Infinite Words: The End

Well, thanks for sticking with my vanity project. I had fun. Hope you did too! Here’s a recap of everything in case you missed out on any. Back to intermittently scheduled blogging next week.

Infinite Words: An Introduction

Infinite Words #1: Individuals

Infinite Words #2: Sex!

Infinite Words #3: More Sex!

Infinite Words #4: Things You Learn In Rehab

Infinite Words #5: Tennis

Infinite Words #6: Sports

Infinite Words #7: Things

Infinite Words #8: Telephony

Infinite Words #9: Depression

Infinite Words #10: Celebrities

Infinite Words #11: Humanity

Infinite Words #12: Drugs

Infinite Words #13: Boston

Infinite Words #14: The Future

Infinite Words #15: The Rest

Infinite Words #15: The Rest

Here’s post No. 15 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

We’re nearing the end of Infinite Words, and a few favorites couldn’t quite fit into any of the individual categories:

235
An afflated orgasm of the heart.

307
Title of an academic paper: ‘The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault”

394
Do not underestimate objects!

420
On America
‘We don’t force. It’s exactly about not-forcing, our history’s genius. You are entitled to your values of maximum pleasure. So long as you don’t fuck with mine. Are you seeing?’

504
Then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you’d ever seen them in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male-to-male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs

620
Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

981
Gately thinks sadism is pronounced ‘saddism.’

1039
It’s so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier.

Infinite Words #14: The Future

Here’s post No. 14 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

As mentioned in the intro, many think DFW is a genius. And at a few moments during the novel, he does seem rather prescient:

382
The Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it; the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and –Jihad era when – somehow even worse – there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

418
Magazines (already endangered by HD-video equivalents) got so full of those infuriating  little fall-out cards that Fourth-Class postal rates ballooned, making the e-mail of their video-equivalents that much more attractive in another vicious spiral.

529
A hidden bird twittered.

We can be thankful, however, that he was not right about everything:

177
Do I have trouble recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations? No contest.

Infinite Words #13: Boston

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.

Infinite Words #12: Drugs

Here’s post No. 12 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

Along with tennis and depression, drug abuse – related to the first two, perhaps – is a third pillar of Infinite Jest. Here’s some words on the subject:

684
[Dad had] that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it.

685
At a certain later age he started lying there when his Dad shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes go to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces always wore.

844
[He] once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left check – Bud O.’d tagged her with a left cross – until U.H.I.D. referred her to AA, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. O into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back to the front and leaving him for a male AA in Birkenstock sandals.

699
[She was] awaiting sentencing for what she describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

890
Sudden substance-cravings will rise unbidden in a true addict’s mind like bubbles in a toddler’s bath.

998
Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks’-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves, such that quiet tales sometimes go around the Boston AA community of certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering person who have pared away potential escape after potential escape until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or meditating or abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there completely motion- and escapeless until a long time later all that’s found in the empty chair is a very fine dusting of off-white ashy stuff that you can wipe away completely with like one damp paper towel.

Infinite Words #11: Humanity

Here’s post No. 11 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

We’ve covered characters in the book, and famous people. Now, several items related to human beings in general:

112
‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

291
What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

520
He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

527
The day-shift nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sot of person not to note.

554
Life has kicked his ass…It’s like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince.

610
If you asked Gately what he was feeling right this second he’d have no idea.

694
And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

973
The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it.

Infinite Words #10: Celebrities

Here’s post No. 10 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

We covered descriptions of fictional characters in the novel. Several celebrities pop up as well:

157
Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they  miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used.

796
NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects – George Will’s laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds.

944
Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorcese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen.

Infinite Words #9: Depression

Here’s post No. 9 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

Infinite Jest talks a lot about tennis. It also talks a lot about depression. Here are some passages relating, loosely, to that:

128
Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

437
On a psychiatrist
You go in there with an Issue and all she’ll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you with an interrogative lilt – ‘Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?’ ‘Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?’ ‘Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?’ ‘Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?’ ‘Having trouble keeping from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen’s?’ – all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really looks exactly the way a girl’s face looks when she’s dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room.

865
There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.

795
It has been everyone’s failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal – first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

Infinite Words #8: Telephony

Here’s post No. 8 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

Here’s another set from a single section, this one describing the rise and fall of videotelephony:

146
A traditional aural-only conversation – utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6^2) or 36 little pin holes – let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone.

148
Try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not.

150
Callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible.

Infinite Words #7: Things

Here’s post No. 7 in the Infinite Words series. An explanation, if you missed it, is here. Buy the book here. Add your personal favorites in the comments.

We covered descriptions of individuals earlier this week. Now, things:

86
The early-November day is foggy and colorless. The sky and the street are the same color.

450
Hal listened to a few minutes of the [music] and told his brother it sounded like somebody’s mind coming apart right before your ears.

454
The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back and forth overhead.

461
On a new paint job
Its black has the bottomless quality of water at night.

479
Gately’s always thought dark beer tasted like cork.

510
Avril’s office’s blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room’s shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn.

772
‘I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’

796
The sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers.

845
It’s like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.

896
The turn-signal red of the stairwell’s lit EXIT sign.

907
A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

978
It was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.