I HAVE MORE TO SAY ABOUT INFINITE JEST.
I told Gaby; she said, “UGHH!! What more could you possibly say!?”
I said, “well, it is an 1100 page book. . .”1
She said, “write about me!!!”
Sorry, Gaby.
“HORATIO, TELL ME ONE THING.”
WHY READ BIG BOOKS?
1
THE WACKEST argument for reading is that books are good for you. I’m gonna tell you the truth: reading books, —especially great ones, — is BAD FOR YOU.
It’s fucking time-consuming as all hell, it’ll wise you to the crunching stasis of the world, <— it’ll get you using phrases like that: thencely alienating you from your contemporaries, morassing you in melancholy;
—I once visited Trotsky’s house in Mexico City, bro was fortressed in there tight; daily: reading & writing 10 hours a day (!);
a dude broke in and murdered him with an axe ;
I wonder if Trotsky thought, as he was valiantly fighting for his life: maybe I should’ve devoted myself to frippery instead: CDMX whores, maybe, or cocaine, —
—
. . . why would you waste your time, in 2025, with entertainment that isn’t perfectly tailored to YOU!?
DIVE INTO THE ALGORITHM! Lay back, open your gullets: be stuffed with delicious confections all day long. You will never be bored.
You will never have to think about what you’re inhaling:
it’ll be over in 15 to 90 seconds; thereby saving your brain energy for extraction by your corporate overlords!2
2
THEN YOU get something like Infinite Jest; the audiobook’s 64 hours long;
I read slow and go back and reread sentences and paragraphs frequently, I’m sure the book took me at least 70 hours to read.
When, in your life, do you ever spent 70 hours focusing on a single thing?
I think literature is the supreme art form bc it’s completely made of thinking: no other art demands as much participation as a great work of literature;
plus, the learning curve is STEEP! If Ulysses is the first book you ever pick up you’re gonna be fucking dazeder than a shucked oyster.3
Also, not every long book is a big ass book: —a big ass book to me is one of them ones we used to call canonical i.e. a testament to human thinking that’s essential to preserve & engage with; if, and only if, you’re interested in. . . — — —
humanity? life? language? — — —
3
WHAT EXACTLY? What does it do? What is the point?
I struggle to articulate exactly what it is; personally I think literature is very entertaining;
I get bored with other stuff. I watch TV, sure.
I was all-in on The Summer I Turned Pretty, tuning in weekly, eagerly, with Gaby. But also, the easy fun in that is dialectical: talking shit, pshawing. But it also gets to the point where I’m like, I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
It’s a spiritual/aesthetic/ethical impatience; . . .
this week I tried to listen to the new 688 page Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets (2025) b/c I’m a fan of The Da Vinci Code (2003),
but eventually I had to turn it off b/c he’s writing sentences like:
Robert Langdon woke up in the Four Seasons hotel and looked over at slippers monogrammed R.L. and thought to himself: Gee, it’s good to be a world famous symbologist.
4
IS IT THINKING? Is that the ~thing~ ?
It’s hard not to think we’re becoming a collective mealy mush,
not worms: worms are wonderful, purposeful, whole creatures, they do do do endlessly & selflessly;
we’re becoming a society of sidewalk vomit: useless, disgusting.
The fear at the heart of Infinite Jest is giving yourself completely away to something that gives you nothing permanent back in return; one of the aims of the book is to bring a Dostoevskian sincerity back into the American novel:
Dostoevsky believed the Christian God was the thing you submit yourself to completely and get everything back in return.
But is that kind of exchange: complete submission for complete gratification even possible? Was it ever?
“WHERE BE HIS QUIDDITIES NOW?”
DYSFUNCTIONAL MEN
5
A BIG PART of my job as a boxing coach is managing the emotions of rich wimps, and I never really have friction with any of my clients;
but this week, one of the most melancholy, anxious wimps in my stable returned from a week in Mexico4;
he told me that he had decided to quit boxing b/c he was lying to himself about “being a real boxer” and in the two remaining sessions with me, he wanted me to beat the shit out of him so he could prove to himself he could take it.
