I’m reading Tender Mercies by Dennis Lehane. South Boston during the bussing years. Violence and fragility, racial tension, family, traditions, love and hate and how the definitions of those words are not the same for everyone. Lots of alcohol in it and smoking so don’t read if you’re easily triggered. What are you reading?

Does anyone have any suggestions for books and podcast that helped them overcome their past mistakes?

So Belinda has tried a few times to get the SDBookClub running again but with minimal buy in.

I will take a crack at it. If you are interested in discussing a book let me know below. Also let me know if you want to read fiction or something recovery related.

Hi All, Just joined sdbookclub. Can someone explain this group? Do you read books together?

I've been feeling pretty blah about my sobriety and picked this back up to finish and attempt to muster some inspiration. Leslie Jamison is an alcoholic writer who studies other alcoholic writers and she digs a lot into The Lost Weekend and a little into Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Infinite Jest, so I thought I'd mention it here.

Last night I ran across a quote that hit me so hard, I dogeared the page. (I'm a librarian! This is not an action I take lightly, but I was in bed and desperate.)

"Sobriety wasn't instantaneous wish fulfillment; it was more like tearing off a bandage and reckoning directly with everything she'd been drinking to survive."

The chapter is entitled "The Only Home He's Ever Had" but what really has stuck with me about this chapter is the phrase "freedom isn't for us", which is a quote from an escapee of a Soviet Gulag who found life on the outside even worse than life on the inside, so he went back. Got me thinking.

It seems to me like this freedom issue is huge in addiction-- and I feel I can speak with some authority here as an addict myself. What the substance seems to offer IS freedom from the pain or the drudgery of life. An escape to a higher state. And I mean, it seems to work, right? But only for a few hours or even just a few minutes. And after all it's a trap, an illusion. You're not really free from anything and now as a user/drinker, you're enslaved to the substance/drink in addition to whatever was weighing you down before.

Intense book, I can already tell. I feel very privileged that I've never had to live on the streets or anything and yet I can relate to the subjects he's describing. I know well how it is to prioritize your next dose over your own health.

What do you think?

Starts this weekend. Drop a comment if you're here for it at all?

Hoping again to get some action going on in this sub! Seemed like there was a lot of interest at the beginning of the year but then it fizzled. I think partially people are just too busy to commit to a book club. But I also think the first selections weren't quite right for gaining traction. The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober was a bit too quick and easy a read and obviously Infinite Jest was too huge, problematic, and difficult for a sobriety book club selection. So what's Baby Bear's quit lit? What are your suggestions for something interesting and thought provoking but not too hard?

We will start a new book by the end of May so stay tuned.

If you are among those who purchased a copy of IJ and who may still be slogging through it, please feel free to make a post if you have anything you want to share. I, for one, would love to hear your thoughts about it.

/u/blavikenbutcher basically carried the lonely torch through the whole book writing up excellent summaries and sharp observations about each section of the book, so do check out his posts that are still around here. I'm leaving his (I think he? his?) final summary stickied here for quite a while, too.

I will not drink with you today or this summer but I would happily read with you.

Belinda

David Foster Wallace’s (DFW) Infinite Jest is a book who’s reputation precedes it. It is almost as divisive as its 1079 pages of dense chronologically scrambled text is intimidating. Whole strategies have been devised on how to best tackle this book with friendly reassurances that it will be worth, just get through the first 200 pages, and it’s life changing. I knew nothing of the story or setting and only a little of the author and his rumoured brilliance and I leapt blindly into the near futuristic, dystopian, world of Infinite Jest.

The gist of Jest is that a terrorist cell of Québécois, wheel chair bound assassins (AFR) are scouring the United States to find a copy of a film made by avant garde film maker Jim Orin Incandenza. This film is the single greatest piece of entertainment ever made, everyone who has ever seen it is some enthralled by it’s all encompassing beauty cannot look away and will watch it on repeat until they wither away and die. The assassins want this film in order to exploit the American susceptibility to wanting to be spoon fed good times and exact revenge for turning a large swath of south eastern Québec into a chemical wasteland. Jim Orin Incandenza (JOI, Himself, or the Mad Stork) is also the founder of an elite boarding school for tennis protégés, The Ennfield Tennis Academy (ETA). This school is neighbour with a Drug Rehabilitation centre, Ennet House. These three groups (AFR, ETA, Ennet House) serve as proxy for main characters, each containing a myriad of sub characters that will drive the story such as it is.

I realise that summary seems chaotic and ridiculous but such is the world that DFW created. To make it even simpler the book reads like he wrote it in a linear fashion and then told the editor to randomise all the story fragments. We get snippets and glances at the characters at various times over a 10 year span. We are left to piece together when scenes take place and to help us along with the chronology years are randomly named after corporate sponsors and we don’t get the key to how these years relate to each other until page 223!

More important that the setting, chronology, characters, or story are the themes and ideas explored in Infinite Jest. This book explores loneliness, human connections, addiction/recovery, the role technology and entertainment play in our lives, and basically what does it mean to be a modern person? You know the little questions.

Have I mentioned end notes? There are 388 of them, some a line or two of text and other over 10 or 12 pages of character development. This actually quite clever and was one of the first things I fell in love with. The very physical, tactile method of requiring the reader to flip back and forth from body to end note reinforces the engagement and involvement that DFW wants from the reader.

There are of course some things I didn’t care for. The use of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and other derogatory terms is very liberal throughout, and not to mention an entire chapter written in what I can only describe as a very insensitive charicature of Ebonics. I know that some of the language used is meant to portray the characters as racists or poorly educated but it is so frequent and prevelant that it comes across that he was using the characters as an excuse to use offensive language. I don't think this should disuade someone from reading this book but it is something that I think could spark discussion.

Reading this book was work, I have been reading it for 3 months. I have over 275 passages highlighted, many, many, notes and I still don’t feel as I have even scratched the surface of what it is trying to say. There is some gorgeous prose in this book, there are moments that had me in tears, some that made me laugh, and many that made me wish I had never started reading it. In the end the experience of reading Infinite Jest was rewarding. I got to think about many aspects of life and art in ways I hadn’t in quite a while. There is no doubt this is a master work and deserves to be read.

Page 719: The Wheelchair Assassins search Antitoi Brothers’, looking for The Entertainment master copy.

Page 719 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: P. T. Krause flees Ruth van Cleve.

Page 721: How the Wheelchair Assassins came to center their search on the Antitoi Brothers’ shop.

Page 723: Fortier and his prosthetic legs.

Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose.

Fortier playing on the American political correctness over their desire to actually change and view others as equal rather than pitiful.

Page 723 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Joelle Van Dyne worries about her teeth, dreams of Don Gately.

Page 724: Fortier goes to the Antitoi Brothers’ shop, where an Entertainment cartridge as been found. It turns out not to be the master, however.

M. Broullîme had rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject’s extremities.

Page 728: Lenz robs the Asian woman and hides out in a back alley.

Page 729: Marathe arrives at Ennet house.

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: ‘Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.’

The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the addicted man without the man’s knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed.

‘You ain’t here. These fuckers are metal. Us—us that are real—there’s not many—they’re fooling us. We’re all in one room. The real ones. One room all the time. Everything’s pro—jected. They can do it with machines. They pro—ject. To fool us. The pictures on the walls change so’s we think we’re going places. Here and there, this and that. That’s just they change the pro—jections. It’s all the same place all the time. They fool your mind with machines to think you’re moving, eating, cooking up, doing this and that.’

‘The real world’s one room. These so-called people, so-called’—with again the flourish—‘they’re everybody you know. You’ve met ’em before, hunnerts times, with different faces. There’s only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you know. They wear different faces with different pictures they pro—ject on the wall. You get me?’

Page 736: Joelle cleans her room, ponders her relationship with Himself and the movies she starred in, and recollects the Thanksgiving she shared with the Incandenzas.

Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean.

It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing in the Back Bay’s co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise, like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone if it came to that.

It’d been Orin who introduced her to his father’s films. The Work was then so obscure not even local students of serious film knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming his own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn’t become notorious until after Joelle’d met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been, part of which caused part of the strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly clean.

Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he’d come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself only to the mother. They all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was the family’s light and pulse and the center that held tight.

Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a hundred times a day. It nearly made up for Himself’s blank stare.

Orin, late one night on the co-op’s futon, recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother’s special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant.

Her biggest worry was that Orin was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy’d warned her the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.

Even as an undergrad Joelle’d been convinced that parodists were no better than camp-followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of people with nothing new themselves to say.

I have felt this way about IJ a few times...

Page 747: Marathe speaks to Pat. M. regarding admittance to Ennet House. A discussion about discovered cartridges piques his interest. Marathe ponders his various options (rush off to alert the AFR, kill Pat M. outright, etc.)

Marathe's accent seems even more exagerrated than in other places in the book, is he laying it on thicker for the disguise?

he and Fortier discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders.

Similar to other critiques of AA throughout the book

Page 755 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Mario wanders around E.T.A. with a camera strapped to his head, collecting footage for a documentary. He ends up interviewing his mother, and asking her how one can tell if someone is sad. The Moms launches into an extended monologue about disassociation, engulfment, and suppression.

‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally.

‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

Page 769: Hal and Mario are again sharing a room. They discuss their childhood dog S. Johnson, liars (Orin and Pemulis in particular), and whether it even occurs to Mario that people might lie to him. Hal admits that he would have failed the urine test, if Pemulis hadn’t extorted a 30 day reprieve.

‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’

‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’ ‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’

‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’

Orin!

Page 774: Kate and Marathe chat in a bar. Marathe tells Kate about how his met and married his wife, and Kate is disappointed in the “love” story.

In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life.

‘I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.’

We have to choose our life's purpose.

Page 785 – 17 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal arrives at Ennet house, and asks for a schedule of NA meetings.

Endnote 324: In the lockeroom, Pemulis consoles his little buddy Possathwaite, who is weeping and declaiming “nothing is true”.

Page 784: Under interrogation from Rodney Tine, Molly Notkin tells everything all knows about Madame Psychosis and J. O. Incandenza, including the disfigurement of Joelle during Thanksgiving when her mother had flung acid at her father, the father (and Orin) had ducked, and Joelle had gotten it in the face.

Endnote 332: Wayne does some “candid sharing” on Troeltsch student broadcast; deLint tells Pemulis that he can either finish the term or hit the trail now, but that his tenure at E.T.A. is effectively over.

Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur’s son, who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot.

Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate—her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure—and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties.

Was JOI trying to process his feelings for Avril by working with Joelle?

she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it,

That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, 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.

Page 795: Hal tries to go to an addicts meeting, but somehow winds up at it “Inner Infant”.

He wasn’t sure why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem—he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope.

​

Page 809: Gately is lying in the trauma wing hallucinating that the ceiling is bulging and deflating
Page 827: Gately awakes again to find Geoffrey Day sitting where Thrust had been. It's night. Day informs him that Johnette is no Gately in the kitchen.  Himself (The Wraith) explains that he made Infinite Jest to get through to Hal, and to apologize. 

What would it be like to try and talk and have the person think it was just their own mind talking?

does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved ‘Cheers!,’ not the center-stage Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar’s crowd, concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize.
Gately remembers them, the extras in all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn’t quite remember them, how it never struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture,
he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were;

Sounds like JOI would have loved Mumblecore movies and teh Duplass borthers.

No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame. The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence.

The wraith feels along his long jaw and says 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. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. 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.

​

A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say

Does JOI (Wraith) realise that Gately knows JVD?

​

Page 845: After Marathe, Ossowiecke and Balbalis failed to turn up the veiled performer, Fortier and Marathe turned to the final and most drastic means of trying to locate the cartridge, to acquire members of the Auteur's immediate family

A direct assault upon the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides.

Page 846: Gately dreams that he is with Joelle in motel with Joelle in the South. Joelle raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his forehead. He then remembers Mrs. Waite, who was his neighbor when he lived with his mother and the MP. There was something about Mrs. Waite, but no one said what it was. Her house and yard are in disarray, and she kept jars of brown-green viscous vegetoid stuff in her garage. He's seeing Joelle/Death through a milky filter, reminiscent of the way a baby sees a parent. He begins cry and asks Joelle/Death to set him free. She shakes her unfocussed head and says: Wait.

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.

Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently,
This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams.

Is the wraith pushing thoughts of Lyle and JVD onto Gately?

Gately asks death to take him but death/JVD says to wait.

Page 851: Hal awakes from a dream where he's in a zoo, that has no animals or cages. It's 5am and Mario is asleep. The Lung hadn't been inflated and Hal is hopeful that this might be cancellation weather for the exhibition meet. He can't ever remember hoping to not play before, and he can't remember feeling strongly one way or another for a long time. 
It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning.
The implied question, then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling.
Hal doesn't want to play tennis, the first time he has ever felt this way ( are his feelings returning?)

Page 854: Gately wakes from the Joelle/Death dream, the actual Joelle is leaning over him wetting his forehead with a cloth.  She tells Gately how she'd gone to St. Columbkill's Meeting and there'd been a guy from her home state of Kentucky named Wayne who had awakened in a disconnected sewage drain pipe after a ten year blackout. Wayne had a deep furrow across his face where his alcoholic father in the grip of post-binge Horrors had hit him with a hatchet. The gash had just about healed when his father dropped dead. He dragged his father under the farmhouse and began charging kids $5 to see a bona fide dead man. He took the money and headed out to 'lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.' Next thing he remembers is waking up in the drain pipe near Boston, with some 'right nasty' medical issues but the timer bell cuts him off, and he points at Joelle to speak next.

JVD is told she doesn't HAVE to count the days, she can choose how to do her sobriety (like Marathe choosing gives him meaning)

Gately pictures a good life in the future with JVD but feels he is taken advantage of her new found sobriety.

Page 864: Hal can hear the sounds of early morning weeping from behind dorm doors as he goes down the hall to brush his teeth. He finds Ortho Stice making an odd chanting sound with his forehead up against the glass of his window.  

we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window.

‘What hilarity?’ Kenkle looked from me to Brandt to me. ‘What hilarity he says. Your face is a hilarity-face.

Stice thinks Hal is crying while kenkle thinks he's laughing.
Who is on the bleachers

Page 876: Gately sees that Ferocious Francis has taken up the bedside chair, with his oxygen tank in tow.   Gately tries to ask in writing whether any were dead and who the guy in the hall might be. A Doctor asks if Gately is ready to succumb and accept the proper pain medication. He lists a host of 'very safe' alternatives. Gately wishes that Francis would step in help out here. But Francis sits silently and the doctor doesn't appear to notice him. 

Why should he have to resist? He’d received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot with a professionally modified .44 Item. He’s post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain.

‘Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid’s gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself. He’s the one that’s feeling it. He’s the only one can decide.’ He either pauses or slows down even further at the open door, looking back at Gately but not meeting his wide eyes.

The thing in Boston AA is they try to teach you to accept occasional cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substance-cravings will rise unbidden in a true addict’s mind like bubbles in a toddler’s bath. It’s a lifelong Disease: you can’t keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts.

Page 896: Hal is going back up to check on Stice and Mario, check his reflection for signs of unintentional hilarity. Hal runs through his family tree.

It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that 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.

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.

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. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. 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. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?

this was your drug addict’s basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot out the problem.

Many parallels between Gately and Hal. Both are immobile, considering what it means to be sober, and recollecting about their families.

Page 902: Gately's decline from promising football player to drug addict is chronicled. 

Page 906: Hal may have been dozing. He seems to remember people poking their heads in. Pemulis is asking that Hal come and do some 'important interfacing.' Pemulis says Eschaton's a no-go, and asks if Hal has seen the Moms around. Pemulis implies that this partly has to do with the DMZ, and Hal reminds him of the 30 days of drug-free living. 
Pemulis hints that his lies didn't buy them any time with the Drug Test but Avril may have seduced the tester.

Page 911: More of Gately's backstory unfolds while he lies in the trauma ward. After he left school, Gately didn't go straight to burglary, although he did steal a few valuables from some of the nurses from whom he copped drug samples. His first job was for Whitey Sorkin, a North Shore bookie. 

