I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: The Best Albums of the Year

Andrew Womack, fellow Infinite Summer player and founder of The Morning News has begun retroactively listing The Best Albums of the Year for each year since 1978.  This is a project that I have often thought about doing myself, yet never had the time to sift through all the music I have.

I was delighted to see how much I not only knew, but also agreed with his decisions.  Although if I’m honest, my list would have more metal and less new wave in it.  But the overall tenor is pretty on par with my feelings.

But, imagine my surprise to see that on the 2004 list I barely knew any of the discs at all!  I wonder what happened to make us diverge so much in that one year.

Anyhow, it’s a noble, well, not noble so much as worthwhile pursuit.  One that we can all enjoy.

[READ: Week of July 27] Infinite Jest (to page 434)

In the August 2009 issue of Wired, they have a little scroll across the bottom of one of the pages that lists  “Word Counts”.  King James Bible: 784,806; Where the Wild Things Are: 338; Infinite Jest: 483,994.  So, at almost halfway done we’ve read over 240,000 words!

Also, I haven’t sufficiently acknowledged some of my fellow Infinite Summer bloggers.  So I want to send a shout out to Infinite Tasks.  I especially enjoyed this post which takes a decidedly more philosophical approach than I did about a section that I found really enjoyable.  And Chris Forster, who gives a lovely discussion about Eschaton.  And I would be remiss if I did not mention Infinite Zombies, just because he may have written a letter here but his posts always get sucked up into spam, so I’ll never know.  (And because the posts are really thoughtful and worth reading too).

But enough back patting, onto the book.

It was a fun place to pick up reading.  At the small paragraph where I left off, we learn that the Statue of Liberty’s book now advertises that year’s Subsidizer.

On a couple of occasions there is the suggestion that the year 2000 is the first year of Subsidization, as they talk about things being different in the new millennium.  Although Matthew Baldwin’s argument here is very convincing which would make Subsidization begin in 2002.

And then we return to A.A.

And if I thought the previous look into the White Flag meeting was harrowing, this section is borderline unbearable.  Two speakers get prominent attention.  This first is a woman who details her history.  The White Flag group disapproves of her because she ascribes Causes for what happened to her, rather than just Accepting what happened.

Her history is pretty appalling.  She was adopted, and her adoptive parents had a naturally born child who was, essentially, a vegetable. But the parents made the adopted child room with and then socialize with the vegetable child (It). She was made to bring It with her, and when she turned 15, she was told she could only date if It went along with her.

This is all sad and horrifying, and it grows even worse when we find out that the adoptive father was, in fact, molesting It, and even went so far as to put a Raquel Welch mask on her, and even went so far as to do it in the room while the adoptive girl was there.  And but the final straw is that the adopted girl would sometimes clean up for the father, out of fear of being next on the molesting list.  And then one night–well, I can’t repeat the event that sent the adopted girl out of the house, running away into the night to become a Stripper.  For that you’ll have to read the book.

And unbelievably, that horror story pales in comparison to the other story of the woman who chose to get high all through her pregnancy.  To the point of getting high while she was going into labor, and being high while she gave birth to her stillborn child.  Again, details are far too gruesome to list here, but her Denial was so strong that she carried around this stillborn baby as if it it were alive.  For several months. In the summer.  You see where this is going.  She was eventually forced into help from Child Services

Even the crocodiles in the back are moved by her speech.

Good grief.

I need to clear my head after that.

A quick return to Marathe Steeply reveals that Marathe is aware that Steeply is going undercover as a female journalist to do a piece on Orin to learn more about Jim and the Entertainment.  A few pages later we learn that she has also been granted access to E.T.A. ostensibly for publicity for the school.

Returning to that very discussion, in Endnote 145, Orin answers a lot of Helen’s technical questions about Jim’s films (there’s also another Sad/Mad Stork slip up). But this leads Orin to talk about Found Drama, a genre of filmmaking which is meant to be so real, so honest, that even those who previously hated Jim’s work thought it was brilliant.  The joke, of course, is that Jim made the whole thing up.  He got a few critics to go along with it and even made some grant money off of what was basically revenge on the critics.  Found Drama seems to involve sending a dart at a White Pages page and imagining what the darted person is doing for 90 minutes.  And then writing critical pieces about it.