I was like, “bro, chill. . .”
. . . we did spar, which we’ve done before, and I was hitting him a bit harder with a jab to the body; —nothing to the head. He was getting exhausted & frustrated. But he was hitting me with some solid body shots. He’s a big guy: 6’5 230.
I told him he hit me with some nice shots; he said, “you’re just saying that so you can get me to buy more sessions.”
I felt like he was completely misunderstanding everything we were doing;
did he think he was gonna be a world champion when he started training with me once a week at 50 years old?
He’s pissed he can’t beat me up. I was like, “dude, you’re a lawyer. I don’t come into your office, look at a stack of papers and then throw my hands up in the air like, I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS!”
—
I wanna connect this reality problem to a lack of engagement with great literature, —that would make finding my thesis much easier,
—but my dude literally just finished reading Absalom, Absalom;
he got a real literature habit, but his attitude toward reality is one I’d think, ideally, literature should probably ameliorate:
morosity, frustration, denial. . .
. . . maybe I’m wrong. . .
6
MARS MUST’VE been doing a fucking whirligig or something: it really felt like beef-week.
I had my oldsters in to spar : — — — let me say chronologically-challenged gentleman bc I was in hot water elder-abuse wise, — — —
Steve who I’ve been training forever, and Howard, from Gleason’s, who’s the same age as Steve, 76, and also wants to fight; . . .
To commemorate their sparring session, I made a Instagram reel of the whole thing. I called it OLD MAN SPARRING :
I was gonna call it SEPTUAGENARIAN PUGILISM, but I didn’t thing the algorithm would latch on to that turn of phrase.
I thought it was a cool, fun video, celebrating the fact that these crazy fucks are getting into the ring,
I sent it to them both beforehand, but I didn’t tell them I was posting it. Howard texted me back: “who you calling OLD )lol (thanks for the video/,,,)”,
and I didn’t hear from Steve until hours later when he commented on the video: UNAUTHORIZED.
And then some random dude, concurrently, commented that I was ridiculing Steve.
That surprised & frazzled me, so I texted Steve. He texted me back a long message, saying that he didn’t put in all this time & work for 3 years just to be ridiculed as an old man. . .
That shook me up. I’ve been training Steve for FREE for years! I love the dude; I respect what he’s trying to do, —5.
—
I almost got into a fight with a member of the gym b/c he called Steve a fucking creep after Steve said to him after he stepped out of the shower: “All clean?”
I’ve been protecting this dude!
What incited Steve’s anger is that he ran into a former boyfriend in the park, and he showed him the video, and the guy told Steve that I was ridiculing him;
and the guy said the same to his 250k followers on Instagram, telling them to come after me and defend Steve.
It had the opposite effect in that it blew the video up, and I think, proved, based on people’s overwhelmingly positive reactions, that they correctly interpreted what I was going for: they were impressed by Steve & Howard’s gusto.
I think what ailed Steve most of all, seeing the video:
he didn’t like seeing himself as “old” participating in real human sparring that maybe didn’t look like Crawford vs Canelo.
7
HAMLET HAS a serious reality problem.
I think that the naiveness implicit in my thinking so far is that somehow, engaging with big ass books will cure you of a delusional attitude toward reality:
help you make peace with & love your life.
But here’s Hamlet, the most literary, literate character of all time; he sees everything too clearly: he despises it;
his lucidity is absolutely terminal: he kills everybody around him.
More & more I think Hamlet is a problem; not just literarily, but a bedrock blight on Western civilization.
His reaction to perfect vision is a nihilistic tsunami of invention that he hopes wipes out generations; like he says to Ophelia:
Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. Why should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves — believe none of us.
His response to what he knows about existence is a desperate desire for non-existence.
The infinite jest at the heart of Hamlet is LIFE; life is a sick joke, and the only sensible reaction is death;
Infinite Jest’s relationship to Hamlet goes much deeper than just the allusion of the title; Hamlet’s deleterious tentacles are deeply inside the whole book.6
—
left a comment on last week’s post that gets at the heart of the dual perniciousness of DFW & Hamlet:more than a brain worm, a brain octopus, a way of allowing your mind to become disgustingly expansive, regardless of its subject matter. . . this sort of carnivalesque devilish growth infects your own brain.
