February 2012
3 posts
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1 tag
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“We are all of us dying of boredom,” the woman was saying. “That is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of the why. Boredom.”
“The younger ones are dying of freedom,” Otto said in a voice flattened by restraint…
“The young will save us,” the woman said. “It’s the young, thank the dead God, who will save...
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This, my dear, is what they call
eternity, my dear, and we’re standing
at it’s edge, my dear, see here,
we can watch our words, my dear,
(be them harsh, a salvos of sleet,
or a sadly falling snow)
spiral away, from our mouths
(no, dear, don’t look down),
into that infinite sepia below.
December 2011
19 posts
2 tags
…and the tide was way out.
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“…for who would want to live in a city whose soldier-police were unjust and intemperate cowards?”
—Plato, The Republic, Book II
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And so but...
For reasons that I hope are obvious, this has more or less become an Infinite Jest/David Foster Wallace tribute blog for the time being. I have seventy pages left to go in the 981-page book (1079 with endnotes), and considering how long it’s taken me, and how overwhelmed I’ve often become not just with its sprawling length but with the demands of its density, that I’m now feeling...
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The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in. I had researched this…just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.
…
I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened...
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It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or...
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marijuana.
It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning. The implied question, then, would be whether it had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling.
—Infinite...
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drugs.
A somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum. Chest rises and falls on its own, far away. The easy squeak of your head’s blood is like bedsprings in the friendly...
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If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron...
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He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen…everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present...
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He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second—less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since...
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Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life…Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next...
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No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.
—Infinite Jest, pg. 839
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His last resort: entertainment. Making something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The...
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Are they words if they’re only in your head, though?
—Infinite Jest, pg. 837
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Infinite Jest about Infinite Jest in Infinite Jest
…it wasn’t just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment…the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always...
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“My feelings of fear and despicability only increased…I lived and moved in the shadow of something dark that hovered just overhead.”
—Infinite Jest, pg. 813
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“Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter.”
—Infinite Jest, pg. 812
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“And I was reveling in the fraud of it, the discovery of the gift…I was flushed with adrenaline. I had tasted power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts.”
—Infinite Jest, pg. 811
We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete…what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human.
—Infinite Jest,...
November 2011
9 posts
3 tags
They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.
—Infinite Jest, pg. 1078 (Note #324)
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Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and always will. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.
—Infinite Jest, pg. 738
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“It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.”
—Infinite Jest, pg. 592
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Autumn Exuent
Aesthetically, it’s been a rather unsatisfying fall. It seemed as if the trees put off changing color until the very last moment, until they had to give in and undress themselves like estranged lovers whose passion has been dulled by repetition and familiarity and no longer feel compelled to ritual. But that could have just been me; maybe I’m remembering forgone foliage as being...
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It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, pg. 566
1 tag
“I saw no god, nor heard any, in a finite
organical perception; but my senses discovered the infinite
in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain
confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice
of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.”
—William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
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“We dance round a ring and suppose,
but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
—Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits”
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“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses
October 2011
6 posts
5 tags
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When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive...
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WatchWonder Showzen S. 1
Wall St, who did you exploit today?
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“Son, it was more than a father’s voice, carrying. My mother cried out. It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open. I may have to burp, belch, son, son, telling you what I learned, son, my…my love,...
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Occupy Wall Street
Some signs I liked and copied down during my visit to Liberty Square last week:
“For the lives we’ve been forced to endure…no mercy for bankster scum.”
“Arm the hungry.”
“Question the gods and prophets of capitalism.”
“Jesus was a Marxist.”
“De-control, De-control—we’ve been shit on far too long.”
“Bienvenidos a la revolución.”
“Stop the war on the poor.”
“They pee on us, they say it’s...
September 2011
4 posts
3 tags
“May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to plan.”
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
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“I am allergic to this planet.”
—Jean Pierre Duprey to a friend, calmly, three days before committing suicide.
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all the metronomes have melted
in the stagnant summer months
and we can’t keep a beat
to save our lives
though our spines are loose
and our fists tight
ba-dum-dum-dum bop
ba-dum-dum-dum bop
I’m sick of moaning
for my masculinity
I want to scream, like him,
for the lost spirit of man
while
stomping up and down the stairs
and then charging
into the living room,
and...
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“You’re literate, so words are what you feel. Then you’re struck dumb. To which love can you speak the words that mean dying and going insane and the relentless futility of the real?”
—“They Accuse Me of Not Talking”, Hayden Carruth
August 2011
1 post
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July 2011
3 posts
4 tags
“…wouldn’t you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition? Perhaps? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Just for once? Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively....
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what exactly has been lost we cannot determine but the silence tells us yes, yes, something has been stolen squeak, squeak, concur the starving vermin
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June 2011
9 posts
2 tags
…But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish with his own generation.
“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us, our home is where we are not,” said Monsignor.
“I am sorry—”
“No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
“Well—”
...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/nyregion/gay-marr... →
Proud to be a New Yorker (finally).
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“Oisive jeunese, a tout asservie; par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.”
“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
—Rimbaud
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