I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Daydream Nation (1988).

Normally I like to review a band’s albums chronologically.  But because in this post [which I just stumbled upon] on Infinite Summer, Colin Meloy mentions that he bought a copy of Daydream Nation at the same time as Infinite Jest, and since I was talking about Sonic Youth anyway, well, it seemed like an easy fit.

So Daydream Nation is generally rated as Sonic Youth’s best album, with most people calling it a masterpiece.  I actually came to Daydream Nation pretty late in my SY appreciation.  I had gotten EVOL but really got into them with Goo. And as I worked my way around their catalog, Daydream Nation was always the big double album that I put off getting.  All of this is to say that I’ve never loved Daydream Nation as much as every one else.

But I’ve been listening to it a lot recently, and my opinion is definitely changing about it.  The thing that always got me about Daydream Nation was that the first two songs are fantastic, in fact, “Teen Age Riot” has always been one of my favorite songs.  And even “The Sprawl,” Kim’s cool, nasty song is great.  But somewhere in the middle of the noisy instrumental section of that song, I always sort of faded out, and couldn’t really get into it.

What I have since learned is that if you actually focus on the disc, you know, not just as an interesting listen but as something to really get into, it’s quite intense.  Like “Providence,” a song that I never really listened to before is a very interesting piece.  (I also didn’t know that that Mike Watt was the voice on the answering machine).  And “‘Cross the Breeze” is a noisy ramshackle song that when you really listen is pretty darn amazing.

One of the things that I didn’t really like about the disc was that the songs themselves were very pretty, and the noisy instrumental sections of the songs always felt sort of tacked on, like they need to keep the songs from being commercially viable. It was never like an organic fit.

Indeed, the main sections of many of the songs are commercial and catchy.  The general image of Sonic Youth is of guys with screwdrivers wrenched into their broken guitars, strangling every last note out of them.   And yet, the opening guitar riff of “Teen Age Riot” is beautiful. And, of Course, “Eric’s Trip” is supremely catchy.  Once again, the guitar riff for “Total Trash” could easily be a pop song were it not 7 minutes long.  And the opening of “Candle” is quite pretty as well.  “Kissability” is another song that could be a pop single, if it were ever so slightly less twisted (of course it wouldn’t be as good, but that’s not the point).

But with each subsequent listen, I’m appreciating more and more of it.   I still feel that Goo has a more organic use of noise, with the crazy feedback sections seeming to stem from the songs quite naturally.  Nevertheless, since Daydream Nation came first, it certainly gets  kudos for originating the style.

[READ: Week of July 13] Infinite Jest (to page 283)

That’s not my copy of IJ autographed, it comes from this flickr stream.  I do have an autographed copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing… which has a similar smiley face.

I feel the need to apologize to Infinite Summer readers in that somehow I missed the page with the Spoiler Line Pages listed.  Okay, this is ingenuous, I didn’t read all of the website, and so I just never saw that listing.  I was more or less going on a 75 +/- page count, so I may not have been right on time with the Spoiler Line.  Now that I actually printed a copy, I’ll be keeping to a more proper schedule.  So, apologies if I messed up anyone’s read!

Also, I feel I have erred egregiously in my first three posts by referring to the Endnotes as Footnotes, which they clearly are not.  And I will be going back and amending that in the previous posts.  I also get  a swift rap on the knuckles for such a grade-school error.

I recently saw on InfiniteTasks, this hilarious link to a DFW/NASCAR article on the Onion, and while it is of course, very funny, I found this Onion link to be far more Infinite Summer appropriate:

Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter at Page 20

The whole piece is very funny, and there’s an “excerpted photo” which I’m attaching at the bottom of this post.

But on to the book.

This week’s reading was much more focused in terms of who we’re talking about: lengthy sections regarding select groups, rather than a few pages of random or unknown characters.

First there’s the purported C.V. of Helen Steeply covering about 10 years worth of reporting.  Whether more significance will come from this remains to be seen.

But it quickly moves back into the continuing saga of Madame Psychosis (Joelle van Dyne).  We learn that she lived for a few years with Orin Incandenza (where she was known as P.G.O.A.T. (Prettiest Girl of All Time).   And then, suddenly, she started working with (and spending the bulk of her time with) Orin’s dad (Jim) as an actress and, possibly? more.