This all comes to light because of Mario’s own film, which is shown every Interdependence Day at E.T.A. at the big celebration.  Interdependence Day is mandatory R&R, and the kids are allowed, for this one day, to pig out on sweets and other delicacies.  (And we lean that Avril knows about the Eschaton debacle (and that some of the participants’ careers are pretty much over), but C.T. and Schtitt were away and haven’t been appraised of the situation yet.)

Mario’s film is something of a  children’s version of Jim’s own The ONANtiad. It is a parody/ biography/puppet show of President Gentle.  And from this film we learn that President Gentle was a third-party spoiler who swept into power just as Americans were sick of everything.  He promised to clean up America, literally (he was a major germaphobe, like Howard Hughes times 10).  He was a combination of Rush Limbaugh and Hilary Rodham Clinton, and he appealed to both the left and the right.  His Clean United States Party (or C.U.S.P.) cleaned up in the elections, under his promise that he would simply shoot our garbage into space.  And his even bigger promise was that no one would have to fret about tough decisions, because he would decide for everyone.  He’s the first U.S. President to swing his microphone during an inaugural address (for yes, this is Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, now politician and Your President), and the first to say “Shit” on television (on purpose). And as Mario’s film continues we learn that this simple little film is, basically a [one-sided] look at the formation of O.N.A.N.

I also learned that I don’t really understand the extent of Mario’s illness.  For while it is said that people helped him with the scripts, if Mario actually created all of this story mostly by himself, then he is pretty smart and sophisticated.  And yet he didn’t understand what was happening with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent.  He also knows when NOT to talk about things to Hal, even though he almost compulsively talks to Hal while they are falling asleep.  So I’m a little unclear about exactly what the status of Mario is, intellgencewise.

But back to his film, which is quite funny.  We learn that the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico are being subsumed into the O.N.A.N.  Gentle will be the Chair and the P.M. of Canada and the P of Mexico being Vice Chairs.

We also learn a great deal about the concavity.  (Syracuse NY to Ticonderoga NY to Salem MA).  It was created because there was a large nuclear “accident” in New Hampshire (many people report seeing men in white coats with the O.N.A.N. logo emblazoned on them at the site of the accident BEFORE the accident happened).  Further accidents were reported in Maine and Syracuse.  Conspiracy theories suggest that these “accidents” coincide with the fact that New Hampshire and Maine left the C.U.S.P. party off their ballots.  These accidents caused lots of babies to be born with no skulls and many other nuclear horror stories, and eventually everyone was evacuated (although any talk of “refugees” was strictly verboten).

There was then a closed-door meeting which Mario re-creates stating first that it is not so much Gentle that is pulling the strings, it is Rodney Tice.  There is no evidence to suggest this to be true, but it is Mario’s take on it (even Jim in The ONANtiad doesn’t point the finger at Tice as much as Mario does).  We also learn that Rodney Tine had an illicit affair with a Quebecker known as Luria P______.

This meeting  is told in spinning newspaper headlines.  Some of them make sense if you re-read them after the next section. But some of the best jokes being the comments about the headlines themselves–like the type of Paper they are (NY tabloid), or the headline writer/meth addict who writes headlines that are far too long and keeps getting booted from one paper to another, or the fact that a worker was killed while trying to install a Whopper onto the Statue of Liberty.

The imagined meeting of the future heads of O.N.A.N. also has Gentle essentially forcing Canada to take the concavity (a before/after map shows most of New England looking like a bite was taken out of it.  It also sounds as if the whole Concavity has been secured by a glass wall.

The garbage is hauled into the concavity because it was too expensive to send it into space (all new NASA ships seemingly just fall over and break anyhow, which just creates yet more garbage).  And, since the whole Concavity was, shall we say, garbage anyhow, well….

