Infinite Jest

My 100 highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• — if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and disseminate the Entertainment, Québec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede,

• L’Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse, a character out of old Québecois mythology who was supposedly so inhumanly gorgeous that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into a human-sized precious gem,

• a man she unveiled for

• (Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the stenographer-cum-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance,

• 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.

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

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

• several balls’ sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they’d become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times.

• At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher was wheeled in and then parked beside the waiting-room chairs.

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

• Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren’t lovers;

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

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

• Pam Heath (?), ‘Madame Psychosis’(?);

• forty hours without Bob Hope

• ‘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.’

• No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own off-spring open his mouth and have nothing come out.

• It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.

• Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a

• competition of some major sort here has brought you down

• 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.

• 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.

• Hal says, ‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.’

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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,

• would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he’d reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure.

• she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes;

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

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

• It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible, in which case it’s cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex.

• at least twenty minutes of permutations of “I’m sorry.” ’

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

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

• 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.

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

• The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Concavity and Grand Convexité are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the media.

• Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame P.,

• The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A., and the return-address box has only the term ‘HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,’ with a small drawn crude face, smiling,

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

• It’s like you were chained to her.

• 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.

• genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome.

• A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out.

• InterLace’s two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. and Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.,

• 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.

• completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will,

• 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

• 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.

• He did this ironically about half the time.

• his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur’s son and Madame’s craven lover, as a child,

• sort of nausea of the head.

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

• ‘The Face of the Deep’ had been the title she’d suggested for Jim’s unseen last cartridge, which he’d said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene instead,

• she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon.

• 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.

• That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette,

• It’s now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head.

• Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONKon his jilted right triceps forever.

• 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

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

• veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day,

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

• 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.

• The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of glass.

• 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.

• man.

• a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it, the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.

• We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’

• She’d barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately, who for some reason kept bringing them bubbling up to mind.

• I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s What aBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head.

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

• He stopped living on April First,

• 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.

• 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

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

• The suffering unites us.

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

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

• I couldn’t remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.

• rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert;

• now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park

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

• ‘They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was in his will.’

• an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom

• 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.

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

• 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.

• hence Himself.’

• conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath).