Author: avery

Yes, I know — the term “mission improbable” brings up around forty-five thousand results in Google. I am, very decidedly, not the first person to think of it. Last week I went with the title “Grapes of Wraith”, which was somewhat poorly received in the comments section. One commenter improved it, though, changing the title to “Gripes of Wraith.” I think we can all agree that that’s a much better choice. So. Let’s try again this week. I’ll need someone to play the part of “person who cares a little too much about the title of Avery’s post” and someone else to play “person who does the extra two seconds of thinking that Avery could have done and comes up with a pun that actually makes sense.”

Your reward will be fruit punch and pie, and international fame.

A consistent response to my last post was the assertion that the inclusion of a ghost in Infinite Jest broke no established rules, since entirely impossible concepts had been appearing since the very start of the book. One could guess from the title of this post that I’m going to argue that some of those concepts are not impossible, just highly improbable. One would guess correctly.

Giant (and skull-less) babies are mentioned as being a result of the concavity, or rather the result of the annularized fusion waste that is dumped into the concavity. I was hopeful (in the kindest way) that I would find, through Googling, some evidence of elephantitis as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but came short (much like the non-giant babies of Japa– heck, I’m not even gonna finish that sentence. I already feel bad just thinking it.) However, studies in the use of x-radiation on gestating mice have produced creatures with hydrocephalus — the scientific term for “dude, check out that huge head.”

One could extrapolate that the radioactive waste produced by annular fusion could have exponentially greater results, creating the giant babies and feral hamsters of IJ. One could extrapolate that, and I’m going to. So there. Totally probable.

Dymphna, the blind tennis player who uses sonic balls (page 17), would seem to present a problem to those trying to convince themselves of the plausability of this book. But anyone doubting the chances of a vision-less tennis pro needs only to read this entirely scholarly People magazine article about “The Boy Who Sees with Sound” to become convinced that in the land of the blind, the kid who can echolocate using mouth clicks is King. Dymphna? Probable-phna.¹¹³

Anyone with their finger on the pulse of the conspiracy-theory world should need not explanation for the plausibility of O.N.A.N — IJ‘s unholy union of America, Canada and Mexico. The Amero has been a cause for concern for wingnuts and kooks patriotic Americans since 1999. Arguably a “natural extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)”, the Amero is a theoretical currency that links the three countries together.

The idea of a pan-Americas currency is based on the Euro, the coin of the realm for all of Europe. Except England, because the fears of racists concerns of nationalists have kept it from invading our shores. If it can work (kind of) in Europe, it can work in America.¹¹⁴ O.N.A.N? Seems like it could happen.

Do you have a problem with the idea of wheelchair assassins powerful enough to strike terror into the hearts of all sensible humankind? If you think dudes in chairs can’t be hardcore, then you’ve never seen the awesomeness that is Murderball (boring name: wheelchair rugby.) The terrifying blending of man and machine that creates muscle-bound wheelchair athletes is all too plausible, friends.

Lastly, I’ve heard tell that Infinite Jest is about an entertainment that is too enthralling, too enticing, and cannot be escaped once encountered. Whilst anyone with a child and access to Dora the Explorer knows that human beings are more than capable of becoming almost pathologically addicted to television, the idea of a film so powerful that you spent the rest of your life craving continual exposure to it seems silly.

But. We know enough of Himself’s work that we can figure out that the effectiveness of Infinite Jest(the film) relies on the distortion and/or manipulation of light. Of course, we hopefully all know of the dangerous effect light can have on the human brain. If there’s part of the noggin that sees light and decides to throw a fit, who is to say that there may not be another band, or wavelenth, or kind of light that can trigger pleasure centres in the brain to such an extent that all thought from then on is based around the desire for more of that stimulation?

Sure, we haven’t come across that kind of light yet, but David Foster Wallace predicted Skype, human beings who were born to play tennis, and Alcoholics Anonymous.¹¹⁵ Maybe he predicted the discovery of addictive light, too.

I mean, he probably didn’t. But how else am I meant to conclude this post? With a frickin’ emoticon?

🙂

Yes, I’ll start off by apologizing for that post title. It’s an awful pun, rendered more awful when viewed in light of the fact that it doesn’t even make sense. Still — we’ve just spent the summer reading Infinite Jest, so hopefully we’re used to things not making sense.

I, for one, thought I was used to it. Wheelchair assassins, massive concavities, an institute full of jocks who somehow posses higher brain function — these were all concepts that astounded and befuddled me, but they were at least possible according to physics, if a little unlikely. Or a lot unlikely, in the case of the clever athletes.

However.

To me — an avowed atheist who has occasionally been referred to as “too rational” — the wraith that visits Don Gately in the hospital room doesn’t so much test my suspension of disbelief as it does rip it apart and stomp on the broken remains whilst screaming “You’re damn right there’s ghosts now, Avery. How you like me now!?”

Of course, this book is far from didactic and should not be taken literally. So it it’s okay with you guys¹⁰⁴, I’d like to explore some possibilites that could explain the presence of unusual words in Gately’s head and the rather personal details of Himself’s life that have also found their way into Don’s indestructible noggin’ without having to resort to The Haunting Of ICU Ward 7.

The most boring answer¹⁰⁵ is Joelle. Pages 856-7 show her recounting — with no consideration of the “anonymous” part of Alcoholics Anonymous — the partial life story of the hatchet-dented Little Wayne chap. It’s not beyond the realm of rationality to conclude that she might also tell Don about the Incandenzas, and that the bizarre and sudden appearance of the ‘wraith’ can be put down simply to the delusions that accompany massive physical trauma.

We’ve already witnessed Don claiming that he doesn’t understand Joelle’s speech at times (during their first few conversations at Ennet House), and it’s quite possible that this is another of those times — hence the words appearing in Don’s head.

Alternatively, Joelle could have left behind some tapes of Sixty Minutes More or Less to keep him company whilst she is gone, hoping that her voice is something that would comfort him. The show often consists of nothing but words that Don wouldn’t understand, often without context and daunting even to those who haven’t just had their shoulder blown off.

Another explanation is that Gately, in his capacity as one of the Ennet House Staff, may have watched some of J. O. Incandenza’s works and been subjected to some kind of info-dump. We already know that Ennet House — care-of Clenette — has recently received some cartridges from E.T.A, and has apparently been a beneficiary of the tennis academy’s generosity before. Perhaps Himself’s experiments into the technical capabilities of film enabled him to create a Work that taught you things on a strictly subconscious basis.

One can assume that, towards the end of his life, the Mad Stork was sufficiently mad enough to encode his biography into the annular pulses of his movies. Perhaps Gately, reviewing cartridges donated before his hospitalization, viewed just the right combination of entertainments to unlock this knowledge. Perhaps the aforementioned trauma has done so instead.

My third theory¹⁰⁶ is far more outlandish, while still fitting in to a world that doesn’t include supernatural beings (yes, I’m still annoyed about the ghost. Okay?) Perhaps Don Gately has been unfortunate enough, after assaulting the three Canadians, to fall into the hands of the Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents.

Perhaps the A.F.R. are under the impression that Gately’s murder of Guillaume DuPleiss (infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer) coupled with his association with Joelle, mean that Gately is some kind of government operative or otherwise shady person with knowledge of the location of the master copy of Infinite Jest. Perhaps the A.F.R. are — with their demonstrated ability to play the long game — attempting to fool Gately into thinking he is in hospital, and are providing actors or masked decoys or people he knows to try and coax this highly sought information from him. Perhaps the Wraith is Gately’s mind’s reaction to such a terrible and insane situation.

Perhaps if you think such a plan is too outlandish or nonsensical for the AFR to enact, you have a wonderful seventy-five pages ahead of you.

Avery Edison is in transit today, so Nick Douglas is subbing in. Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, a collection of witty tweets, which was released earlier this week.

I’m an atheist – if I were in AA, I’d get on my knees with far less openness than Don Gately. But until I “deconverted” in the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was a Christian. A Creationist, even. (That made it easier to switch all the way at once, actually.)

At least twice, I tried to read the entire Bible. I failed both times. I hear that once you get through the grueling books of law, it gets a lot more interesting and things start clicking.

So first let’s tick off the obvious similarities: Infinite Jest is big. It’s hard to read. There are many characters. It has a cult of followers, and it’s best read with bookmarks in several spots so you can go back and piece everything together.

