for me, like the play All in the Timing

Between the various office-hours complaints lodged to the Substance Abuse Counselor regarding one housemate stabbing another in the hand with a fork because he wouldn’t stop tapping his fingers arythmatically, is one:  

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:

as well as

And Lo, for the earth was empty of form, and void and darkness was all over the face of the deep. and we said

look at that fucker dan e (pp.184)

3 of 8: 10/10

I wouldn’t have guessed that DFW could enticingly romanticize the act of smoking freebase and violently suffering from the immediate effects of overdosing, but damn if he doesn't sell it.

Phone call between Hal and Orin about Himself’s apparent suicide is harrowing, traumatic, and authentic in the brotherly banter about how appease shrinks

it was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during.

(for those keeping track at home, in this arbitrarily sliced section of the book are no fewer than 50 vocab words).

4 of 8: 10/10

Then, wholly friend- and connectionless, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw From Heroin.

Another exquisite phone call between Orin and Hal, over the backdrop of their mother trying to get a hold of Orin, and Hal guilting him over ignoring their mother but phoning his 17 year old self to ask about homewrecking which in turn becomes a complex discussion of Quebecois politics 

De Tocquevillian dialectics b/w steeply and Marathe w.r.t. USA penchant for freedom even if it kills the man

we learn wtf Eschaton is (calvinball).

fun phrases like:

brilliantly Imam’d by …

and

(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like ‘Ball-Hopper’ and ‘Ball-Bank’ — the general Academy consensus is these are for dilettantes and pussies.)

more authentic Boston AA:

you are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.

lyle POV:

[lyle] It had a lemony, low-cal taste, the boy’s omniwetness.

5 of 8: 10/10

and but for the remainder of the match (which lasts exactly 11 more games) Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.

They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. 178 It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers 

1. to hear the squeak is a euphemism for violent de-mapping

++ to Himself’s chapters being narrated w/ attention to lighting, framing, optics

6 of 8: 10/10

Ken Erdedy's joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch - and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva -

Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she'd taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he'd always say, loudly, in some lull in the group's conversation, something like 'I'm afraid I'm far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that's all right, just so you know,' and so on.

Grand plot revelation that Joelle D. (James I.’s muse) is in UHID/perpetually veiled because she’s so beautiful that she’s totally captivating. Thus IJ is a film that captures her beauty.

Lenz’ cat-killing rounds out the overall apparent-efficacy of Ennet House/NA/AA.

Pemulis walking in on the Moms and John Wayne RPing conveniently right before/day-of the Eschaton affair is craaazy

another insane footnote revealing that Orin’s interviewer crush is Steeply’s (OUS) daughter which is probably why he’s being gangstalked by AFR. even though the footnote is just a recapitulation of something we’ve already heard about, the way Orin insists on not saying much about the Moms, and then spills his guts to Helen while offering super revealing details about the whole Incandenza family just adds so much depth to all characters involved in the footnote 

Followed immediately by an ironically insightful look into Orin’s depravity as he gets honeypotted by a Swiss agent immediately after dropping Helen Steeply off at the airport, his own narcissism in love being his downfall 

insane, but apt, reveal about the true function of the great concavity by the MC Eschaton Pemulis himself. The process of annulation - poisoning cancer with cancer in a feedback loop of nuclear fusion from waste that must be kept at bay by catapulting more waste into the biovirus of the concavity - all explained in order to get the Pakistani kid’s clean piss. Amazing

cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here’s in repose

7 of 8:

a drug addict is like physically unable to start a car without gunning the engine.

saying this is is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or healthcare surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would called what no one can imagine being without.

Some major plot developments regarding the Steeply’s and their connection to the Incandenza’s 

I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza's suicide. I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way.

you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way

Hilarious, albeit incredibly dark, image of MK Bain and Orin drunk driving with a dog leashed to the volvo.  Humorous imagination of the Sopranos scene( or rather the Sopranos scene reimagines this one) where Chrissy nods off on his gf’s dog.

Helen Steeply being Hugh Steeply seems so obvious, but is a great reveal as Poutrincourt keeps using increasingly obscure Quebecois phrases to determine that there's no reason why Helen's Parisian French should know of. Additionally, throughout this really masterful scene watching Hal and Darkness's game, we get some reinforcement about the posturing of Quebec through Poutrincourt's similar mannerisms towards La Americans - nonchalant disgust.

Harrowing look into the Pemulis household where Mike's older brother Matty is sodomized by their father.

a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.'

Exquisite comparison of types of depression:

keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self.

vs. 

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, …   The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

8 of 8: 10/10

first person Hal

hilarious transcript of ONAN officials discussing control group response to an infomercial about not viewing unlabeled cartridges in which an advertising consultant has epileptic seizures:

Be up and back in the game in a jiff. He won’t remember the fit. Just don’t mention it. The embarrassment of mentioning it’ll set it off again. That why twice in the chopper. I learned the hard way.

they tell you that sudden Substance-cravings will rise unbidden to a true addict’s mind like bubbles in a toddler’s bath.

He made whoever he got high with feel lonely, she got real, like, interior.

Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. 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. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning

Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty’s fleet in terms of like upstairs,

The Brown v. Yale bet, and Gately’s febrile flashbacks followed immediately by the most undignified overdose scene I’ve ever read. Puts Requiem to shame…

related