David Foster Wallace–[Week 8] Infinite Jest (1996)

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star (1994).

“Bull in the Heather” is one of my favorite Sonic Youth songs.  I love everything about it (even if I haven’t got a clue what it’s about): the simple opening, the switch to harmonics, and, my favorite part, the drum break that leads to the chorus (who ever heard of getting a drum break stuck in your head?).

There’s a lot to speak for this disc even though it seems to be overlooked (as the empty spot between Dirty and Washing Machine).  Take the absolute variety of textures, and the almost surreal mixtures of styles within (short) songs (like “Bone” which opens with super fast paced drumming and howls from Kim and then breaks into a very mellow (and catchy) chorus).

For sheer variety: the disc opens with an acoustic guitar strummer by Thurston (“Winner’s Blues”), and then, after the single “Bull in the Heather,” there’s the 2 minute noise-fest “Starfield Road.”  This is followed by the cool and catchy “Skink,” which is like Kim’s version of the slinky and cool “Self-Obsessed and Sexxee.”  This is definitely Kim’s disc, she sings about half of the songs, and shows a great variety of styles here.

“Androgynous Mind” is one of those weird songs that has a wonderfully catchy vocal line but where the music is pretty much abstract nonsense.  And speaking of catchy, this disc continues with SY’s notion of sing along choruses (even if what you’re singing doesn’t make a lot of sense (“Screaming Skull” fits that bill perfectly)).  And then “Quest for the Cup” does a 90 degree turn after the intro.  All of these shifts and changes occur in less than half an hour.

The last 20 minutes or so settle the disc down somewhat (except for the brief “In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader,” but the 7 minute closer “Sweet Shine” ends the disc on a mellow note.

This is also the last SY disc produced by Butch Vig.  Vig’s production is often described as clean. But Vig doesn’t clean up the noise that SY makes, he just makes it, I guess, crisper would be a better word.  Compare the way that Garbage’s “Vow” opens with a big grand noise and then stops dead after a few seconds.  Vig seems to be a master of controlling noise to make it stand out more.  And in that respect, his technique really shines through on this disc…it feels almost mechanical in its precision.

From this point forward, Sonic Youth would break away from this style of music into a freer and looser almost jazz feel, so even if the album title doesn’t make literal sense, it describes the disc quite well.

[READ: Week of August 10] Infinite Jest (to page 589)

Last week, showed Gately’s car speeding through Cambridge.  He runs over a discarded cup which we follow as it sails down the street and hits the Antitoi’s door.  It was very cinematic.  Discussions abound about whether IJ could (or should) be filmed.  I’m not going to add to that discussion but I did want to mention what I see as the filmic way the book written.

In many movies you are introduced almost casually to many of the protagonists, seeing them in their most typical place of employment or hang-out spot or some such thing.  And in films, it doesn’t seem that weird to get a two minute or even 30 second establishing shot of character A before jump cutting to character B.

And that’s how IJ starts, with all of these jump cuts, establishing shots, of characters.  Clenette’s scene is hard to read, but if you saw it in a movie, you’d say, okay that’s her character.  And, for the most part you would expect her to reappear later in the movie. I’m not sure what anyone expects to happen in IJ, so who knows what we think the Clenette scene is about, but realistically, the character has to come back, even if what she said didn’t make any sense at the time.

And as movies go, so does the book, cutting back and forth between scenes building the stories along as they inevitably intertwine.

It’s also not unheard of to have what seems like it may be the end of the chronological story appear first (we haven’t seen any return to the Year of Glad yet).

And so, yes I will say a thing about the filmic possibilities of  this book.  Sure the book is long, and yet so much of the book is description, stuff that in a movie can be done with an establishing shot, even a slow one.  The whole Joelle/overdose scene which covers so many pages could be filmed rather quickly.  So could Eschaton. The question of course is how much would be lost in translation.  And that I can’t answer (although I expect quite a lot).

Be a hell of a film, though.

So, in a few places, especially on Infinite Tasks, people have been mentioning some crucial information that happens on Page 17.   I felt bad that I didn’t recall anything that happened on page 17, so I went back and re-read this section (and how weird is it to re-read parts of a book that you haven’t even finished yet?)

And so Page 17 feels like a major spoiler!  It feels like so much is given away!  It feels like such an essential part of the story that it’s amazing how it’s sort of tossed off in a hallucinatory sequence.