But that’s trivia. What matters is, the story of IJ is deeply Biblical. Kind of. So far. (I’m on page 533.)

An evil threatens to destroy the world, and an insignificant person is called to become a hero to protect it. This is the most pervasive theme in the Bible: The smallest, weakest hero must face the mightiest forces of evil, because God has called him to. Joseph Campbell organized this archetype into the Hero’s Journey, a prototype for western hero stories. It’s the story of nearly every memorable Biblical hero.

When God calls Moses, the exiled Israelite asks, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? They will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.” Judeo-christian scholars think Moses was a stutterer. Imagine that, a hero who can’t communicate.

The “judges” who repeatedly rescued the ungrateful nation of Israel from its military enemies were all similarly unimpressive. Gideon, whom God told to lead Israel’s army against the Midianites (spoiler alert: he does; they win), was the weakest man in the weakest family in the smallest tribe of Israe. He also made God prove his identity by performing little miracles with a sheepskin before he’d even listen to the plan. Samson’s enemies didn’t know where he got his strength – so the man couldn’t have been visibly muscle-bound; he was just a normal-looking guy who could overpower a lion and topple a building. The warrior/judge Deborah was a woman, which in ancient Mesopotamia usually relegated you to making babies, taking showers on the roof, and having poetry written at you.

Okay, here’s where things get complicated. Because while plenty of the Boston AA members are heroes in their own personal stories, there’s one character who really strikes me as a weakened hero like the above: Marathe.

Like Moses (or the opening-scene Hal Incandenza) he has trouble communicating, since his English is still shaky. He comes from the most pathetic province (the one stuck downwind of the Great Convexity) of a conquered nation (though the Israelites, who at one point complained that things were so bad under Moses they’d rather go back to being slaves, seem a lot like IJ’s America). He faces temptation and speaks with his counterpart on a mountaintop (like, you know, Jesus). I don’t know what to make of his rejection of his holy mission. But he’s certainly the disadvantaged hero, what with having popped his legs off in a game of beat-the-train-just-barely, and he’s the character most likely to change the whole game here while musing about the nature of choice and freedom.

The book is Biblical in structure too. Marathe’s conversations with the devil Steeply are an example of the meditative dialogs, monologues, and thought experiments with which David Foster Wallace chops up the “story” part of the story, mimicking the Bible’s tendency to hop from history to lawbook to poetry. (The Bible can also seem terribly self-indulgent, especially around the descriptions of temples and bloodlines. But hey, what editor is going to call up God and ask for him to tone it down? He’s got a fucking verse in there condemning anyone who changes a word of it to hell. Must be a real headache for the copy editors at Zondervan.) As in the Bible, there are letters printed verbatim, oral histories being codified – like the rules of Eschaton.

The Eschaton breakdown is another great Biblical section: The end of the world foretold. That happens in more than the book of Revelation. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah make end-of-times prophecies in their books. An assistant at my youth group once convinced a group of us to go around the table reading the entire book of Daniel (a talented Israelite academic serving with his three friends in the Persian king’s court) in one sitting. I don’t think he knew that this book included a big-ass prophetic passage about the end of days. Well it does, and it’s really boring to read aloud. A lot less fun than Eschaton’s breakdown.

But so the last similarity really is a stylistic trivium, but it’s my favorite: I know of one other author who begins this many paragraphs with conjunctions, and that’s the Apostle Paul. Most of the Bible verses that sound so profound because they begin with “For,” “So,” and “Therefore, brothers,” are from Paul (a lawyer, kinda) in the middle of a letter to some church or another, in which the whole thing is one long train of thought and every paragraph builds on the conclusions of the last. A structure like that probably helps the author justify to the editor that he keep absolutely everything in, even as it glosses over all the goddamn digressions.

So I think the lesson from all of this is that the author is God, the author can do no wrong, and anyone – is Pemulis listening? – who tries to edit God while he’s on the job ends up in deep shit.

Amen.

I am coming to believe that there is not one normal character in this book.⁷⁷ We see characters with physical deformities (the wheelchair assassins, Mario); mental problems (Himself, Kate Gompert, others); substance addictions (the Ennet house gang, a vast number of students at E.T.A); sociopathic tendencies (Lenz, Lenz, Lenz); obsessive compulsions (Avril Incandenza, Lateral Alice Moore); and gender dysphoria (Hugh Steeply, Poor Tony). But no one ‘normal’.