Canada, logically says, no thanks, we don’t want irradiated, useless land added to our territory, but thanks for offering.  Gentle insists.  And the final straw of the meeting is that Gentle has all of the nuclear warheads in New England turned upside down and threatens to blow them up (and basically all of the U.S. and Canada with it) if Canada does not accept the Concavity.

This threat is fictional (and comes from a clearly homemade headline).  It is a tribute to Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade.  Eric Clipperton is a tennis player.  He showed up at a regional tournament, unaffiliated with any school (his school is listed as “Ind”).  He’s an okay player, and in his first match he is losing to Ross Reat.  A fter the second set he produces a beautiful Glock 17 with a chamber full of bullets.  He announces from the referee’s seat, in a move that surely would have gotten him removed from any kind of play, to one and all, that he will shoot himself in the head with said Glock if he loses.

The Clipperton Brigade consists of everyone who was assigned to face him on the court. Because, to a man, they intentionally lose (some by talking on cell phones, other by just standing there) and take the match as a kind of r&r, or maybe they practiced aspects of their game that were giving them trouble.  Because, naturally none of them wanted to be the cause of Clipperton blowing his brains out.  No one took any of these losses seriously, and Clipperton was never ranked.

All the players all also gave him a wide berth, but Mario actually became friendly with Clipperton.  Mario was fascinated by him and found him very funny, hence this little tribute in his film.

While this film is going on we see that some of the kids (as they do many nights) sneak down to the gym, have a sauna, get all sweaty, and then speak to Lyle.  Younger kids can’t figure out why Lyle’s there at all, especially at night when the gym is locked up, but the older ones know. Yes, they do.

We also learn that Jim and Lyle would have nightly confabs with Jim drinking Wild Turkey and Lyle Drinking his Caffeine Free Diet Cokes.

But let’s look at some of the kids’ fears and freakouts.

Lamont Chu wants fame (and to appear in a glossy magazine) desperately.  Anton Doucette is worried about the mole under his nose, which he is convinced has everyone calling him “booger.”  And, my favorite: Ortho “The Darknesss” Stice is weirded out because he goes to sleep with his bed on one side of the room and wakes up with it on the other side altogether.  He is, of course, convinced it is a prank, so he booby traps his room, only to wake up and find that his bed is “against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit” and the tennis ball cans that he set as an alarm were stacked pyramidically where his bed was.  He concludes logically that 1) He is telekinetic, but only in his sleep; 2) That someone else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for him; or 3) he’s doing it in his sleep and is a several fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what else.   [BOY I hope the truth is revealed on this one].

Lyle is steadfast and listens attentively to all fears and concerns, sucking in his cheek when he is really engrossed.  He speaks of how the world is very old.  And in a nod to the premise of Wallace’s This is Water [the commencement speech], he tells Lamont that he is in a cage and the first thing Lamont must do is become aware of the cage.  He also alludes back to the hilarious bricklayer story that was passed around some time ago when he tells two people that they should not “let the weight they pull to [themselves] exceed [their]own personal weight.”

Lyle also tells Ortho about the man who goes into a bar and bets that he can lift a chair that he is standing on.  The man stands on a chair, grabs the back of the chair and proceeds to lift the chair off the ground.  Lyle says it is because he is aware of objects.  No punch line comes with this story, and I don’t get it either.

While Hal is watching the film (and thinking about tobacco), he reflects back on how Mario’s film is is so indebted to The ONANtiad, and then, more generally about how Mario was (naturally) influenced by Jim’s work.

And, delightfully, we get a detailed look at two of Jim’s less popular films: The Medusa v. The Odalisque (Medusa turns people to stone when they see her face while Odalisque is so beautiful she turns people into gems when they stare at her).  In the film, we are in Ford’s Theater watching people watching a stage play of Medusa and Odalisque fighting.  The two are attacking each other with weapons and mirrors trying not to look at each other (the choreography is amazing), and slowly as the mirrors flash around, each member of the audience is turned into stone or gem until they are all gone.

Those of us watching the film, however, never really get a look at anyone, least of all Medusa or Odalisque and so it is a very frustrating film to watch.

