Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (Pages 37-55)

PART FIVE-------------------------------------

Don’t dismiss the short sections: remember that at this time (1997), David Foster Wallace has written Broom of the System, a novel, and Girl With Curious Hair, a short story collection. He’s also written essays (including the excellent long-form Signifying Rappers), all of which tells us that if the novel is (fun-house) mirroring the real world (and certainly Wallace speaks not just from education but experience), then we should expect to find all of these styles within Infinite Jest, too.

Clenette (p. 37-38) is one of those experiments, and the result comes across as Robert Coover meets John Edgar Wideman. Grammar goes out the window from the first line “Wardine say her momma aint treat her right” all the way to the tragic end, but consistently so. And despite the broken language, it’s surprisingly easy to follow—the result, however, is that we draw so close to the actual words, trying to puzzle out the meaning, that we get emotionally attached. It’s no surprise that this is the first entirely serious part of the book. Most affecting of all is when Clenette, the silent observer, finally speaks her mind: “But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat Wardine to death with a hanger. And then nobody know but me. And I am gone have a child.”

Next, we meet Bruce Green (p. 38-39), and we’re suddenly in a parody of a love story. Wallace knows the genre well enough to laugh at it, describing her as having “legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious” and then as “shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous” which is an odd combination. But this is the sort of writing I like best, for it refuses to conform. That means that even this section, which could be considered an unresolved throwaway (at least for now), manages to make the reader think in a new way.

Booboo (p. 39-42) gives us a closer look at Hal and Mario, and it’s a shame that DFW never wrote any plays, because he’s really a master of dialogue: he even includes beats (“…”) and italicized inflections to make it clear what’s going on. Of note is that in Y.D.A.U., their father is dead, and neither Hal nor Orin can speak about it (see p. 32). In Hal’s case, he has also lost whatever faith he had, and pushed himself even more into the ritual grinding of the professional Junior tennis circuit, though perhaps he’s also torn up by his mother’s apparent indifference to the death, or the way she “laughs at C.T. [their uncle] way more than she laughed at Himself.”

Oh, and the medical attaché is still watching the unlabelled cartridge he got, 43 minutes later. Interesting how this mysterious moment is presented almost in real time, even though the sections that surround it take place at entirely different times. (For what it’s worth, the attaché’s scene occurs on April Fools’ Day.)

PART SIX-------------------------------------

And how is Orin (p. 42-49), #79, hypertrophied punter, as he sweats things out in Phoenix? Lonely, for one--and the worst sort of loneliness, for he's surrounded by people (he calls the women he sleeps with "Subjects") yet entirely alone. To illustrate this, David Foster Wallace focuses on turning physical descriptions into mental indicators, hence the opening: "Morning is the soul's night. The day's worst time, psychically." This is nothing new: I remember the sun being described as a hammer in a previous section. But for Orin, things are at an extreme: "The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell" and even the falling fronds are "malevolent, heavy and sharp." In case the omens aren't clear enough, a dead bird plummeted into his Jacuzzi last week. There's a pretty vivid nightmare, too, stemming from what he calls his "unhappy childhood" with tennis, but which involves his mom--or rather the Moms's head--being tied to his head.

Here's a brief interruption, too, on the function of end notes, for DFW takes the time to mention here that "Orin's never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way, so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty surface-level." The dream is haunting enough, and the intelligent reader will already be parsing the section for subtextual meaning. But rather than engage with understanding or grappling with these fears, Wallace reminds us that--as do a great many people who are skeptical of the connection between the body and the mind--Orin's unanalyzed circumstances are of as much importance as the analyzed ones. That is, not knowing is sometimes just as (if not more) telling than actually knowing.

The next bit support this: Orin remembers watching an early-morning video on "Schizophrenia: Mind or Body" (emphasis on "Body"), a video in which a "dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive" has exactly that done to him by scientists with the well-intentioned need to understand. We, as readers, turn the pages for the same reason--perhaps this is why Wallace keeps putting it off, throwing Easter eggs at us (e.g., Toblerone), just like third-season Lost.

