Many many years ago, I discovered Might magazine.  It was a funny, silly magazine that spoofed everything (but had a serious backbone, too).  (You can order back issues here).  And so, I subscribed around issue 13.  When the magazine folded (with issue 16–and you can read a little bit about that in the intro to Shiny Adidas Track Suits) it somehow morphed into McSweeney’s, and much of the creative team behind Might went with them.

The early volumes (1-5 are reviewed in these pages, and the rest will come one of these days) are a more literary enterprise than Might was.  There’s still a lot of the same humor (and a lot of silliness), but there are also lengthy non-fiction pieces.  The big difference is that McSweeney’s was bound as a softcover book rather than as a magazine. And, I guess technically it is called Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern as opposed to Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Issue #6 came with a CD of music by They Might Be Giants.  And from then on it was anybody’s guess what the next issue would look like.  (This Wikipedia page provides a nice summary of all of the issues that have been published, including authors).

The latest issue (#33) is being printed as a newspaper (just to give an idea of the diversity of product here).

The books (for most of them are books, despite the above newspaper) come out occasionally.  I gather it was supposed to be a quarterly, but I don’t know that they’ve ever really kept a schedule. Many of the books are hardcover (beautifully bound).  Some have been paperbacks.  Occasionally they come in a fancy packaging (boxes, slipcases etc). You never know what you’re going to get, which is a lot of the fun.

Although you do know that you’re going to get quality short stories.  The list of fantastic (and well-known) authors grows and grows. (Just a few: Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Roddy Doyle, A.M. Homes, and Joyce Carol Oates.)  And mixed in with them are less well known (ie. more indie) authors, as well as occasional unknowns.  And even if I don’t love every story, I know that they’ll all be worth a read.

McSweeney’s itself has grown from a publisher of this quarterly to include an empire that publishes books (their book of the month club is the way to go), an official periodical (The Believer), and a video magazine (Wholphin).

I am probably a little too steeped in McSweeney’s-world, but I’ve never been disappointed with a release of theirs (okay, that’s not true, they have published a few clunkers).  I’m always excited to get the box with the little chair as the return address.

And, of course, I began a Wikipedia page of all of the McSweeney’s Books. I’m delighted to see that folks have been adding to it!

Original mention in Periodicals Page:

McSweeney’s. Technically a periodical. A collection of short stories and things like it. I’m usually too overwhelmed by the time this comes in, and frankly, I am many many issues behind on reading this. However, I plowed through 21 and 22 recently, and just got 23. So, I’m looking forward to it and its brethren. I got turned onto McSweeney’s because I used to subscribe to MIGHT magazine (R.I.P) which was a hilarious magazine ala Spy (R.I.P). Might ran for a dozen or so issues and then strangely morphed into McSweeney’s. I think somehow my subscription ran over into McSweeney’s and the rest is 23 issues of fun!

SOUNDTRACK:KATE BUSH-The Sensual World (2009).

It was three years between The Dreaming and Hounds of Love.  And this time it took four years for The Sensual World to come out.  This was the first Kate disc that I bought as it came out.  And I was such a huge fan of Hounds, that I was really quite excited about this release.

Kate has always been fairly forthcoming about sex/sensuality on her songs (even if it was metaphorical, the metaphors weren’t really labored).  So, the fact that she’s putting it all out there is not much of a surprise.  And yet, to me this seems like a much more explicit work than her earlier ones  (an older songwriter perhaps?).

The other thing that strikes me about the album is just how accessible it is.  Unlike her previous discs which featured flourishes and howls, headphone tricks and other show offy tactics (which I totally love), this disc comes across as a songwriter who is more confident in her songs so she doesn’t have to put frills on them.

I have a fndeness for this disc because it was the first one I bought as a fan, but I don’t listen to it all that much.  When I played it again, I had forgotten how much I liked it.  And, yes, I miss all the tricks and cool studio fun on this disc, but the songwriting makes up for it.

The opener “The Sensual World” is, yes, a very sensual song (with the “Mmmmmyessses” every line or so).  The second track, “Love and Anger” is a great, freewheeling Kate track.  The younger Kate would have had crazy wild fun with it, but the more mature Kate plays it fairly straight.  And it really showcases what a great song it is.

As “The Fog” opens, she says, “I’m all grown up now” (and there’s no headphone tricks accompanying it).  That seems to be a statement about the disc itself.  But, just so you know it’s npt a totally safe disc, “The Fog” has a wonderful otherworldly violin running through it.

The one thing that stand out on the disc, though is how rocking it is (relative to Kate, of course).   The guitars on about half of the songs quite loud and raucous.  And Kate is clearly having a lot of fun with the songs.

But there are some mellow songs as well.  “Reaching Out” begins as a delicate piano ballad (although it is full of some wild ethereal backing vocals) but it also builds to a louder chorus and finish.  “Deeper Understanding” is an interesting song in which she sings about a computer (which I thought would sound really dated twenty years later but which doesn’t).

“Never BE Mine” sounds like Kate of old (ah, fretless bass).  While “Rocket’s Tail” showcases the gorgeous sounds of the Bulgarian Choir, who would assist her on many future tracks as well.  The choir seems to take on a lot of the strange vocals that Kate herself used to perform. But they have an oddness of inflection that makes it sound otherworldly.  It also has the unmistakable sounds of a David Gilmour guitar solo.

The highlight has to be “This Woman’s Work.”  When all is said and done, Kate’s voice is what any fan comes back for.  This song is a simple piano based ballad.  Kate’s voice is clean and pure and rather magical.  And the emotional release as the song nears its end is phenomenal.

The Sensual World is an overlooked disc (its regular price on Amazon is $7).  And while it doesn’t have all of the flair and magic of Kate at her wildest records, the stripped down version of Kate is pretty wonderful too.

[READ: November 15, 2009] “Noughts and Crosses”

It took me a few paragraphs to realize what was going on in this story and then I liked it even more.

The story opens with an email.  Several of the words are in bold.  The email, from j to n, is a break-up letter.  It’s sort of generic and doesn’t really reveal all that much.  But the rest of the story is a reply to each of the bolded words of the email.

As n replies (presumably in her head, although it could also be written even if it is never sent) we learn more and more about the two of them and their relationship. The parties involved, the promises told and the little giveaways that show that the relationship was over long before this email (a breakup by email!) was sent.

What is so delightful about the story is that the original email seems pretty straightforward, as if you could tell the whole story from it.  But as the full story unfolds, so much more is revealed, and you learn just how much has been hidden in the suddenly vague phrasings of that original email. Even the genders are hidden in that original missive.

As the reply grows more intense, if not more heated, you get a real feel for what that email could have said, but didn’t.  It’s very clever.   This was a wonderfully original way to look at an age old topic.  I think it would have been very suitable for inclusion in Four Letter Word.

SOUNDTRACK: ERIC CHENAUX-Sloppy Ground (2008).

It took several listens before I fully enjoyed this disc.  There’s something about Chenaux’s voice that is very calming, almost soporific.  And, since his general songwriting style is kind of ambient and almost formless–with no real choruses or even rhythms, the disc tends to get lost in the ether.  There’s also some unusual instrumentation (electric harp & guitarjo (!)) too, which continues the otherworldly feel of the disc.

What really hooked me into the disc though was the three “funk marches” that distinguish themselves from the rest of the disc.  “Have I Lost My Eyes” comes in like a raging gust of fresh air after the first three drifting tracks.  It’s got a strong melody and raw drums that propel this fantastic track.  “Boon Harp” & “Old Peculiar” have a similar strong vibe.  And they are really the anchors of this disc.

The rest of the album isn’t bad, I just find it hard to listen to in one lengthy sitting.  The opening three songs tend to drift a round a little too much.  But one at a time, these songs are pretty cool.

[READ: Last Week of September 2009] The Fifth Column & The Flexicon

These two pieces were part of the list of uncollected David Foster Wallace publications.  The difference with thee two pieces is that he plays a small role along with several other authors.  Both of these pieces are sort of a exquisite corpse idea. Although unlike a true exquisite corpse, (in which the author sees only a little of the end of the previous author’s work) it’s pretty clear that the authors had access to the entire work.  The quotes in bold are from The Howling Fantods.

For a delightful exquisite corpse piece that I authored see the untitled comic strip on my website.  About ten years ago I started an exquisite corpse comic strip and sent it to a number of people who all had a lot of fun continuing the story.  I have finally put it online at paulswalls.com/comic.  (See, artists, I told you I’d do something with the cartoons some day!)

[READ: September 29, 2009] The Fifth Column

“The Fifth Column–A Novel: Week Eleven”. The Village Voice Vol. 41, No. 7; Feb 13, 1996; p. 50. [NOTES: This is from an exquisite corpse (a story written by several authors in which each author will start from where the previous had left off and then pass it on to the next) by Jonathan Frazen, Rick Moody, A.M. Homes, DFW and others. It was published over fifteen weeks (a different author each week) in The Village Voice. DFW did week eleven. The complete "novel" was compiled in the March 26, 1996 issue of The Village Voice in abridged form. All fifteen original parts are available here.]

There are no details of how this “novel” or if there were any guidelines at all.
The “story” is a pretty standard sexy/secret agent piece.  Some of the authors try to remove it from its trajectory, but Una, the former Miss Ohio and lover of explosives, keeps resurfacing.  It’s not easy to review this because it is more or less a nonsense piece, with authors trying to (I assume) set up the next author with either an impossible or humorous cliffhanger, but the caliber of writers is pretty high so I’ll summarize a little.

Oh, and the PDF link is really poor quality.  It’s a little blurry and there are lines that are not legible at all.  However, it is the only place online where this work can be found, so, I recommend reading it on the screen at 200% magnification.

JONATHAN FRANZEN-Week One
Franzen sets up the story with a lengthy introduction that serves as the basis for the entire piece.  In it, Una, a barmaid and former Miss Ohio is setting off to a Spy Convention.

RICK MOODY-Week Two
Moody gives us some back story on Una, or more specifically her hometown of Toledo, OH, which is now a ghost town.  We also learn that she has 10 siblings. Moody also introduces the phrase “Let the Sparks Shower.”

A.M. HOMES-Week Three
Homes names the siblings (all variants of their parents’ names (and quite humorous too)).  And then she gets to the heart of the matter: Una has been mailing body parts in padded envelopes.  And in a bit more back story, Homes lists the successive pageants that Una won, leading to her being crowned Miss Ohio.  In this final pageant, it was the talent show, where she dis- and re- assembled an AK47 that secured her victory.  Homes also concludes with the sparks showering.

RANDALL KENAN-Week Four
Kenan introduces a new, lasting character: Michah, a dreadlocked, near-mythical figure in Una’s life.  He thinks Una is crazy.  And maybe she is.

JIM LEWIS-Week Five
Lewis is the first author to mess with the format of the story.  He switches the focus from Una to the publisher of a University Press publishing house.  He rejects the Una story and regrets that his publishing house has gone commercial.  The story then shifts focus to follow the publisher and his three ex wives.

SUSAN DAITCH-Week Six
Daitch picks up on Lewis’ story by including the publishers’ first wife, Elena, in the narrative.  She moves the setting from Ohio to Brooklyn where Elena is taken in for questions regarding a body found floating in a pool.  She is a suspect because her ex-husband told the police that she was sending him body parts in the mail.  (Nice tie in!)

MATTHEW STADLER-Week Seven
Enter Sergeant Dex who questions Elena and asks to feel her pregnant belly.  Dex also informs us that Michah is a fictional character that Elena made up to throw everyone off the trail.  And, he pleads, get us back to the story of Una, beautiful Una.

CLAIRE MESSUD-Week Eight
Messud breaks the fourth wall all the way down.  She has Elena confess.  First “because the plot demanded it”  and second because she was guilty.  Elena also confesses that her goal has always been to undermine Una because she, Elena, was supposed to win the Miss Ohio pageant that Una swiped from under her feet.

DALE PECK-Week Nine
Peck moves the story ahead six months.  Una bursts into a cell, grenades ablaze and rescues Elena.  And Una reveals that Elena’s ex husband is The Blind Man for ASAP (the Association for a Swift Apocalypse and Pestilence introduced by Rick Moody),  Una also reveals that all of the disparate threads (even the fiction that Elena wrote) that have been floating around in this story were actually part of a larger narrative.  Everything has its place.

IVA PEKARKOVA-Week Ten
Pekarkova introduces the thought-to-be-dead-but-very-much-alive Comrade Brezhnev and informs us that he is hiding out under the code name Postmaster General.  He reveals that Una is actually an American man in drag.  And Brezhnev demands action.  He wants to turn the Pentagon into a Square: “This time next week..a shower of sparks would surely fly.”

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE-Week Eleven
DFW simultaneously connects the stories and breaks them apart with his eleven numbered paragraphs.  Each details a scene.  The first is set 36 hours after Peck’s Six Months Later notice.  The third twists the “sparks” into a box of sporks.  Number 4 is a cryptogram from “Shower of sparks” to “C. Howe Sparkshauser.”  It was Corliss Howe Sparkshauser that tried to convince The Postmaster that Una was a drag queen.

