#infinite summer

[keysimash]

Doing Infinite Summer this summer because ive wanted to read Infinite Jest for a while, have picked it up and put it down, etc

if anyone wants to do it with me lmk

[infinite-jest-again]

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[mumblelard]

no cities, no hills or summer reading club

i read about a dozen carver short stories because i hadn't read any in a decade or more and i heard that the flash fiction kids consider him to be some sort of originator which was a disruptive thought technology for me. that carver feeling was immediately so familiar and then too familiar, like being trapped in my teenage mind again, but short stories have felt right because the reflection cycle is more immediate and intense

then i stumbled into alternating a kafka story and a pkd story and letting the voices mix inside me and that is going well. for now, it's making earth sub chi an easier place to process, even if it's making it a harder place to love, so i think i am going to stay here for a little while or maybe even longer

[chark80]

'I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all... the last thing more I'd want is hurt. I just didn't want to feel this way anymore. I don't... I didn't believe this feeling would ever go away. I don't. I still don't. I'd rather feel nothing than this.'

The doctor's eyes appeared keenly interested in an abstract way. They looked severely magnified behind his attractive but thick glasses, the frames of which were steel. Patients on other floors during other rotation had sometimes complained that they sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through all that thick glass. He was saying 'This feeling of wanting to stop feeling by dying, then, is ---'

The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. 'The feeling is [i]why[/i] I want to. The feeling is the [i]reason[/i] I want to die. I'm here because I want to die. That's why I'm in a room without windows and with cages over the light bulbs and no lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don't take away the feeling do they.' -p. 72

[pemcandenza]

broke: pemulis has no moral compass

woke: pemulis’s parents sold him to one direction as a child he just needs some guidance

[brightbeautifulthings]

Week 1 | Week 2-3 | Week 4-5 | Week 6-7 | Week 8-9 | Week 10-11 | Week 12-13 | Week 14-15 | Week 16-17

Week 18 (p. 620-650)

"...inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle ... The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they're not funny. To varying degrees they've given everyone the fantods" (p. 632).

The Wraith's activities have definitely kicked up since the deaths of the Antitoi brothers and Mario's discovering the tripod where it doesn't belong. J.O.I. has been dead for some years now, so I have to assume it's important that he's suddenly more active than ever, possibly because the A.F.R. is drawing closer and Hal in particular is in danger. Hal also nearly lost a game to Stice, which seems like more evidence that something has happened to him already.

"Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions" (p. 647).

More stories of people becoming so obsessed with something, they gradually destroy themselves, in this instance Steeply's father's addiction to M*A*S*H. He ruined his life trying to find real-world connections in the show, which seems like a metaphor for the pointlessness of trying to make all the connections in this book. Even if we could, even if it were possible, would it make a difference?

Week 19

Migraines are a bitch.

Questions & Working Theories

[tw: drug mention, addiction]

Q: Where did the tripod set up in the middle of nowhere on the ETA grounds come from? - The U.S.S. Millicent Kent set up the tripod as an excuse to get Mario alone. - This is the possibly the first instance of the Wraith's work. He's responsible for most of the odd occurrences at ETA, and "Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films..." (p. 122).) A: The Wraith put it there. "But it's true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning" (p. 632). After this, the instances of objects being in odd places around E.T.A. increases dramatically.

Q: Why do Hal's symptoms in the Eschaton game seem more like DMZ side effects than marijuana side effects? Was there DMZ mixed with it? Was it purposely mixed in, or was it the work of the Wraith? - This is the first time we see Hal with similar symptoms as the ones he has in the first chapter, which seems to suggest that--whether or not the DMZ and marijuana are related, whether it was intentional or not--Hal did take the DMZ on Interdependence Day YDAU. - Pemulis goes looking for the DMZ later on, which seems to suggest it wasn't intentional, at least not on his end. Hal also doesn't consciously acknowledge that he's going to take it in this chapter either. - Mario reflecting on his brother: "He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's state of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Ha was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore" (p. 590). Why the change? DMZ-related? - "But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head" (p. 635). If Hal took the DMZ on purpose, does he know it will be out of his system in a month? What else could have created a "whole new Hal"? It seems like a leap to think that quitting marijuana is the sole cause of all the changes.

[fght-ff-yr-dmns]

[mumblelard]

chewink or i want to see the savannah bananas and the fitzgerald chicken and eat ribs from a parking lot smoker and i want to fall asleep on a quilt spread out under a live oak after a picnic with a girl in a sundress