This has been distracting to me in the past. The world of Infinite Jest already requires such a suspension of disbelief — what with the concavity, and the subsidization, and the idea that people are scared by a group of assassins that could be thwarted by a set of stairs⁷⁸ that adding in a cast of characters all so uniquely deviant stretches that disbelief just a mite too far. Of course, this can be a problem with fiction in general, and is preferable to a set of perfect players. After all, “perfect characters are boring, and sometimes even annoying … character flaws = sources of conflict.”

But these flaws are such an integral part of IJ that I’m beginning to think that David Foster Wallace is trying to achieve some goal other than making sure no character is too idealized to be interesting. Because it’s one thing to make a character too arrogant to achieve their own goals, or blinded by greed, or any other of a number of common tropes. But Infinite Jest takes things to extremes, with Orin engaging in ritualistic seductions to fulfill some Oedipal desire, with Joelle feeling the need to cover her face due to severe deformity⁷⁹ and with Lenz killing small animals at night.

These are all extremely negative deviancies. That’s what I keep getting caught up on. No one seems to be particularly happy with how different they are, except Mario. And we really can’t trust his opinion on such matters, because he has “a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well” (p. 589). Mario’s experiences with feeling — at a very base level — are so wildly different to every other human that he cannot be counted on for a reliable comparison of relative happiness.

I feel like this theme of difference is meant to be a lesson — stray too far from the norm, and you will be deeply, deeply unhappy. Do drugs, and you will be unhappy (like the majority of the Ennet House residents). Be too much of a winner, and you will be unhappy (as demonstrated by Clipperton). Be too smart, and you might well erase your own map (perhaps with Himself’s microwave method).

This unhappiness will be permanent, too. No one in the book so far has managed to deviate from a societal norm and come back from the other side unscathed. The addicts are eternal addicts, doomed to become the old men of Boston AA — forever believing that they must Keep Coming Back, lest they fall back into addiction. And even doing that may not be able to save them from true, visceral hideousness; Lenz is hitting meetings like a champ, but they’re not stopping him from killing small creatures on the way home.

The tennis players are incessantly protected from hype, lest they come to see themselves as exceptional — as beyond the average, the normal — and lose their on-court edge. The novel’s many geniuses fall victim to punishments for their difference, too. If we’re not watching Himself kill himself, we’re seeing the hyper-smart and closed-off Avril having sex with under-age boys (p. 553 if you don’t believe me), or listening to Hal assure us the he is “in there”, as the world around him sees nothing but a seizing, “sub-animalistic” boy.

Which brings me to my real concern in all this: Hal. I’ve mentioned before that I’m curious as to how Hal comes by the disability that serves as this book’s very first ‘shocker’. I’ve been hoping that it will be something temporary — perhaps a drug dose that I can hope he one day recovers from, or a stray tennis ball to the head that may cause brain damage that science or time may one day fix. But you see, Hal is committing a number of ‘crimes of difference’ throughout this novel. He’s exceptionally smart. He’s a superb athlete. And he’s using drugs.

Going by the established pattern, that’s a trifecta of deviancy that Infinite Jest can only punish. And I’m worrying that — like Himself’s death, Marathe’s disability, and Don Gately’s addiction — it will be a very permanent punishment indeed.

Alright. You got me — I’m kind of enjoying this book now. And when I say “kind of”, I mean “a lot”. I’m writing this post extremely late because I’ve been staying up at night to read Infinite Jest. I’ve skipped out on plans with my family to stay in and read it. Heck — for the first time since starting, I’m ahead of the Spoiler Line. Wow.

For what it’s worth, I feel like I should tell you that you guys would be terrible at AA. A lot of you told me last week, in the comments, that I should just quit. Stop. Read no further. Some of you even had the temerity to suggest that I suffered from some substantial lack of grey matter. An accusation I shall not waste time repudiating, because I’ve already spent so much time leafing through the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling “repudiate” right.