Oh, and Sparkshauser has terrible ear troubles while flying.  The pain can only be relieved by yawning, so he has taught himself to yawn at will.  Despite the proliferation of extraneous details, DFW narrows down the story with one paragraph: Michah is writing a computer program for Una and Sparkshauser.  It is designed to convince Elena to help them neutralize her ex husband (the publisher).  DFW also re-introduces editor’s wife #3, Clarissa, with whom he is having violent but ineffectual sex as the scene closes.

CAROL ANSHAW-Week Twelve
Anshaw gives Una a personal moment as she and an unnamed man fight for the remote, rather than having sex.  Sparks fly as the veal picatta hits the olive oil.

IRVINE WELSH-Week Thirteen
Irvine Welsh  brings a heap of sex and violence to the story.  The man whom Una has picked up reveals that he is a spy and that the CIA is on to her (and that he is HIV+ and wants her to kill him).  Una says if the CIA knew about her, they’d take her out.   But, he says, the CIA needs terrorists and the government needs terrorists, for how else can the (the government) spread fear? Una, fearing that the man will just go on an on, dispatches him with an ashtray, but wishes she had been able to use her detonator.

GARY INDIANA-Week Fourteen
Indiana offers a surreal turn as he reveals the President to be none other than Pat Buchanan (and the first lady is his sister, Bay, whom he married after his previous wife died).  There’s a lot of sexual tension between the in-photo-only Bay and Una (and with Bay and Michah as well who claims he would like to have sex with the white women before he decapitates her).  All the while Una is dismembering a man named Judy (gay parents named their boys Judy back then).  She then jets to New Vatican City for sex with Pope Paul.

NEIL GORDON-Week Fifteen
Gordon ends the story rather satisfyingly.  Una kills the Pope (after sex of course), who was the mastermind behind all of her assassinations.  And as the “novel” wraps up, the comic final line obscures the potential danger than Una may be in.

For what it was, the novel was kind of fun and satisfying.  I don’t even know that I could pick a favorite section because each writing was trying to do something different, but none of them were outrageously original that their piece stood out.  A solid effort all around, and a fun experiment, too.

[READ: September 29, 2009] The Flexicon

“The Flexicon”. Parnassus: Poetry in Review Vol. 23 Nos. 1 & 2, 1998; pp. 180-194. [NOTES: 'An homage to the lexical richness of English' with contributions by Albert Goldbarth, Paul West, Diane Ackerman, DFW and others. Read it here. DFW's contribution is pp. 183-188.]

The Flexicon is designed as a word lover’s extravaganza.  It begins simply enough as a story in a grocery store.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Begins with the simple and rather jokey rhyme:
Do you know where the Cheez Whiz
That you squeeze is?

PAUL WEST
Moves the piece further with some delightful wordplay.  He keeps it in the grocery store, showing the man trying to seduce a woman in the ant trap section with delightful words like abonnement, shebang, and fistula.  There’s also a mildly obscene James Joyce joke.   It sets the bar high for obscure words.

DIANE ACKERMAN
She adds depth to our character by saying that he can only speak in rhyme.  ”Holy mole my goal is frijoles.”  He also has a list of 15 Things to Do Today  Like: 6. Auscultate silverfish.  8. Unzip tse tse fly.  and 15. Jactitate soundlessly.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Creates an extra character, one who sneers at the very idea of the exercise.  He is a bag boy (or a chef, perhaps) who thinks this sort of lexical game was all well and good in 1965 or if you’re French but for a failed MFA student, it’s all hogwash.

His first bit of fun comes with a list of words that are more or less the opposite of what they look like (Big is a small word, Pulchritudinous is an ugly word).  But the fun of his section comes with the MFA teacher’s (who never earned his PhD he is proud to report)  golden rule: DON’T USE A BIG WORD WHEN A SMALL WORD WILL DO.  This leads to a glorious footnote which explains that even with this restriction, cryptorchid & exeleutherostomizes really are exactly the words that the author needed, because no other words match their definitions so precisely.

DFW’s section is quite fun and snarky.

MAC WELLMAN
Follows DFW with a three part poem which I must admit is beyond my ken.

SUSAN WHEELER
Has a lot of fun with some tiny poems that explore the various parts of speech of certain words: The prick pricked his prick; The weenies weaned their Weiners.  Although it tends to lose the thread of the “story.”

SUSAN YANKOWITZ
Has four paragraphs of internal rhyming nonsense and fun.  I don’t understand a word of it, but it’s fun to read aloud.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Reins in the story by bringing it back to food: “Cecilia was tough cookie.”

While overall this piece is nonsense and fluff, it is delightful to see and to say these words and phrases.  Oftentimes an exercise like this is sort of show-offy, and this has elements of that, but mostly it’s an excuse to have fun with words.  And the authors certainly do that.

SOUNDTRACK: TOPLESS WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES soundtrack (2006).

I learned about this soundtrack from a very cool article in The Believer (the beginning of which is online here).  In the piece, the author claims to have never seen the film (he was given the soundtrack by a friend) and he doesn’t want  to change his associations with the music by watching the film.  And now, I too can say I have never seen the film, and likely never will.  And I really enjoy the soundtrack too.

The soundtrack is sort of an excuse to showcase a bunch of bands from New Zealand’s Flying Nun record label.  Featured artists are The 3DS, The Bats, The Clean, Superette, Snapper, The Chills, Straightjacket Fits, and Chris Knox.

It’s nigh impossible to give an overarching style to these songs.  Even when the bands have multiple songs on the soundtrack, they are not repetitive at all.  Even trying to represent a genre would be difficult.  The opener “Hey Suess” is almost a surf-punk song, while Chris Knox’s gorgeous “Not Given Lightly” is a stunning ballad.  There’s a cool shoe-gazer song “Saskatchewan,” and some great simple indie rock (a bunch of other tracks).

The only thing these bands have in common is that they’re all from New Zealand.  And as with any large body of land, no two bands are going to sound alike.  Nevertheless, all of the bands fall under the indie rock umbrella.  It’s a great collection of songs that many people probably haven’t heard.  It’s worth tracking down for the great collection of tunes and, if all you know about New Zealand is The Flight of the Conchords.

[READ: September 24, 2009] Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

After finishing Infinite Jest I wasn’t sure just how much more DFW I would want to read right away (of course, seeing as how I have now read almost all of his uncollected work, that is a rather moot point).  But when I saw that John Krasinski (of TV’s The Office) was making a film of this book, I had to jump in and read it again.

Obviously, there are many questions to be asked about this film ().  Is it going to be based on all the stories in the book?  (Surely not, some are completely unrelated).  Is it going to be just the interviews? (Probably, and yet there’s no overall narrative structure there).  And, having seen the trailer, I know structure is present.  I’m quite interested in the film.  In part because I didn’t LOVE the stories.  Well, that’s not quite right.  I enjoyed them very much, but since they weren’t stories per se, just dialogue, I’m not afraid of the stories getting turned into something else.  The text isn’t sacred to me, which may indeed make for the perfect set-up for a film.

Anyhow, onto the stories.

The obvious joke is that the author of Infinite Jest has created a book with “Brief” in the title!  But indeed, many of these stories are quite brief.  Some are only a couple of paragraphs (which true, from DFW that could still be ten pages).  But, indeed, most of the interviews in the book are brief too (except the final one in the book, which is nearly 30 pages).  

There are a couple of very long pieces, most of which follow DFW’s now-signature roundabout style.  But it’s these new short pieces that are quite a change of pace.  And I have to say I’m mixed on them.  Most of them feel like sketches: a scene or two but little more.  And while plot is not essential to every story, it often feels like these are experiments in writing shorter pieces.

The title stories (the Brief Interviews) (some of which appeared in Harper’s and one of these Harper’s stories (the first one (#16)) does not appear in the book) are indeed brief interviews.  They are scattered throughout the book in seemingly random order.  But I’ll look at them in numerical order.

The basic conceit here is that each hideous man is being interviewed by an unamed interlocutor whose questions remain unseen.  Most of the questions regard sexuality or women (although some deviate).  And the men have different perspectives on situations (some of them offensive, but most of them offer an insight that is almost shocking in its frankness).  Nealy all of the men are “educated” which means they get to use interesting terms, either literary or psychological.  And one or two have even studied feminism, it would seem.

I’m not going to review each B.I. because that would be silly.  The stories don’t really “do” anything beyond giving a picture of a man.  There’s not necessarily a plot (although some do have a plot) and there’s no real resolution to most of them.  And yet I found them all quite engaging (some more than others, obviously).

But so here is a one-line summary of the context of each B.I.   There is no indication that the gaps in numbers mean there were other interviews.

B.I. #2:  “Honest” explanation of how he can never fall in love with you.
B.I. #3: A dialogue about a man “assisting” a woman at the airport whose fiancee was not on the flight.
B.I. #11: Man is leaving the questioner (this seems to break the mold of the B.I. set-up, as the questioner does not appear to be the same one and I wonder how the film will address it).
B.I. #14: Man screams inappropriate things upon orgasm (very funny).
B.I. #15: Bondage with relation to parent issues.
B.I. #16: (Harper’s only) Dad laughs when son is too impetuous (quite funny and worth clicking on the link for).
B.I. #19: I like you cuz yer smart.
B.I. #20: Not brief at all.  This is the tour de force interview about a man who falls for a woman only when she relates the story of her abduction.
B.I. #28: Intellectualized dialogue between two men about how difficult it is to be a woman (no specific interlocutor here).
B.I. #30: He marries her because she has a good body.  Anything wrong with that?
B.I. #31: The selfishness of the Great Lover vs the honesty of the selfish lover.
B.I. #36: Self-help is good.
B.I. #40: Man with deformed arm.
B.I. #42: Man whose father worked as a bathroom attendant.
B.I. #46: Rape could be a meaningful experience, like the Holocaust (features my favorite New Jersey-ism “Alls I’m sayin’”).
B.I. #48: Third date=asks to tie her up=sexing a chicken (innuendo laden & hilarious).
B.I. #51: Fear of “what if I can’t?”
B.I. #59: Masturbation fantasies ruined by physics (very funny!).
B.I. #72: Weird twist ending (to the whole series?).

Another “series” in this book is “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders.”  This book collects numbers VI, XI and XXIV.

VIII appeared in McSweeney’s #1 (in 1998) and again in Oblivion as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”.
VI appeared in McSweeney’s #3.
I have no idea if others were written or were published.

These are all very short pieces (about 2 pages) and they work more as sketches than actual stories.  They don’t even work as flash fiction.  After the length and detail of Infinite Jest and even many of the pieces in this collection, it’s hard to know what DFW was doing with these short pseudo-stories.  I enjoyed VI and XXIV but not so much XI.  VIII, which appeared in Oblivion but not here was very long and convoluted and quite enjoyable, very different in almost every way from the ones here.

As for the rest of the book, there are several very short pieces here (and one seems to have once had the “Yet Another…” title but has been changed for the collection.  These short pieces include:

“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”
Two paragraphs about the effects of introducing people.

“Death is Not the End”
A Poet Laureate sits poolside, ruminating.

“The Devil is a Busy Man” (there are actually two stories with this title)
The first one (“Plus when he got…”) was originally called “Yet Another Instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII)” and reveals how you can’t give things away for free…you’ve got to charge something even if it’s worth nothing.

“The Devil is a Busy Man”
The second one (“Three weeks ago…”) examines how revealing the secret of a good deed can actually make the deed evil.

“Think”
A story of infidelity which changes dramatically, unexpectedly.  Despite its unspecific information, it’s still a powerful story.

“Signifying Nothing,”
Here is a weird one for you.  That’s how the story opens and that is what it is.  In it, a man recounts a time when his father wagged his dick in front of him.  The incident is never mentioned again. The story ends with a strange family reunion in which the incident is, indeed, not mentioned.

“Datum Centurio“
A lengthy definition of the word “date.”  It is written as a very expansive definition, and the definitions do get funnier as they go along, although really this is sort of a lexicographer’s joke.

“Suicide as a Sort of Present.”
This story is the most complete story of these little vignettes, depressing at is may be.  It is also rather unsettling.

In general, I’m not that big a fan of these shorter pieces.  There’s nothing wrong with them per se, they just don’t do a lot for me.

That leaves these longer pieces:

“Forever Overhead”
This is a pretty great piece about a boy climbing to the top of the tall diving board at the community pool.  It is one of Wallace’s great, detail-obsessed pieces.  You can feel yourself on the ladder with the young boy.

“The Depressed Person”
Another of Wallace’s tour de force pieces. This story is quite long for what all happens in piece.  However, its recursive nature and its attention to details perfectly encapsulates the mindset of a depressed person, trying desperately to reach out to friends that she has reached out to far too often already.  A very moving piece.  (It was published (I think a little differently) in Harper’s and is available here).