Hamlet piles invention upon invention, and Infinite Jest does the same; but I think that maybe all this invention that ends in despair is poisonous. . .
8
MY FAVORITE UNCLE was Luis Henrique; we called him Kiko.
He had a literally Don-Quixotic approach to reality; enforcing his delusions on the world to extremely successful effect.
In 1999, he was working at Berlitz in Rio, teaching English.
He decided he’d had enough of Brasil and wanted to move to New York. So he told everybody at work that he had a brain tumor, and that he was dying.
He was well-liked; everybody banded together to raise money for his treatment.
He raised enough money to comfortably leave the country and start his new life.
You understand he didn’t have a brain tumor, right?
He blew up his life in New York, eventually of course, because that’s what he always did. Used 9/11 as an excuse to flee his marriage, and then ended up living in Weirton WV.
He was sick of the United States and wanted to find a way back. . .
he met this woman online, a Brasilian woman who lived in Japan; he was very good with woman because he was handsome, and everything he said was a lie.
He quit his job (he was never very industrious), so that he could comfortably spent all night chatting with her, on Japan time.
Eventually, he convinced her to leave her husband and meet him in São Paulo; he left Weirton in a haste (I’m pretty sure he tried to set his apartment on fire) and he met up with her in São Paulo, at her parents’ house.
It was a disaster. After a week in São Paulo, he said fuck it, stole her dad’s car, and moved back to Rio.
He strolled right back into Berlitz, told them that he was miraculously cured of the brain tumor, and they gave him his job back.
There were never any consequences for any of this. . .
He died in 2020 at the age of 53 of a broken heart: what my mom calls liver cirrhosis.
9
WHAT IS the right way to be in relation to the Truth?
How do we get there?
“WHERE’S YOUR FATHER?”
GOOD SONS
10
MARIO INCANDENZA is the only character in Infinite Jest who has a positive relationship with reality.
He’s the disabled son of Avril and her half-or-step brother Charles Tavis (born of a not-so-secret but still occluded affair b/t the two);
he serves as the Holy Fool of the book: in a way that’s so obvious that if it wasn’t for DFW’s sincerity crusade, one might almost read it as ironic. . .
The clearest incidence of this is in a story we get about Barry Loach, one of the tennis coaches at E.T.A. Barry,
challenges his brother to let him prove somehow that the basic human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother’s present depressed condition was leading him to think.
The brother challenges Barry to pretend to be homeless, stand outside the subway begging someone, anyone, to touch his hand and like, acknowledge his existence in that tactile human way.
Nobody does. Until Mario comes thru and naively,
extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand. . .
What allows the Holy Fool to act righteously, Christianly, is a lack of information: a naivety about the world.
There is something good, for DFW &, I think, the real model for this book: Dostoevsky, in being naive.
What I’m wondering, I think, is how we can have Hamlet’s awareness, and be righteous. . .
(or at least, functional). . .
11
MARIO’S ANALOGUE is Alyosha Karamazov7:
the righteous son of the drunk, inconstant, murdered Fyodor Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
Alyosha & Mario share something unusual in the world of both their novels: they have a constant, present father. Alyosha’s father is God almighty (lucky for him),
—but, more vitally, his earthly patrimorph is Father Zosima, who provides him with much-needed guidance & stability, something his brothers never ever get from their biological father.
Mario’s biological father won’t speak to him, but, unlike everyone else in the book, he actually bonds with Jim Incandenza over film-making:
basically being the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart’s final and best-loved love, lurching gamely but not pathetically to keep up with the tall stooped increasingly bats man’s slow patient two-meter stride. . .
The heaven Mario devotes himself to filmmaking and he has a stable guide to show him how to be a patriot to that heaven; he asks Hal early in the book if he felt God’s presence when he was playing tennis,
I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there. . .
bc Mario feels God’s presence when he’s shooting with his camera; but Hal is not naive enough for belief,
So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I. . .