This film was not nearly as badly received as The Joke.  On marquees, the film was promoted as “THE JOKE: You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money To See This Film.”  This hilarious practical joke, which took Jim and Mario from Cambridge MA to Berkeley CA and back for showtimes, was set up so that Jim and Mario were standing at opposite sides of the theater with cameras rolling.  People paid their ticket prices and got their accoutrement and adjusted themselves, wondering what these two were doing there with cameras, particularly the guy in the corner propped up by a police lock.  When the film started, they realized that the film on the screen was actually them, the audience, looking up at themselves, live.  The film lasted as long as people were willing to sit there and look at themselves getting angrier and angrier about being ripped off.  Fantastic!  The longest shows were about 20 minutes as critics studied themselves studying themselves taking notes with endless fascination.

And then Hal’s wandering mind turns to the advertising.  And this section struck me as  delicious.  Mostly because I am an anti-advertising guy (even though Advertising was my declared major in college and even though “classic” ads often run through my head and I quote them at any “relevant” (and therefore hilarious) moment.  Or maybe it’s because now that I’ve a TiVo and when people say, “you know that ad where” I can look blankly (not smugly, just blankly) at them and say, “No I don’t.”  Whatever the reason, I found myself writing down several quotes that I found too wonderful not to write down.

Like, “it did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

The section also seemed very prescient to me.  I’ve been noticing this throughout the book, about how technologically savvy DFW was.  We can assume he was writing this book around 1994 (that seems to jibe with how long it would take to edit the monster and finally get it published in 1996).  He used phrases like “killer app” which although it had been around since the 1980s was really gaining in popularity around 1994–so he was either prescient or just using the lingo of the time, I guess.  Again, HDTV was field tested in 1994.  It didn’t take Nostradamus to see that HDTV would be the wave of the future, but still, you’d have to be reading Wired pretty regularly at this time (published first 1n 1993) to be really aware of these things.  And finally, this entire advertising section is based around a video on demand system (thank you TiVo).  A similar system had been tested in 1994 (that year again) and even in 1988 in the UK, but it didn’t become commercially viable until 2005.  DFW could read the writing on the wall, I guess.

And so on to the discussion.

The Big Four Networks (this was pre UPN/WB/CW, so DFW missed that one, at least) have seen declining ad revenues because of the proliferation of cable channels.  Enter Viney & Veal (who are mentioned in Mario’s film as not being responsible for the bomb threats at ABC (read on)).

Viney & Veal advertising decided to make really cheap ads for local companies. And in the hilariously grotesque Endnote 162, we get a detailed look at the ad campaign for Nunhagen Aspirin (it’s back!).  The campaign was cheap and simple. They got the Enfield-based National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation to sponsor an art exhibit.  All the painters had crippling cranio-facial pain and painted pictures of people experiencing cranio-facial pain.  The TV commercials would show one picture for 30 seconds with a soothing Nunhagen Aspirin logo in the corner.  There were many, and it seemed that most viewers were disturbed by at least one of them.

People were so freaked by the ads that it actually made them use their atrophied thumbs to click the remote and change the channel.  Obviously, sales for Nunhagen skyrocketed.

The problem was that Neilsen ratings for ads showed that people kept not only turning off the Nunhagen ad, but they would also skip the ads that followed.  This was not too good for the Networks, as advertisers complained, but since Nunhagen was doing so well, they could also pay more for their spots.  And thus, network greed started to kill itself.

This ad was followed by a series for LipoVac liposuction.  But the fantastic nail on this coffin was the campaign for Fond du Lac’s (Wisconsin) NoCoat Inc tongue scraper.

I find this particularly fun because it was right around 1996 that my dentist was trying to convince me of the merits of this very thing.  I’d always heard of brushing your tongue, but this scraping thing really freaked me out…probably having a lot to do with the literal phrase “tongue scraping.”  So, in any case, the NoCoat Inc ads show vividly and in slow motion “an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise” as it went to lick an ice cream cone.  It so freaked people out (as it would me if I saw it) that people turned away in droves (and, perversely spawned a whole craze in tongue scraping, which, reminds Hal that “the sink-and-mirror areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be.)”