“Octet”
This piece is weird for many reasons.  It is a footnote-fueled set of ostensibly eight pieces.  However, the footnotes explain why there are not actually 8 pieces and why the whole piece has failed in its original intent.    The pieces are designed as sort of pop quizzes, and yet as the footnotes explain, some of the original questions were just bad.  And one question was reworked but the original version had to stay in for the rework to make sense.  It’s a very meta- piece of fiction and is fairly fascinating.  Although, what its point is is anyone’s guess.  And, one gets the feeling that the footnotes are all true, and yet there is no way to know if this whole exercise is as DFW intended or was just a fun experiment.

“Adult World (I & II)”
This two-part story concerns the same characters.  In the first part, we meet the young wife, a few years after she got married.  She comes to the realization that her husband’s sexual proclivities have nothing to do with her.  And that for the first few years of their marriage, she was foolish to be so self-deprecating. As is DFW’s way, the story wends it way around several different focal events but eventually curlicues around itself to get to the heart of the matter which is fully revealed in Part II.

Part II of the story (although actually Part 4) is designed in an entirely different format.  It continues the story from where it left off, but it seems as if it is a rough draft for a skit or play.  Strangely, this style increases the dramatic aspect of the story and makes it climax a lot faster.

It’s certainly a weirdly designed piece, and yet as experimental fiction it works quite well.

“Church Not Made with Hands”
This is one of my least favorite DFW pieces.  I simply could not connect to anything that was going on.  It is set up in several different “chapter” segments, but the surrealness of the story combined with the peculiar storyline never meshed for me.

“Tri-Stan:  Sold Sissee nar to Ecko”
But this piece is probably my least favorite DFW piece of everything I’ve read by him.  The conceit revolves around mythical characters trying to create shows for TV.  I got a lot of the jokes and references in the story (Sissee Nar, etc).  Even the title, Tristan & Isolde, I see a lot of what’s going on.  And yet the whole conceit seemed simultaneously painfully obvious but also far too obscure.  So I don’t know if I’m missing something crucial or if the conceit is just not well founded. I still haven’t figure out who Agon M. Nar is supposed to be (as it doesn’t conform to the Narcissus inversion style or even the Herm ‘Aprho’ Dite jokey style).  Anyhow, this piece degenerates into a protracted (dream sequence?) attempt to sell a story about Narcissus’ beauty.  This is also one of the few cases where I feel that DFW’s circuitous style fails him.  The “metaphor” (or whatever it is) is working too hard to compete with the detail obsessed style, meaning you’re too busy thinking of two different aspects of the story to allow it to do what I think it wants to do.  It’s also well known that DFW had a love/hate relationship with TV, and it seems like he is just taking potshots at TV as well.

“On His Deathbed Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon”
This is another very lengthy piece that doesn’t really go anywhere.  And because of its very subject, I at first found it hard to bear.  Basically the story is of a father on his deathbed relating how much he has always detested his son.  Because yes, as a father there are things that your kids do that drive you crazy, but to hear someone this hateful and spiteful  made me very uncomfortable.  However, at about the midway point, the story really comes to life building to a fascinating twist at the end.  I think you could lop off the first ten or so pages and make this an even more successful story.  This is one of those rare cases where the repetitions and circles were just too circuitous.  Not to say that that opening information wasn’t important.  I just feel it was too much.

So, overall, I found this collection to be somewhat mixed.  The strong stories were really great.  The Brief Interviews were fun and interesting as character studies.  And some of the short pieces were enjoyable as sketches.  And yet, I can’t help but think that the short story is really not DFW’s strongest suit.

Okay, now that I’ve had time to digest the book (and to cope with the ending) I wanted to give some final thoughts on the book.  I also wanted to tie up some loose ends by posting my original response to the Salon.com questions as well as my letter to the posted article (keeping all my IJ stuff in one place).  I also found a map of Enfield that places things nicely in context.  I’ve included that at the bottom of the page.

But on to the book:

My previous post ended with what feels like a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth.  And yet I the disappointment I felt at the end of the book was not so much at what was said, but was actually a sort of disappointment that the book is over.

The book, the world, these characters became a part of my life.  I know for a fact that I have never spent this much time and effort on a book before (I didn’t even spend as much time on Ulysses, which I’ve read twice for a class).  And I think having the book left so open keeps the characters floating around in my head without actually letting them rest.  (Wraith-like if you will).

When I finished the book, the first thing I did was to go back to the beginning and re-read the Year of Glad section (now, for the third time!) [And I now I'm not the only person to have done so....just how many posts will say that that's what they did?]. And I know that’s sort of the set-up of the book, like Finnegans Wake or even Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  And, in re-reading, even more gaps were filled in.  And that is, of course, why people read it multiple times.  And yet, do any of the multiple-times readers come any close to filing in the gaps of that lost year, or do they just find more and more awesome details to obsess over (or both)?

But before I get wrapped up in trying to “figure out what happened” I have to mention just how much I enjoyed the book.  I’ve never read anything like it.  The details, the quotes, the laughs, the pain.  It all sounds so trite (“It was better than Cats!”)  And yet, whether it’s the work itself or the amount of time spent on it, these characters are now with me.

So, I had read IJ when it came out.  And sometime in 1997 or 1998 after DFW published A Supposedly Fun Thing… he did a promotional tour stop in Boston.  And I recall getting up there and getting his autograph and saying how much I loved IJ and how it has stayed with me two years later. And that was true then (of course, if you’ve read me fumbling around and not remembering anything, you’ll know the details didn’t stay with me for 13 years, but that’s okay…the writing and the imagery stayed there somewhere.)

I think also, given the amount of time I spent on the book, and the amount of effort I expended keeping track of things, having this vacancy (both in the fact that the book is over and in the gap of one year) is really weird.  I’ve since read a bunch of reviews of IJ and the one thing I cannot imagine is how anyone with an advanced readers copy of this book could hope to read it in a few days (typical reviewer turnover time) and actually have something useful to say about it in time for a slated book review date?  I would think that if you weren’t following quite so closely you wouldn’t feel the sense of loss at the end of the book.

But enough pontificating.

Let’s think about what happened from 11/20 YDAU to Whataburger in late November, Year of Glad.

• We know that Hal was starting to lose control of his features once he had stopped smoking marijuana.
• We know that Orin was captured.  And in reading the post at Infinite Tasks, I realized that I had missed Orin yelling “Do it to her! Do it to her!”  Is the “her” Joelle?  That would make some sense, (although it seemed as if JvD was being protected by Steeply).  But, if the AFR were going after the Incandenza family, would they have Avril rather than Joelle?  But I wouldn’t think that Orin would have to be pushed very hard to give up Avril.  And really, Avril seems above the fray somewhat.
• We know that Steeply warned JvD about Marathe being at Ennet House.
• We assume the AFR captured the Quebec team and did whatever they intended to do at E.T.A. (whatever that was).

In the Year of Glad we know that:

• Hal had been in the hospital (psychiatric) about one year ago.
• Cosgrove Watt is dead  (although why is Hal thinking of him?)
• Hal’s ankle hasn’t hurt all year.
• Hal and Gately dug up Himself’s head while John Wayne watched (in a mask).  And somehow this impacted Wayne’s ability to win this years’ Whataburger (which Hal is in the middle of during his interview at AZ college).
• Given everything that happens, the world seems to be proceeding as normal (ie., O.N.A.N. hasn’t been decimated, there’s no sign of any major changes w/r/t The Entertainment destroying people).
• Hal doesn’t think about Mario or the moms except about her alphabetizing cans above the microwave.  One assumes nothing happened to them.
• Orin is okay: “The brother’s in the bloody NFL for God’s sake.” (14)
• There is no mention of JvD at all.

So, we’ll never know all the details.  But let’s assume that Hal never did the DMZ (Pemulis was seen crying around a dumpster on 11/20 after looking in the ceiling…his drugs were removed).  [Okay, see several paragraphs hence where I pretty well discount this idea].

Regardless, he clearly had some kind of breakdown between the WhataBurger and the AP exams he was planning to take (his scores were a little too close to zero).  But Hal is seeded third in The Year of Glad’s WhataBurger, so he clearly has been playing quite well, despite his losing interest in playing anymore.

At some point, he and Gately and Wayne go up to the Concavity to dig up Himself’s head. How does this transpire?  Well: The AFR and Steeply’s team (with insider dope from Marathe), know all of the parties involved.

Since it’s a blank year, Gately is likely healed by the time they go up there (Gately has “dreams” about these events: driving in a bus due North… although really why would he be in a bus?).  Joelle appears with wings and no underwear…is she dead? At the end of Gately’s dream, Hal, who can’t speak, mouths that it’s Too Late (to “divert the Continental Emergency”) (934).

All that suggests that they couldn’t dig up whatever (Master or Antidote) to prevent the dissemination of the Entertainment.  And Endnote 114 says that the Year of Glad is “the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time” (1022).  So, something has happened (presumably a new president has been elected, as who would vote for the guy who let the Entertainment happen?)  And yet, when Hal is at the U of A, everything seems pretty normal (true it comes from Hal’s P.O.V. but there’s no talk of anything apocalyptic in the office).

And so, the question really isn’t so much what happens (which we do sort of know), but how does it happen?  And the reason I’m bummed about trying to figure this out is that 1) I’m not as clever as DFW and 2) I don’t have enough time to ponder this and 3) I really enjoyed reading about these characters, and even though I feel that I know them quite well, I imagine they were in for some tumultuous character changes over this year.

I also wondered again about the narrator of the book.  There are so many different possibilities for who is telling this story.  In this interview for Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, DFW says, “and Infinite Jest is the first thing that I wrote where the narrator — it’s supposed to sound like the narrator’s talking to you.” (about 3/4 of the way through the interview…there’s no pages).  The obvious one is Hal, and yet there are a  number of things that suggest it is not him.  And of course, Infinite Tasks has a thoughtful post about the narrator here.  Axford maybe?  Or even J.O.I.?  I’m inclined to say it’s a student/academic deal, what with the scholarly information/paper type thing.  Especially since, and I don’t know who has brought this up before, the notes section is called Notes and Errata, whatever that means for the book.

Is there the possibility that the author is Gately, after getting that influx of brains through J.O.I.?  (Or am I just reaching now?)

And something I just thought of…is the preponderance of Drug company information in the Endnotes indicative that the “readers” of the work wouldn’t know what these drugs/drug companies are anymore?  Is that suggesting that the book was written several years after the fact (and possibly after the Entertainment has ceased the need for the drugs?)  Again, I’m reading too much here, I think.

And but so for what is ostensibly disappointment (at so much unanswered), it has in no way diminished my love for DFW, his style, his sensibilities, everything. Since finishing IJ, I have downloaded all of the uncollected DFW works from the Howling Fantods, and have begun re-reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in light of the new John Krasinski film that is coming out soon.

So, yes, I’m still a committed DFW-phile.

As for IJ itself, I hope that some answers will, like Gately’s ghostwords, come out of the ether. I hope that one of these days I’ll read just the right words that fill in what I’m missing.  And yet, if none of that happens, that’s okay too.  I enjoyed the ride, I enjoyed the book club, and I enjoyed being a part of the whole thing.

And, I’m quite certain I haven’t written my last word about IJ yet either.

See, here’s more already.  A very clever person has concocted this fantastic explanation of what happened which certainly works for me.   It’s amazing how many people theorize that the mold & the DMZ are interrelated somehow (of course, as with any gun on the wall that will eventually go off, the mold has to be significant, I mean it gets mentioned THREE TIMES!)  And, yes, the DMZ is pretty crucial to the story too, so perhaps my (earlier)  naivete about Hal not taking the DMZ was, well, naive (or actually quite foolish).

My calculation is that I have written nearly 60,000 words about Infinite Jest this summer.  (Which is more  than Slaughterhouse Five (49,000 words) and darn close to Lord of the Flies (59,900 words).  Now, if only they’d been original coherent and publishable, eh?

My questionnaire for the Salon.com article

I wanted to include my answers to the questions that Joe Coscarelli asked me (during Week 3) for the Salon.com article.  In true DFW fashion, I’m removing the actual questions (plus I didn’t ask him for permission).  So if you’re interested in just what he asked, you can email me.  But here’s my Week 3 frame of mind.  (I particularly like my guess at that 80% of the participants would finish the Infinite Summer project…I think I overestimated).

Q? Q?

My name is Paul Debraski.  I’m 40 years old.  I work as a librarian in NJ.  I’ll also fill in that I’m married and have two kids (ages 4 and 2, which may come up regarding how much time I have to read this thing).
Q? Q? Q? Q?

I read Infinite Jest the week it came out.  I was absorbed in all of the hype (I was living in Boston at the time, and the Boston Phoenix newspaper was really hyping it).  My recollection is that I read the book in three days, although as I think about it time-wise that doesn’t appear possible.  But I LOVED the book, and was hooked immediately (that it was partially set where I was living certainly helped).  I wasn’t working at the time, so I had a lot of free time, so I must have read it in about a week.
I saw the first incarnation of A Supposedly Fun Thing… in Harper’s, and I was blown away by that too.  After that I’ve read everything he’s done.

