Week Eight

Before we get into the horror that is Randy Lenz, we meet up with Roy Tony once more, wait out the repercussions of Eschaton in the HrH’s very blue waiting room, the morning sun is about to rise on Marathe and Steeply, Pemulis has some very important info about Avril, Joelle and Don have a hard time talking with each other, and Orin is seduced by a hand model.

Recap

November 9 – NA Beginner’s meeting with Ken Erdedy, Kate Gompert and Roy Tony
Our first introductions to the pains of addiction came from Ken and Kate and their struggles with pot. 500 pages later, we are briefly brought back through the NA meeting, where Ken notes that the feeling of anhedonia, while not mentioned outright, “seemed to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads” (p. 504). Ken makes a critical error trying to avoid a hug from Roy Tony (a serious badass if you will recall from Clenette’s tale of Wardine and Wardine’s momma and Roy Tony p. 37).

November 10 – Hal, Pemulis, Kittenplan, Axford wait outside CT’s office, while Avril “diddle-checks” the girls
What to make of the parallels between the Hal sitting in the waiting room outside Tavis’ office, with it’s deep blue pile rug, and Pemulis’ “rodential squeaking” of his chair (p. 509), and the blue rug of JOI’s father’s bedroom and the “rodential squeaking” of the bedframe from last week’s section? Also, Clenette has been in CTs office the entire time?

CT, an “odd and delicate specimen” (p. 517) has a “pathological openness of manner” (p. 519) and Avril seems to be a master manipulator, in a way only a mother truly can be. (We get a very chilly analysis of Avril from Orin in endnote 234.)

So many instances of the ridiculous presented as the mundane here: Otis Lord still with monitor affixed, eye holes cut out of the monitor’s base, the story of the multi-eyed, yet blind kid with “cranium-issues” who had to wheel an IV cart with a metal brace for his head around on the court (though weirdly this Dymphna, who we know Hal is playing in the Whataburger in Year of Glad is only 9 years old in this segment and would be in the 16s next year?), Lateral Alice Moore (I enjoyed how long DFW dropped references to LAM before finally letting us in on the reason behind the nickname).

Marathe and Steeply
I feel like my criticisms of these sections are starting to imitate the very thing that drives me bonkers about them! If you compiled the entirety of their conversation together, it would read as so repetitive, cyclical, and heavy handed. Yes, the “Oriental myth” and Medusa/Odalisque again brings home the idea that humans will freely choose deadly temptation. We do learn that Marathe is by all accounts a quadruple agent, or perhaps a rogue agent, as he has chosen his wife over the cause. I’d be curious to hear others’ opinions on these conversations on the desert ledge.

November 11 – Don and Joelle have a stilted conversation
Don relates a story from his days Out There, and tries to get Joelle to talk about the veil. Joelle’s movement from plain, relatable language to her academic tone when talking about UHID becomes a sore point for Don, which then devolves into an argument. When JvD finally caves to Don’s repeated question about what exactly is wrong with her, she says she is ‘deformed with beauty.’

November 9 – Pemulis catches Avril and John Wayne together
Beyond the great visual of Avril in splits and John Wayne in a jock strap and football pads, we now know that Pemulis has this information locked and loaded when he enters CT’s office the next day. He definitely planned this “accidental” discovery. How did he know?

Goddamn Randy Lenz
How do we talk about someone like Randy Lenz? Wallace provides so much insight into his psyche, yet I was still left entirely emotionally unconnected to him. He is such a detestable person, mostly for me because of his sense of entitlement and his ‘specialness.’ And of course, his abuse of animals is really, really disturbing. We are given so much time with Lenz that I wanted to shower afterwards. Also in this section, the comedic/tragic death of Green’s mother and the bizarre situation of his father’s irregular leg lengths and descent into murderous despair.

Orin doesn’t seem safe at all
‘Helen’ is gone, after the interview turns a bit sour, and Orin’s wheelchair ‘fans’ are back, as well as a stunning hand model, who seems to know exactly how to woo him, and whose accent is suspiciously similar to the “legless surveyor”(p. 575)

Coaticule Complex
Idris Arslanian (why does a Pakistani have an Armenian name?) gets schooled by Pemulis on the details of Annular Fusion, as Lyle works with poor Doucette, who can’t wrap his head around it, especially “the temporal-flux stuff.”

Reflections

This week, we walk right into rejection, like walking into the wall that is righteously pissed off Roy Tony. You reject his hug, like Erdedy does. Roy Tony isn’t looking for a hug, Roy Tony doesn’t like to hug. But Roy Tony has surrendered his will, has risked sharing his “vulnerability and “discomfort” and Erdedy risks the ass-kicking of his lifetime by acting like he, Erdedy, is somehow above this all and can reject AA’s tenet of Hugs Not Drugs.

Marathe and Steeply do their own Medusa v Odalisque-esque dance of rejection, itself a fitting double bind (or quadruple bind?). The complete essence of their conversation is to offer up and reject each other’s ideologies, disdain loosely hidden behind their sparrings. And yet both have also on some level rejected their own governments (a deep betrayal on Marathe’s part, and a less impactful but still self-positioned semi-betrayal on Steeply’s).

The conversation-slash-argument between Gately and Joelle has always left me feeling very very sad. They speak over each other, and Don gets really testy – the first jerk-like behavior I’ve really seen in him. He seems purpose-driven to share the AA message and actively tries to live according to a moral code. So he really comes up short in this passage (IMHO), rejecting JvD’s assertion that he is driven by shame about what “might be perceived as a lack of brightness” (p. 537). And his bull-headed persistence asking about her hideous deformity forces Joelle to reject his approach and his questions over and over. Neither Don nor Joelle connect with each other, or even listen to each other.

And finally, how do you solve a problem like Lenz? His “impotent rage and powerless fear” (p. 541) is bred deep. Lenz seems borne from a rejection by the entire universe, so his work to “resolve his issues” escalates, as we know it must, with little effect. And then, when faced with a real-life opportunity to connect with Bruce Green, Lenz fears rejection of such intensity that he is paralyzed to tell Green that he likes him (and to leave him alone).

I love DFW’s acceleration techniques. There is a cinematic, madcap, almost Stoogeian feel to the way he stacks narratives on top of each other, alternately piling them up like a swaying tower of bricks, or layering them on like oppressive, heavy blankets. And then to play with this comic technique by paring it with truly grim subject matter (Lenz’ progression from rats to dogs, the Drano deaths, Doony’s accident with the bucket of bricks, the Entertainment itself). It is just so freaking effective. So imagine my delight when I caught up with Pemulis as he talked about “accelerated phenomena which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time” (p. 573) because that right there is what makes it so great. The slowing down of time becomes this parodic, car-crash scenario that you just can’t pull yourself away from.

Orin’s chasing of various Subjects with toddler-aged children is of course a classic cover for deep feelings of rejection. And Tavis is riddled with fear of rejection too.

I would love to see serialized treatments of the smaller character studies in IJ, like poor Bruce Green’s family saga- done Black Mirror style.