People turned away from the networks and advertisers followed.  And when these cable channels got the rights to major sporting events, well, that put the Big 4 on the ropes.  Cable channels had always advertised on Network channels  trying to woo people away from the Big Four toward the CHOICES available on cable (which I am personally aware of them doing and I remember thinking it was weird that the Networks would accept the ads).

Soon, 3 of the 4 Networks folded and all that was left was ABC showing nearly infinite repeats of Happy Days (with subsequent bomb threats to ABC and personal threats to Henry Winkler who gets a minor thrashing here, ((which I probably enjoyed at the time, but since he’s been on Arrested Development I’m not as nasty anymore).  And, actually his Hank Zipzer book series for kids is not only quite good but gets me out a jam when kids ask for a book “for 4th grade”.)

And then came InterLace.  Noreen Lace Forché had also seen the writing on the wall and started buying all of the networks shows for her little company called InterLace TelEntertainment which essential became TV on demand.  (And yes, TP stands for teleputers). The selling point of course, why let other people tell you what to watch and when to watch it.  (I have to wonder if the DVR people used any of this section in their own advertising years later).  People bought in and were able to watch shows on cartridge or via modem.  This created an advertising-free zone.  Which led to, in one of my favorite quotes, “No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.”

This more or less put advertisers totally out of business (including Viney & Veal, one of whom (Viney) committed suicide before Veal was seduced by Lace to make ads for this new InterLace, and ultimately for the Gentle campaign). And but so other forms of advertising sprouted up all over the place, billboards on the highways like in the scene from Brazil (an image which I always feared would come true (and which I cannot believe I can’t find online)), and magazine pages virtually exploded with ads.

The final attempt was to locate ads on cars, “an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in ‘cars that sold out.'”  Genius.

Back to Marathe Steeply and what is becoming the moral center (centre?) of the book.  Their argument continues about the U.S.A. pursuit of Happiness (and Steeply’s defense of same raised a swell of pride for me) vs the reality that nobody wants delayed gratification.  The example of the Habitant can of pea soup nicely illustrates (by Marathe however it was convoluted by Steeply) that if two people want the same thing someone is going to get bonked on the head.

And so the underlying question from Martahe: why would the U.S.A. ban the Entertainment when each individual has the right to choose whether to watch it or not.  Why should the U.S.A. ban a choice that any adult should be wise enough to make?  Steeply argues that the Entertainment isn’t like beer or candy, where the mistakes are minor, to which Marathe replies, It’s still a choice.  “Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?”

Oh, and just when you think that you’ve heard all you will about Eric Clipperton, he reappears briefly.

At the dawn of O.N.A.N. the U.S. T.A. was reorganized as the O.N.A.N.T.A., which became continent-wide rather than just countrywise.  This new system led to new rankings, and since the new person in charge was from Mexico and didn’t know anything about Clipperton’s Glock-inspired wins, he believed that the string of undefeated wins automatically located him at #1.

Several days later Clipperton turned up at E.T.A. looking completely horrible.  But it is strictly forbidden to allow non-students into the academy, but they relented.  And, seeing as how desperate Clipperton was, Mario pleaded with Himself to speak to the poor kid (and laws provided that the encounter be filmed since he was not authorized to be there).  And, seeing as how bad off Clipperton was, Jim then called in Lateral Alice Moore and even Lyle from the weight room to talk to him.

But before they could get there, Clipperton pulled out the glock, pressed it to his temple and went through with what he threatened to do on the court.  And Mario insisted that he, and he alone, be allowed to clean the room.

What a way to end a week.

Conclusions:

Despite the major downers in this week’s reading, it also offered some incredible high points. It’s also funny how all this talk about addiction makes me think that I may be addicted to the book.  I really don’t want to put it down, I think about the characters when I’m not reading the book, and I even find myself sneaking peeks into the book after I’ve finished my reading for the week.  Worse yet, I find myself relating bits of the book to my poor wife who has patience for me, but little interest in the book.

Me: “Hi my name is Paul and I’m an Infinite Jest addict.”

You: “Hi Paul.”