http://repatblues.blogspot.com/search/label/infinite%20jest has an essay I can’t recommend too much: More Maternal Fantods; Or the Dangers of Reading-While-Female. Is Avril eating her kids alive, or is this good-enough mothering?

And the comment (above thread) about ANNUL snapped my head around. I missed the annul in annulation completely!

The psychologically wrenching scene aka chapter 16 of “The Awakening of My Interest In Annular Systems” arises with JOI in his parent’s hillside house, in a sky-blue & white room which picture-window overlooks: nothing but bright sky. After wrangling various parental neuroses, dependencies, enablings, and one massive bed, JOI retreats upstairs, to rise above his family ritual drama. It is there, annulling the parental pressure (as it were), that he intellectualizes his way into a fascination with annular systems. aka, How I became a successful headcase, part one. Stay tuned kids, for “How JOI becomes the headcase Master”– in the next exciting episode.

Yes, the generations are inhabited by ghosts of the past. IJ main characters’ stories reflect back into the past, a trick with mirrors; the past lives through them, distortions and all.

yes: I was jumping w/ excitement when the line about the fish swimming in the water (and how the old fish says ‘how’s the water, boys?’ and the young fish are like ‘what’s water?’) came up. –I read the Kenyon speech *before* IJ. It was great to see that come up again.

Thank you for the short version. I’m like ‘headsmack!’ to what you just wrote about the lenses. Wow. Thanks!

Contrast that with the way C.T. thinks of Mario – referring to him as It or the “thing it’s not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest…” or “not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it’s quite possible is nothing but Tavis’s imagination (451).” I think DFW even writes that C.T. has a hard time even being in the same room as Mario.

It seems like he is still under the influence of the DMZ that Pemulis scores from the Antitoi brothers and which Pemulis, Hal, and Axford all decide to ingest before the Whataburger Invitational, in which Hal is competing in the opening of the book.

But, then again, I could be completely wrong.