Infinite Jestation (A Blogthrough): Pages 243-312

In which O. talks to Hal about separatism and suicide (p. 242-258; p. 1007-1021), the ETA boys play at Port Washington (p. 258-270), we meet more of the Ennet House members (like Emil Minty aka yrstruly, p. 270-281), we learn of Orin's career-changing love affair (p. 283-299), catch up with a really poor Poor Tony (p. 299-306), and sit in on the crazy prorector classes (p. 306-312).

Not that I disbelieved, but yes, for whatever slow spots there are, the novel is now in full swing. James O. Incandenza's filmography (Footnote 24) starts to taken on greater significance (have we met Hugh G. Rection yet?), but more importantly, the emotional ramifications of what seemed to be glossed over moments now come into play. Given the context of what we know, some of these sections are arguably exposition, but if so, they're an example of how to use exposition, and playwrights should take note of the conversation between Orin and Hal. (Not just the fact that Orin's being trailed by the Wheelchair Assassins, and being interviewed by--assumedly--Hugh Steeply's female cover, Helen.) For a book that's so dense with language, some of the most telling moments slip in via the "..." silences, and Hal's half-attention is a clear indicator for just how hurt he was by his older brother's choice to more-or-less abandon the family. Of course, it's also an indicator of how heartless Orin's become, so much so that he needs to crib notes on his father's death off of Hal--who we learn discovered his father's literally exploded corpse--and ironically that Hal, in turn, cribbed his own notes, plagiarizing his own grief, albeit in the same way that Struck (footnote 304) winds up doing just as much work if not more, needing to use signposts to avoid feeling as if he's all alone.

The tennis section at Port Washington is full of charm, and there's tenderness behind the tarps--see Pemulis and his partner Schacht and their easy camaraderie--although there's not an inch of yield on the court itself (as exemplified by John Wayne, who is the same on and off).

Meanwhile, in the Ennet House, Geoffrey Day (Footnote 90) raises a rather valid point about the catch-22 of addiction: If you acknowledge that you have a problem, then you belong in AA--but if you don't have a problem, then you're in denial, and then you really need to be in AA. But if Day's right--ignoring that he's clearly trying to find a way to get thrown out of the program so that he can say it wasn't his fault--then what's fascinating is that Wallace is positing that we are all addicted/flawed, that we all suffer this dis-ease . . . but that in fact, from this, we are actually united--united in struggle, just like the Wheelchair Assassins, say, or their younger, train-dodging selves. Call it fraternal, if you like, and make life into a universal hazing, but is there anything that can unite us more, ultimately, than empathy? Given Wallace's commencement speech, I'm inclined to believe that's the direction he's taking here, the fine lining being that you can't be kicked out of Anonymous meetings, and that for all our faults, we're still human, no matter how inhumanly we act.

Again, there's more charming exposition as we see a softer side of Orin, falling for Joelle van Dyne--who we now see really is deformed, by how "grotesquely lovely" she is--or as DFW puts it, the Actaeon Complex she evokes, in which men are repulsed from her perfection. On the sadder side, we see the tiniest glimmer of this relationship's end, especially as Dyne--on Orin's introduction--starts working as a apres-garde filmmaker herself. But of special notice in this section is our first real sense of Charles Tavis, who breaks into this section (p. 286-288). This is the real trick of Wallace's writing, in that he doesn't change from third-person, or even break up the paragraph; instead, he just uses the sort of self-identifying language that you can positively hear on an unctuous guy like Tavis. Notice just how many bases Tavis covers in off-setting any potential wrong-doing on his part, all of which only serves to make him look all the seedier:

Well someone had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absense of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose replacement was naturally, naturally going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can't get mad at a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to assume the stress of filling in as anger-object than that dead man's thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic assistant and replacement, whose upstairs room was right next to the HmH's master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper.

