I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately. A few days ago, I had a dream about Patrick Swayze in drag, probably leftover trauma from watching To Wong Foo, and soon after my dream, he turned out to be dead. Now, I’m not craaaaaazy, and I have absolutely no real belief in PSYCHIC DREAMS and crap, but hey, it happened, and it was kinda weird, and it’s got me in the habit of Googling things I dream about in a semi-joking attempt to find something prophetic about them.

So today when I wake up with a damned pun floating around in my head, I had to Google it. I mean, who dreams in puns? LOSERS, that’s who.

After Googling the actual book to discover what I wasn’t missing in high school, I Googled the “Wraith” alternative. This is one of the only pages I found where it was an intentional misspelling rather than a careless typo, and the only one that could be found easily. And then I discover, oh snap, it’s a blog about Infinite Jest? I picked that baby up a few months ago and have been determined to read it, but I’ve barely touched the thing all summer.

I don’t know what my point is. Maybe that it’s pretty sweet that I dream up potential blog titles. Maybe that I wish I’d come across this site before the summer was almost over, and I’d actually read the freakin’ book with the rest of y’all. I’m envisioning an alternate universe in which I actually finished something this summer, rather than sitting on my ass and watching life pass me by, and it’s pretty sweet. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and do things a little differently. I also wish I wasn’t making a completely inane comment on a blog post I merely skimmed for fear of spoiling plot points for myself when I actually crack down and read this baby. Regardless of my point, I just want to say that I’m glad I Googled a terrible pun and came across this site. CARRY ON, SOLDIERS.

I was not so much troubled by the use of the wraith itself as that it delivered so much condensed information; it was so “loaded” – in terms of explanation (though of course it also brought up just as many questions) – which I did not think was typical of the other phenomena in the rest of the book. Occurring this far into it caused the wraith to “appear” in a “different light” than the other phenomena. Revealing so much about JOI’s intent and about his perception of Hal’s “disappearance” and lapse into solipsism – delivered in the same breath, as it were, as the conflation of generations of fathers and sons and the description of his work as “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…the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.”

Now I was hearing the author’s voice. The wraith had made me think more about the author and his intentions than I had since I finally “surrendered” myself to IJ. The author had LITERALLY first seduced me into surrender and then yanked me out of it. That, for me, was the “real” problem.

a) Is there more vitriol on the commenters to this woman’s posts than anyone else’s? Huh.

b) I thought the ghost/wraith was dumb. By the time I read this, I had forgotten that in my confusion with the rest of the book, and it’s conclusion. This post probably explains better than I could why I thought the ghost was dumb. IJ was not set up as a magical realism book, imo anyway.

c) On reading the comments, and thinking more about magical realism, I recall how I was so so p*ssed off at the end of Life Of Pi. The author there was like, here believe something impossible (oh, and there was the conceit that in believing it, you would also believe in god); oh wait, now it’s the end: I take it back. It was just a metaphor.

So now I’m thinking it is important how the author sets everything up. Springing something new on us 75% into the book: annoying.

d) I have a lot of ideas/thoughts/feelings about this book, but honestly can’t think of any friend of mine that would read it, and therefore that I would give it to. I’ve been encouraged by this blog, and all the loyal readers. I appreciate it truly. But I occasionally felt like I didn’t belong because DFW is not my god, or even my favorite author, although I did enjoy many parts of IJ and am very glad I read it.

(Is the map not the territory like the mirror is not the lens; and, even the territory and lens are not the real?)

Wallace will repeat this trick in Incarnations of Burned Children, where the ghost at the end works as a beautiful metaphor.