Page 916: Pemulis is about to retrieve his stash to take it to the Entrepot [trading post]. He finds that the ceiling panel in the hallway of Subdorm B has fallen to the floor, and there seems to be no trace of 'the shoe.'

Page 916: Gately hadn't suspected that Fackelmann had been skimming money from Sorkin all along, and he didn't find out until the 'not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob' which took place while Gately was out on bail. Gately had lost his taste for violence and had taken to burglary instead.  Sixties Bob is most likely the fence for the 'arty looking film cartridges' from the DuPlessis burglary [p 55-60]. The 'dream' that begins with the long busride, and Gately being inside of a blue bag and continues with Gately and Hal digging up the corpse of Himself is clearly no dream, since we know already from p 15-17 that Hal has a memory of the same episode. Presumably Gately has been kidnapped from the hospital in a blue body bag and driven by bus with Hal to Himself's gravesite, and made to dig up the corpse, only to discover that they are too late and the cartridge that was buried with him is already gone.

Page 916: A 'grotesquely huge' woman with stubble bulging in her hose grabs Joelle as she comes out of the hospital, and tells her that she's in almost mind-boggling danger. Joelle says 'this is supposed to be news?'

Page 916: Back at the luxury apartment Gately and Fackelmann are still indulging in narcotics and M&M's the next morning. Gately nods into a dream that he's on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides say 'Paragon Bus Lines: The Gray Line' and he realizes [in the trauma ward] that this is the same bus from his dream that went on and on. But he has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream. 
Page 938: Joelle is being interviewed presumably by Steeply, who grabbed her a little while ago...
‘When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling—it was always ironic—he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, 

Page 938: Hal returns to his room he finds Coyle watching one of Himself's cartridges, Accomplice!, while Mario gets dressed. Mario notes that Hal woke up early, and that he looks sad. 

My eating mold and the Moms’s being very upset that I’d eaten it—this memory was of Orin’s telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.

And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. This was concerning ‘adult’ films, which from what I’ve seen are too downright sad to be truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult is kind of a misnomer.

Orin’s father—though he wouldn’t forbid it—would rather Orin didn’t watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn’t ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he’d personally prefer that Orin wait until he’d found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that 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.

DFW like JOI likes stilted unnatural characters.

Page 958: Joelle figures that they've let her loose just to see where she'll go, so she goes to Ennet House. She sees a police car in the snow outside Ennet House as she approaches.
Page 958:  Someone named Mikey is speaking at an AA meeting. He tells of going to pickup his son to take him bowling.
Why???!??

Page 960: The ADA explains to Pat why he has been outside Gately's hospital room but didn't arrest him.
Page 964: The unnamed ETA student says that usually part of the experience of having a gala is getting to watch the different people arrive, but not so for this one. Rumor had it that the Quebec team had been seen, and they were in reality some kind of Special-Olympicish adult wheelchair-tennis contingent.
Page 971: Orin is inside a glass cage resembling a giant bathroom tumbler. O captured by AFR and held in a tumbler like he used to torture the roaches.

The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams.

​

Page 972: In the trauma ward people are coming and going, at a seemingly accelerated rate. The RN feels Gately's forehead, and yelps. Someone down the hall is jabbering and weeping. We hear Hal crying before Gately passes out and we finish the novel with the Facleman execution.

It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

OK so that was a giant under taking! I had to take a lot of breaks and a lot of notes over those last 250 plus pages. We get deep into the cyclical way in which people work with their past. The cycles of abuse, addiction... The way our past affects our present. There is also a thread of interconnectedness of the characters, many of the characters have near misses, or take such minor parts in each other's lives that they are unaware that people they know were nearby at critical moments throughout their lives.

This section takes another stylistic turn, weaving in the dreams that blur reality as well as introducing the supernatural. This interweaving of dream, wraiths, memories, and reality made it very difficult to keep straight. I re-read Gately's many times to piece together where his stay in the hospital for the gunshot and post kidnapping separated not to mention how to piece together his abduction and grave digging with Hal.

Hal's transformation into the Hal we meet at the beginning is subtle and slow. I first noticed the change to the first person and then all the other people misinterpreting his mood and feelings. Did he get dosed with DMZ? What is stolen by the wraith? or was it simply a side affect of withdrawal? I did like that Hal went secret user to secret recovery.

I started seeing a lot of similarities between what was being preached as JOI's ascetic and DFW's. They exploration of figurants, extras, and human furniture can be seen to be an analysis of Mickey in this section and many of the tertiary characters throughout IJ. I also found that JOI's use of non-actors to get a wooden strange performance relates to how DFW writes many of his characters.

The parallels of Hal and Gately are wonderful.  Both were star athletes who turned to drugs but one managed to succeed despite the drugs. They arcs come back together here in the end as they both re-examine their lives while immobile and facing a major life crisis. They both deeply and brutally relive their family lives, while confusing their present.
This book was mind blowing but also a huge chore at times. There were parts that were absolutely brilliant and parts that made me wish it was never written. In the end I am absolutely thrilled to have read it and picked it apart.

Mixed feelings. Now I know why I couldn't remember what happened from the first time I read it 20 years ago.

Page 575:: Randy Lenz and Bruce Green continue strolling around Boston. We learn that Green’s mother died of fright after opening a novelty snake-in-a-fake-can-of-nuts gift that young Bruce had given her at his father’s urging, and that Green’s father went insane (and was executed for sending out deadly exploding cigars) sometime thereafter. Green and Lenz are separated; when Green next sees Lenz, the latter is killing a dog belonging to some partygoers. The partygoers see the killing and give chase, but Lenz manages to evade them.

Green's childhood trauma is tragic and hilarious.

I really want the Canadians to catch Lenz

Quenucker is a funny blend considering a Canuck and Quebecois are polar opposites.

Page 589: Mario’s nineteenth birthday approaches. He strolls near Ennet House, and we learn: (1) he “can’t feel physical pain very well”, (2) he can no longer read Hal like he once was able, and (3) Mario doesn’t understand why the E.T.A. students are embarrassed by genuine emotion.

Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.

Page 593: Don Gately’s Ennet House duties, divided into the “picayune and the unpleasant”.

Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener.

Gately confronting the monotonous life of the sober populace.

Page 596: Orin answers survey questions from a man in a wheelchair, while the “putatively Swiss hand-model” hides under sheets of the bed.

‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’

I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’

The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’

Orin wants/needs to hate what he loves. That is why he likes being subjected to TV rather than watching what he wants.

Orin's cruelty is on full display here. He's contempt for others and how he looks down on them. How he likes to smother life (cockroaches in glass or Mario under blankets)

The assassin has many questions for Orin. Orin's answer about how the gluttony of choice is a different experience that the force feeding of broadcast TV hits home.

Page 601: As Gately supervises the reparking of the cars in front of Ennet House, the partygoers arrive in search of Lenz. A confrontation ensues, and Gately is shot while apparently beating several of the assailants to death.

Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else.

Gately’s smile has reached his eyes. ‘You’re Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.’

Page 620: An engineer for WYYY is kidnapped by a man in a wheelchair.

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching.

The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way.

Very prophetic of Reality TV and Social Media

Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer’s head, and four lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet.

Every so often a Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy sound against players’ feet above and behind them.

This is possibly some of the most North Eastern North American white words ever written.

Just funny

Page 627 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: E.T.A. students in the cafeteria, discussing a Hal / The Darkness match that Stice nearly won, and debating whether the milk is powdered.

Hal recalls his brother’s late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl.

This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they’d never be able to want anyone else.

Orin may not appear terrible at first but he maybe the most despicable character in the book.

Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.’s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them.

The way sex is used as a weapon by his family members may have ruined it for Hal.

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.

The misogyny is thick

lots of secrets. Hal used to secretly get high knows the powdered milk secret...

Page 638 – 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.: Steeply reveals that his father had a literal and life-destroying obsession with the television show M*A*S*H*

The theory of the theme of this Burns-slash-Burning apocalypse now sort of spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging and deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type of world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.’