Another note in this section is the way in which Orin winds up on the football team. DFW writes this bit with bone-crushing glee, and it's worth noting that the underlying philosophy that he approaches so savagely (perhaps because he felt savaged by it) was that "What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life." In other words, cliches get to be cliches because they're true, and the truth here is that the only thing we can really control in our life is how we look at life itself (again, empathy). Now, you could argue that if not for Orin's years training in an obscure tennis style (Eschuteon), he never would have been able to kick the way he did, and yet . . . Orin makes it perfectly clear that he felt he had no control over his childhood, which is part of why he left. (Avril, by this point, is pretty well established as the uber-guilt-tripping mom.)

One final bit here is the importance of context--namely, relativity. As Orin switches careers and explains his stance to those around him, he ends up lying about a lot of it. And yet, as we'll see here, truth, like Orin's talent in tennis, is subjective depending on who hears it. In fact, given that Wallace--in a book of fiction--bothers to point out that his characters are telling further fictions sort of gives further emphasis to what others have pointed out to be a positively Derridan way of thinking--especially with the jumbled narrative, and multiple names for identical characters, all of which cause to make assumptions and then rethink those assumptions when given another glimpse of the same reality down the road. Now, assuming that time is an infinite line, and that as we move further along that line, the things behind us change shape and meaning, is there ever any given moment at which something will be indisputable "truth" for then and forever more?

The next section gives a clear example of this. When we first hear of Poor Tony--not by name--he's described as a purse-snatcher who has accidentally swiped not a purse, but a container for the world's first exterior heart. (Coincidence that he's an inadvertant murderer, like Don Gately?) Our reaction is pure disgust, though Tony--we learn--is wracked with guilt over it. When we meet Tony proper, we think he's a spineless wimp, especially as yrstruly describes him--the sort of guy willing to let his friends shoot tainted heroin, just so he can see if it is, in fact, tainted. Again, we feel disgust for him. And yet, when the camera shifts to focus on him, so to speak, at his absolute lowest (and then lower, and lower, and lower--infinitely so, eh?), Wallace leaves us with no choice but to feel empathy for Poor Tony's absolute squalor. Sure, he's made choices that brought him to this point, but he's still a thinking human being--again, you can't be kicked out of humanity. All the people on the train look away from him, and I myself would do the same--and yet, reading about it, having context and words, these things provoke that raw emotion, that empathy, that we must train ourselves not to shut out. What would the world be like if we could all put ourselves into a man's shit- and piss-covered shoes?

One final, sad observation--and again, a matter of perspective. A woman commits suicide, and it just so happens that her act of desperation reveals and thwarts the dastardly actions of the
Quebocois terrorism-by-mirrors. It's described here as an act that "SMASHED THE ILLUSION." Is her suicide now more acceptable? I shudder to think.

Pre-Disposal

One can only extend the benefit of the doubt so far. We start out hoping for the best of Pre-Disposal, that there's a reason why two small-time dealers, the energetic Rob X (Paul Pryce) and his gruff associate George (DK Bowser), are shooting the breeze on a ripped-out car seat in the middle of Bed-Stuy if they really owe $15,000 on a lost shipment. And we assume that Rob D (Joe Mullen) can't possibly be the naive Williamsburg hipster he appears to be, that he must in fact have some reason for getting sucked into X's aimless spiel, what turns out be a convenient pitch for a TV miniseries about life on the "streets." Something Must Be Up, given all the ominous phone calls D keeps ignoring, and the whispers George keeps passing X's way.

Not so. John Prescod isn't a playwright so much as he is a filibusterer; he's bluffing his way through the first act, hoping that the slinging of enough street-slang will somehow take on Substance and Significance. Director Joshua Luria covers this up for as long as he can, but when they're forced to show their hand in the second act--X is not only a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, but he was involved in the attack! Elyse (Deborah Green), a very obvious plant (naive, clumsy white girl with a baby carriage in Tompkins Park after dark) is actually some sort of agent sent to watch X! D isn't actually a film student at all, but a con artist looking for a way out!--suffice to say the whole house of cards collapses so completely that there aren't even any cards left.

