INFINITE JEST readalong p 902-941
It’s the penultimate post for the Infinite Jest readalong, #InfiniTC, which was supposed to end in September but had to be stretched out so people could fit this honkin’ book into life.
We remain mostly with Gately in bed, intubated, in the hospital.
pp 902-906 Don Gately had a promising football experience in high school but got kicked out for low grades, then started doing drugs regularly, and then poof, no more football.
pp 906-911. Hal again, thinking about one of his dad’s films with a droning professor. Pemulis comes in and tries to talk to Hal but it interrupted by other kids. Why the section-ending sentence, “Then this to began to seem familiar.”?
pp 911-916. Gately after HS became an enforcer for Whitey Sorkin.Though he did little enforcing once he started he couldn’t stop.
p 916. Pemulis goes to his stash but the ceiling tiles are down, the stash is gone.
pp 916-934. Don recalls how his friend Fax got caught in a scam and how he was killed. He had to drag the story out of this then girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep (echoed in the character name Shanna Mallwae-Tweep on Parks & Rec?, who are fans of the show, hence the lawyer’s office name on one of the episodes.) And Lyle appears as a wraith–can he do this if not dead?
p 934 Joelle is taken by Steeply.
pp 934-938 a horribly detailed description of what a Dilaudid binge looked like. *shudder* Ending with Don having a dream in which a sad kid (Hal) digs up something and mouths, “Too late”. (Jim’s head?)
pp 938-941 We have Steeply in the Charlie Brown narrator Qs, with Joelle’s answers, that she was in only two scenes of IJ and that any master would have been buried with Jim, who is buried in one of the overgrown parts of the Convexity.
I very deliberately did not binge and read till the end so I could try and limit my talk to just this week’s pages. Meet us back in a week and we can talk about the whole damn thing. You have questions? I have answers! Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
Next week, 11/10/15: The End!
November 2nd, 2015 at 9:50 pm
I have a question about that “digging some guy’s head up” detail, as in how exactly does that work w/ suicide by head in microwave oven. I mean, we’ve all seen what happens when you over-nuke a hot dog. I realize it works for the Hamlet theme but, yeah… 👴ðŸ»â™¨ï¸ðŸ’¥ðŸ’€
November 7th, 2015 at 9:20 pm
And can we talk about how mean spirited that dig was on poor Linda McCartney? As if being in Paul’s band was ever her idea in the first place? Yeah, plain old mean.
November 9th, 2015 at 5:56 pm
Is the slam on Linda McC in the last section of the book mitigated at all because it’s played by Bobby C, clearly a hard case and not a good guy (though he does all right by Gately) and it’s his choice, and Gately, as we do, hates it and thinks it’s cruel.