I think of John N.R. Wayne who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head.  There’s very little doubt that Wayne would have won.

Wow.  So much packed into those two sentences!  Holy cow.

And, the end of that sequence has an orderly ask Hal, “so, yo, then man what’s your story?”

Is that the device that sets up that Hal is telling this whole book?  I just blew my mind.

This week’s reading begins with the aftermath of The Escahton debacle.  Or the precursor to the aftermath, anyway.  And it features the color blue. A lot.

It also gets to a question I’ve been puzzling about for sometime: why is every IJ book jacket/promotional material designed in a sort of cloud motif. Well, in the section we lean that Uncle Charles’ office is decked out in an unsettling cloud wallpaper (which is coincidentally the same wallpaper as Hal’s dentist).  It has only appeared briefly so far, so it seems odd that it would take on such an iconic feel.  But we’ll see if it comes back.

So today is November 10th. Pemulis, Axford and Hal (and Kittenplan) are in C.T.’s waiting room.  They figure they are all (except Kittenplan) in big shit for the Escahton debacle from two days ago.  C.T. is in his office (with both doors–the outermost featuring his credentials on a plaque so long it almost reaches both sides of the door–closed).  They can hear muffled discussions in there.  Tavis’ office is right next to Avril’s.  Avril’s office is bigger with a much-coveted big beautiful desk.  Avril, being afraid of confined spaces, does not have doors, leading to serious privacy issues for anyone in there.

At this time, Avril is talking to some young girls regarding the awareness of possible sexual misconduct from any “tall people” on campus.  The girls are all a bit too young to actually get what Avril is talking about (which is refreshing) but which leads to some funny outbursts (like Erica Siress’ complaining that her granny pinches her cheeks too hard).

Pemulis, whose biggest fear is getting kicked out of the school and trudging back to Allston with his tail between his legs (which led his dormmates to get him the “Yes, I’m paranoid but am I paranoid enough?” poster), is concerned that this infraction may get him booted from the Whataburger Tournament.  He is trying to sneak info out of Lateral Alice Moore as to whether or not his name might be on the list of invites.

There’s also a bit of backstory on Lateral Alice More (finally). Turns out that she’s pretty cool despite her weird affliction.  Said affliction was caused during an accident on her previous job: she was a traffic reporter whose helicopter hit another traffic copter (the details of the accident are mercifully spare) which resulted in her inability to intake air properly, so she has to walk side to side.  When encouraged, she can make copter sounds (hands slapping chest) and report “local traffic” for those in the waiting room.

She also sits in an electrified chair (DANGER: THIRD RAIL) that allows her to effortlessly swing around her horseshoe shaped desk.

There’s a fascinating bit about Hal and Axford’s joint neurosis.  They can’t ask for help when their ball goes skittering across to another court.  (Asking for help is common practice, even on a playground).  No matter how often they are remonstrated by deLint and Schtitt, they feel compelled to run across x number of courts just to get their ball.

Lateral Alice, who is Avril’s secretary too and who has seen the two together on several occasions, says that there is a Coatlicue Complex at work twixt Hal and Avril.  The endnote for Coatlicue Complex says “No idea.”  So a Wikipedia search tells me that Coatlicue is the Aztec “Mother of the Gods.” And the first page of this article gives us the  “The Coatlicue-Malinche Conflict: A Mother and Son Identity Crisis in the Writing of Carlos Fuentes” which leads us a little off track but does give us a nice definition of personification of motherhood through divine conception.  This article from the University of Michigan gives even more fascinating detail into this myth.  Although with all this information it’s even more complicated as to what L.A.M. may mean by it.

And with some more backstory about C.T., we learn that he was instrumental in many architectural designs.  Including, most infamously the Toronto Skydome, in which people in the seats could see right into the hotel rooms that adjoin the field, where people were doing what people do in hotel rooms (no picture of THAT available, although here’s a photo looking out from the room onto the field).

There’s also a hilarious description of Uncle Charles as being peculiarly foreshortened.  So, when sitting still it seems like he is actually somehow, shrinking from view.  It cracked me up to read that as a result of quitting smoking he has picked up some nervous tics in which he waves his arms around, making it look as if he is flailing and falling away.  Evidently Ortho “The Darkness” Stice does such a great impersonation of him that he’s not allowed to do it in front of the under 18s, for fear of them losing respect for him, C.T.