Q? Q? Q?

Ah book clubs.  My wife tried to join a few book clubs in the last year and ultimately ended up starting her own.  My experience with them (as a librarian) is that geographically you’re lucky if you can find a number of people who are genuinely interested in what you want to read.  Often times you get stuck reading a book that you would never read on your own, which may be okay, but if you get stuck reading junk, that’s a month you’ve just wasted.  The only thing worse is when you’re excited about a book and the rest of your group just couldn’t get into it. In this respect, the internet has opened up so many possibilities.  And yet, as you ask, it can be way too big to be useful.  I mean, the infinite summer site has hundreds of posts every day.  I can’t read IJ AND all the posts too!  I think ideally you would like to use the internet to find people who broadly enjoy the kind of literature you like, and then narrow them down to people reasonably local so you can meet face to face once in a while.  It’s that face to face that really heightens the experience.
Q? Q?

I did the Five Boro Bike Tour in New York two years in a row, which certainly had that social feeling to it.  But I have never done anything big online like this before. I log into Facebook a few times a week.  I could easily get sucked into a lot more if I’m not careful. Twitter is a bit too inconsequential for me at this stage, although if I found something I was really interested in, I could see subscribing to it.  At this point, email notification, which I check throughout the day, is fast enough.   I blog at http://ijustreadaboutthat.wordpress.com.  I started it primarily as a place to keep track of the books I was reading.  I had started a print notebook of the information, but blogging seemed like more fun.  Once people actually started reading it, it became a rush of excitement as well.  I like to think I haven’t caved to reader pressure too much, but I do keep an “audience” in mind when I write.

Q? Q?

I was attracted by the camaraderie, and the idea of achieving something big in a group.  I’m not the kind of person to go to New Year’s Eve in Central Park so this is social without actually having to bump into people.

I check the site every day to see what the guides and directors have said.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the guides, and I like that they are frustrated and enjoying themselves and just having fun.  I read some of the forums, although as I said, there’s so much, that it gets daunting.

On a purely mechanical level, the summary timelines (and the percentage countdown) have been very helpful.  As for my fellow readers’ comments, I’ve been really enjoying seeing the kinds of things that people are attracted to about the book.  There’s so much in it, and so many different aspects that you can like (or hate), that it’s fun to see others’ perspectives on what I love or, more importantly to get something out of a section I didn’t like as much.  I also really appreciate the people with a bit more time on their hands who are willing to really look into something to find out everything they can about it.
Some of the vernacular sections I haven’t been willing to fully parse out who is talking about whom, I get the gist and the plotpoints, but I’m hoping the characters will reveal themselves later.  When the forum folks talk about them, I get a nice, Aha! moment.  They also helped when I was under the impression that Mario was younger than Hal.  Not sure how I messed that up, but it was nice to get that straightened out.

Q? Q? Q?

My reading has been solid. I have been hitting each deadline and imagine I will continue to do so.  I have an hour lunch, so I get in my car, drive to a quiet spot and try to read 20-25 pages (about as much as is possible to read in an hour and digest everything).  That gives me about three days to read the allotted portion.  Why three days?  Well, this summer I had planned to enter several Summer Reading programs at the libraries.  In them, the more books you read, the more chances to win.  So am I stuck reading one book for the whole summer?  Well, I’ve been sneaking in some “easy” books on the other days (Kurt Vonnegut is a nice compliment).  As I mentioned I have two young kids so there’s very little chance of reading at home (if I want to remember anything, that is).

When I started re-reading the book, I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much, that it was all right-place, right-time of my life.  But in starting again, I am totally hooked.  I actually don’t want to only read the pacing that I’m sticking with.  But I will continue on my projected course.  It’s all about discipline!
Q? Q? Q?

I know that DFW was a teacher.  I think that any teacher knows that a group of people can really learn from each other, or at least ask questions that other people weren’t thinking of.  Having said that, a teacher also knows when the class is getting too tangential.  Now, IJ is nothing if not tangential, so I think he would probably want a bit of reining in so people don’t get too into their own heads (rather than DFW’s).  Of course, who will do the reining in?

I agree that reading is a wholly personal endeavor up to a point.  For instance, I won’t read any spoilers; I won’t get in any discussions that will impact my reading of the next section.  I want my first reading to be my own.  But I am more than happy to be influenced after the fact.  If this new information radically affects what I read, I’ll go back and read it again.  For instance, one of the guides said that the first ten pages of the book were fantastic on their own.  I certainly enjoyed them, but since I was in for the long haul I didn’t really delve into those pages the first time through.  After reading that post I went back and re-read that first section and I was really blown away.  It also made me slow down during some of those dense parts to really appreciate what DFW was doing.
Q? Q?

IJ is daunting.  First because it is long, but also because the language is colorful, dare I even say beautiful.  As with any endurance thing, I’ll say the obvious, it’s about pacing.  Whether that means keeping up with the pages per week, or, as seems to be more relevant to IJ, not getting burnt out if you get lost/confused/feel like throwing it against the wall.  There is a lot going on. Both in the overall plot, but even in the individual sections.  So, if you don’t care about tennis, I think it’s safe to not read too deeply into the tennis parts.  While they are certainly important, they are not going to help with the “plot” (as far as I can remember, I could be totally wrong about that plot part, actually).

There’s a lengthy session where the older kids are assisting their little buddies.  It goes on for some 15 pages.  Now, I’m not sure how that will impact the plot specifically; mostly it’s just stuff about tennis and competition.  And I’m not entirely sure if it’s important that Hal talks about one aspect while John Wayne talks about another.  And it’s tempting to sort of sail through that because it doesn’t “really matter.”  But, if you slow down and enjoy the language.  Enjoy that each kid has a different style of teaching and think about how that kid also plays on the court (which is sort of described in that section too) it’s a totally enjoyable read.  It’s funny, and it’s insightful.

I think some people will give up because they fall behind.  It’s not easy to read a lot (although what else do people do on their lunch hour?).  But I think there is satisfaction in finishing it.  Even if you fall behind, it’s worth it to not drop it altogether.  We just got (in week 3) to a very funny series of seemingly unrelated almost short stories (about the demise of videophones, and a 7th grade essay of Hal’s about police shows on TV) that are so much fun and so lighthearted that they are worth any grief you may feel from other sections.

As for life being too hectic for novels…  I have many friends who sort of proudly proclaim that they only read nonfiction, as if nonfiction is somehow better.  I read some nonfiction, but in general I find it to be less satisfying than fiction.  I find that I can put down a nonfiction book and pick it up several months later and more or less continue without losing any momentum.  With a novel, you have to pay attention or you literally lose the plot. Sure, that’s more work, but it’s so much more rewarding.  And, at the risk of sounding very pretentious (as if a 7 page email response isn’t pretentious enough) I find that I learn more about people or humanity (or at least learn to appreciate things about people) from novels more than nonfiction. Plus, I think the creativity inherent in fiction trumps nonfiction.  I’ve also noticed that the popular memoir trend is written in a much more fictional style.  Why?  Because novels are fun!

Q?

I honestly have no idea how many people are reading.  I’m delighted that it appears to be several hundred.  In reading reviews from various places it sounds like a lot of people bought the book but not so many read it.  I’m thrilled that this will get more people to read the book.  I’d say that the people who were actually willing to try to read this are the kind of people who won’t be daunted easily.  Let’s say 80% completion rate!

A.

Same here, I hope I didn’t prattle on too much.  Let me know if I can help in any other way, too!

After the Salon article came out, there were several letters written.  I added to the discussion with this one.  A follow up person asked me to clarify, the my sentences were a little unclear, so I have tried to clean it up without changing any meaning:

I’m biased obviously

I was quoted in the article, so I’m biased, obviously.

When IJ came out I read it in about a week. Absolutely loved it. It spoke to me in many ways, not least of which was that I lived in the (real) town where the (fictional) book is set (more or less). So, I had a lot of connections to the details.

And “details” is the crucial word. DFW is hyper-aware of details. Way back in high school English Lit, I was one of those people who hated books that had too much detail…Get to the plot! I don’t need 3 pages describing the landscape. Since then, I have grown as a reader and realized that books are not necessarily for plot. That may sound like heresy, but we often read for reasons other than getting from point A to B.

IJ gets from point A to B, but it goes to a lot of other places first, and in fact, it starts somewhere around point F and winds its way back to point A (not unlike Pulp Fiction, to take a far more mainstream example).

The two things that are daunting about IJ are 1) its length. Duh. Although I’ve never quite understood what is so much harder about reading one 1,000 page book than five 200 page books. And 2) his way with words. DFW loved language. He loves to play with language. He spends time on flourishes, on detours, on, yes, cul de sacs, and I totally agree that sometimes I want to just scream…get to the point. But if you take the time, not work, just time, to read it…it is very rewarding.

About the big words and the endnotes…you don’t have to understand most of the big words, heck, like in the spelling bee, context is everything. Look it up if you want, but it’s not necessary. The endnotes…well, I loved them. I thought it was clever and amusing, and as I read it through this time (my 2nd) I’m realizing that there’s something else going on that warrants the endnotes. Not sure what it is yet, but I can’t wait to find out.

All this is to say, hey, you may not like the book. That’s pretty likely actually. But if you enjoy challenging yourself a little, it’s a good investment. And, as people have said, it’s really very funny (amidst the drug addiction and tennis), and it’s pretty easy to get hooked, even if you don’t follow every detail of every section.

And you can click on my signature to see my post about the book, maybe it will encourage you to give it a second chance.

All along, I had been wondering if there was a good map of Enfield so I could see exactly how it was superimposed over Allston/Brighton.  Sure enough the good folks at boston.com made one.  Click on the map to see the original.

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-”Rather Ripped” (2006).

When Rather Ripped came out, I was really excited by it.  It rocked heavy, it was catchy and it featured a lot of Kim.  I listened to it all the time, and would have said it was my favorite SY disc of this era.  However, listening to Sonic Nurse reminded me how much I liked that one too, so I’m unclear now which one I like better.

Jim O’Rourke left the band, so they’re back to a 4 piece.  And the overall sound of the album is more minimal. There’s less squalling feedback (although there are noisy parts).  And the song structures are tighter.  It sounds more like a punk album that a jazz album.  It’s a great release.

“Reena” is so instantly catchy, it’s an amazing opener.  And it’s followed by ”Incinerate” which might be even more catchy.  A simple guitar riff and a beautiful chord progression.  ”Do You Believe in Rapture?” is a delicate guitar-harmonics filled song.  The only thing that keeps it from being totally poppy are the off-kilter harmonics between verses.

It’s followed by the screaming noise guitars of “Sleepin’ Around.”  This has some amazing tom-filled drums from Steve Shelley which really propel the song along.  It eventually morphs into a pretty straightforward chugga-chugga song until the noise solos in the middle.  ”What a Waste” is a lo-fi rocker with Kim singing angrily.  It’s followed by Kim’s more delicate/sexy “Jams Run Free,” a rather tender guitar line.  And, with Kim playing more guitar, I’m wondering if she’s writing these more delicate guitar riffs?  They seem kind of bass-like rather than the complex lines that Lee typically writes.  I’ll never know.

“Rats” is a noisy Lee song that I’m quite fond of.  It’s immediately followed by an even more delicate Kim song, “Turquoise Boy.”  This is a slow ballad that is quite surprising.  ”Lights Out” continues the quiet mood with Thurston’s own brand of sinister/seductive singing.

“The Neutral” continues Kim’s delicate singing.  While “Pink Steam” is a beautiful six minute near-instrumental that Thurston reins in with great vocals at the end.  ”Or” ends the disc in a quiet frame of mind.

I’m still undecided if I like Nurse or Ripped better.  But I am delighted by this new style that SY has been playing with.

[READ: September 17, 2009] Infinite Jest (completed!)

Hal is remembering the ‘98 blizzard (which I actually tried to remember if I had been in Boston for and then realized that ‘98 came after the book was written…Doh!)

It was the year that E.T.A. opened and they moved from Weston to E.T.A.  The Moms was attached to the Weston house so she dragged things out.

And the carpeting in Hal’s dorm room is the Lindisfarne Gospels with pornography in the weaves.  (See, Hal did like Byzantine porn–gosh, when was THAT discussed?).

Hal remembers the Weston house in stills rather than movies, as he doesn’t have Mario’s memory for detail.  But when he thinks back to Himself sitting there, legs crossed but feet still on the floor, shaving with Noxzema, he can’t even comprehend him so much as thinking of a homosexual love scene like in Accomplice!

Hal thinks back to other things in Weston, like him eating mold–although he doesn’t remember it, it’s all from Orin’s story.  And then he thinks back to another story Orin had told him.  Back when E.T.A. first opened and Orin and his pals were like 15, they were caught with a good old fashioned porn videotape.  James’ response was more of sadness than anger.  He told Orin that he hoped he wouldn’t watch it until he’d actually made love to a woman, so that the porn wouldn’t impact his worldview of sex from this point forward.
Orin laughed because his dad thought he was a virgin.  But Hal felt sad about the whole thing because James was actually trying to be honest with Orin–in a way he never was with Hal–and Orin didn’t see it.

Wayne pops his head in towards Hal.  Hal thinks of Wayne as a machine, able to control his breathing and even his pupil dilation, which is really creepy on court.  And he knows that the Moms and Wayne have been sexual since like his second week here.  Then he imagines all the people he knows she’s been sexual with (and there are many, including Uncle Charles).  And in each scene she lies there motionless staring at the ceiling, with the only emotion coming later when she tries to keep it a secret.

And then, because with twenty pages left we wanted a section about someone we didn’t know anything about, we get a brief story of addict Mikey whose temper prevents him from seeing his own son (who supposedly got his cast off, finally).

When JvD walks home (knowing that Steeply is following her) she sees the A.D.A. cruiser parked at E.T.A.  Turns out that the A.D.A. is confessing to Pat that he needs to forgive Gately, the man who did THAT with the toothbrushes to him and his beloved wife.  He admits that his wife had the OCD neuroses long before Gately violated them.  In both of their best interests, in order to get past the events, he has to let Gately go.  He has already agreed to drop Gately’s case, but he can’t bring himself to forgive him. Yet.

And then back to 11/20 and the party.

They are going to move the tennis matches to MIT’s indoor courts. And rumor has it that the Quebec team is really adults…. in wheelchairs!

Hal is getting his ankle wrapped up, his face alternating between hilarity and a painful grimace and all the while he’s talking like normal.  The man taping him up is Barry Loach.

Barry Loach’s back story comes through.  The mom of the super-Catholic Loach family hoped one of her kids would become a priest or nun. No one had so far, and Barry is last in line.  His next older brother professed a desire to join the order, so Barry could pursue his dream of sports medicine.  But then his brother had a crisis of faith.

In trying to persuade him to stay in the seminary, Barry agrees to an experiment: sit in a T station like a bum and ask that somebody just touch him.  Nobody does (although he gets a lot of money).  He stays that way for nine months, growing more and more indigent and homeless-like, including failing out of his classes for sports medicine. He is on the verge of spiritual collapse when good old Mario walks up.  Mario doesn’t realize why he shouldn’t touch the creepy homeless man, so he does.  And, long story short, Barry gets a job at E.T.A. despite not having finished his degree.   No word on if the brother went back to the seminary.

And then we’re back to Orin.  Orin is trapped in an upside down glass.  The Swiss hand model, the wheelchair guy and Lurie P_____ are standing outside.  This all parallels very closely to Orin’s own proclivity for trapping roaches that we saw in the opening scenes; then these AFR folks suddenly open a door and drop, ew, an unlimited number of roaches in with him.

Back at St, E’s, Gately is feverish. And so he floods his memory back to that final day with Fax.  He sees Pamela in a tree outside their window.  Then he sees C. out there too.  C. busts the glass open and climbs in.  C. surveys the scene, kicks Gately in the balls and then opens the door for the rest of his crew: punk Asians and trannies in leather jackets.

C. says they all know that Gately’s not responsible for what Fax did, so he should just sit back and enjoy the show.  They put the TP back on the wall, remove the Flames video and insert a video of Sorkin in his anti-headache commercial.  (Remember we read about them like 8 weeks ago?)  His cranio-facial footage is a painting of him having his brain pulled out through the top of his head.

C. then busts out his favorite CD: a disc of Wings with all but the Linda McCartney backing vocals and tambourine removed.  Gately thinks it is not only sad, but actually cruel to listen to this poor woman “sing.”  C.’s men tie up and then tie off Fax and inject him with something (which proves to be an anti-narcotic to maximize the pain).

And they tie off each other, as well as Pamela, (who broke her shin falling out of the tree and is pretty much passed out).  And they are all going to partay!

C. then injects Gately with Sunshine, which is even more powerful than the venerable DMZ.  Gately is impressed with it immediately and he can’t help but watch it go into his veins.  But then Gatley notices Fax screaming.  They are sewing Fax’s eyelids open.  He recognizes A Clockwork Orange tribute immediately.  But it’s unclear what they are showing him…could it be The Entertainment?  No, because that would tie up some kind of loose end, right?

Then C.  gently lowers Gately to the floor and when Gately reopens his eyes, he’s on a beach in the freezing sand with rain pouring on him.

And that’s it.

Really.

That’s how it ends.

So, obviously, the first reaction is WHAT?

But realistically, when there was about thirty or even fifty pages left, it was quite evident that we weren’t going to catch up to the Year of Glad.  The microscopic details of the November days were just too great not to warrant another two or three hundred pages.  And so that also begs the question, were the pages that were deleted for editing in any way relevant to any unresolved issues?

And but so, yes.  Infinite Tasks and myself worried so much about the Joelle timeline and then he goes and leaves a one year gap between the beginning and the end of the book.  So, the question is: would the book be less frustrating of it didn’t include the Year of Glad stuff? Is that one year gap more frustrating than if the book just ended?

As for the ending itself, I do really like it.  I like that it ends in this weird way with Gately (because, really how could this book actually end?)  I just wish that it had ended that way after included a few more clues as to what had happened.  (I mean, hell, the chronology of the story is so askew the Gately ending could have happened anywhere).

But I’m annoyed that:

• The Stice/moving items thing isn’t explained at all.
• We have literally no idea what happened to: Joelle, Orin, Mario or any of the other Ennet/E.T.A. folks (Pemulis?  Kate Gompert?  DFW has shown us multiple times that unless he explicitly states someone’s death, they probably aren’t dead, so did she view the Entertainment or not?).
• What about Avril’s involvement with anything?

To just scratch the surface of unresolved issues.

I’m going to write up a final post (in the next couple of days) [it's here if you want to read it] that talks about more of these issues and what I’m sure will turn out to be my overall positive experience with the book.  But for now, I’m still a little bummed about the ending.

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Sonic Nurse (2004).

After the glorious Murray Street, SY return with an even better disc: Sonic Nurse.  This is probably their most overtly catchy (and therefore in my opinion wonderful) record since the Goo/Dirty period of 1991.  (Can it really be 13 years between these discs?).

This disc features Jim O’Rourke as well.  I’m led to believe that he has been playing bass with the band in order to free Kim up to do other things.  Although what she is doing I can’t really imagine.

“Pattern Recognition” opens with the most catchy guitar line in Sonic Youth memory.  Such a great and easy guitar riff.  Kim’s voice is sultry and wondrous.  And Steve Shelly really gets a chance to shine with some fun drum parts.  And, as is typical lately, the catchy songs get some lengthy end treatments, so this song ends with a 2-minute noise fest.  But it’s a good one.  ”Unmade Bed” is one of Thurston’s special mellow-singing songs but the guitar solo is weird and wonderful.

“Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” was originally called “Mariah Carey and the…” (and I have no idea if the original was different).  Is one of those noisy Kim-sung jams that SY are known for. But it also features a “Hey hey baby” sing along chorus too.

“Stones” continues this midtempo catchiness with another amazing guitar riff that runs throughout the song.  While “Dude Ranch Nurse” is another mellow Kim piece that has a great riff and wonderfully noisy bridges.  And of course, Lee is awesome on “Paper Cup Exit,” yet another fatastic song.  The cool breakdown in the song is a nice unexpected twist.

“I Love You Golden Blue” may be the most beautiful song the band has ever done.  Kim’s voice is delicate and delightful as she whisper/sings over a gorgeous guitar line.  The final song is another of Thurston’s beauties: “Peace Attack” a slow builder, complete with verse ending guitar solos.

Sonic Nurse is a beuaty.

[READ: Week of September 14, 2009] Infinite Jest (to page 949)

Flying in the face of potential spoilers, I was looking for any evidence of there ever being a “unedited Director’s Cut” version of Infinite Jest.  There is, supposedly, one copy of the full text floating around, and I’m actually quite surprised no one has tried to capitalize on DFW’s death by releasing it (I’d rather see that than another “This is Water” type publication).

But while looking around, I got this pleasant surprise from the Howling Fantods–these are comments on a first draft of IJ (without too much unpublished work shown).  But there’s also this disturbing (to me) item:

(N.B.: Wallace made numerous corrections for the paperback edition of 1997, so that edition is the one scholars should use. Put a Mylar cover on the pretty hardback and leave it on the shelf.)

Great. So I read the wrong copy?  Twice??

I haven’t said very much in any of these posts regarding DFW himself.  I don’t feel it is my place to comment on the man or his situation.   However, through a nice shout out to me, I found this really cool site: The Joy of Sox.  It’s primarily about the Red Sox but it has a delightful side venue in DFW information.  There’s not a ton, and he quotes extensively from others who have done more research than he–he’s a fan of DFW, but this is a sports blog after all.  But it is a delightful collection of miscellanea.  And he pointed me to this article, “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open“, which I had never read (so thank you!).   So, do check out the site, he’s not doing Infinite Summer, but he’s likely going to read IJ again in the fall.

As this almost-final week opens, the book is flying downhill like an AFR wheelchair, paralleling Gately’s literal inability to talk with Hal’s metaphorical? literal? we’ll see? one.  But it really is the Gately show.  We learn more and more about him, and his back story makes him more and more likable.  Who ever would have guessed?

This week’s reading opens with a transcript of a meeting with Rodney Tine Sr (and Jr, who is driving his dad crazy tapping a ruler against the table), Mr Veals (formerly of Viney and Veals), “Buster” Yee, the epileptic director of marketing from Glad, and Maureen Hooley, V-P  for Children’s Programming, InterLace.  The meeting concerns the upcoming anti-Entertainment PSAs.  After dumping Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie as a spokesperson, they settled on Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass, who offers a sage word of advice for kids not to watch unknown TP cartridges.  And if they find their parents slumped over and unresponsive don’t look at the TP player, No-ho-ho-ho way!  An enjoyable comic interlude during all of this heaviness.

Because then we’re back to Gately.

Gately dreams that a nurse gives him a pen and steno pad (JvD understood what he was motioning!).  Dream-Ferocious-Francis and the Crocodiles are there, and they know a surprising amount of detail about the Nuck fight and Lenz’s responsibility there (of course it is a dream).  And, as the dream continues, a Pakistani doctor is trying to convince him that he should just take the Class II or Class III painkillers.  Gately tries to his hardest to argue with the steno pad and his weird left handed hieroglyphics, but the doctor persists.  And yes, Gately is sorely tempted to take the drugs because the dream doctor tells him the pain is just going go get so much worse.  Francis G doesn’t help him out during this except to tell him “You might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding” (889).

The ghost doctor is lucky that Gately’s testicular grab is all a dream as well.  (Good for you, Don).

We also get a look back via Gately about when he was an addict.  He was always quite considerate (for an addict) but when he got high, he got really self-involved.  One of his mates said it was like he shot cement rather than drugs.

Later McDade & Diehl come in from visiting Doony Glynn is the gastrointestinal ward.  Glynn is on a drip of something pretty nice, and even though his problem is virtually inoperable, he, Glynn, is pretty happy right now.  Oh, and Unit #3 on the Ennet House grounds is going to open up as an agoraphobic’s residence which should bring about some pretty intense cabin fever come wintertime, no? Heh Heh.

As for the bad news, McDade & Diehl say they probably won’t testify on Gately’s behalf as it would be suicide for them to step anywhere close to a DAs office.  And, even worse, that gun is totally M.I.A.  They think maybe Lenz took off with it.  But he was seen in an alley that night, so it might still be recoverable (that also gives us an estimated time for Gately, which no one has bothered to tell him yet). And hey, damnit why has no one brought him a pen or anything?  McDade & Diehl slink off when the nurse brings in a box printed with Fleet on it.

Hal meanwhile, is still unsure of what’s going on.  He is having…feelings.  Genuine panic and exhilaration for the first time since he can remember.  He deals with them by lying down in VR5 and just reflecting on/ignoring everything.  Hal muses about people being so devoted to one thing for their whole life.  Now that he’s actually thinking about it he finds it admirable but also rather pathetic (and clearly that’s why they start the tennis kids so young).

Kent Blott had spread a rumor that Pemulis would be doing a mini Escahton today.  But Pemulis has been avoiding him since he got back from Natick, as if Pemulis knew he went there.   Hal also thinks back to how Uncle Charles is not blood related to Avril (and we see a lot of the miserable family that sprung up in Quebec back then).  We also learn that Orin was 7 when Mario was born (so that should put to rest the suggestion that Orin is his dad, right?)

Hal also thinks about Stice’s comment that Hamlet questions so much in life but he never actually questions the existence of the ghost, which seems like an obvious thing to question.  (I almost feel like that was for you, Avery). This parallel to Gately’s ghost-vision of James is, of course, not a coincidence.