Thank you to all the people who told me to stick with the book. You guys galvanized me to come up with a plan of action. I looked up how much I had to read, counted how many days I had until I had to write this post, and then used the calculator on a phone smarter than myself to do math that a child could manage. And then I sat down every day and read 30.667 pages.⁶⁶

It’s quite something to be learning a little self-discipline by committing to working on a task every day, and during the course of that task read a summation of the same disciplinary tactics applied to alcoholism. Many times I felt like not picking up IJ, either because I was slogging through Marathe and Steeply, or because I wanted to play Mario Bros., but read the book anyway because I recalled the words “for god’s sake Keep Coming Back”. It was a great insight into the power of committing to a goal and actively working for it in spite of oneself.⁶⁷

So. I’m reading the book every day, and enjoying the crap out of it. Even the Marathe and Steeply sections that I mentioned just a few scant sentences ago. I’m also not counting page numbers anymore, desperate to just meet my quota for the week. And the “portraits” of characters I mentioned last week have stopped seeming superfluous, and instead started making everything that much more real, just like they are intended to.

Long story short — I Kept Coming Back, Trusted in a Higher Power (DFW), and, well… It Just Worked.

Now, if only I could quit the booze.

(Note: This post was not a reaction to Kevin’s post from yesterday, but works in tandem with it, I think. Although it’s safe to say that we each draw very different conclusions.)

I am not enjoying Infinite Jest.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun experience, right? So here it is. Confession time.

I resent that I’m having to work this hard, that I feel like I’m indulging the author. I resent having to read enormous blocks of text, with no paragraph breaks, for pages and pages at a time. I resent the endnotes that (more often than not) only serve to either waste my time or confuse me even further. I resent that I’m continually reaching supposed milestones (“just make it to page 100!” “get to 200!” “300 is where you get rewarded for all your effort!”) that don’t actually represent any appreciable change in tone, style or plot.

I feel like my time is being wasted with an overabundance of technical explanations of subjects — tennis, drugs — that are largely irrelevant. DFW is explaining the wrong stuff. I’m at page 310 (behind, I know) and by now I’d have absolutely loved to see some explanation of the world these characters live in. Instead, we’re only being given vague allusions to “the great concavity” that leave me itching to check the wallacewiki just so I know what’s bloody going on.

Because that’s the thing — I don’t feel like anything actually is going on. I’ve gotten three hundred pages into this book, and nothing at all has happened. I feel like I have read three hundred pages of introductions to characters. Some of those characters (Hal, the folks at Ennet House) have been introduced multiple times, to no further elucidation. Some of them (James Orin Incandenza Sr., Himself, Guillaume DuPlessis) are freaking dead.

Instead of action, I’m getting portraits. Highly detailed — to a fault — portraits. And that would be fantastic if I were in an art gallery, or reading a collection of biographies. But I’m not — this is supposed to be a story, a series of interesting events told in a compelling manner. Not a bunch of descriptions of people and locales presented in an outright hostile manner to weed out the ‘unworthy’.

This post sounds a lot more hate-fuelled than I intended it to, I’m sure. I don’t hate this book, otherwise I would be quitting.⁵⁹ But I am frustrated by it, and it is becoming more and more important that a payoff arrive, and soon.

I’m sure it will. Many people I respect are having a great time reading Infinite Jest. I hope I can join them.

Before I dive into the main body of this post, there are a few notes I should get out of the way.

Firstly, I realize that the topic I’m to write about — suicide in IJ — is a little unseemly in light of David Foster Wallace’s own departure from this plane of existence just last year. I apologize for that, but it really can’t be helped.

Second, I will make — every now and then — statements about suicide that I will appear to present as fact. I should clarify (without going into detail) that I have some experience with the whole horrible concept, and am speaking with personal insight, albeit not professional.

Lastly, I totally spent like, ten minutes trying to make a pun out of a combination of the word “unseemly” and the “seam” of a tennis ball, for the purposes of titling this post. This is similar to last week’s endeavor, which saw me spend an equal — perhaps greater — amount of time ruminating on how I could fit the phrase “I decided to call an audible and call Audible” into my post.³⁸

This week’s massive-chunk-of-IJ-that-I-had-to-read-all-at-once³⁹ featured not one but two suicides: a third person look at Madame Pychosis’ — possibly successful — purposeful overdose; and a discussion between Hal and Orin on the cause of their late father’s… well, lateness.

