Here’s post No. 13 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.
Anecdotal evidence suggests this blog has a reasonable number of readers with connections to the city of Boston. Infinite Jest takes place in Boston. Here’s some stuff about your city:
152
Harde, the well-loved old janitor was laid off from Boston College for contracting narcolepsy.
240
Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical corporate, and spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue and separating Brighton from Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton’s ribs and its fist sunk into Allston…with the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential and mercantile properties.
296
A city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and fealty.
476
Blanchard’s Liquors
1034
Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience is so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to go anywhere near it.
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