PART SEVEN-------------------------------------

And but so then, Wallace does give us enough to continue (I wish Nabokov could've reviewed this novel). Hal is seventeen, for instance, which tells us that everything in Y.D.A.U. takes place one year before the book-opening Year of Glad. At the same time, he encourages secrecy and mocks what we presume to know, using Hal's covert pot smoking as an excuse to widen the scope and discuss What People Know (p. 49-54). I admit: I don't enjoy this section very much--it's deadpan and detailed descriptions of the layout of E.T.A. bore me. Of course, this glut of information is Wallace continuing to mock us (from the previous Orin section) with what is essentially straight surface-level facts, which as it turns out, we don't need. Everything that I've enjoyed to this point are the more abstracted glimpses of the self--what Infinite Jest does best is not in the devilish details, but in the freeing expanse of the unknowable.

And here's where Wallace gets in the section-justifying kicker: "Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency." Our apathetic disconnect is no joke, and I've spoken before about how I use blogging to fight the natural tendency to simply float through life's entertainments without understanding or embracing their effects. Given where Hal ends up, detached from himself, I think it's pretty clear that pure knowledge is exceptionally bad and potentially madness-inducing and life-ending, a sanctioned drug far more dangerous than this section's so-called "Black Star."

That's a heavy note to end on, so two quick paragraph-long sections check back in on the attache (and his wife) and Mario. These brief visits remind us in shorthand form of just how very much is happening in the world; if you're wondering why Wallace bothers, here's his answer: "It's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it."

Words looked up: fantods, phylactery, pargeted

The Cripple of Inishmaan

[First published in Show Business Weekly]

Martin McDonagh’s bleak The Cripple of Inishmaan doesn’t offer much hope, but it provides lots of laughs. Francis O’Connor’s set and costumes strip comfort down to functionality and Garry Hynes wisely follows McDonagh’s slow pacing to the letter. These choices preserve the exciting dullness of Inishmaan and its commiserating community.

Kate and Eileen (Marie Mullen and Dearbhla Molloy) operate a rundown shop, selling canned goods—“mostly peas”—in a lonely corner of the already lonely Irish island, circa 1934. Their only joy comes from caring for poor crippled Billy (Aaron Monaghan), just as the unscrupulous gossip, JohnnyPateenMike (David Pearse), lives only for newsworthy feuds. Here, emotions are buried under gruff veneers as a survival mechanism: BabbyBobby (Andrew Connolly) calls himself “a hard character” and Helen (Kerry Condon) lashes out, for she knows what happens to people like her dim brother, Bartley (Laurence Kinlan), who take things at face value.

Billy is a funhouse mirror to these people—he reflects their softness back at them, which permits The Cripple of Inishmaan to transcend the farcical The Lieutenant of Inishmore (a play that often drowned its dark humor in darker action). However, Billy is restless. He spends his time cow-watching not because he’s slow, but because his intelligence depresses him—he knows that he’ll never kiss a girl, especially one as fiery as Helen. Given the chance, he chases the American dream to Hollywood, leaving a hole in the hearts of those who “don’t mind being stuck with him” (Inishmaan for “love”).

Life goes on, and Hynes’s minimalist staging and Davy Cunningham’s grim lighting maximize the effect of the slow-boiling comic naturalism. When the town assembles to watch The Man of Aran, their casual banter meets the Hollywood distortion of Irish life: their seated solemnity is far richer and livelier than any film’s illusions (“It was a tall fella in a grey donkey jacket,” says Helen of the shark). This is a cruel comedy, but the high quality of Druid Theatre’s production—from Monaghan’s physical control to Mullen and Molloy’s comic timing—helps us reach the little kindnesses (and cruel necessities) that so vividly come to those who wait.

Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (Pages 17-37)

PART TWO-------------------------------------

A flood-of-consciousness fades out from 18-year-old Hal's adventure in The Interview, an appropriate-enough drowning that allows David Foster Wallace to switch tones in earnest for his next section, The Woman Who Said She'd Come (p. 17-27). Using what James Wood would call the “free-indirect style,” we’re introduced to Erdedy, an addict as much in his repetitious language and fixed descriptions as in his own “meth”odic details of the bulk-quantity binge he’s planning, a so-called “marijuana vacation” that ironically requires vast amounts of work—both in planning the whole affair and then in the actual unpleasantness of smoking through the 120 grams of high-quality resin in four days. Here’s what that sounds like:

This arrangement, very casual, made him anxious, so he'd been even more casual and said sure, fine, whatever. Thinking back, he was sure he'd said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn't care at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn't matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he'd made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered a lot. It mattered a lot.