It's not just the script that falls apart, either. Eric Alba and Joshua Luria establish a nice set for the first act, with very up-to-date graffiti (RIP MJ) on the burnt out wood walls of a squat house, and there's trash everywhere but the garbage can. However, in the second act, a park bench in joined by a table that's actually a bureau, as well as two ornate wooden chairs (hell, I'd have stolen those). More incongruous are the shifts in lighting, which occur mid-sentence, not to mention the flat-out awful fight choreography from Montgomery Sutton--it's bad enough they're using a rubber plank, but to see the otherwise menacing Bowser having to swing it "like a girl" is just flat-out embarrassing. The only thing that acts the way it should is Amanda Jenks's basic costuming: it's the only thing you might actually see in the real world.

As for the acting, the problem is that you can tell it's acting. Bowser and Pryce posture far more than their real-world counterparts would need to, and though Pryce is rather good storyteller--charismatic and engaging--he's no Rumpelstiltskin: the straw lines he's given remain just that. D constantly presses X to find a hook to his narrative, to find something new, as the sad truth is that seeing a man's head blown off by a point-blank sawed-off shotgun is old school. When X provides him with that original twist (the 9/11 crap), D realizes that he's being fucked with, and gouges X's eye out. Good thing the audience isn't as violent as D, considering that X's story is Prescod's story; Pre-Disposal is the sort of awful play you wish you could punish.

Haunted House

There are no multimedia screens, no experimental dance breaks, no tricky narrative surprises; compared to most new American plays, Daniel Roberts's Haunted House is positively "analog." Or at least, that's the word that Lucy (Diana Cherkas), a tech reporter, uses to describe the Dunn family--Cy (Jordan Charney), Peter (Jason Altman), and Wendy (Meghan Miller)--though in her distinctive lingo, she means this in a quant, charming, and yes--"beautiful"--way. Her arrogant boyfriend, Moses (Jason Blaine), puts it more directly: "You guys are so fucking real; it's sort of disconcerting." All of these descriptions apply not only to the Dunns and their haunted house, which represents a fast-fading and more innocent past--but to Roberts's script, which outs him as one of the most talented traditional dramatists working today.

If you were to relive the seminal moments of your childhood, your cynical modern self might easily dismiss them for their cheesiness. But Haunted House treats the past with respect, respectfully preserving the familiar odors and the time-honored dust, taking pride in what others dismiss as pedestrian and ordinary. Roberts understands that what we assume to be irrelevant is far from meaningless, and so he evokes a genuine sorrow, the sort comes from losing hold of what we don't even realize is precious. He also finds the most elegant ways of putting it, as when Lucy compares loneliness to "a single gig of RAM," or when Wendy describes magic as the way "the molecules that separate everything from everything" just disappear when she touches her lover.

A good haunted house is only as good as its ability to secret away its gears, and this is where Brian Ziv's direction plays such a vital role. He embeds every object on stage--from the plastic scythe to the static columns of Dominos--with real life. He finds nice parallels too, from the way he uses Julia Noulin-Merat's set to look in through the windows of both the actual Dunn house, and their haunted one, showing the time-worn hauntings of each. Above all, he heightens the terrific dialogue by ensuring that the actors each bring quirks to their role, from the way Charney's Cy sweeps up his ghoul's cowl with generations of grand English tradition behind him, to the way that Blaine's Moses never wastes a movement, bearing full-on scorn with the ease of his trademarked pencil-snap.

The cast is the other thing Haunted House has going for it--no mere mechanical creepy-crawlies, these. Not for a minute could we see Cherkas's nerd-chic Lucy as anything less than fully fleshed, from the way she melts into the giddy joy of feeling thirteen again, to the way she battles her impulses to try and find what she really wants. These internal struggles are even visible in someone like Peter: while he may be the obedient, simple son, Altman keeps him from being a sheep, and his sudden movements are all the more surprising--and understanding--for that. All the characters, especially the way Miller shows Wendy's hidden romance, have such strong feelings that when they clash, it's hard to know who to root for.