‘the old man’s theories were almost inconceivably complex and wide-ranging. As the years of new seasons went on and some actors retired and characters were replaced by other characters, the old man generated baroquoco theories about what it was that had quote-underline “really” happened to the absent characters

So sad

secret notes, secret letters, secret theories...

Page 648 – 13 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: At Ennet House, Geoffrey Day describes a dark, billowing shape that he accidentally summoned as a child, the shadow of which left him bereft of hope.

Page 651 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Steeply and deLint watch the Hal / Stice match. Steeply pushes for an exclusive interview with Hal, but is rebuffed.

The ETA philosophy of not letting the press is an extension of the academy's desire to keep them isolated.

Pages 663, 664, and 665: A correspondence between Steeply and Marlon Bain of Saprogenic Greetings. Endnote 269 contains extended excerpts from Bain’s replies.

Bain calls Steeply, Steely, Starkly, Bainbridge,

Very flattering to Orin. I think it is Orin much like he used to fake replies to his mother.

Page 666 The Tunnel Club searches the catacombs under E.T.A. for rats.

A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’être has to do with exclusion.

Page 673: Thierry Poutrincourt joins Steeply and deLint in watching the Hal Incandenza v. Ortho Stice match.

Poutrincourt shows concern for transcending or indulging in celebrity and the consequences of those choices.

Poutrinciurt sees through Steeply's deception (disguise)

Page 682 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Matty Pemulis, prostitute and brother to E.T.A.’s Michael, recalls sexual abuse at the hands of his father.

tragic read

Page 686 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: After the Stice match, Hal first runs into deLint, then spends the evening watching his father’s films.

Page 689 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: On the way to Antitoi Brothers’, Poor Tony Kraus considers snatching the purse of the two women in front of him.

Page 692: Geoffrey Day ruminates on how male Ennet residents have names for their members, and fond reminiscences about Lenz’s “Hog”

Geoffrey Day’s noted the way most of the male residents of Ennet House have special little cognomens for their genitals. E.g. ‘Bruno,’ ‘Jake,’ ‘Fang’ (Minty), ‘The One-Eyed Monk,’ ‘Fritzie,’ ‘Russell the Love Muscle.’ He speculates this could be a class thing:

​

Page 692: A general discussion of depression, alternating between Kate Gompert (thinking about her Ennet House friend who is addicted to train sets) and Hal (watching The American Century as Seen Through a Brick).

It’s of some interest that 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. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing.

Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who’s being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who’s not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

A condemnation of how we regard mental v physical illness

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

​

Some truly insightful passages looking at depression and suicide.

Page 698 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Newer resident Ruth van Cleve leaves E.T.A. in the company of Kate Gompert; P.T. Krause follows, eying their bags.

Pages 700-701Five brief vignettes:

* Jim Troeltsch prepares to narrate a wrestling cartridge in his room.

* Michael Pemulis moves a panel in the ceiling with a handle of a racquet.

* Lyle sits in his usual spot, atop the towel dispenser in the weight room.

* Coach Schtitt and Mario “tear-ass” down the road in Schtitt’s BMW.

* Arvil Incandenza calls a “journalistic business”.

Page 702: While Hal watches Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, other E.T.A. members invade the common room. Joelle attends a cocaine Narcotics Anonymous meetings, hears about a man who walked out on his wife and child.

The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e.

​

A bit like what I think DFW was attempting her. I think he wanted to subvert racism and misogyny but ended up glorifying it in parts.

Page 711: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun conclusion.

I really want someone to make Blood Sister!

Page 714: P. T. Krause gives into temptation and snatches Kate Grompert’s purse.

Page 716 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz, meanwhile, high on cocaine, plans to rob two Asian women.

Lenz is such a horrible human.

​

_______________________________________________________________________________-

I am fully addicted! I cannot put IJ down at this point and it feels like the book is in overdrive.

The two standout characters in this section for me are Hal and Gately. Both appear to be on paths of true self awareness, discovery, and authenticity. They seem to be growing into complete people that many of the other characters in the book are incapable of.

I did have a great laugh at this bit of writing:

Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer’s head, and four lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet.

If any bit of writing throughout IJ ever 100% substantiated the accusations of DFW being the whitest writer than that would prove it. That line is so specific to north eastern white middle class boys/men it pains me.

Another brilliant bit of work are the passages on depression and suicide. DFW has done and unbelievable job here getting to some truly insightful and moving pieces of writing on topics that are so gut wrenchingly difficult to discuss. There is an honesty there that is moving and brought tears to my eyes.

I love Blood Sister. I really want to see it on the big screen. It is also an excellent look into not only JOI's mind but I think ultimately DFW. Much like people in the IJ universe feel that JOI's satire may have fallen in love with what it was trying to poke fun at there are many passages of IJ I feel have the same fault.

I think we can all agree on and conclude that Lenz is horrible.

What did you take away?

I will post a summary up to page 718 tomorrow.

Page 528 – PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL: The Marathe and Steeply show continues. Steeply argues that America is not the only culture in which people are drawn to things that could “entertain them to death”.

An antidote to the high and mighty "stupid american" attitude.

more casual problematic language "Oriental"

A hint that Marathe might actually value something over his cause ( his wife ) and that he hides this.

Page 531 – 0450H., 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT / FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA: Don Gately tells Joelle Van Dyne of a bar fight in which some of his friends “messed with a guy’s girl”; he also asks about the purpose of the veil and her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.).

U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’

‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’

‘I am so beautiful I am deformed.’

‘I am deformed with beauty.’

I find Joelle description of hiding one's shame of being unintelligent is worse than being unintelligent to be fascinating.

UHID is about hiding oneself whereas AA is about revealing oneself.

A lot of this chapter is about how others' perception of us affect us. Gately's fear of looking stupid, Joelle fear of being seen, the cuckolded boyfriend anger at being make to appear small

Page 538: How Randy Lenz became a Steel-Sak-wielding animal killer.

A very difficult chapter to read.

It is revealed in this section that Ennet house has no locks, this strips agency from occupants much like their addiction did.

Page 548 – EARLY NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND UNDERGARMENT: Rodney Tine, Chief of U.O.U.S. and compulsive pecker checker.

Daily penis measurements obsessively kept in secret.

DEA involved (entertainment as drug)

Page 550 – LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis walks in on John Wayne (N.R.) and Arvil Incandenza in the middle of … something. “‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting” rockets to the top of the “Best Lines in the Book” list.

Rusk mentions Ortho has a lack or absence of control (like addicts or ennet occupants)

Blue carpet = secret tryst revealed when they thought they were in private

The cheerleader outfit and wayne's football uniform, Jocasta Complex?

Page 553 – WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz and Bruce Green stroll around town. Lenz regales Green with stories, all while wondering how he can ditch his companion in time to do his nefarious deeds. Eventually he manages to get away, and Green observes the dog-killer in action.

the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth—Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.

Green fears that liking someone or befriending them gives up some power.

His cocaine use make him lose control of facial muscles.

Page 560: Troeltsch, Pemulis and Wayne visit Hal in turn, each for just a few moments.

Hal is counting his breaths, trying to regain control????

Lenz mentions canadian suicide train cult, Marathe lost legs to train...

Page 563 – SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U: As advertised.

Page 565: Orin gets it on with a Swiss hand-model. Endnote 234 is a long interview between Steeply and Orin, in which much light is shed on Orin’s relationship with his parents and the mold-eating incident.

Note 234 reveals attitude towards family dynamics and the mental state of the Incandenza parents, also the mold incident.

Neighbour was "so-called friends with Avril"??

How did the model know about Orin's fetish (she had all the pictures arranged for him)?

His addiction to his fetish stems from needing to be "The One"

the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither,

What is the joke on Himself?

Page 567: Michael Pemulis explains annulation to a blindfolded Idris Arslanian.

there is a parallel between Doucette's tears at not understanding and the reader's!

There are hints at the real motivation for the Concavity (fusion research)

Page 574: Orin sees his first wheelchair-bound “punting-groupie” since Ms. Steeply left.

Wheelchair spy is swiss like the model.

The Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake.

Orin is left Strung out and hung over.