If you don’t see the desperate all-encompassing comedy of that, or phrases like “one last final time” and the “grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to” then Infinite Jest is not for you. The nitpicking of grammar in The Interview is meant to be every bit as (if not more) comic as the farcical events it describes; in this section, the quibbling deadpan is meant to smooth over the insanity of what Erdedy is planning. We can be calm and logical without being rational or wise, and seeing that disconnect is funny. The result is an exterior monologue that reads like a Rubik’s Cube being solved by algorithm: patterns of helplessness emerge as the circuitous logic nears closer and closer to resolution (or madness), without every actually getting there. (In fact, this ends with him in “a balloon of colored silence” being “flung” and “splayed” between points.)

None of this, by the way, is exposition. The text lives for us as the lies (read: fictions) do for Erdedy: “He had not sat down and outright bold-faced lied to her, it had been more of an impression he’d conveyed and nurtured and allowed to gather its own life and force.” This is a rather clever way for an author to justify including tangents and rambles, but also a sincere one. Life is tangled, and it’s not the outright stuff that convinces us, but all the cumulative little bits that ring true. For instance, a Naked Lunch-like insect keeps popping out from behind a shelf; there’s no reason for this to happen, but it allows Erdedy to mention “he felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar.” That, in of itself, is a half-reflection, for it offers nothing conclusive: but doesn’t it feel real? Doesn’t that significantly insignificant moment hit the nail right on the head? When Erdedy explains his whole process, the thing that sticks with me most is that he’s bought “four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon.”

By the way, does anyone else think of “A Dream Deferred” when reading the opening of the lengthy run-on conclusion to this section? “He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away . . .”

PART THREE-------------------------------------

And now, because he can (and because it works most fluidly in this form), David Foster Wallace treats us to a section entirely comprised of dialogue (and a few sound effects): The Professional Conversationalist (p. 27–31). It is now the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (seven years before The Year of Glad, in which the novel begins), and ten-year-old Hal can not only speak (despite eating a weird fungus five years ago), but can speak about Byzantine erotica, even though he makes “dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds,” suffers from caries, and is all-too familiar with dentists. He’s also got a photographic memory (“O.E.D. Condensed Volume Six page 1387 column twelve and a little bit of thirteen.”), tends to get beat up, and wears a bow tie . . . all of which is just incredibly detailed nonsense that Hal makes fun of. Despite these solid facts, what do we really know about Hal?

About as much as we know of his father, Himself, a drunk who wears argyle sweaters and who has masqueraded as this conversationalist in order to get his son to talk (which implies that we are facing either an unreliable narrator or unreliable listener). As the scene continues, Wallace uses an increasingly absurd series of descriptions and vocabulary (style enhancing the setting once more) to get across the comedy:

That your quote-unquote “complimentary” Dunlop widebody tennis racquets’ super-secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scene appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father’s analplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and gastrectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy….

For what it’s worth, after failing to find a definition for oral-lyrologist, I chose not to bother recording or searching for any of the more esoteric words above. However, one hardly needs to understand the words here to understand the emotion, or to feel the energy. This is an ace of a scene in that it goes right by you and scores a point. However, I wouldn’t let it all go past . . . just like the flashes in The Interview, it seems like many of these things (like “the pan-Canadian Resistance” or a certain “Near Eastern medical attaché” that shows up two pages from now) are more than smoke and mirrors, which means that there may also be more to the madness than we realize, too. Remember: what one person sees—their reality—is not necessarily what another person gets.