There are tons of hidden rooms in Roberts's writing: you can read it as a deep-down allegory for the "corruptive forces of modernity"--that is, apathy, which is full blown in Moses, a "faith-eist" who actively believes in nothing. But you can also just experience it for the terrific ride that it is: those goosebumps won't be from horror, but from hearing and seeing such sad, beautiful truth.

Ice Factory '09: Lavaman

Photo/Kalli Newman

For years, Arnie Muspell (Michael Mason) has lived in the twin shadows of his brother, Archie, and his dead mother, who was immolated in a freak flood of lava. Under no circumstances should such psychically repressed energy be brought anywhere near people like Archie's former Man Whore bandmates, Gill Gatlin (Cole Wimpee), who is a walking pharmaceutical, and Dino Riot (Adam Belvo), an all-business, flesh-eating hedonist. Unless, of course, you're trying to punk your audience into being entertained, in which case Casey Wimpee's Lavaman is a twisted success.

Under Matthew Hancock's fine direction, Aztec Economy displays the sort of raw intensity that is too often absent from theaters, and while they don't push the audience nearly as far as they threaten to, Lavaman is far more than mere rebellion. First off, there's a catchy narrative, skipping between the present--in which a mohawked, violent Arnie is whaling on a stabbed Dino in an abandoned grocery--and the night before, in which a far more reserved Arnie is trying to explain his cartoon--ahem, graphic novel--to his skeptical, slovenly roommate, Gill. The play builds slowly from there, but with intent, using the quiet, dead evening scenes to illustrate the necessity of doing something, anything, to remain alive. The same goes for the animated scenes from Arnie's undrawn "Lavaman," with the art slowly shifting from violent abstractions--"he particularly targets married women left alone in cottages and mothers of twins"--to a detailed depression: "He just sits on his lazyboy and watches infomercials all day long."

Enter Dino, on the cusp of his birthday, looking to get back to basics. This requires getting Gill drunk on the highly alcoholic Loverman and getting back Gill's now-pregnant girlfriend, even if that means going through the lesbian biker chicks she's hooked up with. It also requires getting the taciturn Arnie to step into his brother's shoes, something which Dino plans to do via the contents of his ominous, body-sized black bag. Actions speak louder than words, especially given Dino's hypothesis, that English is only used to allow "one thing to pretend to be another." To that end, the second half of the play--raincoat on, pelican drinking on the table, a hacksaw waved around--far more gripping. It's the dirtying of an, until then, pretty tame commode (to use another of Dino's apt metaphors). Lavaman posits that we revere suffering: to that end, Casey loads up on vivid descriptions, while Hancock controls every scene so rigidly that as the drugs start to take effect and Dino starts to snap, there's enough of a shift for us sympathize with and fear.

Unsurprisingly, much of the dialogue is also off the wall, but often so excitedly so that you get swept up in the all-too-believable atmosphere. As Dino, Belvo finds a perfect expression of the "not-to-be-denied" attitude by acting as a deprived businessman, the sort you'd expect to find in a Brett Easton Ellis novel. A similar juxtaposition occurs for Mason's portrayal of Arnie, who goes--literally--from a buttoned-up fly-on-the-wall, to a half-naked, sweat-drenched maniac, lashing out in a way that is almost certainly not healthy for his voice. As Gill, Wimpee gets a little shortchanged, in that he doesn't change so much, but he makes up for it with a healthy dose of consistency.

For a show that's so overt--"I like to rape women and burn babies," says Lavaman--there's a lot of subtlety behind the words (which at times operate with the depth of lyrics). More importantly, Lavaman knows exactly what it is--a live-action punk graphic novel--and plays it so seriously that it's impossible to take it with anything less than with the utmost of mortified enjoyment.