While Hal is sitting in the office, he remembers back to the last time he was summoned there.  On the previous occasion it was to assist with an incoming student (who was legally blind and actually carried a kind of IV with him…and yet was still an amazing tennis player).  The student has since deferred matriculation to the next semester.  While waiting, Hal can see into CT’s office where he sees a portion of CT’s body while he is talking to Tina Echt (Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name department).  C.T. tells Tina that E.T.A. will take her apart and reassemble her as an adult tennis player.  Tina–who is seven, and whose parents are not present, and who is wearing clip-on earrings of Mr Bouncey Bounce and who can barely see over the net–absolutely freaks out at this, thinking he is being literal.

Hal has been sitting there, hearing this interview, for about an hour.  When Avril comes out they have a nice(ish) exchange in which she offers him an apple (knowing that he hadn’t eaten yet) which Hal initially declines knowing that she hasn’t eaten either.  And they proceed into Avril’s Politeness Routine.  On family charades night this trait is mocked excessively: “Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.”

We also see a nice exchange between Hal and Ortho (when Ortho comes into the waiting room to stand on the air conditioning vent) and we learn that they are friendly enough that they don’t need to speak (and Stice gives a good impression of C.T. scaring the hell out of someone).

The scene ends with  Hal’s hilarious observation that the handshake between Echt and Tavis  looked “like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil.  Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind.”

When the culprits are called into his office, we learn that Dolores Rusk is in there with C.T. (which also explains why Avril was doing the sexual predator speech to the young girls, as that is normally Rusk’s domain). We also learn that Pemulis has a dark, deep-seated hatred of her, for reasons that he will not explain.  He once tried to hot-wire her door handle which backfired terribly when the first person to touch the door handle and get fried was not Rusk but a poor immigrant cleaning lady.

Also in the room is a urologist.  And we also lean that Clenette is there too, emptying wastebaskets.  And, indeed, Otis P. Lord is there too, wearing a monitor around his neck.

You can practically hear the door slam as we switch scenes.

Marathe and Steeply continue their discussion of pleasure.  I found Marathe’s description of the glowing sky as “a false dawn,” to be significant, although I’m not exactly sure why yet.  (Am I reading too much into things or getting better at seeing them?)

But then it’s off to Ennet House, where Don Gately and Joelle van Dyne have their first (as far as we know) sit down chat.  Gately relates a story about going to bars with his friends and, on this one occasion, his friend basically stealing a girl from a local guy who (and Gately realized too late that this might happen at a local bar) came back with a gun and shot the guy in the head.  Joelle is not too impressed by the story.

In concern of the timeline that I mentioned last week and Infinite Tasks talks about here, Gately says that she has been in Ennet House for about 3 days (and today is the 11th).

Gately is also the first person to ask what we’ve all been wondering: why, exactly, is Joelle wearing the veil.  She explains that she’s been wearing it for 4 years, and it is clear that she has become a master of evasion, deflecting the questions in all sorts of directions.  But Gately is onto her and says point blank, would she just say yes or no if he can ask her what is wrong with her.  Des she have “three ti– arms” (hee hee) or what?   And in a moment of brutal honesty that Gately doesn’t realize is honesty, Joelle admits that she is dangerously pretty, and that she is hiding herself to spare others the danger of seeing her beauty.  She also, very kindly, although Gately doesn’t necessarily see it as so, tells him that he is not as dumb as he fears that he is.

And then we get an extended look at he nightlife of Randy Lenz.  Lenz always bums a ride to the nightly A.A. meetings (even though, or perhaps because, he has a very noticeable car).  And he always sits in the seat that will be most north for the duration of the trip.  But he always, always, walks home, and on a few occasions has barely mad curfew, even if the walk should get him home much earlier than that.

Lenz is a weird guy so Gately and co. allow him his weird little habits (although walking alone late at night is a serious red flag, and he has been given 5 random drug tests, 3 of which he passed and 2 of which were corrupted in the lab).  In fact, Lenz has been snorting  coke (a stash of which he keeps in a cutout section of a book by William James called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion.  This book which Lenz found intellectually satisfying (as well as large enough to fit his stash) actually makes several appearances, including one by someone other than Lenz.  [Even though I think I’ll read Oblomov in solidarity with the E.T.A. kids, I’ll not be reading William James any time soon (or any time at all, frankly).]  But Lenz never snorts on these late night walks, which he assumes will get him red flagged… and plus he knows how to get around pee tests (see the above two corrupted tests).