PART FOUR-------------------------------------

After a brief introduction to Mario, Hal’s older brother of the oversized skull and childish behavior, we jump to a full scene with The Attache (p. 33–37). This section gets a lot of humor out of how hypocritical the foreign ear-nose-throat “specialist” is, starting with his labeling of North America’s selling out as “hilariously vulgar.” Not that he isn’t dead on: their calendar has been promotionally subsidized—it’s “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”—and there’s the “idolatrous West’s most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper.” However, after a hard day of using the “evacuation-hypo” on the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment, he indulges in the same behavior, being babied by his wife, and using technological advancements to wholly devolve:

He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing, adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from whatever entertainment is up and playing.

For all the specificity of location—“Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves”—it’s simultaneously reassuring and frightening to see some common and unacknowledged addictions creep in, too. Our attaché has the aforementioned fixation on television; his client, the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment craves Toblerone—even though he appears to be allergic.

Another thing that Wallace has worked in is a sort of underlying familiarity—no matter what the situation, there are Easter eggs of repetition (“a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica,” Hal’s specialty). Whether we glom onto them or not, they subtly spark our neural pathways, forging new connections and memories out of even the most incidental moments. Whether or not Infinite Jest ever actually goes anywhere, it is remarkably life-like even in its deliberate comedy.

Words looked up: rapacious, pleurisy, magisculed (typo: majusculed), dyspeptic, thrushive (?)

What Sounds Cool: January 2009

The following is a list of shows I'm excited to see. The capsules explain why, the links explain how. In December, I'll see how accurate my recommendations were, but understand this: I'm fairly confident I'll enjoy any show I list below.

COIL 2009 (1/6 - 1/14): Crossing over (and, for a few shows, in conjunction with) the Under the Radar festival at The Public, COIL is PS122's "best-of" display of more local (but no less edgier) artists. I can't make it to Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), but having seen it in '08, I heartily recommend it. I'm also expecting good things from The Shalimar, who are punk enough to make Trash Warfare, their spin on Phaedra as "the original MILF" work.

Hedda Gabler (1/7 - 3/28): I love Mary Louise Parker. I like the few Ibsen plays I've studied. I think Christopher Shinn's a decently intellectual modernist. Did I mention that Paul Sparks, Michael Cerveris, and Peter Stormare are also in the cast? There are a million ways for this show to end up an utter disappointment, and yet, the odds are with this talented ensemble, a group that may help to encourage Roundabout to push their revivals much much further.

Under the Radar Festival 2009 (1/8 - 1/17): Flat-out necessary theater. This is your chance to see what people are doing around the world, not just in the corner of a basement bar. Mark Russell is a fairly good arbiter of taste, so far as those things go, and I'm excited to see The TEAM in action with Architecting, Def Poetry's Lemon back on the stage with a spoken-word show County of Kings, and Reggie Watts's Transition, even though I didn't like his last one (Disinformation)--I'm impressed enough by his magnetic personality to see what's new. Of course, what I'm most excited for are the site-specific works: Tim Crouch spins a scripted play in an art gallery (England) and Rimini Protokoll finds a way to outsource actors in the interactive theater, Call Cutta in a Box.

The Shipment (1/8 - 1/24): Though I wasn't sold on the discomforting self-inflicted violence in Young Jean Lee's slap-happy send-up Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven, Lee's voice-- now more inquisitively challenging than antagonistically rebellious (similar to the most recent work of Thomas Bradshaw)--found such a genuine truth in Church that I wouldn't dream of missing her now. In her latest, Lee looks at a subject that "makes her uncomfortable": the history of blacks in entertainment--from minstrel shows to stand-up acts--and the inherent racism that still leads to (if not encourages). Additionally, it's playing at The Kitchen, which is my sort of place: "If you can't stand the heat, don't go to see theater."

Sixty Miles to Silver Lake (1/15 - 2/8): It'll certainly be hard for SoHo Rep to top their last production, Blasted, but this intimate father-and-son two-hander from Dan LeFranc may catch the right mood. Odds are good, especially with Anne Kauffman directing, as her sense of playful realism on The Thugs should be a good match for a play that stretches the boundaries of a simple car ride.