Well the possibly question is answered thusly: pretty much everybody except for Avril (Jim’s wife) knew that they weren’t sexually active.  Avril was unsure.  However, we also learned (in Endnote 80) that the question was probably moot to Avril as she and Jim were not sexually active anymore.  And she had at least one indiscretion in the Volvo, in which she wrote the man’s name (which is not revealed) in a steamy window (which Orin later discovered).

But back to Joelle.  She is headed to a party at her old house, which is now rented by Molly Notkin.  Molly is all-but-dissertation-ed in the M.I.T. Film & Film-Cartridge Theory PhD program.  She is having a huge bash for herself (she is dressed as Karl Marx because of her oral exam in which she presented Karl Marx himself as a film critic).

Joelle arrived in her veil, but she is not really interested in socializing.  The party around her is described with lovingly amusing detail mostly in snippets from the POV of Joelle.

• There are the hilariously, impossibly slow dancers who are like statues, moving only certain body parts in the subtlest of motions.
• There is Melinda (high on ecstasy) who is completely enamored of her tits. She even tells the room how wonderful they are, (which Joelle objectively agrees are spectacular).
• A hilarious conversation about the Brady Bunch Variety Hour.  [This is my point of view peeking in: Of course, anyone who has seen it knows that the entire original cast returned except Jan (Eve Plum).  And it is quite obvious that everyone is an original cast member (fatter, sure, but clearly them) except fake Jan] whom this person describes as a middle-aged black woman.  [This is Not the Brady Bunch reunion show in which everyone (including Eve Plum) returned except Cindy (Susan Olsen) which was A Very Brady Christmas which actually seems like that’s what they should be talking about given its more recent release date.]
• Another great hilarious story about a feast that was capped off with a brandy laced with ipecac.  The resulting scene was then filmed by the host for an upcoming movie.

During the Joelle scene we also learn a few more things about Infinite Jest V, the movie.  The most enticing thing is that in his will, Jim asked that it be buried with him.

[I’m not sure if I am reading any of this next bit right…]  The origins of Madame Psychosis wearing the veil appear to be that she believes the Infinite Jest V to be fatal upon viewing, and since her face is the main thing of the film (and Jim edited the work and then killed himself) that she seems to be hiding herself from the world for fear that people will look at her and die.

[I’m happy for anyone to affirm or deny this].

At the party, she plans to have Too Much Fun (this phrase meaning, apparently, to get high/stoned/blitzed on your Substance of choice).  Her Substance, which is shown in incredible detail is coke and baking soda boiled up in a cigar tube and then smoked.  [To show my utter ignorance on this topic I had to look up that this is how you make crack.  Huh].  This preparatory scene goes on for pages and pages, as we watch her concoct her Substance and proceed to smoke it, all the while thinking about everything around her and in her life.  It is excruciatingly drawn out as if we are living every single second of her last moments on earth, precisely because this is how she plans to kill herself.  She wants to make her heart explode.

On to other things: in my Week 3 post I asked if anyone knew where Enfield, MA was supposed to be, geographically.  In this weeks’s reading we get a lengthy, like geographically detailed mapping of Enfield, MA: off the Allston Spur and all of that.  Anyone unfamiliar with Allston/Brighton MA probably isn’t helped all that much although it is lovingly detailed.  I lived in the area for a couple of years, but now that I have all this I’d still love to see a map of it!

My favorite part of the Enfield discussion was the Empire Waste section. In it, we learn that the Empire Waste Company catapults huge blocks of garbage from Enfield, MA into the Great Concavity (we have heard noises, and seen large blocks flying overhead in past sections).  In Canada, that catapult are known as trebuchet noir. I want to mention that this is one of the things that I distinctly remembered about the book from my first read.  For some reason this image of garbage blocks flying through the air really stuck in my head, and it only get as a few lines too, but how vivid!  I also can’t imagine how powerful they must be to send them that far.

And then comes a wonderful phone conversation between Hal and Orin.  We learn that Orin hasn’t called Hal in 2 years, and we see, rather amusingly, that Hal is presently cutting his toenails, the sound of which drives Orin out of his mind.  Hal is also, amusingly, shooting his nails into a garbage can across the room, at an approximate 70% success rate.  And he keeps interrupting Orin’s “urgent” call to update him on the success.

Orin is calling because Helen Steeply (yes, it all comes back) is interviewing him for Moment magazine.  (Orin has already slept with her back at her trailer…and there’s an amusing diversion into the contents of trailers).  Helen seems to be prying for questions about Jim and the rest of the family.  And so, Orin is trying to find out some information from Hal about how he felt about Himself’s death. Orin did not even go to the funeral.

