Infinite Jest

My 100 highlights

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

• 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?

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

• 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?

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

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

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

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

• living completely In The Moment.

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

• 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.

• man.

• The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising,

• beauty

• an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom

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

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

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

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

• 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.

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

• ‘I’m in here.’

• 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.

• 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.

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

• the found copy was Read-Only.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• 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,

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

• Dr. Avril Mondragon,

• ‘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,

• 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.

• We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.

• 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,

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

• now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park

• the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

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

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

• 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

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

• Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

• 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;

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

• 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.

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

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

• It’s like you were chained to her.

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

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

• 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.

• Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’

• 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 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact;

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

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

• 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.

• (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,

• The suffering unites us.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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

• head prorector deLint’s

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

• 152

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

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

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

• 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.

• rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert;

• 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.

• 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.

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

• competition of some major sort here has brought you down

• 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.

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

• 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.

• ‘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.’

• He did this ironically about half the time.

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