And then back to Gately when he was a happy kid.  Gately devoted his whole life to football. It was his one ticket to success.  He was very good at it and had a real future because he was huge but he was also fast.  It was inevitable that Gately would get involved with the party crowds, but he still kept football as his number one priority, and he only took Substances when he was done with football.

And then he meets Trent Kite, a geeky science kids who cooks up his own drugs.  Kite’s homemade drug of choice was a Quaalude-like object that he called “Quo Vadis.”  Gately thinks of this period with Kite as the Attack of the Killer Sidewalks, when the drink and drugs would combine to aggravate sidewalks all over town and cause them to jump up and hit them in the face.  Despite the heavier drugs that he got involved in, he never let it get in the way of his football.

It was only English class that kept Gately down.  He had always been told he was ADD, even though he could focus plenty on football and the like.  He was also told he was stupid, especially at English.  And then he was assigned Ethan From (sic) and it was that damn boring book that kicked his ass.  Coaches had found ways to get him through every other subject, but the English dept wouldn’t budge.  And soon Gately was suspended from playing ball.  [I have never been one to think it a good idea to pass kids who were good at sports, and yet in this case, it seems an exception would have made a very big difference in one man's life.]

Without the structure of ball, he did tons of drugs, grew very fat and basically lost his prime spot to the next new kid.  And that was that for Gately and school.

Meanwhile, Pemulis comes into find Hal on the floor. He asks for a personal meeting one on one, which Hal declines, as he is too inert. Pemulis explains that it’s about the DMZ, which Hal tries to talk him out of. They are interrupted with news that half of Stice’s face is left on the window upstairs.

Hal, ignoring Pemulis’ requests, asks him to put in the film Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency (another film not in the videography) and they watch the final scene with Paul Heaven giving a monologue.

Gately is reminded again about his old pal Eugene “Fax” Fackelman.  He and Fax used to work for the bookie Whitey Sorkin.  They were more or less his muscle, and he treated them quiet well (for a bookie).  In fact, he treated almost all of his clients quite well, rarely resorting to violence.  But when things got too overdue, it was Fackelman who Sorkin resorted to for the initial stages of violence on non-payers.  (Gately actually tended to get too aggressive and couldn’t control himself).  And over the years Gately grew a strong distaste for violence).

Pemulis sneaks out to find the drop ceiling panels removed.  He gets out his stool and starts  looking for his sneaker stash.

During this time a super-hot R.N. comes in with a dweeby M.D. (and Gately realizes for like the first time that the kids with violin cases seem to have become the doctors later in life).  And he is mortified that the super hot R.N. has recently given him a Fleet enema.

Gatlely reminisces about his “girlfriend” Pamela Hoffman-Jeep (his first hyphen!).  She was a binge drinker who would pass out nightly. Any man who would take her home without Taking Advantage of her she would call chivalrous and would immediately fall for him. Gately was a pretty nice guy and never took advantage of her (despite Fax and Vine’s warnings that she was way too clingy for her own good and if would just X her he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore).  And they stayed together for quite a while.

She also gave him the straight dope about why Fax was sitting slumped over in the living room with a huge bag full of Dilaudid.

Turns out that in one of Fax’s stupidest (and final) moves, he tried to scam two close friends.  Fax took a bet from 80s Bob who was a die-hard Yalie.  But on this one bet (having air-tight insider scoop), 80s Bob bet against them.  When Fax called it in, the secretray who always knows that 80s Bob bets for Yale, entered it wrong.  The game turns into a fiasco (through the involvement of radical feminists on motorcycles) and Yale winds up winning big.  80s Bob doesn’t know he won, so he pays off Fax.  Sorkin doesn’t know he lost so he gives 80s Bob’s winning to Fax to deliver.  Fax now has $250,000 and goes straight to Mr Wu (they always show up aagain!) where he buys thousands of dollars worth of his drug of choice.

He runs home to Kite and says they should take off and start somewhere fresh with this amazing stash.

Kite says, hey, 80s Bob is the son of 60’s Bob, the craniofacial doctor that Sorkin goes to every day.  They’re going to figure it out.  Not to mention that C (the junkie from earlier in the book who also makes a return) also shops at Dr Wu and will certainly hear that Fax made a huge purchase of his favorite drug.  Kite tells Fax he’s dead.  Fax knows he’s dead, so he takes it like a junkie and shoots up and puts his chin on his chest.

60s Bob, by the way, has multiple ties to Gately and Kite.  And we also learn that he fleeces items to small dealers to buy 60s artifacts (like the guy who sold TP cartridges to the Antitois in exchange for a lava lamp)….  So 60s Bob is (pretty obviously) how the Antitois got The Master (but, of course, how did the AFR know that?).

Gately was watching good old BU on the telly and he watched as an amazing punter making his debut on the field was blowing everyone away. The announcer talks about this young punter and how he played his cards right and that he is set for a lifetime of success in football.   And as Gately watches this, he realizes that he was crying.

Back at E.’s Gately rouses himself and realizes that the wraith is back but this time there’s a yoga guy in faggy gym shorts licking his forehead (everyone repeat after me: Hi Lyle!).  He goes to hit the man but the pain is too great.

He then dreams that he is with a sad kid digging up the kids’ father’s head, although he has no idea who the guy is or why they’d be doing it.

Oh, and an absurdly large woman (with stubble on her legs–Steeply is that you?) grabs JvD as she is leaving Gately’s room and tells her that she is in grave danger.  Which JvD says, Duh.

Gately then recalls knowing he should help Fax in some way, but instead just goes over and starts shooting up Mt. Dilaudid with Fax.  They do it all day until they have peed their pants and other disquieting ideas.  Fax has been watching his favorite film (which Gately doesn’t like) which turns out to be JOI’s Various Small Flames.  When they run out of distilled water, Fax “That’s a Goddamned lie” decides he’s going to shoot up with the puddled urine (shudder).  Even Gately is freaked out by that idea.  And somehow he gets the phrase “more tattoos than teeth” to pop in his head.  Phone calls and buzzers at their apartment are ignored, but when he hears Pamela’s voice through the intercom, he tries to make his way to the door but collapses, sending everything, including the flat screen TP player crashing to the floor.

Oh and Kite, nobody’s fool, has long since taken off with everything he could carry, under the guise of leaving the state for a “conference.”

JvD is talking, presumably to Steeply, about the Entertainment. She describes her scenes in the movie.  There were only two: in one she is walking in a revolving door where she sees someone she recognizes.  Later she is talking down to a camera in a baby carriage.  She is apologizing over and over.  The lens itself was special, kind of wobbly with the view of an infant.

She has never seen the finished Entertainment and believes the Master was buried with Himself.   Oh, and when Jim said that he was making something so good that people would die from seeing it–literally terminally compelling–he was kidding.  Really.  He had a dark sense of humor.  And that the final joke is that he himself is buried in the Concavity so they’ll never be able to retrieve it.

Hal returns to his room to find Mario and Kyle Dempsey Coyle watching James’ film Accomplice!  This disturbing film features an old man (J.O.I. regular Cosgrove Watt, the only “professional” actor (as in, did a few local ads) he’d ever employed) purchasing a beautiful male prostitute (Stokely ‘Dark Star’ McNair, the videography informs us) who Hal never saw in any of James’ other films.  The old man is so offended when the prostitute asks him to use a condom that–while he does use one–he also employs a straight razor to slice the condom up during the act (which also, of course, slices himself up.  OUCH and Ew!)

It is then that the old man realizes it was the prostitute himself that was Infected, and so now the prostitute is a murderer (which the last 1/3 of the film shows them repeating the word “murderer” over and over.)  Mario loves this film but Hal thinks it’s a but much.

When the film ends, the room watches weather reports from all over the Metro area (and we get to laugh at stupid weather and news people).

But oh hey, the reason that Kyle Cole is in here is because in his room (which is also Stice’s room), Stice is in there covered with toilet paper and bloody as all hell (and really who thought that toilet paper would help with great hunks of flesh ripped off your face?).  But that’s not the weird part.

Stice’s bed is, like, affixed to the ceiling somehow.  Troeltsch had requested a room switch some time ago (which is why he was in Axford’s room–and Hal is a little freaked out that he didn’t hear about that sooner) because he couldn’t handle Stice’s bed things going mysteriously all over the room.

Stice has locked himself in the room, mumified in toilet paper sitting on a bed that is somehow affixed to the ceiling.  And he thinks (hopes) this is all in aid of him becoming a better player (somehow).  Kyle has had enough of all of that, frankly.

And Otis P Lord had his monitor removed on Thursday (does this savvy up with when Gately saw the man with the square head next to him in the hospital?)

Hal thinks back to when Himself got involved with films.  Everyone thought that it would be a passing phase.  In the past, he would get obsessed with something until he grew successful at it.  Once he mastered it, he would move on (James, that sounds familiar, like something your wraith told Gately about Hal).  Hal thinks this means he was never successful as a filmmaker but Mario disagrees.

This lengthy Hal section continues for several more pages, but in honor of my final Spoiler Line, I will end here.  Oh, and since we’re supposed to be finishing the book on Monday, I hope to have my final week’s post up then too!

It is also dawning on me that with 30 pages left in the book, many many things are going to be left wide open!

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Murray Street (2002).

After NYC Ghosts and Flowers, I put off getting this disc.  I was getting a little bored by the meandering, somewhat glacial pace of the last two discs, and figured that was the trend they’d be continuing (especially since there are only seven songs on here!).

And yet when my friend Lar told me I absolutely had to pick it up, I consented, as he’s rarely wrong.  And he was not wrong here either.  Murray Street continues in a vein  similar to the last few discs, but it includes what the others were missing: amazing melodies!

It opens with “The Empty Page,” a reasonably upbeat sounding song with some wild choruses.  “Disconnection Notice” is one of their slower pieces, also cooly catchy, which doesn’t meander as it gets to where it’s going.

“Karen Revisited” is an eleven minute piece from Lee.  It begins, typically, as a beautiful Lee song.  However, the last six or so minutes are taken up with a deconstructing noise mess.  (There’s cheering at the end of the song leading me to suspect it was recorded live).  I don’t so much mind the noisy end part, but it’s so disparate from the first part that I wish they were two separate songs.

“Radical Adult Lick Godhead Style” is an absurd free form piece of lyrical nonsense which rocks tightly.  “Plastic Sun” stands out for being sung by Kim, by being very dissonant, and by being only two minutes long.

The album closer, “Sympathy for the Strawberry” is another long, slow, expansive piece, and yet the melody grabs you right from the start and won’t let you go.  Fantastic.

This reigning in of styles forecasts good things ahead on their next few discs as well.

[READ: September 13, 2009] “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear”

This short story is quite short and quite surreal.  And I am amazed at how much time I spent with it.

As it opens, there is a weird an unsettling scene about a man who has killed someone in his blog.  I felt that the story was trying to be deliberately surreal by having this person get killed online, and yet that doesn’t seem to be the case.  The story remains weird and deliberately confusing until you get about 2/3 of the way through.  Then it all becomes clear and warrants a second read through.

This is the first story I have read this is just about blogs and blogging (and now it’s meta because I’m blogging about it too, right?).   The only thing that I found weird about the story is that the it’s often unclear whether what we’re reading is part of the blog or a discussion to us about the blog (suffice it to say that the proposed blog is not the kind of blog I would read intentionally, so I’m a little lost by the author’s tone). But aside from that, the story was rewarding and fun (and, as I said, quite short).

The quirks come in as the story reaches its end, and it upends what you’ve been reading. For a slight piece, it packs a lot in.

SOUNDTRACK: THE MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSSTONES-Don’t Know How to Party (1993).

I’ve always had a thing for ska (although even I got sick of it when No Doubt took over the airwaves, thanks Gwen).  When ska gets added to blistering metal, well, it’s hard to resist.  And so we get Boston’s own Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

This was the first Bosstones’ record I’d heard and I fell for it immediately.  I also really appreciated the aggressively green plaid that the band sported at the time (although they have since denounced the look).

A horn section can be a tricky thing in a rock band, with many using it to very poor effect. But the Bosstones used it wonderfully, complementing the heaviness and adding a cool skanking sound to the metal chops. And the songs are fantastic and fun.  “Someday I Suppose” is just one of the great rocking anthems from the 90s.  “Illegal Left” is wonderfully catchy and funny.  And “Issachar” is just blistering punk.  These three songs show the rocking and skanking range on the disc.  All of this is wrapped around Dicky Barrett’s rough, growling, heavily-smoker-sounding voice.

The Bosstones would go on to write some hugely popular tunes after this disc (with each disc getting progressively more recognition and sales) but for me, this is what ska is all about.

[READ: Week of September 7, 2009] Infinite Jest (to page 876)

Infinite Tasks drew my attention to a new comment regarding the Joelle timeline that we’ve been concerned about.  Greg Carlisle responded to it at Infinite Summer. And so Infinite Tasks updated an older post here.  I’m willing to accept Carlisle’s word as he did write Elegant Complexity after all.