And Orin learns for the first time that it was Hal (at age 13) who found his father dead.  And we all learn, in great detail, how Jim killed himself by putting his head in the microwave (which, how? doesn’t the door need to be latched?).  Yes, it does.  And Jim thought of that, so he cut a hole IN the door and stuck his head in.  Police anticipate that he was dead in ten seconds, although, given the not-too-graphic description, it took much longer to clean up.  Orin asks if he was asphyxuated a few times, which, given DFW’s love of words, made me question if I had been wrong all these years.  [Thank you, Hal for clarifying before hanging up].

Hal relates this entire section to Orin as his remembrance of his sessions with his grief therapist.  Which therapist apparently caused Hal more grief than the actual death of Himself.  Hal was with the therapist for weeks, freaking out because he never saw this large man’s hands, and because the man would never stop asking Hal “How does it feel?”  Even when Hal was coping fine, thank you.  Hal even went to the books to try and learn how to talk to a shrink to get him to lighten up, but that lesson did him no good.  Finally he sought out Lyle, the guru of the weight room, who suggested he learn to think like a shrink.  So Hal cabbed to the nearest library, literally in a towel (coming from the weight room), to find some books he could read.  And we get Hal’s hilarious “revelation” that he screams at the therapist (and I couldn’t help picturing Charlie Brown getting yelled at and flipping head over heels in the air), that when he walked in the house he thought that something smelled delicious! Which solved his shrink problem.

Orin also reveals that he thinks he is being followed by assorted guys in wheelchairs.  Which Hal is quite cynical about.

Oh, and that weird nightmarish scene earlier in the book–you remember, the one with the face in the floor–well that was apparently Hal’s, and it was a recurring nightmare from his father’s death.

We also learn in both this section and from Joelle, that Orin has referred to Himself as the Mad Stork (and once, accidentally, the Sad Stork) and that some Stork references will creep in from time to time.

Hal also refers to the discursive O.E.D.  Looking this up led me to RumorsDaily which contains a bunch of words that said blogger had to look up from IJ.  It’s a handy place to find the tough words!  And yes, of course there is  the Infinite Jest wiki, too!

And then comes the tennis.

When I first read IJ I didn’t really care about tennis.  I had no opinion of it at all.  Since then, I started playing tennis, then hurt my knee and stopped playing tennis.  I have wathced some great matches on TV but really don’t care about tennis all that much, once again, and yet now that I’ve played and watched it, I have a much greater apprciation for the tennis chapters of the ebook.  And I can see that if you don’t like tennis, this must be a drag.  And, as far as I can tell they don’t really impact THE PLOT that much.  And yet, since the book is pretty much about tennis, and the tennis sections are, more than anything else, fantastic character studies in wonderfully rich detail, I don’t advise skipping them (plus they’re very funny, too).

So this lengthy section concerns the big match before the Whataburger Tournament at the Port Washington Tennis Academy on Long Island.  It’s a long-standing rivalry which involves humiliation in defeat (the losing kids sing an embarrassing song to the other team and the losing coach does something behind closed doors that has never been revealed).

We also (finally) learn a bit about John Wayne.  Jim Incandenza first encountered him on his film (yup, check back to Endnote 24) Homo Duplex, a film about all of the people he could find who were named John Wayne who weren’t The John Wayne.  Jim was blown away by his tennis skills and courted him for years before he finally agreed to come to E.T.A.  John Wayne gave up Quebec citizenship for the ride at the E.T.A.  He doesn’t seem to care much about anything but tennis, and is hard to read most of the time.  His father, a coal miner, also seems to be counting on John Wayne making a ton of cash at tennis to get him out of his shitty job.

We also get some insight into Teddy Schacht (who has Crohn’s Disease and a bum knee which, ew, swells to the size of a volleyball after a match). Schacht is a pretty good guy, but once the Crohn’s and the knee kicked in, he pretty much gave up all hope of professional tennis and is planning to be a dentist.  At this point he plays for the love of the game and is rather looked down upon by some of the serious players (like Hal) but sort of admired by others for his ability to not care.  And even though Hal kind of looks down on him, Schacht’s still a good guy and definitely hangs out and takes part in the clean urine program (and even pays full price for it).