I was struck that Wallace seemed to take great pains to make sure that we saw these two examples of suicide as wildly different from the normal perception of the act. Madame P’s method of choice might seem terribly familiar to anyone who knows much about drug addicts (or watches a whole bunch of CSI), but Wallace — from the beginning of the section — assures you that you don’t know jack:

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction is, of course, more obviously unique — a perversion of the already perverse act of sticking one’s head in an oven. It is the last great technical achievement of a lifelong genius. There is sometimes a desire accompanying suicide to do it as efficiently as possible, which can be at odds with an occasional wish to inflict greater psychic damage than normal on those who have ‘driven you to it’. Incandenza’s method meets both requirements.

These are probably just a couple of literary flourishes in a book already full of them — Infinite Jest is not one for standard deaths of characters, as we learned when reading of Guillaume DuPlessis’ accidental suffocation. But still, there is irony to be found in the fact that Wallace spends such time developing these off-the-wall methods of suicide for his characters, and then ended his own life with a simple belt.

Hal and Orin’s discussion of Himself’s death strays into a discussion of grief itself, and how to handle it. Hal, prodigy that he is, refuses to submit to the prescribed process of loss. He sees his grief counselor as an enemy combatant, to be studied and conquered. This battle appears to be the very method with which he chooses to deal with his grief — Hal cannot see things other than as academic or athletic challenges to be overcome — and we are given no opinion from our narrator (whomever he or she is) on whether or not this is healthy.

I didn’t know David Foster Wallace, and have only read 274 pages of his masterwork, but already I grieve for him and for the books he will never write. I’m sure that part of the process of dealing with this minute amount of grief is to look for clues or hints in the author’s work. Such a cliche way of dealing with this loss would be frowned upon by Hal. But I think that’s okay, because maybe Hal is kind of a jerk.

This post subsidized by Kellogg’s.²⁶

Everyone knows that Sunday evening feeling.²⁷ The pit in your stomach that grows and grows while you watch crappy TV shows that you’re not really watching because school is tomorrow and you have. Not. Done. Your. Homework.

Those who read my post last week (“Not the best student“) will not be shocked to learn that I suffered heavily from the Sunday evening feeling. I do not believe that I ever, in my school career, did a single piece of homework until the night before it was due.

How does this relate to Infinite Jest? Please. Like you even have to ask.

I’ve just finished some blast processing, reading all 75 of this week’s pages in one sitting, which MAN I do not recommend. It’s certainly lucky that, as Matthew mentioned, these pages were a lot more easy going than earlier fare. But still, that’s a lot of pages. I’m looking to Infinite Summer as an exercise in reading and writing, sure, but more than anything I’m hoping to learn some time-management skills, too.

I can’t help but be jealous of Hal’s routine at Enfield Tennis Academy  — there’s very little space there to mess up or miss a deadline. I suppose it could be that I’m just jealous of his life, of course — what I wouldn’t give to be moneyed, super-intelligent and a tennis ace. Well, maybe scratch the tennis part, I’m not really one for sports. And his smarts seem like a bit of a burden at times, actually.

Okay, so I just want the money. Big deal.

The more we delve into Hal’s (mis)adventures at ETA, the more anxious I grow about that first chapter. I’m really liking this guy, guys. And I don’t want him to become that trapped soul, that shell of a person.

I really feel like this post is lacking a unifying theme, but I’m sure that’s to be expected after cramming that much IJ into my head. And the whole Madame Psychosis section did some damage all by itself. I can’t quite work out if I like it or not. Or even if I like the idea of her show or not.

I mean, it’s certainly a great concept — this mysterious figure, the only paid host of a college radio station, sending out whatever she feels like to MIT students and anyone else who can pick it up. I’m just not sure I’d be one of the students who tuned in with any kind of regularity.

The show we ‘overheard’ seemed deliberately opaque, and hard to parse — I’m presuming even more so delivered to your ears. I’m wondering if the show is Foster Wallace’s way of commenting on the difficulty of reading his own work. I’m wondering if that’s too shallow an interpretation on my part. I’m wondering if my pop tarts are finished cooking yet.

Okay, that last one isn’t really relevant, I’ll grant you. Unless it’s somehow telling that I finished that chunk of Infinite Jest and immediately craved cinnamon pop tarts?

