Chunklette Devoured 1

day one: pgs 1 - 204. Increasingly, the re-re-reading project (hereafter RRRP) looks to be insane. 1000 pages in five days is not the problem, which indicates quite a lot about both the number of responsibilities I have and the manner in which I dispatch them. The problem is getting something out of it . . . anyway: a few observations, replete with quotes that slay me every time. substantive propositions will be covered in another arena.

1. For me, the book starts to really hum at 172, which is the "Here is how to" section - Mario makes a film with Hal narrating the text we encounter here. It's like four pages or so, and segues into the unattributed comments from Emmet House residents during one-on-ones with Pat Montesian, another favorite of mine. Here are two snippets from Here is how to . . ., neither of which capture how thoroughly enmeshed self-discipline & like willful repression are in Hal's world.

Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is a sort of dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to
his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expctations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own dead father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.

And

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

2. Hal is reading Hamlet when Pemulis calls to confirm acquisition of the potent DMZ (171). This is, to my mind, the relevant Shakespeare text to overlay on top of IJ, despite the surface appeal of Henry V. I'm not sure what the basis for aristocracy is (talent?), but that's another story.

3. Thematic stuff: nightmares (Hal, Orin, Tracht (?)), bugs, the logic of achieving a cure through excessive exposure to/consumption of the thing that makes the cure necessary, and the byzantine connections and name droppings that never quite cohere but grow ever more tantalizing when you think something new's been discovered about the Entertainment or the interrelationships between the different plotlines and the characters driving them.



4. Toomy Doochy, the harelipped snake-owning chicken-screwing pot dealer, has become a shudder-inducing feature in my interior life, to an extent I have trouble understanding and even greater trouble eradicating. For all the love I have in my heart for Don Gately, Bruce Green, and other members of the IJ coterie, I'm not sure it's not bested by the cringe factor that comes with Doochy and other characters who haunt the story. One of the worst is the foster father who puts a Raquel Welch mask on his . . . I don't even want to describe it. Is this just par for the tragic course i.e. being dosed with significant amounts of masochism that assault you and make you cringe is part of the larger strategy of making you work, think, and feel in ways that sugar-coated, purely entertaining or "shocking" aesthetic experiences only mimic? Big question, poorly formulated, but perhaps the impetus of it translates.




5. The vignette involving Himself and his father in like 1956 is one little nugget of Wallace's ability to completely inhabit a voice, a perspective, and render it so artfully that you almost wish you could encounter it again just to get to know it a little bit better.





Music listened to during this post: Mob Deep, The Smiths, Le Tigre, Bloc Party, Black Flag, TV on the Radio, Clipse, Beta Band, Frank Sinatra ("My Way").