_________________________________________________________________

Marathe and Steeply kick things off with a bit of a twist on their previous passages. Rather than have a pure anti-american slant Steeply begins to retaliate and prove that it isn't just americans with their lust for pleasure who are victims to addiction. He make several points about Canadian susceptibility. We also learn that Marathe's previous high horse stance of standing for something real like his nation is not 100% true as he has weakness in his love of his wife that he is hiding. I love the wider philosophical views of morality and motivation presented in the Steeply/Marathe passages, they provide a more universal human look at the world of IJ rather than a zoomed in personal look that the Ennet House and ETA passages give us. DFW does continue to be problematic here with the use of Oriental rather than Asian. When one write one or two characters as racist or homophobic it can be read as the character speaking but nearly all characters at this point have been racist, homophobic, transphobic, or presented some kind of problematic prejudice, when do we start to attribute this to author and not characters?

Joelle and Gately have a great back and forth. They really get to the meat of many of people's fears and how they can be dealt with either with an AA style of getting them out in the open and confronting them versus UHID approach of hiding it so it isn't a problem. This passage brings up a great look at how people's perception of us and our difficulties can be a bigger problem for us than the problem. Gately's fear of looking stupid, Joelle fear of being seen, the cuckolded boyfriend anger at being make to appear small all factor into exacerbating their underlying issues.

Lenz who wasn't a likable person before this has really taken a turn throughout these passages. His violent escalations to find power and fulfillment are vile and then we learn how he is forcing himself on Yolanda under the guise of helping her and this man seems irredeemable at this point. These abuses of course stem from the helplessness he feels in Ennet house where his privacy is strip away and his inability to control his addictions but this does not excuse the ways he finds to control his surroundings.

We get a peek into the history of Avrl and Himself's relationship. Orin hints at the neighbour "friend" of Avril, Pemulis catches her and Wayne is a Jocasta complex (reverse Oedipus) role play (which may also explain Orin's fetish) both of which serve to lead us to believe that the Incandenza's strained relationship may have been the cause of the powerlessness Himself may have felt leading him to drink and to commit suicide. This relationship may also be the root cause of Orin's fetish for single mothers. He wants to use them to regain his father's power while also fulfilling his need to be the centre of someone's universe.

Some major themes of powerlessness, control, annulation/orbits, attraction and repulsion. Characters caught in each others orbits unable to escape the needs and desires to correct past wrongs and indignities by acting out or lashing out.

What did you all read into this?

Part 10 will end at page 665

Page 442 – YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Gately ponders his relationship with a possibly fictitious Higher Power, and remembers his mother’s alcoholism / cirrhosis.

“Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink”

“This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.”

There are some really funny parts in here. Also some chilling accounts of spousal abuse.

Page 448 – VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U: Hal has the “losing your teeth” dream; Mario continues to listen to “Sixty Minutes More or Less”, even without Madame Psychosis.

Page 450 – 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Early morning drills at E.T.A.; Schtitt delivers the “second world within this world” lecture (i.e., “suck it up, whiners”).

Schitt’s lecture on ignoring the outside to focus on the inside sounds a lot like some of the AA speeches.

Page 461: Pat Montesian, and Gately reckless driving in her husband’s car.

“Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car.”

Gately finds god in material happiness**.**

Page 450 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the “pleasure centers of the brain” (p-terminals) experiments.

“Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu—the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.”

“whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation—’ ‘To become some crazed rats.’”

“Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.’ ‘Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’ ‘Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life. Finally pitching forward from sheer—’ Marathe said ‘Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’”

“IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR”

“You’ve never been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife’s condition be damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it and have a quick look? To see what’s all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?’”

“M. Marathe had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had fallen, still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon the floor beside his father’s ear, audible between Marathe’s mother’s cries.”

A lot insight into Marathe’s sustain for American style unfettered pursuit of pleasure.

Page 475: Gately continues cruising in Pat M.’s car; the Wheelchair assassins kill Lucien and Bertraud of Anitoi’s Entertainment.

Antitoi could be a play on anti toi or anti you meaning many of the items the brothers peddle (drugs and entertainment) help destroy and corrupt your sense of self.

Strange narrative and focus shifts here.

Page 489 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the possibility of an Entertainment “master”; Steeply asks if Marathe has ever been tempted to watch it.

Page 491 – WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA: James Incandenza helps his father isolate and fix a squeak in a box spring.

Page 503: At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Ken Erdedy gets hugged by Roy Tony.

“You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’”

Page 507: Marathe admits to Steeply that some interns were “lost” while there were experimenting with the Entertainment.

“I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just even a few seconds—a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fucking heart. In the next bed, restrained, the idiot intern: this was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, Rémy. But Hank Hoyne was no child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats when he first got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not even a whimper or backward glance.’ ‘A will of steel.’”

“Hank Hoyne is an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world’s as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us”

Page 508 – 10 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal and others await punishment for the Eschaton disaster; an introduction to “Lateral” Alice Moore’s.

______________________

I think IJ is starting to hit it's stride and after 400 plus pages of set up we are getting to the meat of the matter or I like the addicts we are reading about am losing my sense of self for a singular point of focus.I am starting to feel like the fish, I am so wrapped in this story now that I can't see any but it...

A lot of focus on mental and spiritual matters in this portion we have: Hal’s Dreams, Gately seeking god or some kind of spiritual relationship, Schitt's speech of mind over body etc... After so much time spent on the visceral nature of humanity (and our waste products) we are getting a intense look at the psychological and spiritual nature of the characters. I found a nice comparison of Gately talking about going through the motions of prayer to work the steps in order to get out focusing on the cravings and Schitt's talking about getting into a second world in order to deal with the conditions outside themselves.

I really enjoy the Marathe/Steeply sections maybe as a Canadian I have that pre-conditioned self-righteousness when looking at the dark digs at the American priority on personal freedom and the pursuit of pleasure. There is a nice exploration of Marathe's history with the destructive power of pleasure seeking, addiction, and technology. He has seen the destruction of unfettered and all consuming pleasure. He has seen the impact the US pursuit of freedom has caused and has a clear conscience on weaponizing there psychological weakness against them.

The last little point I really enjoyed was how Interdependence day falls in line with point in the book where all the fragmenting plots are revealing their interdependence to us.

“IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR”

WE MUST NO LONGER PURSUE PLEASURE

What are your thought?

I should have a post up tonight or tomorrow...

Stop at Page 528 - PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY

Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: Mario’s semi-fictional film “The ONANTiad”, which documents (a) the rise of Johnny Gentle from Famous Crooner to head of the Clean U.S. Party and then President of the (then) United States; (b) the establishment of the Organization of North American Nations; (c) the creation and subsequent expatriation of the Great Con(cav|vex)ity; and (d) the origins of subsidized time.

The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to.

The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to.

Chicago’s once-vaunted Sickengen, Smith and Lundine went so far as to get Ford to start painting little domestic-product come-ons on their new lines’ side-panels, an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in ‘cars that sold out.’

Page 394: Lyle dispenses advice to students down in the weight room, including “don’t underestimate objects”.

Page 395: Descriptions of the James Incandeza films The Medusa vs. the Odalisque and THE JOKE.

Page 407: The story of E.T.A. Eric Clipperton, who won tennis matches by threatening to kill himself if he loses. (And then does so anyway when he wins.)

Page 410: The origin of InterLace Entertainment.

Page 418 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marthe and Steeply have the “single-serving sized cup of soup” discussion (how do people weigh deriving their own pleasure against inflicting pain on others).

utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you.’

you want to raise the question of what prevents 310 million individual American happiness-pursuers from all going around bonking each other over the head and taking each other’s soup. A state of nature. My own pleasure and to hell with all the rest.’

‘But so but then in immediate unison all the various different Separatist groups drop secession and independence like rocks and all transfer their insurgent resentment to O.N.A.N. and the U.S., and now insurge against O.N.A.N. on behalf of the same Canada they’d spent decades treating like the enemy. Does this seem a little bit odd?