The Joys of Fantasy

"For those of you that can't remember," says Claire (Claire Kavanah), the narrator of The Joys of Fantasy, "that's Teri, and she's at the bottom of a well." True enough, at least symbolically: a nightgowned Teri (Teri Incampo) is sitting in a ring of blue beads. "She's really, really thirsty," continues this narrator, determined to make a point: "The thirst is a metaphor for her loss of Scott." For emphasis, the stage manager, Susannah (Susannah Berard), adds some details, so laboriously, so seriously, that it removes the idea of "fantasy" and then sucks away what little "joy" is left. At least Caroline (Caroline Gart) has a cute sense of humor about things, though the only thing the cast seems sincere about is that their show used to be called "Our Town Revisited" until they were almost sued.

It's assumed that Mitchell Polin, who wrote and directed this, went into this with good intentions: the show quickly paves its way to theater hell. All the disclaimers in the world couldn't save this inexcusable mess--in fact, the first thirty minutes of "setting the stage" are what kill the show, as Claire conceited explains the conceits of the experiment: "Take art. Smash it up. And try to figure something out." Personally, I don't attend theater looking to make up my own story, and in any case, when Kim announces that we should do exactly that, Caroline points out that they're really trying to abuse the audience's imagination.

It hardly matters: Our Town this ain't. The cerebral hums of a live band--Tungsten74--continue through the show, and the long, philosophical discourses are, for some reason, projected up onto a notably non-minimal scrim. Throw in literal props--phones, chairs, even a tumbleweed--and there's even less room for imagination. Again, it hardly matters: if the audience is still paying attention by this point, their imaginations are hard at work trying to imagine that there's any sort of chemistry between Teri and her kidnapped husband, Scott (Scott Troost), and trying to pretend that the preening Michael (Michael Cross Burke) has an ounce of bad-assery in him.

The cast of The Joys of Fantasy knows it has these problems; that's why it spends so much time attempting to dismiss them. The problem is that saying "Why do you always have to understand what is happening" only calls more attention to the fact that nobody does. Referring to Turner's Falls only reminds us that this is not Grover's Corner. Magic cannot exist without reality, and there is little joy in pure madness.

Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (Pages 211-242)

In which Michael Pemulis introduces us to the vaunted, elusive, incredibly potent DMZ (p. 211-218) and Joelle van Dyne (p. 219-240) fills in the blanks w/r/t to Madame Psychosis and the Incandenza clan (i.e., she was most likely Orin's first, given that she was more than the simple early-morning Subjects from p. 42-49, before becoming James's fatal Medusa, a scopophilia-enabling PGOAT--"prettiest girl of all time"--who led to Infinite Jest(V?) being completed). Fellow Jester "E. Hunter Spreen" posts about the Internet-like cross-referencing of the novel, and if you look at just this one stretch, it certainly seems that this may be the first post-modem novel (not just a post-modern one). Wallace inserts material as if his search-engine were a pop-up ad, and so we get the official standardized time-line (p. 223, which Infinite Summer has also translated into normal calendar years), not to mention Helen P. Steeply's as-of-yet irrelevant curriculum vitae (p. 227), which in of itself represents a sort of stumble-through life. Even the dialogue in this section--from p. 231 to p.234--is like dropping feelers into an unfiltered stream of collective consciousness.

Don't believe that Wallace is doing this intentionally yet (re: my thesis)? Note that, as per usual, D.F.W. drops a nugget of rationale into this section, as Joelle, overdosing on what she sardonically calls Too Much Fun, wonders what in fact all of these collective facts in the novel really mean:

This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?

Even as he has his narrator posit this, at the same time he shows us just how much more there is to a simple fact, especially since what we assume to be "facts" are so often unreliable (see Faulkner's Sound and the Fury), to the point at which the limit of logic is such that as fact approaches concrete, it cannot help but abstract itself. This is the danger of a "straight" novel, one that preaches a direct message with linear characters and no surprises: fact alone is rarely interesting.