If you Google powdered wig, it becomes clear that if you wear one you must arch your eyebrow.

But, no, Lenz has a reason for these meandering walks (in his powdered wig and Ralph Lauren topcoat).  For, being cooped up with no way to express his rage has given Lenz a major need for an outlet.  And his outlet has taken shape in the destruction of small animals.  It began with rats, which he would crush near dumpsters.  And after each animal was finally dispatched, he would state a satisfying, “There.”  He gradually evolved from rats to feral cats.  He would take the Hefty bags from the kitchen along with him on walks.  He’d bribe some cats with anchovies or tuna, catch them and stuff them into the bag.  He’d then tie the bag shut and watch the interesting shapes the bag would make as it skittered down the alley.  There.

Some cats would actually claw through the bag, so Lenz would ask those who were bound for the store to pick up Steel Sak bags for him (and I loved the comment that Lenz had so many idiosyncrasies that garbage bags were no big deal at all.)  And the Steel Sak bags works very well on the tougher and therefore more satisfying cats. There.

He then started doing more despicable things to the poor creatures, including setting them on fire.  One chased him down the alley, burning all the while which, while horrifying, was also quite amusing to read how much it freaked Lenz out.  This incident ties back to the beginning of the section when Gately realizes that Lenz came in one minute before curfew and just ran upstairs making an unholy racket…but Gately had other things to worry about, like that Bruce Green and Amy J had both missed their curfew.

Lenz then started doing these things right on people’s property with less-feral cats, instead of in alleyways.  There.

And as with any habit, he needed a bigger fix each time.  And he almost considered taking out a homeless man, but his conscious did get the better of him.  So, he moved up to dogs. There.

And speaking of Bruce Green, he asked if it would be alright for him to tag along with Lenz on his nightly walks. Lenz doesn’t mind because Green neither talks a lot (as most of the people in Ennet House do, let’s be honest, always inserting their own damn stories while you’re trying to tell your own).  But he also doesn’t just sit there in total silence; he inserts the appropriate acknowledgment of listening which Lenz finds okay.  Although, Lenz is starting to get tetchy that he hasn’t been able to There anything for a few days, and it seems like Bruce is planning on this being a daily thing.

The Lenz section, animalcide aside has some amusing moments, like his recollection (to Green) of Joelle (whom he thinks is named Joe L.) saying that Doony Glynn is so cross-eyed (from an accident involving a large load of bricks) that he “could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.”

But Glynn also provides a pretty fascinating look into an extended trip (after ingesting “The Madame”) he once took in which for several weeks the entire sky turned into a deepwater grey-green flat square with grid coordinates  on it.  The sky displayed the DOW Ticker and the NIKEI (sic, unless DFW is up to something, it should be NIKKEI) Index as well as the time and Celcius temp (and when he checked in the paper the stock prices were accurate).  It totally freaked him out.  Although Lenz thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital time piece (Lenz’ obsession with time is well documented.  It stems from his father (a train conductor) insisting the Lenz keep his pocket watch shiny and wound all the time…which is why he won’t wear/carry a watch, but always needs to know exactly what time it is).

A serious interlude is introduced by the childish information that Rod Tine measures his penis every morning.  The serious part is that Tine has been dispatched to Boston to find out some info about The Entertainment.  We learn that master copies have been found and confiscated in Berkeley, Louisiana, Tempe AZ, and Boston (but the Berkeley one has escaped from confinement).   And, in yet another question we’ve all been asking: we learn what the first few minutes of The Entertainment consist of: a veiled woman walking through a revolving door and seeing the reflection of a face in the door. That’s all we get so far.

There’s now a jump in the timeline as we move back to November 9th.  Pemulis is skulking around the offices of E.T.A.  He is dressed outlandishly in unmatching garish colors (Troeltsch sees him and says he looks like a hangover).  He overhears Stice in Dolores Rusk’s office (clearly talking about his moving bed, which Pemulis seems to know nothing about, so it must not be him.  And yes, I’m delighted that it has come back into the storyline).  Rusk spews a fascinating amount of psychobabble which basically seems to conclude that he has a serious oedipal complex and that he is counterphobic (this definition is more satisfying).  Stice’s remarks about linoleum are quite funny.