And yet there’s another interesting time line issue that I bring up below about a chapter heading and an electronic calendar that Hal looks at.

I’ve also decided that, since the story is steamrolling to an end, and since so many of the end days are coming along, I’m going to update my own calendar (but just the November info).  I’m putting it at the end of the post to include this week’s information.

In general, I’m a little bummed to see so many people have completed the book early, tempting as it is to do so (although obviously that’s better than not finishing at all, right?).  I’m nevertheless enjoying my routine and I think I’ll actually miss it when it’s over.

This week’s reading is almost entirely focused on Gately in St Elizabeth’s Trauma Wing.  He is stuck staring at the ceiling which is breathing at him.  It reminds him of a holiday in Beverly, Ma in which the beach house that they rented had a hole in the roof. The hole was covered by a plastic sheet which flapped and pulsed with the wind.  His crib was placed under the hole and it freaked him out (although what is a 4 year old doing in a crib?  Well, Gately’s mom is clearly not the best parent.)

During his bouts of consciousness, he is aware of visitors (although he’s not entirely sure who is actually there).  There’s also someone in the bed next to him who is wearing a box on his head, which I had to wonder if it was Otis P. Lord and his laptop monitor?

Some of his visitors include:

Tiny Ewell who seems to be taking this opportunity to unload a whole bunch of deep personal shit about his Past.  The gist of his unloading concerns his involvement with and eventual leadership of the Money-Stealers’ Club, a group of Watertown Irish Catholics who pretended to be a youth hockey league and scammed locals out of their cash.  Since Tiny was the smart one, he quickly figured out how to embezzle the funds and buy Pez &  Mad Magazine and Creeple Peeple.  When Christmas came and the Irish lads wanted their funds, Ewell had to hide out till he hatched an even more devious plan (stealing money from his dad’s union funds).  He gave the lads some money but still got a wedgie for his trouble and has been left with a grave concern about how much he liked stealing and how good he was at it.

Gately tries to commiserate but realizes that he can’t actually speak (or do much of anything).

Gately’s dream/memory returns him to Beverly where the plastic sheet bursts open and he realizes a storm is coming.  He bursts through the bars of his crib and runs out to the water where he watches a tornado crash into his house and take his mother up in its spout.

Joelle shows up (he thinks) and mops his brow (or is that a nurse?).

Then Pat Montesian comes in and tells him not to worry about anything.  That the community sticks together.  And it wasn’t a relapse on his part to get into the fighting and brouhaha, it was just the circumstances and he had to react, what with nothing else that he could do.  And she says that if he needed a painkiller it wouldn’t be a relapse either, unless in his heart of hearts he was doing it for the relapse.

And the pain is pretty intense.  And right now he’s only Toradol which the endnote describes as “little more than Motrin with ambition” (hee!)  But good for Gately for resisting the Demarol (for however much control he’s had over saying no, anyhow).

Then he almost certainly dreamed that Mrs Lopate the objay dart from the Shed (you know the catatonic one in a wheelchair) was wheeled in to stare at the IV above his head.

And now this time he’s sure that Joelle is there, staring an worrying about him.  She must be very concerned for him because of his Noxzema (He had overheard the doctors say that the bullet may have had a foreign substance on it because Gately has toxemia).  And in another Fun-With-Words line, Gately realizes that when he pees, it goes into a bedpan, so he must have been castrated.

Then Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust comes in and recaps that evening’s (post battle) events for Gately. It’s a fairly hallucinatory story what with either Thrust words or Gately’s understanding of Thrust’s words leading to some pretty funny mispronunciation (turnipcut, prosfeces).  Basically, Lenz, Green and Alfonos Parias-Carbo (who I feel we have not heard of at all, yet) dragged Gately inside and, upon his request, didn’t call the ambulance until Pat showed up.

Meanwhile, when Lenz freaked out that he was the one who going to get blamed for all of this, Green grabbed him and slammed him against the lockers.  But aside from that outburst, Green is not eating cheese about anything that he knows vis a vis Lenz.  Pat was trying desperately to keep both the security guards and the Boston police at bay.  Then, Gately was lifted (and just how much does he weigh, man) into Thrust’s Corvette and was sped off to the hospital.  And Thrust wants him to know, although really don’t worry about it, that he bled all over everything: people’s coats, Pat’s couch, the floor, even Thrusts’ beloved ‘Vette interior.

Thrust also booted Lenz out of the house (Lenz was clearly high).  And separately, Gately, Joelle and Pat all slapped their foreheads (and wanted to slap his) over it.  But Thrust says otherwise he would have killed Lenz on the spot.  They slapped their foreheads because obviously Lenz would be very useful when the cops come sniffing around.  And that AM, Amy J. (remember her? she got booted that night for not coming back for curfew?) said she saw Lenz’ Duster get towed, so no one knows where he could be.

Gately tries with his best blinking signals and run-over-kitten vocal sounds to find out if he’s in trouble with the cops, but Thrust can’t interpret anything.

Thrust continues with more tales from the house.  Hester Thrale hasn’t returned since that night (Gately recalls her taking off down the street) so her stuff is on the porch (and Emil Minty was caught stealing a pair of her panties from the bag).  Ruth van Cleve returned after her mugging but Kate Gompert hasn’t (and Pat has called out a special suicide watch call for her).  Clennette came down to the house with a whole bunch of tapes from E.T.A. and the residents are all pissy because Staff have to preview them before the residents can watch them.  And if residents have to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence (which, hilariously, means aging, if you didn’t bother to look it up) one more time, they’ll brody off the roof.   Emil also put a bent arrow on one of the objay who sits around all day (presumably Mrs Lopate) which has now earned him 2 strikes.   And there’s a new resident, Dave K., who got super drunk at a company party and was involved in a horrific limbo incident so he walks around like a crab (Marathe witnessed him on his arrival at Ennet House).

And just as Gately has had enough of Thrust and his endless chatter, Thrust leans in and tells Gately some really useful things. Like how the BPD and the feds have been around, because there may be an international incident what with the Nucks and all (and at the international part Gately freaks).  And but it seems pretty much like Gately is all set for a clear case of self-defense or at least Lenz-defense, excepting for the minor fact that the gun which blew a massive chunk out of Gatley’s shoulder and is an unparalleled ballistic machine is, well, missing.  And boy that would be a big help for Gately’s case if it would, you know, turn up.

And one of the Nucks from the incident is dead, with a high heeled shoe in his eye.  And Yolanda W.  just left her shoe there, in his eye.  And it would really help her case too if the gun were found.

Oh, and he had brought cream cheese brownies in with him but the damned nurses confiscated them.  And the whole time he’s been waving around an unlit smoke, even tapping it as if it were lit, and when he tucks it behind his ear, Gately is 90% certain that his hair gel will render it unlightable.  And then Thrust goes off on his way (he’s actually late for a funeral of a 4 years sober fellow who got drunk and literally took a long walk off a short pier).

When Gately next rouses himself, Geoffrey Day is sitting in what Gately is beginning to think of as the confessional seat.  Day is eating a brownie which he says the nurses were giving out (ha!).  Day reveals that he used to be abusive to his super-phobic, mentally disabled little brother (who was afraid of leaves).

Gately thinks “It seems like Don G’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively paralyzed and mute” (828).

Gately also reveals a recurring dream he’s had since he’s been sober: an Oriental lady (the kind that walks through Chinatown laden with bags) staring down at him.  She is impassive but is definitely above him, either because he is lying down helpless or he is very tiny.  She doesn’t do or say anything but it totally freaks him out.

And finally, Gately has been noticing this figure peripherally, a sort of ghostly figure, way tall, with glasses and a sweatshirt and, actually far too much detail for a dream ghost.  The ghost also has floods, and Gately thinks that maybe he’s the grown up ghost of one of the violin-playing-flood-wearing kids he used to torment in school, but the ghost said that

it was just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith.  Gately sarcastically in the dream thought that Oh well, if it was just a garden-variety wraith, is all, geez what a fucking relief. (829).

The wraith flits around the room (like a scene from Bewitched) but then finally settles down in the and actually starts talking to him (and since Gately can’t actually talk, this thinking-talking is kind of comforting).  Gately tries to imagine all the possibilities of who this ghost might be (a Higher Power or the Disease), but the wraith basically just starts unburdening himself on Gately.

Gately was thinking for fucks sake what was this, now even in unpleasant fever dreams now somebody else is going to tell him their troubles now that Gately can’t get away or dialogue back with anything about his own experience. (831).

The wraith talks and talks to Gately and tells him how hard it is to just sit still and talk (that it’s the equivalent of like three weeks for him to sit here and talk for a couple of minutes).  And soon he reappears with a Coke with Oriental writing on it.

The wraith jumps on the ceiling and begins doing ballet moves.  And suddenly the word PIROUETTE appears in Gately’s head in all caps very loudly.  And Gately’s never heard the word before and it feels like an assault.  This is then followed by an eclectic list of words.

[This is the first time I was a little spoiled by another post.  I read the first line at Infinite Tasks that mentioned James visiting Gately in a dream.  And, usually when I read Infinite Tasks I am caught up to the spoiler line, but I was under the weather over the weekend and hadn't actually gotten to their yet ( I was three pages behind!) so I spoiled myself that James was the ghost.  I mention this because I'm not sure when the average reader realizes that the wraith is James.  The clothes give a clue, as does some of the language.  But I think for me the clue would have come right in here with the list of words because they include:]

LATRODECTUS MACTANS, ANNULATE, EXTRUDING, SINISTRAL, POOR YORICK, NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY and CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE

But the wraith soon gets to the meat of the issue: extras on TV sitcoms sit around moving their mouths without actually saying anything.  (And of course, being a junkie, Gately is well familiar with TV shows like Seinfeld and Ren and Stimpy and Cheers! and M*A*S*H and ‘Oo is ‘E When ‘E’s at ‘Ome [What Britcom might that be?] and Exposed Northerners).  These actors whose mouths move but are forever silent are called Figurants, a word from ballet.

Then James starts talking about his own filmic career and how he likes to let everyone on screen actually speak, which critics dislike and film criticism blah blah blah which Gately tunes out of and thinks back to his mom.  This means we have to revisit the abuse she suffered at the hands of the former M.P.  Actually, Gately wishes Ferocious Francis G would hobble in, and the wraith disappears for a second and comes back to say that FFG is getting dressed and appears to be on his way here.  But back to James.

And this is fascinating because in typical DFW fashion, we get the most honest appraisal of James thus far.  And yet it comes at how many layers removed: A dead James appears as a ghost in a dream to a recovering addict whom he never met.  And yet, given the varying level of truth that DFW has set forth thus far, this just might be the real thing.

James says that he sees Hal as most like himself. That he is talented and exceptional and before James died he watched his son slowly slip away and turn into a figurant himself.  He became more and more hidden.  And when James would tell the family about this, they believed that he, James, was the unstable one, or that he has been drinking (which tat this point he hadn’t been).  They simply wouldn’t listen to him.  And he also believed that Hal is taking Substances.

And so James’ last attempt to just try to converse with Hal was to make something that would engage him, that could snap him out of his anhedonic stupor.  Something that he couldn’t just master and move on.

Something that would make the boy love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out–even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonations of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment.  Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life….  A way to say I AM SO VERY SORRY and have it heard. (839)

Which Gately writes off as self pity.  And when Gately thinks about his own father and how forgetting everything about him would be the preferable option, James gets right in his face and says no,

Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all…the worst kind of gut wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.  (839)

Which makes Gately flash back to the M.P. again.  And we get a little more detail about how Gately was often home while the M.P. beat his mother daily.  Initially, Gately ran from the room, but eventually he just sort of stopped caring.  He would often just turn up the TV.  He wonders why he never stepped in, even when he grew bigger than the M.P. But he never did, it seemed none of his business.  We knew the M.P. used to keep a tally of the Heinekens he drank, but he also kept a tally of the weightlifting he did: weight and reps jotted down after each set:

He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd-counter.  Gately has realized this at a very young age, and it was bullshit and maybe crazy. (841)

Oh, and he always licked the pencil tip before tallying things (which Gately still finds repulsive).

He also used to pull the wings and legs off flies, which he claimed was better than killing them because other flies would hear their screams and stay away.  And young Gately would lean in real close to hear the flies’ screams (but doesn’t ever remember putting them out of their misery), and as with his mom he wonders why he never stepped in to help.

Yet even when the M.P. wasn’t around, he and his mother never talked about him or anything that he did, it as like he disappeared.

When Gately wakes again, Francis G and some other crocodiles are there.  And they all have unlit cigars and are telling al-anon jokes.  Gately tries to speak but the only phoneme he makes is ü.  So, he tries to appease them by shaking his thorax, even though laughing sends rockets of pain through him.  But they do reveal some pretty important info: the man outside, who appears to be parked there for the duration (lots of newspapers and take out food) matches the description of the A.D.A. whom Gately has been so fearful of.

