Itinerantdaughter's Blog

“Can you, like, sum up the last 250 pages for me?” ~RB, on Infinite Jest

I had this idea last year and it seems someone has made it a reality! 😦

Wish I could go anyway (natch) but am stuck in Football Country…

David Foster Wallace’s Incandenza Comes to Life

…in The New Yorker!

Fiction. Yeah. Sure.

“My surfeit of religious interest also had to do with the frequency and tenor of the “voices” I regularly heard as a child (meaning up until roughly age thirteen, as I recall it). The major reason that I was never frightened about the voices or worried about what “hearing voices” indicated about my possible mental health involved the fact that the childhood “voices” (there were two of them, each distinct in timbre and personality) never spoke of anything that wasn’t good, happy, and reassuring. I will mention these voices only in passing, because they are both not directly vital to this and also very hard to describe or convey adequately to anyone else. I should emphasize that, although “make-believe” and “invisible friends” are customary parts of childhood, these voices were—or appeared to me as—entirely real and autonomous phenomena, unlike the voices of any “real” adults in my experience, and with manners of speech and accent that nothing in my childhood experience had exposed me to or prepared me in any way to “make up” or combine from outside sources. (I realized just now that another reason that I do not propose to discuss these childhood “voices” at length is that I tend to fall into attempts to argue that the voices were “real,” when in fact it is a matter of indifference to me whether they were truly “real” or not or whether any other person can be forced to admit that they were not “hallucinations” or “fantasies.” Indeed, one of the voices’ favorite topics consisted in their assuring me that it was of no importance whether I believed they were “real” or simply parts of myself, since—as one of the voices in particular liked to stress—there was nothing in the whole world as “real” as I was. I should concede that in some ways I regarded—or “counted on”—the voices as another set of parents (meaning, I think, that I loved them and trusted them and yet respected or “revered” them: in short, I was not their equal), and yet also as fellow-children: meaning that I had no doubt that they and I lived in the very same world and that they “understood” me in a way that biological adults were incapable of.) (Probably one reason that I fall automatically into the urge to “argue for” the voices’ “reality” is that my “real” parents, though they were wholly tolerant of my believing in the voices, obviously viewed them as the same sort of “invisible friend” fantasies I mentioned above.)”

~ DFW, All That

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/14/091214fi_fiction_wallace

I am done with Infinite Jest! Praise be to God! It was lovely but I’m happy to be out of DFW’s world, for now. Now on to a biography of Anne Sexton. The suicide marathon continues…

In his introduction, Dave Eggers said it took him one month to read IJ. It took me two point five, exactly. Fuck you, Dave Eggers.

“How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?”
“You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.”
“Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.

“Hey Hal?”

“And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.”

“…”

“You know for me, boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.”

“…”

“Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen.”

“Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.”

“Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.”

“Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him in you want to if you ask, maybe.”

“Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.”

“The merciful type of lie.”

“Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.”

“Rococo‘s a pretty word.”

“So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an overelaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.”

“…”

“I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.”

“You sound like you can always tell.”

“Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.”

“Psychosis live on radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: ‘The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.”

“The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.”

“I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.”

“…”

“I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.”

“You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?”

“Boy do I ever.”

“Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now i believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.”

“But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?”

“That’s monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.”

“Golly Ned.”

“That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.”

I’m doing this experiment this morning…I tend to not be able to sleep for more than 3-4 hours at a time, and when I wake up, I eat a snack, watch something (this morning it was the end of Stepbrothers…there’s nearly two hours I can’t get back), read, maybe, and eventually go back to sleep. This perversion of the circadian rhythm hasn’t been working out too well for me, so I’ve decided, today, to try to stay awake. All I have to do is entertain myself for an hour, then it will be breakfast and hopefully I’ll be sufficiently distracted and, then, caffeinated.

Naturally I don’t have a whole lot of brainpower (give me a break, it’s six o’clock in the FUCKING morning…I firmly believe no person should be awake before nine) so I’m not doing any intellectual lifting; rather, I’m reading Missed Connections to keep myself awake. I’ve only been doing this for five minutes or so, and I’ve already found TWO that are based on the female’s ownership of Infinite Jest.

I don’t know whether to be mightily encouraged or pissed off!

“The alley was dark as a pocket.”

Mario Incandenza, the multiply-challenged middle Incandenza bro, is my new guru.

“[Mario’s] prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore.  He doesn’t kneel.  It’s more like a conversation.  And he’s not crazy, it’s not like he hears anybody or anything conversing back with him, Hal’s established.

Hal had asked him when he’ll start coming back to their room to sleep, which made Mario feel good.

He keeps trying to imagine Madame Psychosis — whom he imagines as being very tall — lying in an XL beach chair on a beach smiling and not saying anything for days, resting.  But it doesn’t work very well.

He can’t tell is Hal is sad.  He is having a harder and harer time reading Hal’s state of mind or whether he’s in good spirits.  This worries him.  He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore.  Feel it.  THis worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important.  Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard.  He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

He hadn’t told the Moms he was going to walk around after he left her office after their interface: Avril usually tries in a nonintrusive way to discourage Mario from taking walks at night, because he doesn’t see well at night, and the areas around the E.T.A. hill are not the best neighborhood, and there’s no skirting the fact that Mario would be easy prey for just about anybody, physically.  And though one perk of Familial Dysautonomia [inability to feel pain very well] is a relative physical fearlessness, Mario keeps to a pretty limited area during insomniacal strolls, out of deference to Avril’s worry.  He’ll sometimes walk around the grounds of the Enfield Marine P.H.H. at the bottom of the hill’s east side because they’re pretty much enclosed, the gruonds are, and he knows a couple of the E.M. Security officers from when his father got them to portray Boston police in his whimsical Dial C for Concupiscence; and he likes the E.M. grounds at night because the different brick houses’ window-light is yellow lamplight and he can see people on the ground floors all together playing cards or talking or watching TP.  He also likes whitewashed brick regardless of its state of upkeep.  And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia.  A woman’s voice, calling for help without any real urgency — the Moms laughing or screaming at night — sounds from a darkened upper window.  And across the little street that’s crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet’s House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millenial Fizzy, and Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other.  The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.”

I think I’ve reached the “exhaustive account of a tennis match” mentioned in Dave Eggers’ foreword, so don’t expect an update from DFW-land

Happy day after Bastille Day…

“Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in a minibike chain once and how but within days of intensive concentration the finger had grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard’s tail, confounding doctoral authorities. Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own unusual life-force and the energois de vivre and knew and accepted that he was somehow not like the run of common men, and began to accept his uniqueness and all that it entailed.”