Hal, guideless, purposeless, fatherless, anti-death is grimly primed for despair or fascism (which, like drug addiction, fills your void with something noxious);
either perniciousness will step in to rule his life, or nothing will except darkness. . .
He needs someone (like Gately, maybe. . . ) to tell him, like Alyosha tells the boys at the end of The Brothers Karamazov,
Oh, boys, my dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!
“WHO DOES IT THEN?”
THE WORD KNOWN TO ALL MEN
12
AVRIL INCANDENZA is trying to induce a kind of Holy Foolishness in her children; something Hal almost realizes, quite perspicaciously,
(and here I disagree with the narrator w/r/t Hal’s insight into his mother’s psyche),
Despite himself (and showing a striking lack of insight into his Moms’s psyche), Hal fears that Avril sees Mario as the family’s real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type, a very rare and shining thing, even if his intuition — slow and silent — scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each A.M. without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry.
But Mario’s real talent is naivety; that’s not something you can induce without completely distorting someone’s reality.
I was wrong in part one when I sardonically said Avril’s big fault is she loves her boys too much. That’s not true.
Her big fault is her dishonesty, and her resistance to impose reality on her sons.
We get the most egregious scene exemplifying that in footnote 2698;
Kevin Bain, an old friend of Orin’s who was always around the Incandenzas, tells us a harrowing tale of one day, right after Orin got his license, he took the family Volvo out for a whirl forgetting that Avril used to leash the family dog to the car,
Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S.Johnson was attached to it.
When they returned home and faced Avril, Orin just lied, and even though Avril loved this dog with all her heart,
Not only was there no punishment or even visible pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment increased. And all this was coupled with elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral arrangements and moments of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin,
for fear that he might see that the Moms was hurt and so feel bad or guilty, so that in his presence Mrs. Inc became even more cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign, even suggesting in oblique ways that life was now somehow suddenly better without the dog, that some kind of unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed from her neck.
(This scene is perfectly exemplary of the aesthetic travesty it is not to get Avril’s perspective. . .)
Avril wants to keep her children protected in a perpetual womb:
allowing her to be the perfect nurturer, and, she thinks, keeping Orin & Hal from ever having to face the cruel realities of the real world.9
Oddly, as clear as this psychological state of Avril’s appears to be,
—and this is another reason why I think the narrator (& DFW, if they are different) doesn’t have a good grip on her, —
the narrator, seeming very much like the author speaking thru Hal, ostensibly posits that the answer is indeed more infancy,
Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of feat of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic,
is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool.
One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
This is DFW at his worst;
this strikes me as a horrible misdiagnosis: irony is the rot at the heart of American culture, and not the very thing Hal ‘despises’ and should rightly despise:
this time-hating, life-denying, yearn to return to the womb.
13
I WAS THINKING about the implicit desire undergirding this whole essay:
an anti-Hamletian, life-celebrating, adult art of acceptance that requires a massive amount of your attention & devotion and rewards it handsomely;
it occurs to me that the answer is so obvious: Ulysses. . .
It’s interesting how much, structurally, Infinite Jest is a failed Ulysses, maybe knowingly so; we have our melancholy prince Hal/Stephen, our older, wiser man Gately/Bloom who could falstaff our young Prince to maturity:
but Gately & Hal never meet on the page. . . there’s a meeting alluded to, but it has no impact in preventing Hal’s final silence; his ultimate denial of the world. . .
with Leopold Bloom we get one of the most functional men in literature:
he’s a shitting perverted cuck10, sure, but he also exemplifies the greatest feature of Christianity, —in that utterly blasphemous book, —
that Infinite Jest, despite its overwhelming tacit Christianity has no time for: agape.
There’s just a paucity of love for the world all thru-out Infinite Jest.
Bloom & his narrator Jim Joyce form a perfect world-loving concord; Joyce uses his pure lucidity. . . (never forget his blindness & his daughter Lucia) . . . and whirls a world even more inventive than Hamlet could muster:
and the invention adds up to an additive vision: the attitude imbuing the whole book:
YES to the world; and it seems to me now that what I can’t stomach about Infinite Jest is that this book and its author gives us, despite his best efforts,
an unequivocal NO. . .