Separatists all some-how united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

Page 434: Gatley and Stavros Lobokulas clean the Shattuck Shelter.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is a lot of focus on major turning points in this section. Political, international, and personal turning points. There is a lot of discussion of choices made, actions taken, and the consequences. Some examples are AA members recounting there rock bottom moments and how they are dealing with it now, Mario's film outlining Pres. Gentle's handling of interdependence and the affect it had on North America, and subsidised time and the yearly changing of Lady Liberty's endorsement.

Gentle seems like a really unhinged character. His germaphobia and impulsivity are really disturbing but not as much as his obsession with finding a new enemy, he cannot seem to fathom unifying his people with anything but hate (terrifyingly prophetic.) This segment also does a great job of eliciting the pre-millenial tension I remember permeating society in the late 90s.

The rise of Interlace is attributed to aversion to advertising and the american obsession with individualism and personal freedom, this rise of Interlace has a huge impact on commercial Television and particularly on the business of advertising on television which leads to more insidious and prevalent advertising on the sides of cars and naming the years. This is creepily close to our modern desire to get away from TV commercials which has made advertising ubiquitous in our culture now with product placements, internet targeted advertising, even humans being a product (Kim I'm looking at you). In our efforts to get away from advertising we have absorbed it at ever more invasive levels.

There is a lot about cleanliness in this section that I am not sure how to interpret. Gentle and Avril's obsession, Mario cleaning the Clipperton suite, Gately's janitorial jobs... I am not sure what DFW wants me to get from it.

So what got you going this week? Let's read to Page 516 for part 8

Part 7 thread should be posted Tuesday or Wednesday

Stop at page 442 starting with the line.

On a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit

I want to thank you for your patience! I was off skiing for March Break and didn't have the time or bandwith to get this done.

Page 299: Poor Tony undergoes a week of withdraw (most of which is spent in a library restroom), culminating in a seizure while riding the train.

Poor Tony manages to elicit a little empathy. While hiding out he suffers greatly and graphically from withdrawal. This passages manages to humanize a character I cared very little for until now.

All his past actions have taken a toll, he has no friends left to help him, no connections to score from, no hope.

Page 306: An overview of the prorectors’ weekend courses (including “The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault”!), plus a description of some anti-O.N.A.N. activity by the separatists (mirrors across the road). This section includes the 14 112 17-page “endnote 110”, a conversation between Hal and Orin regarding the true motives of the separatists.

​

Separatists all some-how united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

Goddamn endnote 110!

Footnotes in the endnotes, oh the humanity.

The Moms writing style and spheres of concern are hilarious.

More seduction talk from Orin, driving Hal made but he does not stop him.

The Wheelchair assassins stalking O.

Well that was something. I think this great american novel could make a case for being an excellent Canadian one as well. As a French Canadian some of the French is close but no cigar but the overall historical understanding of the Separatist plight is very poignant.

Page 312: The birth and life of Mario Incandenza.

page 317 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marathe and Steeply discuss the American concept of freedom (e.g., freedom from, not freedom to).

A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving:

American concept and obsession with "Freedom To" has long been a fascinating topic for me. This chapter speaks to my soul.

American Freedom To has lead to a society that can no longer choose wisely, they only choose pleasure.

The common enemy tactic that Marathe describes the US is using to keep the union intact is the same strategy Hal explains to the little buddies that the coaches at ETA use and also in Hal and Orin's discussion of separatist strategies.

Page 321 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: The E.T.A. students play Eschaton, The Atavistic Global-Nuclear-Conflict Game™.

I could handle this section having been cut out.

Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: An exhaustive description of the Boston AA chapter and a meeting in which several speakers relate unthinkable horrors.

‘When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,’

Everybody knows that the returning slippee has punished himself enough just being Out There, and that it takes incredible desperation and humility to eat your pride and wobble back In and put the Substance down again after you’ve fucked up the first time and the Substance is calling to you all over again.

Lots and lots of talk about not being able to be kicked out.

Joelle's story made my jaw drop and made me cry.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Things appear to be coming together. I think we have met the majority of the characters and their intertwining stories and relationships are beginning to make a little sense.

The poor tony passage really surprised me not with the graphic details of his withdrawal or with how far he has fallen but by how much sympathy and empathy his karmic turn was able to elicit from me. I've made no secret that I did not like Poor Tony but I could not help but be saddened by the grotesque way his life has devolved. Yes, it is clear that he has gotten here by the choices and associations he has made but it does give me any satisfaction to see him suffer so. I am genuinely interested now to see where we go with Tony which I was not previous to this passage.

The next section continues to reveal that O is being stalked by the AFR and that he has a growing interest in the separatists (because of the stalking???) He has a frantic call to Hal where he pumps him for information and asks for help formulating some theories about the separatists and what made them turn on ONAN. This whole line of thought is fascinating as a French Canadian, lol. I like how DFW brings back the "common enemy" trope from Hal's Little Buddies lessons and Marathe's analysis of US policy. Uniting a group by creating an "others" group is a powerful bit of psychology and DFW seems to be laying some groundwork for examining it. The amount of research DFW must have done into Canada and our politics is surprising for a great AMERICAN novel.

Marathe and Steeply I feel I never get enough from. I love, love, LOVE the freedom from vs freedom to debate. It is one I have had many times. As a self professed lefty pinko scum I am often on the freedom from side and have a really hard time with the rugged individual, freedom to streak in American culture. This passage is fascinating and will require a re-read.

I never want to read about Eschaton again. This section and the Wardine section should have been axed.

The AA analysis is so good. So much to talk about.

One theme I found threaded through this section was how once you wanted in to the group you could never be rejected. You could say or do anything and you would always be accepted. The only person that could take you out of the group was you. This is such stark contrast to the theme of isolation and separateness that runs throughout IJ. It is the antidote to their behaviour. Unconditional acceptance of people that do not want to be accepted.

This open acceptance is a tough pill to swallow and many of the attendees fight it outright, dismiss it as corny, or very skeptically and begrudgingly give it a chance. Don Gately our guide in this section does an excellent job of bridging the gap between new comer hesitance and crocodilian surrender.

This section more than any other so far has really connected the dots for me. We have so many characters who are meeting each other for the first time or for the first time sober. Gately cannot piece together that Joelle is Madame Psychosis. Minty and Burt do not recognize each other. Is this a play on the anonymous portion of AA?

Joelle's share was heartbreaking. I could not finish it in one reading. I was holding my heading and crying through much of it.

What are your thoughts?

The suspense about DMZ is KILLING ME. I may be alone on this point, but I was actually super into all sorts of internet-ordered psychedelics over the summer. Some were like straight up acid. Some were dissociatives that made me feel really weird and (obv) detached and somehow sort of like plastic? My then bf had been doing them for years, but I came in at the tail end of it. They were technically legal because the drugs classified as illegal were specifically listed by chemical compound, and these varied here and there. Probably still available if you know the right people, but not easy to find online. There was a crackdown over the winter of some benzo pills that fell for a while into the same legal grey area. (I almost said "Damn shame" just now, but then I remembered I'm not doing drugs anymore. Lol.) Last one he got was orange dream, which he referred to nearly as reverentially as Pemilus does DMZ, although not with the mind destroying potential. We never took that though bc we decided to get clean. But like WOOOOW I wanna know what happens! And of course see what if any the link is to Hal's break down, considering the "Call it something I ate." HURRY UP PLZ IJ!

In what is probably typical for readers in recovery, I'm seeing parallels to sobriety in countless places. This morning on the train I nearly broke down in tears over Edward Abbey's description of Delicate Arch, a rock formation in eastern Utah, then laughed out loud because it ended so perfectly.

"A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us- like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness- that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures."

OMG, the perfect simile for sobriety! I need a tissue!

Then, this line, also the perfect simile for living without booze:

"After Delicate Arch the others are anticlimactic but I go on to inspect them, as I'm paid to do."

Because after the euphoria of noticing the real (sober) world all around us wears off, it is a bit anticlimactic. And I laugh about it because the let down is real, too.

I am loving this book, but here around the 225 page mark, I'm realizing that I can actually relate to those who can't get through it. I think it's not the story, not the prose, but the physicality of this book. I am having psychological hurdles thrown up at me when I go to pick up this book for a session with it. I'm encountering mental resistance. ME! The readingest-ass nerd bitch you'll ever meet! I do things like jump in a cab and say "to the library and step on it!"

