Infinite Jest

My 100 highlights

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

• No one single instant of it was unendurable.

• Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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,

• 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

• 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.

• rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert;

• Himself

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

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

• 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.

• ‘radical experiments in viewers’ optical perspective and context’ as IJ(V?)’s distinctive feature.

• 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,

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

• 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.’

• 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.

• 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?

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

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

• 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.

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

• The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this

• 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

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

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

• Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame P.,

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

• The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising,

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

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

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

• 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.

• We were never inseparable again.

• ‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’

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

• beauty

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

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

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

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

• 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,

• an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom

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

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

• 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.

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

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

• sort of nausea of the head.

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

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

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

• Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’

• American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

• 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,

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

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

• Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name.

• 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.

• 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;

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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

• Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland, which is when new resident Gately came wobbling in,

• 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 suffering unites us.

• 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.

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

• It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end.

• a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig’s Disease of the spirit

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

• ‘Can I ask you who it was who found him? His — who found him at the oven?’ ‘Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old.’

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

• It’s like you were chained to her.

• Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment

• ‘And good old Mario says he’s seen paranormal figures, and he’s not kidding,

• 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.

• living completely In The Moment.

• 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 stopped living on April First,

• 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.

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

• ‘I’m in here.’

• 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 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,

• The twirler induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty.

• 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.

• you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way.

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

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

• 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,