There is a moment, though, where you can almost see another glimmer;
it’s the most Joycean moment in these 1079 pages. Gately’s being spoken to by the ghost of Jim Incandenza, and the ghost blows his nose11:
The wraith blows his nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs. . . the wraith opens and examines the hankie just like an alive person can never fail but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out.
The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame. The wraith confesses that he had, at one point, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence. But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging.
This is the most Joycean moment of the book because the wraith blowing his nose & shrugging is something Dante would do:
the snot-nosed, purgatorial, now nameless Jim Incandenza, blowing his nose & forgiving Avril. . . ,
then disappearing into the depth of this dark testament. . .
I’m not sure how much I understand any of this, but I have no more to say.
I NEED TO GO OUTSIDE & READ SMTHG BY A GIRL!
It’s 1079 pages, but you know DFW turned in like a 1700 page version; DFW mentions specifically one moment that his editor Michael Pietsch wanted to cut but he insisted stay in; it’s when Orin, a punter for the Arizona Cardinals is flying in off the top of the stadium dressed as a Cardinals, as the players make their big entrance for the game:
He doesn’t loop or spiral like the showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding equivalent of snowplowing, unspectacular and aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings’ nylon clatters in an updraft; ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising.
I hate this brief part so much and think it’s so stupid & ridiculous & lame. If the sections of the book that were cut share anything of this tone, then we were spared a slog.
And if you wanna truncate your active time on earth even more, plug in to a six hour podcast; the inane babble is liable to sunder your true life expectancy, make it even unhealthier, than chain-smoking cigarettes! I fear arriving at the pearly gates and being shown the numerical mountain of hours I spent listening to the Bill Simmons Podcast on 1.5x speed, drooling, on the train. . .
What?
Where he was trying to eradicate his internal demons via hallucinogenic mushroom therapy, and I hate to say it, but it seems to have had the complete opposite effect: frazzling the demons & increasing the volume of his self-deleterious din
All I get out of it is a spot twice a month on his show at Broadway Comedy Club, which is almost more of a punishment than anything
Pause.
I was trying to find this scene everywhere; I remembered it so vividly as one of the most important scenes in the book and I flipped thru the whole main text 981 pages twice and couldn’t find it; then I asked ChatGPT where this scene was and they said it wasn’t in the book and I was arguing with it, thinking I was going crazy. And then I remembered, it was in the footnotes! I found it and Chat GPT still kept trying to convince me that it wasn’t in there.
Sounds like Affluenza. . .
Aren’t we all?
the ChatGPT pulls are fucking hilarious—" 'Infinite Jest' is one of those books where it's easy to feel gaslight by your own memory..." is such an elite gaslighting move; I'd have to hide this from an ex so she couldn't learn any new techniques.
I went back to your last post, and I broadly agree with this one more than the last. I've been thinking about the opening scene of the novel, one of my favorites, and how it has started to seem like a secularized version of the scene in TBK where Ivan believes he is being visited by the Devil—Hal feels lucid, rational, eloquent, but is actual bestial and incomprehensible. It's chronologically the end of the book, and it's a complete meltdown separating the exterior and the interior, and I think it shows the corrosiveness of being someone like Hal (or Ivan), and the trap of believing you are the Cartesian Subject. If you embrace that dualism, your body will reject your mind. I think IJ sort of gets at this point via contrapositive, vs Ulysses does it more constructively, at least how I read it. Bloom had to humble himself and embrace the baseness of existence, and Stephen *needs* to do that, or he might end up like Hal.
Great post!!!
Steve’s reality problem is that there are two kinds of people: those who want to lift you up and those who want to take you down, and Steve hasn’t encountered enough of the latter. When you’re new to boxing you meet a lot of the former, which is part of what makes it so great. But boxing is a combat sport and if you want to succeed you need those people who want to take you down. My reality problem is I’m 57 and the oldest bro at my boxing gym. Am I Steve? Yeah, probably.