Blogging DFW 13

I’m on page 950. 

This is an entirely self-indulgent blogging project, meant mostly for myself; I’m just trying to do it.

Right now two important things are happening . .  .

1.     Gately is hospitalized, trying to resist Demerol for serious pain, and we’re getting a trip down his memory lane.

2.     Hal gets a whole, big first person point of view section.

Listening for the lovely moments:

HOW ONE WALKS IN THE CITY: “Lenz walked by with urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn’t.”

LIFE IN REHAB: “Marathe and the others were invited to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee.”

WHEN YOU MEET SMART-ASS PRETENTIOUS TYPES: “. . . the sort of guy . . that knew how to long-divide and say whom but didn’t even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages.”

I think the only two characters I feel fully engaged with are Gately and Joelle. Joelle’s story of bringing Orrin home to Kentucky, her father’s unnatural affection for her, and her mother’s breaking point are amazing. Beginning on page 793 and continuing . . . ending, tragically, in the chemical disfigurement of Joelle and the suicide of the mother.

GATELY HOSPITALIZED: “ . . . each breath was a hard decision. . .”

RE: THE TENNIS KIDS WATCHING PORN: “bombed by their own glands—they were pop-eyed at the prospect . .  .”

A COUPLE INSTANCES OF GOLD: “. . .shaken him like a margarita . . .”

“Yes, she did look witchy, but who over fifty didn’t?”

“[the sexy nurse] comes over and puts a cool soft hand on Gately’s forehead in a way that makes the forehead want to die with shame . . .”

MORE CRAZY INFO ON FILM AUTEUR J. O. INCANDENA’S “LETHALLY ENTERTAINING” FILM CALLED “INFINITE JEST”:

This is from Molly Notkin . . .

 “ . . it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated square of color . . . sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.”

“—That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and foe reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden.”

“That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge . . . and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represenred little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether . . .”

“That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur’s widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin’s heard the woman didn’t have much interest in any agendas larger than her own neurotic agendas. . .”

“ . . the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate.”

“and it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations od Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, eminently photogenic to boot . . . apparently a realrestaurant-silencer0type-beauty even in her late forties.”

Notkin “testifies” that the film might’ve had less to do with lofty theoretical mumbo-jumbo, “but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromosome . . . including possibly with the Autuer’s son.”

Joelle also “testifies”? She says of Incandenza, “He’d stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn’t take it but he’d made a promise.” She says, “There wasn’t anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something too perfect. But as a joke.” She continues, “I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too leathally beautiful for people to stand . . . I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim had a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke.”