Infinite Jest

My 100 highlights

• 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;

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

• 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.

• 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 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

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

• Hal deliberately waits till the audio console’s third ring, like a girl at home on Saturday night. ‘Mmyellow.’ ‘The turd emergeth.’ Pemulis’s clear and digitally condensed voice on the line. ‘Repeat. The turd emergeth.’ ‘Please commit a crime,’ is Hal Incandenza’s immediate reply. ‘Gracious me,’ Pemulis says into the phone tucked under his jaw, carefully de-Velcroing the lining of his Mr. Howell hat.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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?

• sort of nausea of the head.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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,

• the found copy was Read-Only.

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

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

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

• Dr. Avril Mondragon,

• now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park

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

• 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.

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

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

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

• M.P.’s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son’s despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his — father, the Auteur.

• Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it.

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

• The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean,

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

• living completely In The Moment.

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

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

• I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. It’s… potential may be worse than none, Jim.

• ‘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.’

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

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

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

• 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.

• Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the headphones’ backbeat, all simultaneously.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem.

• 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;

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

• 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,

• 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.

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

• He stopped living on April First,

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

• All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s?

• Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents.

• head prorector deLint’s

• 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.

• 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.

• Marathe could give the fact of the cartridges to Fortier and the veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely.

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

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

• ‘Is Himself still having this hallucination I never speak?

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• No one single instant of it was unendurable.

• given that he and Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne,

• He did this ironically about half the time.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive,

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

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

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

• It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

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

• 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;

• 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.

• 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,

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• We were never inseparable again.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.