hinzugefügte Notizen
A sudden uptick in my usage of a Moleskine notebook I've been trying to fill since late November 2008, and likely due to the fact that I started reading (for realz) a library copy (which means no marginalia) of Infinite Jest, has led me here to share some of the uptick's notes. So, with very little commentary:
19 June 2011 Was convinced this afternoon by a high school Latin teacher to attempt Infinite Jest again--and he read the damned thing in German, so . . .
20 June 2011 - The first chapter of IJ an exercise in the dialectic split. And what of my own manifoldly split ("split") brain? This is a ridiculous undertaking.
- "It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him." [DFW, IJ, p20]
- "The clicks of his portable clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, movement, and readjustment." [DFW, IJ, p21]
- Epic in small, tiny doses. Things that never end, that go on and into infinity. I will likely never [again] experience the feeling of floating I had that one day @ PIL.
- Maybe I should just give in and use a larger notebook, because surely some new, different piece of schreibzubehör will suddenly solve all of my problems.
- Would that there were official monsters . . .
21 June 2011
- "She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape." [DFW, IJ, p39]
- "legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious." [DFW, IJ, p39] (cf. "Strum upon me the modernity of those tennis pants. Won’t you?" in Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, p123)
- "Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week's other faint dried outlines, so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure." [DFW, IJ, p43]
- "the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer." [DFW, IJ, p46]
- "American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret." [DFW, IJ, p53]
- "Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, Hal's brooding." [DFW, IJ, p54]
- I always read/hear [the phrase] "sweating freely" as containing the possibility that one might attempt, via some obscure inner strain(ing), not to sweat.
- "It's one of those unpleasant opoid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily on and out of this half-sleep where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete." [DFW, IJ, p61]
- Inside of a book, I never miss the internet. Inside of the internet, I never miss books enough.
22 June 2011
- "At some point it starts sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something'll blow." [DFW, IJ, p66]
- "as complex an convolved as a sculpture of string." [DFW, IJ, p67] (cf. Oliveira's string sculptures in Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar)
- continuation of prev.: "There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net." [DFW, IJ, p67]
- deliquesce: 1. to become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air, as certain salts. 2. to melt away. 3. Bot. to form many small divisions or branches.
- Adorno: or Barrett Watten on Adorno?
- Mice Parade
- "Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet." [DFW, IJ, p70]
- "Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart." [DFW, IJ, p72]
- "'It's like I cant get enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror more than sadness.'" ff. [DFW, IJ, p73]
- ". . . with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue plastic that's downright gorgeous when held up to a window's light." [DFW, IJ, footnote 30, p994]
- bra-eating dog