No, I can't enjoy anything that comes without being earned, which is what makes the small moments in Infinite Jest such an absolute blast. For instance, I decided to read Footnote 304 (which is referenced by Footnote 45, which is referenced by page 108: hyperlinking). This is Matryoshka writing, for we're interrupting a moment in the present to skip to a moment in the future's digression, a digression which focuses on how Struck, in an attempt to write a paper, is plagiarizing from another paper, which in turn is written about the Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollent (AFR, or wheelchair assassins, re: Marathe), which in turn speaks about a variation of chicken called Le Jeu du Prochain Train (The Cult of the Next Train), and which in turn leads to a brilliantly nested footnote in which the paper being plagiarized cites a different paper on

The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N. North America, (C) Y.P.W.

Now, you could say that all of this is just abstraction, much like a casual dismissing-at-first-glance of Madame Psychosis's reading of the U.H.I.D. pamphlet (pre-membership). Except that aren't these all actually facts, of a sort, which lead us, kaliedoscopically, into a real meaning? In this case, for those who are willing to consider--that is, to read actively--you'll find that this is a pretty clever put down of American obsessions: look, it says--we can be just as fetishistic in our rabid support of anti-abortionism as we can of its polar opposite, Kevorkianism. Aren't we all just wholly, totally, irrevocably crazy to invest so deeply in anything that would have us think so monomanically about the world? And, pulling back further, isn't it silly to obsess, then, over facts, the act of which is sort of like appreciating a tree in the middle of an infinitely dense forest? Isn't feeling--our impression from facts--a potentially more honest, more important, thing to stay in touch with?

Poor Joelle, poor Wallace, poor Gompert, then, who felt they felt too much.

Bird House

Bird House is as absolutely adorable as it is completely confusing. Kate Marks has written a dream of a world so consistent in tone that even though axes fly through the wind and cuckoo birds burst out of people's mouths, she sustains our interest. Likewise, Heidi Handelsman has conjured this fantasy so fully that even though we see the puppeteers through the life-size windows of this hand-crafted bird house (Sara C. Walsh's set), we remain raptly dreaming. It's impossible to dismiss Bird House, and yet equally hard to accept it for what it is (Alex Koch's pastel backdrops drop a few impressionistic, though hard to make out, clues).

Syl (Christina Shipp), a confident sure-shot, and Louisy (the bubbly Cotton Wright), an immature adult, live a happy, simple life of escapism atop a tree house on the Bright Side of their world. At night, they sleep head to toe in their casual comfort, and by day, they speak carefreelessly, defining words like "parasite" with a wordsmith's charm: "Someone who comes to a potluck without a pot." However, troubles eventually find them: giant ants march militarily across the floor, and blue birds slam against glass windows like it's the end of days--even the cuckoo-clock birds, Kook and Ooo (puppeteers Anthony Wills Jr. and Ora Fruchter), are said to get into domestic violence behind their quaint little doors.

Syl can't explain why she needs to abandon this life (or won't, on Marks's end), so one day she just digs through to the Lop Side, where she encounters Louisy's opposite, Myra (Kylie Liya Goldstein). Make no mistake, Myra's just as endearing, but she's a mature child, and she slyly uses Syl's unfamiliarity with this world of War-Wolves to cling to her side. Meanwhile, Syl's opposite--Rita (Wendy Scharfman), an easy-going prophet--shows up on the Bright Side, looking for Myra, but settling for Louisy. The problem is that everything's as earnest as it is eager, and though the Lop Side is full of dirt and vicious wind, it comes across (because of the characters) as being just the same.

Despite being a storybook play, one whose odd comedy swiftly grows static, Bird House doesn't have a storybook ending (as the faint, ominous projections imply). Surprise, surprise: the good intentions we bring to war "over there" are not always as heroic or noble as we desire. But this conclusion is never justified, and even in its darkest, oddest moments, the play never manages to grow up, or change. Louisy, having killed an ant, tearfully realizes that "war is not a story," but Bird House all too clearly is.