Schacht also assists Pemulis during his, by now routine, puking before a match.  Which Schacht posits is due to Pemulis’ claim that he goes totally clean before a big match and is probably having withdrawls, but he would never say so to Pemulis himself.  Mario also appears to be “filming” this sequence with his hands in prepaperation for how to film Whataburger in the dark lighting of a “Lung” (even though Whataburger will be outdoors so the question is moot).  In a rather touching moment, Pemulis later tells him exactly the kind of tracking and lighing he would need.

Despite Pemulis’ nerves, he still manages a win as his opponent suddenly starts behaving wildly erratic after the first set.  Pemulis gets a V.D. (Victory by Default).  At the after-party, Pemulis’ opponent, among other things, told the Headmaster’s wife that he’d like to do her from behind, while Pemulis looked on innocently (did he act out his DMZ fantasy from his discussion with Hal and Axfield?)

Oh, and E.T.A beat P.W.T.A. quite handily, and there was much rejoicing (yeaaa), even though most of the bus ride home was spent studying.  And, a new book is introduced!  Well, not exactly, but the students at E.T.A. are presently studying Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, which according to Wikipedia

Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Throughout the novel he rarely leaves his room…and fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel.

So what say ye all:  OblomovFall.org?

Then there’s a shift back to the Ennet House, and we reside there for awhile in what turns out to be a very funny scene (and in which I really start to like Don Gately).  Pat (see Week 3) tells Gately that the new resident is sent to test his patience.  And thus we are introduced to Geoffrey (not Geoff) Day, an intellectual who tries to argue the logic of the program to anyone who is stuck listening.  In a hugely entertaining Endnote, he has a lengthy dialogue with Gately.  He uses multisyllabic words decrying the program for spouting cliches and assuming that everyone needs to be in A.A. (because if you admit y0u need it then you need it, but if you deny you need it, you definitely need it, and, so that’s pretty much everyone, no?)  Gately’s practiced patience with this bizarrely logorrheic man is quite funny, especially as he tries to calm him by saying Day, man, “I’m about to get fucking lapped here I’m so not-following.”  Gately puts Day’s chances of completing the program pretty low, but then who is he to say?

Some other new, fun Ennet House residents are Charlotte Treat (who does needlepoint a little too intently for Gately’s liking, especially for an ex-needle addict) and the wonderfully named Emil Minty (who is a mohawked punk and gets on Gately’s nerves).  Also, there’s Burt F. Smith who lost his hands and feet to frostbite when he was robbed and left for dead (and trying to watch him light a match is, well, There but for The Grace of God.)  Oh, and our friend Bruce Green is here too, although he’s pretty quiet.

And there’s also Randy Lenz.  Lenz has a great backstory in that his last score seems to have been some kind of D.E.A. sting operation into which he wandered.  He now seems to be wanted both by the D.E.A. and by the dealers themselves, and it seems that Ennet house is his hideout.  Lenz never wears a watch, but constantly asks what time it is, like exactly.  In a hilarious interaction, Lenz asks Day if he has the time, and Day explains (again) that he has an old fashioned analog watch (with Spiro Agnew on it?) and can only give him the time-ish.  When Lenz freaks out (and Gatey supplies the digital time to the nanosecond) Day goes on a tangent about how everyone has offered to buy Lenz a digital watch.  And Day himself wants to get him a fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of his wrist so he has to hold it like a falconer.   When Lenz threatenes him, Day gets one of the best jokes of the week when he says that he’s shaking so hard he can barely hold his arm steady to see his digital watch.

Gately, meanwhile is just waiting for Pat to show up so he can have his shift be over.  I loved that he was desibed as lying on the couch, “less built than poured”. And, of course, childishly there’s a hilarious bit about farts.  How no one knows who did it, but unlike in polite society, no one will ignore it.  We all delight in knowing who the guilty part was [Gately himself, tee hee] [highlight to reveal].  And, in a nice nod to another section, someone has been cutting his or her toenails in the common room.

And that’s that.

Some other observations

This was probably one of the easier sections to have read.  The Tennis and Ennet House were very detailed and yet they were rather straightforward.  I’ve been really enjoying having more and more details filled in as more people look at a specific incident.

It also feels like a good tactic when you start reading IJ (too late for me now) is to keep a list of every question that you would like an answer to, and then see if he answers it later.  How could Jim kill himself in a microwave?  Check.  Etc.

Great stuff!

Here’s the photo from the Onion.  Click on the picture to get the Onion’s scalable page: