(Not exactly, but that would be more like apples and apples.)

It’s an obscure lyric from an obscure Beatle song — only a die hard fan would even notice, it’s not credited, and it’s not even RELEVANT.

It’s just a joke, and I found it funny. The bricklayer story wasn’t as funny, but you can’t win ‘em all…

There are some other things: a key detail about Madame Psychosis is lifted from the film “All That Jazz,” but that reference is mentioned, at least indirectly (as I recall); meanwhile, the plot of “Reuben, Reuben” (with the dentist) is lifted from that film with no credit. However, it may be that the plot of “Reuben, Reuben” was already lifted from an old joke or story, the way the bricklayer story is. I haven’t researched it.

But I have to mention this: in a writing course a few years ago, a student plagiarized the part about Erdedy waiting for his drug delivery. The student condensed it quite effectively and made some funny alterations; at the time I had just finished IJ and that segment was months in the past. I didn’t recognize it, though I did liken the subject matter to DFW when I spoke to the student. He had the opportunity to fess up that he had borrowed the situation and some of the language, but pretended instead that he hadn’t read it. Later, when I went back and checked IJ and saw the extent of his usage, I had to confront him and report it.

It’s a bit unsettling to me to see the passages in which DFW was doing the same thing!

I may be out in left field on this—having covertly exhaled illicit smoke through the whirling blades of my bathroom fan not long before coming up with this—but I think DFW’s revisions are key to understanding why this story/urban legend is included in the text. Looking at the DFW text and the ListServ text, one sees that most of the differences are minor stylistic changes and the metrification of measures of mass (not to mention substantially increasing the weight of the bricks to like really comic proportions), but the one that interests me is the difference in what the claimant lists as the cause. The ListServ claimant claims the cause as “poor planning,” which actually sounds more strictly business, albeit more vague thereby requiring clarification, than DFW’s “trying to do the job alone.” Other than sounding like a euphemism for masturbation—a thread I will pick up in just a moment—“trying to do the job alone” and miserably failing is a motif in the novel. Look at the Ennet House residents for instance. They must keep a strict regimen of attending meetings and getting active with their group if they want to have any hope of not returning Out There. There’s also the way substance abusers in the text, Erdedy and Hal for example, keep a separate, solitary, and often secretive existence as a user, and as they spend more time in this separate existence, their lives become less manageable. Then there’s all that stuff Marathe says to Steeply—who is, not insignificantly, divorced—about choice and selfishness, that when one’s choices are primarily selfish one becomes without foundation, free falling, alone (108). Not to let any spoilers drop, but Marathe continues lecturing Steeply on the selfishness of U.S.A.s through at least page 430.

W/r/t the possibility of masturbatory reference intentional or otherwise, there are frequent references to masturbation in the text. Most notably, there’s the example of O.N.A.N.—as in onanism (see daily discussion forum, “Toilet humor so far”). In the self imposed isolation of his bob hope binges, Erdedy masturbates excessively enough to require lubrication to prevent abrading the sensitive dermis of his glans penis—petroleum jelly is actually pretty thick, viscous stuff in terms of personal lubricant, so I’ve a feeling Erdedy is engaging in like a strenuous ritual of self abuse (21). Orrin suspects that Hal is always masturbating when he answers the phone, when he’s actually been getting high subterraneously, O. admitting he used to rub himself raw (136-35). In a way, O. is not far off, masturbation and substance abuse being very similar at a very basic level. In its most general definition, masturbation is an act of self indulgence, or ego cathexis if you tend towards the psychoanalytic. So masturbation gets tied in with this whole self indulgence/selfishness as self destruction theme emerging through the drug abuse/addiction, masturbatory acts/references, and ubiquitous T.P.s/death by Entertainment.

One last semi-coherent, cannabis addled thought as I wax Freudian… The libido operates on the pleasure principle, but ironically the ultimate pleasure in the end game of the pleasure principle is the return to the inanimate, “To die; to sleep; / No more.”

That’s Hamlet just so no one accuses me of plagiarism.