Uh oh.

We move away from Gately briefly to

November 19th: Marathe did not reveal Joelle’s whereabouts to the AFR, so they are going to find relatives of the filmmaker and take them instead.  They won’t be going to E.T.A. because the only thing the AFR fear is giant hills. So instead, they are going to hijack the Canadian tennis team that is on its way down to play E.T.A.  They’re going to use the old mirror on I-91 trick and if the bus survives they’ll take it, if not, Bôh!

Oh, and they also added two new test subjects to their tally: a strangely dressed homeless man carrying two bags of Chinese laundry and frying pans (adios, Lenz) and a man in a wig and horrifying clothes (goodbye, Poor Tony).  But Lenz is still messing things up in that he is cutting off Poor Tony’s fingers rather than his own.

Then we’re back to Gately again.  Gately is having a wonderfully naughty dream about Joelle van Dine doing a meaningful striptease with him.  But when she drops the veil her face is Winston Churchill’s.

When Gately was a kid, his next door neighbor Mrs Waite was the crazy lady that everyone avoided.  Kids drove on her lawn, even left flaming dog poop on her porch.  But she never got mad, and that seemed to make it worse.  She was a witch, at best.  But one day, when Gately was avoiding the M.P.’s beatings, he ran into her. She invited him in and Gately eventually would stop in to her kitchen once in a while.

One day when the neighborhood was celebrating birthdays (Gately and a bunch of the kids had birthdays around the same day and he was invited along as sort of a pity guest). Mrs Waite brought a homemade cake to the party. She had clearly saved up a lot of smokes to spend the money to make the cake (and this scene rather broke my heart too).  She trundled back home, everybody gasping, until finally the mother eventually threw it out untouched.

Gately’s next JvD dream involved her, JvD, in Mrs Waite’s kitchen, every detail exact.  JvD is naked again but not sexually.  She is Mrs Waite and JvD and Death.  And in the dream, Gately learns that Death is the woman who kills you who will be your mother in your next life (hm, that sounds familiar!).

November 20th (Gaudeamus Igitur) dawns. (This section is in First person).

A.P. exams are three weeks away.  Pemulis had been helping Hal like a trooper, almost 24/7, but once the John Wayne incident happened, he has been missing quite a lot.

Hal wakes very early.  It is snowing.  He actually hopes for a cancellation in the match today.  He has never hoped for a cancellation before.  But, at the very least, he has a feeling!

Between I.D. and the WhataBurger, there is an annual bash.  This is a day of rest where parents and other V.I.P.s come and the kids are all semi formal.  They always play an international team, (although last years’ 70-2 route of Ethiopia got racially ugly).  This year is against the Quebec teams (whom the AFR are planning to intercept).  The team is supposed to be flying in but Logan is likely closed, so maybe they will end up at Montreal International Airport D’Orval, Cartiervile Airport.  Struck and Freer are pretty excited at the thought of getting X’d by what are clearly sequestered and desperate Quebecker girls.

I can’t decide of this means the AFR are incorrect about how the team is getting to ETA or if they knew they would be detoured to D’Orval airport.

huipil

When Gately startles awake after those creepy dreams, he is more freaked to see that JvD herself is there.  She brought him one of the brownies from downstairs (but then sees he can’t eat it–he has a tube in his mouth–which is why he can’t talk).   She smells great, but the huipil she’s wearing is perfumed from the last time she wore it, not for him.  And he notices that her nails are bitten to the quick, like his.

JvD is telling the story of the recent meeting at St. Columbkille’s.  The highlight being that a young man from Kentucky (her home state) who was 19 but looked 40 had the longest blackout that anyone can remember.   When the boy was young, his drunken father hit him in the face with a hatchet, which had more or less healed itself (yet left an astonishing scar).  Said father died when the boy was 9.  So the boy wrapped him in a sack and stored him under the barn.  He then charged 5 dollars a pop for the kids to view a “real dead body.”  He took his proceeds, went downtown to where his dad got his hooch from and woke up ten years later in Boston.

St Columbkille’s does a round-robin-type meeting (and Gately is desperately trying to figure out what day those meetings are so he can figure out what day it is).  And the Kentuckian selected JvD to speak next.  And as she was speaking she realized that she no longer thought of the cliches as cliches.  She’s actually starting to believe them.  And that if she thinks of things one day at a time, not consecutive days, she could pull through it.  In the past, she had thought about sobriety like Evel Kenevil, that each day was another bus to jump over.  Gately has a picture of Evel Keneveil that he imagines taking down and framing for her.

As Gately listens to her talk, working things out for herself, he realizes that anything can be endured.  That any problem, A.A, or this hospital pain, or even thinking about the guy in the hat who is waiting to bust him, can be endured if you break it down into small enough segments.

Then JvD pulls out her photo album and shows Gately her dad as well as many of the animals from her farm growing up (and her voice gets tines of Kenucky in it).  And Gately imagines himself with JvD long term, with little Gatelys, even though he knows that falling for a newbie is the 13th step and is only done by bottom feeders.

Then back to Hal.

(Strangely, the clock in the bathroom says it is 11/18 even though the headline for the section is 11/20…what’s that all about?).

Hal is wandering around, and he hates being up before dawn (and who doesn’t?).  As he finishes his ablutions, he sees Ortho Stice with his head against a window. Hal says hello, and Stice asks if he has been crying.  Hal says nope, it’s just morning.  Then he and good old Stice chat amiably.  But Hal has to ask why he is sitting here like this.  And Stice says his forehead has been frozen to the window for like four hours.

Stice asks Hal if he believes in the paranormal.  Hal says Mario does, and he doesn’t lie.  But he’s not willing to comment.  Stice says he’s going to show him some mind bending shit once Hal pulls him free.  (Oh man I want to see that!)

Hal tries to pull him off which only leads to screams.   Troeltsch shows up (oh, crap) with “microphone in hand” (double crap) and starts asking interviewing everyone about what’s going on.  And yet, wait, did he come out of Axford’s room?  It’s a total no-no to even be in someone else’s room after curfew, so staying the night is like, beyond the pale.  And wait was Axford in there with him?  Let’s not even think about that.

this image always comes up when you search for betel nuts

When Hal says he’s going to get help he asks Troeltsch to keep an eye on his toothbrush ever since the incident from 9 months ago when all of the toothbrushes were covered with betel nut.

Downstairs, the janitors Kenkle and Brandt are mopping the floor.  Of course, at almost 900 pages into a book it is absurd to add 2 new characters, with fairly detailed backstory, but so be it.  Brandt’s IQ is listed as submoronic to moronic.  But he enjoys Kenkle, and so they live together in Roxbury Crossing.  Kenkle not only has a PhD in low temperature physics, he once worked for the U.S. Navy.  He was discharged, although he changes the details whenever anyone asks.  He basically just dropped out and returned to Roxbury Crossing.  Kenkle is a talky, talky, talky man.  And Brandt barely talks at all.  So they’re a perfect match.

Brandt and Kenkle had been riding the T at night for fun (which is what they did) where they ran into James on the Orange line trying to get home.  (You can’t get there from there).  They helped him off the line and walked him up the hill.  When they arrived at E.T.A., James invited them in to continue their conversation.  James employed them both in Zero Gravity Tea Ceremony and were offered janitorial jobs at Jim’s insistance.

Hal interrupts Kenkle discussing the bad mojo involved in doggy style sex to tell him that Stice is stuck and needs serious help.  Kenkle says, if it’s s serous, why are you laughing.  Hal says he’s not laughing.  Kenkle says he’s practically knee slappingly cracking up facially.  Hal tries to stabilize as best he can but Kenkle says he still looks mirthful.

And we leave Hal trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Really, we have to end now??

Revised timeline, please correct any mistakes!  Items in bold are new.

November 1 Orin in Denver flying into stadium
Nov 3 Troltsch ill/Hal floor nightmare/post-practice shower/talks with Little Brothers/Orin & Hal longer phone call (learns about Himself’s death)
Nov 4 Pemulis buys DMZ/Transcripts from Ennet House
Nov 5 Hal &  Orin discuss separatism & toenails
Nov 6 Weight room (Pemulis mocks the grunters)/P.W.T.A. match/Gately meets Geoffrey Day
(Sat) Nov 7 Saturday classes/Troeltsch announces the results from P.W.T.A./Joelle tries to kill herself
Nov 8 Interdependence Day/Escahton/White Flag Meeting/Mario’s ONANtiad film
Nov 9 A.M. drills/Gately cooks/Antitois killed/NA meeting Erdedy hugs/Pemulis walks in on Avril & John Wayne
Nov 10 Pemulis, Hal et al await their fate in CT’s office.
Nov 11 Joelle & Gately have their first real chat/Lenz & Green walk: Lenz kils Nuck’s dog/John Wayne blabs on the radio/Orin meets Swiss hand model/Steeply leaves AZ for E.T.A./Discussion of powdered milk/Stice almost beats Hal/Tunnel Club finds a fridge/Hal watches films/Mario asks how to know if osmeone is sad
Nov 12 Gately’s Nuck fight/WYYY’s engineer is kidnapped
Nov 13 Geoffrey Day reveals his nightmare
Nov 14 Poor Tony has a stroke on the train/Matty Pemulis sees Poor Tony/Poor Tony grabs Kate & Ruth’s bags/Lenz steals Chinese ladies bags/ AFR find the Entertainment/Marathe shows up at Ennet House/Marathe & Kate drink in Ryles
(Tues) Nov 17 Hal gets AA brochure from Ennet House/Pemulis gets “thrown out”/Molly Notkin “confesses”/Hal goes to Infant Meeting
Nov 19 Marathe returns to the AFR with “no news” of Joelle/They set out to capture the Quebec tennis team
Nov 20 Whataburger Tournament
Nov 25 Mario’ 19th birthday

Note: Gately’s dream sequences are a bit unclear timeline wise.

SOUNDTRACK: GREAT NORTHERN-Trading Twilight for Daylight (2007).

A patron donated this disc to our library.  I had never heard of Great Northern, but I gave it a listen, in part because I hoped that the band name came from Twin Peaks (no idea if it does). And wow, I was blown away by this disc.

This is like the great unheralded indie rocker band (although having looked them up apparently the are quite heralded).  Their songs sound like an inviting combination of The Anniversary (the GN song “The Middle” always puts me in mind of The Anniversary’s “The Siren Sings”), Veruca Salt, Nada Surf and any number of supremely catchy bands.  The vocals are split between a make and female voice which makes the diversity even more appealing.

There’s not a bad song on the disc, and I find myself playing it quite often. The music is first rate, with great textural setups and drop offs, and the choruses, oh the choruses.  It’s hard to even pick a favorite song.

I’m somewhat surprised I’d never heard of this band before (they have a new album out this year that I haven’t heard), but then they are on a label I’ve never heard of either (Eenie Meenie).  I will totally get their new disc, as well as their Sleepy Eepie EP.  I’m really that impressed.

[READ: January 2007] Sacco & Vanzetti Must Die

I read this book over two years ago (I’m cleaning up the final books that I haven’t posted about), and I’m afraid I’m a little shaky on the details.  But I just remembered that I read about it in The Believer.

The premise of the book is that Sacco & Vanzetti are actually a comedy team, not anarchists.  Well, they are anarchic, but in the realm of comedy, not bombs.  They are a sort of Laurel & Hardy with Sacco as the fat troublemaker (and yes the name fits) and Vanzetti as the straight man, the ideologue.  As they progress from slapstick routines to film, their comedy gets more specific, and their schtick concerns “knife grinders/throwers.”  The knife angle is explained as a family trademark or maybe it’s a stolen gimmick.

Inevitably, their careers begin to wain, and their lives take a turn for the worst.  And when things get bad, they get really bad, leading them to trial, with possible execution.

There are a lot of undercurrents about the role of immigrants, specifically Italian immigrants, in America (and the scapegoating that was often done to them).  For example, one of their films is called A Couple of Wops in a Jam. Other Italian stereotypes are also employed in the book, all of which lends to criticism of the way the real Sacco & Vanzetti were treated in their trial(s).  For an overview of the real case, including the suspected Italian prejudices, see here.

The main conceit of the book, however, is that Sacco & Vanzetti are inevitably doomed.  It is their nature to be found guilty, whether as comedians or as anarchists.  And so the book plays out as something of an alternate history of the 20th century, yet with a similar outcome.

If memory serves, the end of the book gets a little confusing.

Well, I just flipped through the copy and I’d forgotten that there are “supplemental materials” and “historical interludes” and as the book nears the end, the confluence of art and history gets very tricky.  It turns out to be a rather intellectual exercise (which is not surprising coming from Dalkey Press).  It deals with grand themes, but also revels in pie fights.

I remember there being a lot of scenes that I enjoyed (especially the film excerpts).  And of course, I love surreal/metafictional concepts.  As I said, I think it got a little tricky at times, but overall it was a really good read.  In fact, writing all this makes me want to read it again.