Infinite Jest

My 100 highlights

• The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising,

• No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.

• 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.

• The mismatched socks spoke to Pat’s heart more than anything else.

• (Watt) has an ecstatic encounter with Death (‘Psychosis’) and becomes irreversibly catatonic.

• competition of some major sort here has brought you down

• If I’d done you one from the last year, it would look to you like some sort of infant’s random stabs on a keyboard,

• substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact;

• ‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’

• The M v. O.’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment.

• the found copy was Read-Only.

• His face today had assumed various expressions ranging from distended hilarity to scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going on.

• and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin.

• A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic.

• Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking.

• It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way.

• Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal ‘I’m-so-terribly-sorry’ monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him

• the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

• Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization. UNRELEASED

• The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.

• But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

• a man she unveiled for

• in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody comes right out and says so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life.

• It’s like you were chained to her.

• It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it.

• Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’

• Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life.

• Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door?

• Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height.

• For almost a month in the weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or ‘Insight’ meditation consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation of one’s own death.

• 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.

• The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N.

• this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness.

• the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light.

• 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 but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.

• rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert;

• ‘I’m in here.’

• 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

• ‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’ I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’

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

• she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon.

• There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she’d repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later.

• That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest is testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement procedure, was the anonymous comment of a public medical official reached for comment by Moment.

• Steeply’s car for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side

• explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

• The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares.

• the mirror he’d cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he’d made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she’d gone on to use on-air;

• an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom

• a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (Johnson), struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancée’s (‘Psychosis’’s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller,

• he’d wait until he’d experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.

• ‘The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib’s-eye view.

• wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow.

• the anti-samizdat remedy cartridge of F.L.Q.’s allegation,

• This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured.

• He stopped living on April First,

• Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating.

• We were never inseparable again.

• the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject’s

• Also, does this quote “anti”-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really also exist;

• beauty

• Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma.

• 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 simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.

• But even in the early Work — flashes of something.

• now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park

• 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.

• Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m.

• Staff has to preview the cartridges for suitability and sex before they can be put out for the residents,

• It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody,

• Himself

• His other son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses.

• Here is Molly Notkin dressed as a crumbling Marx again greeting Joelle at her door with the sort of delighted mock-surprise U.S. hostesses use for greetings.

• by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair -tennis contingent

• Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

• It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother.

• that first night after Inflation, traditionally the fourth Monday of November,

• Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

• Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation.

• we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

• the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete.

• He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

• Clenette H. had brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill

• Infinite Jest (V?). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.

• Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’

• 152

• He did this ironically about half the time.

• the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity.

• ‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the WhataBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’

• the Auteur’s funeral had purportedly taken place in the L’Islet Province of Nouveau Québec,

• living completely In The Moment.

• Joelle was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved for twenty-one.

• Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’).

• if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make.

• 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.

• Joelle’s been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B.,

• My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, slightly, sort of directing the expression to everyone in the room.

• conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you’re sure you have misheard them.

• Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes,

• the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20–21

• ‘Film director’s wife’d taught out at Brandeis where the victim’d done his residency.

• ‘Hermaphroditic. Androgynous. It wasn’t obvious that the character was supposed to be a male character.