But seriously, I was thinking of this over the weekend as it took me about 5 or 6 sessions just to get through footnote number 110. It's weird-- there's nothing about this part's style or content that puts me off. I mean, the sports stuff gets pretty dull for me as someone who doesn't really follow any sports and has never really played them. But politics and family dynamics are right up my alley, which was what this footnote was about. But there was something . . . somehow . . . daunting about reading a 15 or 16 page footnote.

Anybody else getting that? Well even if no one reads this post, I needed to get it off my chest. Cheersing with my San Pellegrino here.

I started Infinite Jest yesterday. Only about 150 pages in. Absolutely loving the challenge of reading this book. Among millions, my #1 question as I trudge through is what can I accept as reality? The first section shows that Hal is seemingly suffering from some sort of mental illness. Later pages suggest schizophrenia, but then the topic is barely broached after. The author mentions how Orin's memory of the eating mold incident is split in 2, so it seems likely DWF plays with limits of memory a lot in the course of the novel. It's 100% eating at me that Hal told Mario "it's no one you know" when Orin called. If Hal is schizophrenic, one or both brothers could be entirely fabricated, right? Then there's the ridiculously confusing addition of the filmography...the film about the father who pretends to be a professional conversationalist bc he hallucinates that Hal isn't talking to him. This leads me to question what in the novel is real, vs. What is a filmic adaptation of reality, and what is complete bs bc it's misrepresented by a mentality ill character. TL;DR: this book is driving me nuts

Page 219: Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a, Madam Psychosis, who dated Orin and starred in many of James Incandenza’s films (in addition to whatever other relationship they may have had), attends a party and attempts suicide by overdose in the bathroom.

One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends—even a bad party—that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much. She’s lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it,

she didn’t love it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn’t stop or imagine stopping or living without it.

This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The ’base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God

Even during a social event Joelle and the other party attendees take the measure of wearing a veil to isolate themselves, a protective barrier even when they are putting themselves out there. Caged and isolated by her addiction, Joelle is set to commit to the ultimate isolation and intends to kill her self via overdose which she plans to do while isolated in the bathroom. Isolation inception!

Page 223:

Year of the Whopper Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Year of Glad

Page 223: Joelle Continues...

Page 227: Helen P. Steeply’s (Putative) Curriculum Vitae.

A resume of Helen Steeply's undercover persona.

Page 227: Joelle Continues...

Joelle reveals to us that Jim had told her about a film he had made that was as good as he always wanted to make but we still don't know how it got out in the wild. Joelle talks about how Orin neither disapproved of or partook of her cocaine. He sounds like a classic enabler.

Page 240: A description of Enfield.

Page 242: Hal and Orin speak on the phone. Hal describes the bizarre mechanics by which their father committed suicide, and his horror upon discovering the body.

‘But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I’ll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off

I’d become obsessed with the fear that I was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy.

‘The odd thing was that the more obsessed I got, the worse I played and slept, the happier everybody got. The grief-therapist complimented me on how haggard I was looking. Rusk told deLint the grief-therapist’d told the Moms that it was starting to work, that I was starting to grieve, but that it was a long process.’

I needed to prepare from the grief-pro’s own perspective. How could I know what a professional wanted unless I knew what he was professionally required to want,

I said nobody can choose or have any control over their first unconscious thoughts or reactions when they come into a house. I said it wasn’t my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be—’ ‘Jesus, kid, what?’ ‘ “That something smelled delicious!” I screamed. The force of my shriek almost sent the grief-therapist over backwards in his leather chair.

I find the lack of grief or turmoil about his father is quite humourously juxtaposed against he complete consternation with having to deal with the trauma/grief therapist. Hal seems far more disturbed and affected by therapy, miss tournaments, and figuring out a way to end therapy than he is of his father's death.

Hal is disturbed by Orin's obsession with seducing mothers and Orin promises to teach Hal some seduction techniques. This is paired with Orin asking for many details about Himself's death which gives me a little oedipal feel.

The date of Himself's suicide is April 1 and five years late to the day the Attache receives the entertainment with the label HAPPY ANNIVERSARY.

Hal believes Himself didn't release Infinite Jest because it was a failure but Joelle had previously revealed what a success Himself thought it was.

Page 256: ETA plays Port Washington in a tennis match.

It strikes Schacht as odd that Pemulis makes such a big deal of stopping all substances the day before competitive play but never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any kind of withdrawal or dependence.

to win enough of the time to be considered successful you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all

Page 270: Don Gately, now on staff at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, councils the newest resident Geoffrey Day.

‘So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés,’ is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. ‘To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.’

Pat M. encourages newer Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as valuable teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint.

It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need help if you didn’t miss it.

There’s a difference between abstinence v. recovery,

Burt is C and Yrstruly's victim.

Page 281: Having defeated Port Washington, the ETA gang returns home on a bus.

Page 283: All about Orin: how he made the transition from tennis to football, and his relationship with the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne.

almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

99.9% of what goes on in one’s life is actually none of one’s business, with the .1% under one’s control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%,

Well, we are really getting into the meat of this beast now!

One thing that has started to click is how DFW`s use of notes, non-linear chronology, and a chronology that is foreign to us is not simply to seem clever, it forces a physical interaction and full engagement from the reader. You have to take notes, flip back and forth to endnotes, highlight and digest passages. This book is an all encompassing experience.

This section of the book is all about details and patterns. We get many details about Joelles last hours, The chronology, Enfield geography, Jims death, how to fool a therapist, how to express grief (as well as how to fake it)... We also learn how important patterns are for humans be it patterns of tennis play, cyclical patterns of substance abuse, thought patterns... These 2 major ideas are thoroughly explored.

Another core idea that is further illuminated is how humans have an inability to transcend our desire for happiness and pleasure regardless of the harm it causes us. The pleasure of drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and isolation affects every character. Jim and Joelle cannot see the problem their happiness is causing with Orin and Avril. Pemulis cannot see the effect the happiness drugs give him affect his tennis.

The is a funny counter point of Orin rebuilding himself by getting away from addiction, finding a new sport and rising from the ashes of a failed tennis carreer while also being an enabler in the self destruction of Joelle and his Father. The first time he sees Joelle use cocaine he takes pride in the fact that while not partaking he found no fault and in fact took pleasure while being around while she was inebriated. He also jokes about how clean the house is when he wakes up (Joelle talks about how much she loves to get high and clean.) When Orin is with his father and Joelle he lets them get so out of control the cab has to make several stops for them to vomit. He is clearly not the major cause or contributor to their addictions but he is no friend either.

Day is a very interesting character. He challenges the system at Ennet House. He openly mocks the words of wisdom and kindness. This allows him to isolate himself from the staff and other residents, protecting himself. If he belittles the program, staff, and other participants it is easy to shift the blame if he relapse. A relapse would also give him the isolation and separation he seems to desire.

So yeah there are some thoughts... What did you think?

IMO when DFW talks about addiction and substance abuse, this book is at its very best. I'm about 250 pages in and the descriptions of using, the long passages describing the rituals around obtaining, building up to, and getting the fix are really intense.

!That part where Joelle is about to smoke crack in the bathroom of the party about gave me a heart attack even though I have never smoked crack.!<

Page 151: Drug tests at E.T.A; Mike Pemulis sells sterile urine.

‘Urine!’ ‘Clinically sterile urine!’ ‘Piping hot!’ ‘Urine you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’

‘Urine trouble? Urine luck!’

Page 157 – WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ: Himself’s father (Hal’s grandfather) prepares to teach Himself how to play tennis, tells of the incident that ended his own tennis career, and drinks heavily.

Himself’s father goes on many interesting rants discussing the link between a physical vessel and its meaning (tennis ball, flask, body)

Page 169 – 4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis acquires some “incredibly potent” DMZ.

I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

Page 172 – TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA (etc.): Hal narrates a film made by Mario. The narration consists of a series of how-to instructions “Here is how to do individual drills …”)

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.

This portion really drives home how robotic and prescribed Hal life is.

Page 176 – SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS … WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: A series of statements made by recovering addicts at Ennet House.