Freshwater (1/15 - 2/15): These days, you have to sell a show as if you're operating a hedge fund. If you like Virginia Woolf, great: you'll be off to see this NY Premiere of her only play, and historians can marvel at the way the 1923 and 1935 versions have been combined. If you're afraid of Virginia Woolf, you can go simply because Anne Bogart's directing the thing, and you know well enough that that means it's going to have a distinct look and feel to it. Hate both those artists? You can still go, simply on the very bankable reputation of Women's Project!

Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (Pages 1-17)

I accept that things in this world are the way they are only because I cannot think of those things in any other way: that is what constitutes reality. I do not fly because I cannot conceptualize myself flying; I am bound by a failure to actualize my imagination. Fiction suffers no such limitations: the fluid world is approximated by words, words which the writer stretches to accommodate their unique perception, and which we then stretch further in our unique reception. In fiction, things that were true a moment ago can turn false with the turn of a page, but as they are preserved fly-in-amber-like by ink, they are still, at some moment, true.

This makes the blogthrough of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest a rather appropriate medium for such textual subjectivity. A group of people will read the novel (twenty pages a weekday), and each will record their own experiences. The novel will then, tesseract-like, widen from the writer’s world to the reader’s world and to the reader’s reader’s world, becoming, in essence, infinitely large in of itself. Best of all, it will be self-adapting, as each new entry—as long as it is truthfully written at the time—will continue to reveal something not just about the book, or the reader, or the reader’s reader, but about that infinitely large world—our world—itself, which is fairly appropriate for DFW, whose writing often spiraled out from a single subject to encompass humanity itself.

Off the bat, let's agree to agree that David Foster Wallace was a genius, and that although the edited version of Infinite Jest hits 981 pages (1079 if you count, which you should, the end notes), every word is more or less intentional [1]. Given that, I plan to read this novel--appropriately enough given the prevalent tennis themes--like a line judge, looking at each sentence as a well-executed shot, especially those that barely graze the line [2], and in doing so, extend our notion of "fair" space. So as to not confuse the metaphor, the court I'm speaking of is a linguistic one; the fun of reading Wallace is in discovering just how far one can go.

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1. As is my demonstrative waffling.
2. Even the slenderest baseline (approx. 1"), contains an infinite amount of space if you buy Zeno's paradox.

PART ONE -----------------------------

Appropriately, Infinite Jest begins by deconstructing reality: there’s an unreliable narrator, an in media res flash-forward, and disconcerting set of abstractions and approximations. The time is given as "Year of Glad" and the first line reads, "I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies." It’s an eerie description, but one that mirrors the mental and physical disconnect of The Application (p. 3-17). If there’s any doubt to this intent, the next line emphasizes that Hal’s posture—like the novel’s spine—is “consciously congruent” (although the “chair” David Foster Wallace writes from is noticeably postmodern).

In the following pages, DFW excuses himself, through Hal, from being exact--"I believe I appear neutral," "I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully," "There is something vaguely digestive about the room's odor." In turn, this leaves him free to take humorous liberties with his descriptions: "The Director of Composition seems to have more than the normal number of eyebrows," "whose smile's teeth are radiant against a violent sunburn," "The two halves of his mustache never quite match." My unfounded premise (as I’ve not finished the book) is that these descriptions are necessary, which leads me to a syllogism that either the novel is pure comedy (it is called Infinite Jest) or that the pure comedy is a symbol for something else (Hal reminds us that he is “not what you see and hear”).

This fits in rather nicely with my perception of reality, and sure enough, Wallace’s next target is the past: he places a “(sic)” mark by the word “remembers” and has Hal recollecting his brother Orin’s memories, disclaiming it all (or punctuating it) with comedy: “It’s funny what you don’t recall.” The descriptions within this memory are also more lucid than anything in the present: "The patch itself [was] horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red." But if none of these things are trustworthy, but all of these things are intentional, then these signs are creating something larger than what is written, forming their own real world. DFW stretches his grammar to accommodate words like “Rototrembling” or to describe things in a new light (“The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims”), and as he does so, he stretches our baseline of expectations.

And so, full circle to tennis, remember that the writer can only serve; the ball is in our court the moment we start reading. How refreshing, then, to find that the boundaries of that court are so infinitely wide that they no longer exist.

Words looked up: mottle, circumflex, lapidary, presbyopic, parquet, enfilade