Pemulis then goes into the main office where he hears C.T. working on his StairBlaster.  And then, as he knocks on the door frame of Avril’s office, he sees John Wayne in a football helmet, shoulder pads an a jockstrap in a 3 point stance.  Avril herself is in a cheerleader’s outfit doing a split on the floor in front of him, arm raised in the air.  As Pemulis knocks, he asks if she has a moment….

A few moments later (interrupted by a Lenz section that I’ll get to in a second) we see Hal, lying down on his bed, bathing in the sun.  Troeltsch pops his head in and asks what Hal’s doing (photosynthesizing); Pemulis then follows and asks if he’s eaten (the beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree); then John Wayne pokes his head in.  Says nothing and then slowly backs away.

And now back to Lenz.  We follow Lenz for an evening, in which he wants to tell Bruce to back off but he’s afraid of making him go away for good, or any other number of paranoid fears that Lenz can come up with.  In order to make it easier for him to ask Green to give him some space (and allow him to use the meatloaf that is festering in his pocket) Lenz snorts some coke (on the back of the toilet at the AA meeting!).

After the coke he is totally cool, even if he does have two gaspers in his mouth and one in the ashtray.

But (and a lengthy footnote explains why) Lenz’ reaction to the coke is to cling needily to anyone who will listen to him.  (The footnote gives a whole bunch of individuals’ reactions to coke, which is fascinating).  And so, Lenz goes on a multipage tirade of all of the fascinating things he knows and has done.  Which include:

• Just how fat his mother was
• The plots of several books which he confabulates (I’m glad I looked up this word, as I thought it was a (sic) situation for the word conflate
• How the tip of his finger was chopped off by a bike chain but which he grew back through intense concentration
• That the Nile crocodile is not the most feared crocodile
• That he is beyond-black-belt in akido
• About a Halloween party where a woman wore dead gulls around her neck (and at this party was displayed a baby with no skull which the people there worshiped and called The Infant)
• Some memories that he can recall from when he was in vitro
• Why Geoffrey Day is definitely a poofta
• The extent to which there are packs of feral animals throughout the Concavity (and how post-Rastafarian cults would break into the Concavity to worship The Infant)
  

A brief interlude with Orin shows him dropping off Helen at the airport (after getting nowhere with her–despite what he’d told Hal earlier–and with him answering way too many of her questions that he said he wouldn’t answer).  While at the airport, he is picked up by a “purportedly” Swedish Swiss hand model (with a toddler!) who asks for an autograph and then proceeds to offer plenty in return for the autograph.  [8/20 update: Sorry about the “Swedish” I admit to having a fondness for Swedish rock bands (there’s even a category for them!), so when I start to type Sw, Swedish tends to come out…no offense intended to the Swiss!] Orin also notices that while Helen was around, the wheelchair men were not, and yet now, with Helen gone, he has just spied a new wheelchaired gentleman.

Endnote 234 offers some insights into the types of information Orin gave out to Helen.  The description of what James accomplished in the last 5 years of his life is astonishing.  (Founded E.T.A., created a smudge-free, fog-free glass, managed the revenues of all of his previous patents, and got blind drunk every day).  I particularly liked that in his spare time “he made in depth documentaries and a dozen art-films that people are still writing doctoral theses on.”

A fascinating section of this endnote was the retelling of the mold story from the beginning of the book.  It differs slightly from Hal’s version in that it makes Avril out to be much more crazy that Hal did.  Of course, this all comes in a section that has Orin talking about just how crazy (albeit functional crazy, as in she is so compulsive that she has organized her compulsions into a manageable framework for living) the Moms is.

We then get a comic interlude with Idris Arslanian. He is wearing a blindfold (relating to the blind kid who was going to matriculate but didn’t).  Turns out that coach Thorp said that the blindness was not a handicap but actually an asset, so Idris is wearing a blindfold to engage his other senses.  He also has to pee pretty badly; he got lost looking for the lavatory.

Idris first bumps into Schacht, but soon Pemulis, who initially pretends to be Troeltsch informs Id that they are near the weight room where Anton “The Booger ” Doucette has gone crying to Lyle for calming assistance with the fact that he just cannot handle the Energy survey class (even though it’s a pretty cake class).