(Note: I request silence from those of you who know that I always crave cinnamon pop tarts.)

So: is everyone doing better than me, or are you guys having to indulge in massive catch-up sessions, too? Did you like the Madame Psychosis section, and if you did can you tell me why and what it’s about so I can steal your words and use them at parties to sound clever? And are my pop tarts done? (Yes.)

The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.

I know we passed endnote 24 last week, but I want to return to it. And I will do so because when I type things here you have to read them poop ha ha ha I made you read poop.

In 2006 I went away to film school¹⁷ fully expecting to pop out of it again three years later as the most visionary writer/director of my generation. Dream big, kids. I left three weeks later, in part because of some assigned reading that very closely resembled endnote 24, only longer, and with that gross shiny-textbook smell.

So I would like to extend my thanks to David Foster Wallace for making me relive that experience, albeit shorter and in the comfort of my own home, as opposed to hunched over a library table desperately trying to read as fast as possible so I can do my essay/s. I was there three weeks — how did I get behind on so many essays? And why were there essays in a supposedly practice-based course? And why am I still bitter about this?

I wasn’t sold on endnote 24 until I read the above passage. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The summary for Cage III – Free Show is an amazing concept. It’s funny and twisted and exciting and everything you think Infinite Jest will be when you first hear about it.

I can’t help but view the whole book in a different light, with Free Show in mind. I would actively discourage myself from such a conscious process, but I’m so obsessed with the quote at the top of this post that I would rather interpret IJ the wrong way than try to put it at the back of my mind.

“Fine, Avery” I hear you say, “you liked a tiny portion of an endnote we all slogged through. Well done. But what about the rest of the book so far?”

I’m enjoying it.

Oh, you want more than that, right? Okay. Well, I’m having great fun with the Marathe/Steeply segment. Although that’s not to say I have any idea what the hell is going on (sentences like “have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray” put paid to that notion). I don’t know if it’s my status as a trans-individual that grants me such delight in Steeply’s extremely poor disguise (re: the lopsided boobs — we’ve all been there), or if we’re all having a good time reading it but I’m not going to question my enjoyment. Especially since I have so little time for such questions after scrawling acronyms from the section onto my arm in a failed effort to remember them.

If you’re interested, having such epidermal annotations publicly visible in a crowded mall will draw the attention of security agents desperate to know if QFP is some kind of terrorist organisation with a vendetta against Sears.

Just, y’know. FYI.

The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

“He was forty, and she was twenty. Big age difference. Especially at that age. But they had a baby, and she turned into a completely different person. She punched him. Kicked him in the privates.”

Oh, sorry. That’s part of a conversation I overhead this morning in a diner¹¹ as I waited for my order to arrive and tried pretty darn hard to read Infinite Jest.

I figured since I had to sit through some middle-aged woman’s not-so-elegant discussion of postpartum depression, you should too. Hope you enjoyed it.

Of course, this is something I’ll have to get used to. I’m not the fastest reader, and I’ve never dealt with such a lengthy book before¹² so my method of getting to the end of this thing will be to read it whenever possible, no matter what (possibly loud and obnoxious) company I’m in.

Diner table. Bus stop. Therapy. Wait, scratch that last one. Or maybe not — considering the themes already touched upon in the first hundred pages of IJ, maybe the pretence that I read the tome in the company of my mental health practitioner will be taken as some deep, insightful tying-in of commentary and commented-upon.

Which would certainly not be any kind of misrepresentation on my part. I am insightful as balls.¹³

This space was meant to be taken to introduce myself to you all. There’s a chance I’m failing. In fairness, I’m a little nervous, realizing that if this were Sesame Street, I’d be the kid singled out as the one “doing her own thing”. My fellow guides are all distinctly proven entities, whereas I’m the plucky newcomer with the lucky bat and the sports metaphor that doesn’t make sense in the context of literature discussion.

If you’re wondering, I’m told I’m here to provide a youthful perspective, which I can only read as meaning that the other guides are decrepit and irrelevant, and I’m the cool, young chick that’ll bring in the 18-35 demographic we so desperately crave so that we can make muchos advertising dollars off of David Foster Wallace’s back.

To recap: we’re shills; I’m the only guide worth reading, because I’m young; and having babies makes you hit your husband. I hope you’re taking notes.