These snippets are very emotional triggering. Such desperation, denial, and sadness. Many of the statements seemed to be avoiding the issues, or denying the underlying issue while still being a cry for help.

Page 181 – LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Madame Psychosis begins her show at 109-WYYY FM; Hal and Mario listen at the Headmaster’s House.

I am unsure what we’ve learned here if anything. There is again some strong emphasis on the entertainment. I enjoy that the E.T.A. has a focus for the athletes to be entertainers as well as athletes.

Page 193: A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the other six buildings on the Enfield Marine Public Heath Hospital complex (down the hill from ETA).

This little tour of the recovery facility is sprinkled with many derogatory segments about the residents. DFW seems to be channeling some self loathing about addicts through Don Gately.

Page 198 – 6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: ETA weight room; introduction to Lyle, the sweat-licking guru.

This feels hyper masculine and sexually repressed.

Page 200: An overview of the residents of Ennet House, including a long discussion on Tiny Ewell and his fascination with tattoos.

Looks of meditation terms and ideas.

Insane stream of consciousness. It propeled my reading to go faster and faster like a runaway train.

The study of tattoos is interesting.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

Page 211: Michael Pemulis hypes up the DMZ to the other members of ETA.

Pemulis holding court and all the boys being held in awe of not only this mythical substance but in Pemulis' hunt for knowledge of the substance.

This section has really ramped up the focus on addiction, it's victims, it's root causes, and how addicts are viewed by society. I am still unsure of DFW angle, the tone of the book reads deeply personal to me so I find it hard to distinguish the loathing of addicts from being an observation or DFW's self hatred, either point is interesting and gives us food for thought.

I was also struck in these passages by the underlying sexual energy, with the licking guru and the not subtle at all weight lifting description but also in the intimacy of the tattoo examinations.

What hit you cats this week?

for Week 5 I propose we end it at page 295: 14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPENDS ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

So how did y'all like this section? Could you relate?

I have to admit that for me, it was not very relatable. The author mentions feeling as though she'd been blind to the beauty of nature before getting sober. Not so for me. I hated nightclubs, kind of liked pubs, but always preferred drinking at home alone or with an SO or a small group of friends over going out. But nothing was better for me than getting drunk around a campfire after a day of hiking in the mountains. Or having drinks between ski runs.

And even as a drunk I was something of an early bird. Seldom up later than 11 pm (esp in those last few years-- usually passed out by 9) and tried to be up to see the sunrise, though it was hard, again, especially in the last few years when I was just poisoned through and through from the constant boozing.

All that said, sobriety has certainly reacquainted me with nature. It was harder and harder for me to get motivated to do anything but the bare minimum in life as a drunk.

I got a kick out of her quoting Eminem talking about working with Elton John as his sponsor and how they're both so into nature now. "Look at that fucking rainbow!" "I fucking love leaves now man!"

So how 'bout you? Are you a nature-lover in sobriety, were you a nature loving drunk like me, or is really neither here nor there for your recovery story?

Here are section summaries, with my comments in italics:

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT pg. 95

Banter and exhaustion in the ETA lockeroom. Present: Hal Incandenza, John (N.R.) Wayne, Jim Troelsch, Michael Pemulis, Ted Schacht, Ortho Stice, Jim Struck, Keith Freer.

The boys banter reveals how important "the Entertainment" is. It seems to be a major part of their course work and studies. There is a real sense of camaraderie but not of real closeness between the boys. The Big Buddy system put in place by the administration to help the younger students actually seems to have created a way for the older boys to assert dominance.

There is a game of "one upmanship" between the boys as to who is more tired and exhausted. Stice points out the "Word inflation" much like modern language, good isn't good enough everything is great or awesome. There is no subtlety.

Marathe and Steeply continue their conversation through sunset.

Marathe has a great speech about fanaticism.

‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U pg. 109

Big Buddy meetings: first Hal (with Kent Blott, Idris Arslanian, Evan Ingersol), then Wayne, Troelsch, Struck, and Stice.

Hal points out how the post practice complaining is a ritual, a common cultural practice that binds the boys together, forms social ties. Despite these ties he goes on to talk about the isolation bred by the competition of individual success and competition. How can these boys co-exist as friends when their individual success comes at the expense of each other? In a bigger context we can extrapolate that as a species how do we draw the line between helping out all humans while ensuring that we as individuals thrive?

‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’ ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ Ingersoll muses. Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll’s face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. ‘So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris’s singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?’ ‘I do not require his root, for I am ready.’ Arslanian bares canines. ‘Well that’s the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?’

MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR pg. 121

Mario is seduced by USS Millicent Kent.

A really strange passage detailing, Millicent's father's sexual proclivity. When that tidbit of knowledge is paired with her fairly commanding sexual advance on Mario is does seem to hint at passed abuse or trauma from her father making her act out.

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT pg. 126

Marathe and Steeply discuss the Entertainment, and possibility of an antidote (the anti-Entertainment).

30 April — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT pg. 127

“Lyle”, the sweat-licking guru who lives in the ETA weight room.

WTF is that about?

yrstruly, Poor Tony, and C go on a crime spree, acquire heroin from Dr. Wo. The heroin is laced with Drano and C dies after shooting up.

The dialect, run on sentences, and spelling make this a very difficult read. yrstruly is going to be a problematic character, a lot of hateful thoughts from him.

The virus that Darkstar has (I assume HIV/AIDS) is a problem in the community and cause a bit of bonding over sharing warnings about not sharing Darkstar's works similar to how the ETA boys come together over their complaints. It is an interesting glimpse into the hard world of the addict. Drug seeking, sex work, isolation from the mainstream while trying to stay even and safe.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. pg. 135

Orin speaks to Hal by phone.

Orin and Hal seem to be speak at each other rather than too each other for the majority of the phone call until Orin asks about the Quebec separatism.

Background of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House.

Bricklayer story.

Hal’s paper on active and passive heroes.

Steeply’s article about the woman who had an artificial heart in her purse when it was snatched.

Is the purse snatcher from yrstruly's crew?

List of Anti-O.N.A.N. groups.

Why videography never took off.

*I absolutely love the discussion of how voice calls allows one to only partially commit to the interaction compared to video calls requiring a more fully committed participation. Fits into the theme of isolation, we like voice calls because it lets us only partially let go of our isolation in a very controlled fashion versus videos more invasive nature. *

This section of the book is where it is finally started to grip me, although I am still very unsure what the book is about (plot wise). I am also starting to notice how the style and vocabulary is VERY 90s, I have a feeling I would really loved this book when I was 25. The way DFW uses offensive slurs also treads that line Tarantino does, It's fuzzy if the use of homophobic and racist terms is part of the character and part of DFW wanting an excuse to use a word that is inappropriate. A point I am starting to notice is that there is a certain desperation for freedom in the characters that leads them to isolate themselves, this isolation leads to or enables there addictions. For example, Hal's very controlled life leads him to hide in the basement pump room which allows him to hide his drug use.

What are your thoughts?

CG's observation that the earliest days of sobriety are like "waking up in a trashed hotel room, which now happens to be your life" was funny to me. I could see where it would be an apt metaphor for many though it didn't quite fit my situation. And I loved her 30 for the 1st 30.

I did not use exactly those 30 tools (especially that weird My Little Pony doll one, LOL), but my tools and strategies were mostly very similar. The ones I related to the most were numbers 7 (exercise), along with 14, 15, & 29 (eating a lot, giving yourself treats, self-care). These all relate to how I just treated myself with so much compassion and kindness and care, and these were all so incredibly helpful.

But the 2 I related to the most were numbers 25 (counting days with an app) and 20 (finding a sober tribe). These 2 items were both fulfilled by r/stopdrinking. I still spend a ton of time on SD of course-- and I would even if I weren't a mod now-- but in that first 30 days I spent maybe 3 or more hours a day there. Seeing my days add up and seeing so much proof that others were going through the same struggle that I was made it much easier to keep going through the hard days and gave me somewhere to share my good days and victories where I knew people could relate.

So which of the author's 30 tools for the first 30 days worked best for you? Or if you're still in your first 30, which ones are you trying out? What could you relate to or not so much relate to in this section?