The class covers fossil fuels to annular fusion/fission.  Pemulis explains to Id (and to us) all about Annular Fusion (which goes over my head too).  Although the discussion of annular chemotherapy in which you give cancer to cancer cells makes sense, but I’m not sure how it ties to fusion exactly.

But we do learn that the output of annular fusion (on? because of?) the Waste hurled there is that the Eastern Concavity is lush beyond all measure, which is why they are so many oversized, feral creatures.  Pemulis also says that waste is hurled into the Concavity (which has a 25-130-25 angle) out on prime numbered days.

The section ends with Pemulis negotiating for Idris’ pee (since Idris is a good Muslim and does not indulge in anything).

And back to Lenz and Green.  Lenz continues his rant.  First he says that Joel (sic) is a cyclops, which is why she wears the veil.  Then he says that his morbidly obese mom never leaves the house.  And when he was young, his mother was on a Greyhound bus.  She used the tiny bathroom in the back of the bus, but when the bus hit wretchedly unpaved road, she was ricocheted around the bathroom until her uncovered ass was wedged in the tiny bathroom window .  She couldn’t reach the door, and no one could hear her scream.  She suffered frostbite and psychological trauma and then sued Greyhound.  The millions that she won enabled her to quit her job and do nothing but eat all day, which caused her heart to explode several weeks later.

The talk of dead mothers upsets Bruce Green, but he is even more upset by the sound of Hawaiian music that is playing loudly a few blocks away.  And both of these things are connected.  In a lengthy and kind of cute story which all ends horribly (of course), we see young Bruce give his mother an elaborately wrapped present.  The present turns out to be a can of Mauna Loa Macadamia nuts (which is her favorite) but when she opens it, it turns out to be spring loaded snakes (Bruce’s father worked for some kind of novelty company with ‘N in the name that Bruce has blocked out (Acme Nuts ‘N Serpents or whatever) and so he can never go into a business with ‘N in the name).  [For the funniest skit about peanut brittle and spring loaded snakes, check out this imeem track of Paul F. Tompkins (or get his album, Impersonal)].

While his dad was laughing at the prank, his mother had a cardiac arrest and died on the spot.  With Bruce watching and realizing that he gave her the gift that killed her.  And so any Polynesian music gives him the serious fantods.

Somewhere in this area trickles past the week’s Spoiler Line because I kept going until the next text break

As Green remembers this he turns around and realizes that Lenz (who had sneaked down the alley to “pee,” is now gone).  All alone, Green wanders past The Unexamined Life drinking establishment, sorely wishing he even wanted a drink, but he is drawn to that Hawaiian music.  He follows the music through the streets of Allston with the music reminding him of the time that he and Mildred crashed a Harvard party.

It was a Hawaiian themed party with grass skirts and whatnot.  As soon as Don Ho came over the speakers, Bruce, who had been feeling out of place to begin with, sat in front of the keg and drank nonstop until he pissed and shit himself.  He sneaked into the bathroom and removed his soiled clothes (humorously burying them under the dumptruck load of sand that was dumped into the center of the party room) then put on a grass skirt and took two trains and a bus home.  When Mildred (who was seven months pregnant) got home, she was totally pissed that he left her at a party in her condition while she was being hit on by Harvard men who said they loved fat chicks.

And but so when Green finally gets to the house with the JBL speakers in the windows blaring the Don Ho, he totally susses the party as a bunch of Nucks dancing around with Molson bottles.  But his attention is caught by Lenz, who is just two houses down.  And Green watches as Lenz gets to enact his ritual, taking out Gately’s meatloaf,  feeding it to a dog on a leash and dispatching it.  There. I’m a bit unclear if the dog is the party owners’ dog or a neighbor.  But regardless, someone in the party saw the incident.  The party-goers pile out the door and give chase to Lenz’ echoing footsteps.

Green, speechless, hugs the tree he is hiding behind, hoping to God that no one at the party thinks he’s an accomplice.

Thoughts:

Now that I’m older, I’m more disturbed by the amount of killing that goes on in this book.  Not egregiously/boycott worthy, but still.  The deaths are all rather comical in nature, but if I think about them in reality, they would be utterly tragic.

And yet I still find so much to laugh about in the book.   And every time I reach the end of  reading segment, I look forward to the next part (Oh, goodie, a section about Mario next!).

Now that I have gone back to page 17, and learned about the (more or less) end of the story, I can’t imagine how the book itself will end.  I’m pretty excited at the prospect.

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