r/davidfosterwallace

im wondering if any of you have favorite writings about dave or his books. i read the new infinite jest foreword & it was p good. looking to read more stuff like that

1. DMZ / Mold
TLDR: The mold had not been producing DMZ for years because of Hal's dry mouth, but withdrawal from Bob Hope caused excessive salivation, which made the mold produce DMZ. The DMZ affected ONLY facial expressions.

1.1 The toothbrush-wraith theory is not correct — Hal is aware of the Betel prank and therefore hides his toothbrush: "only the worst kind of naïf leaves his toothbrush unattended around ETA"

1.2 Ingested mold produces DMZ. But why hadn't it produced DMZ for years?
The answer is a dry-mouth condition inherited from JOI.

- “Your mouth is making those dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds.”
- “Dr. Zegarelli says that's one reason for all the caries, is that I have low salivary output.”
- “Those dry sticky salivaless sounds which can be death to a good conversation.”

And also: “The caries are Himself's legacy.”

Marijuana withdrawal caused excessive salivation, which in turn caused the mold to produce DMZ:

“if by dinnertime he hasn't gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect from B. Hope's desiccating action”

1.3 DMZ affected only facial expressions.

From Pemulis's DMZ research: "It’s the fitviavi-mold base. If the stuff shows up at all it shows as a slight case of imbalanced yeast."

Then, from the medical attaché scene: “The medical attaché’s particular expertise is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora.”

Moreover, the incoherence of Hal's facial expressions started when: “Hal's just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his face still feels big and dead, with this persistent sensation that he's drooling without being able to feel it or stop it.”

“The left side of his face feels like something far away that means him harm and is coming gradually closer.”

If this is not persuasive enough, then: “The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression I hadn't known was there.”

1.4 Film hint in the viewing room (warning: speculation)

“Thus the Flood's real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale”

“We thus become… ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual…”

2. Hal is able to speak during the final year

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’”

CT quote:

“Hal here functions, you ass. Given a supportive situation. He's fine when he's by himself. Yes he has some trouble with excitability in conversation.”

“Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid”

3. Hal has mental breakdowns under pressure after he stops using marijuana as a desensitising agent

The produced DMZ explains only the effect on his facial expressions (speculation)

4. Hal had a previous mental breakdown on November 20, before the tennis match with AFR, and was therefore hospitalised

We are first shown that John Wayne got there and received sedatives: “the anonymous guy in the other bed … has a very deep voice, is crying.”

Then Hal remembers:

“the only other emergency room I have ever been in [was] almost exactly one year back”

Then we learn that Gately can't speak because of the tube and that he was deintubated:

“The tube was probably why he could only mew and grunt. He probably didn't have permanent voice damage. Thank God.”

“16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been specifically discreditated…”

So, filling in the gaps: when Hal was hospitalised, he met Gately in the same room, and Gately was able to talk to him.

There is another hint:

“It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably — a nurse’s aide … a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly … who will … ask So yo then man what’s your story?”

5. Joelle met Hal in Gately's room. She told him that AFR was searching for a cartridge

As we know, Joelle visits Gately; he was contacted by AFR and knows Hal.

6. Orin told AFR that the master cartridge was in JOI's head

Therefore, AFR made John Wayne force Hal to show them the grave.

7. John Wayne is an AFR operative, not a double agent

John Wayne made Hal show him where the grave was.

The Fackelmann scene was a moral reversal. Gately stayed with his "sick friend," but he actually needed to flee with him. He stayed for Dilaudid. Now he actually stays to "help a sick friend."

"the pretense that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime instead of just hiding there in the corner..."

“Gately did, he remembers vividly, he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it was true.”

Gately accompanied Hal in digging up the grave because, in his dream, he had already seen the situation and thought it was of Continental-Emergency importance. In the dream, he believed that the head in the grave contained the solution.

>

and it is:

>

8. Hal holds up the hair and part of JOI's head to trick AFR-Wayne

“the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.”

But Hal actually knows that JOI's head does not contain any cartridge. Gately, in the dream, genuinely believes that the head contains the cartridge.

So AFR is tricked and does not obtain the master cartridge.

9. The master cartridge is not in JOI's head

JOI's head was blown apart by the microwave, and Hal saw it; therefore, he knows that there is no cartridge in the head.

The whole "head is master" idea is an allegory later repeated by Wallace in his "This Is Water" speech:

"It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master."

Moreover, in the Professional Conversationalist scene, JOI says that he has a stabiliser and camera in his head — this is actually about feeling like a machine, and he also literally converts his own experiences into later films.

>As of Yore — “A middle-aged tennis instructor… preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue…”

>It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him — “A father… suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out.”

10. The master cartridge was stored among the "empty" Antitoi cartridges

10.1 DuPlessis is connected to both the FLQ and Avril

The Antitois did “work of affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q.”

but were “spurned by the F.L.Q. after DuPlessis's assassination”

Professional Conversationalist passage:

“Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P-----?”

Also, Avril “had taught out at Brandeis where [DuPlessis had] done his residency”

and had “a history of involvement with leftist Québec separatists in graduate school”

10.2 The first Entertainment victims — Berkeley: “a film scholar and his partner” — the cartridge was sent by Orin as revenge for a critique of JOI

10.3 FLQ steals the cartridge

“The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room”

“an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers.” — a hint that Canadians did it. We know that AFR is not even sure that the cartridge exists, so it was done by the FLQ.

10.4 FLQ trolling campaign against AFR

The ad was a “2-D cardboardish dispenser with a wheelchair-seated figure, lap covered by a blanket, whose expression is bizarrely ecstatic — something between terrible joy or ecstasy or a seizure”

The detachable cartridges are part of the display and bear:

“IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR”

with the little graphic that resembles “a disembodied smile.”

10.5 Bertraund Antitoi steals the cartridges for later sale, but they appear to be empty

10.6 The master cartridge should have been buried with JOI

“James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal ‘I’m-so-terribly-sorry’ monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he’d willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity”

But the instructions in the will must have been carried out, and the person who did so was most probably Avril.

10.7 Avril provided the master cartridge to DuPlessis (speculation)

10.8 Orin sent DuPlessis a Read-Only copy as revenge for his supposed sexual relationship with Avril

10.9 Gately and Kite robbed and killed DuPlessis, so they had DuPlessis's cartridges

They looted “several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges”

10.10 Kite sold cartridges and other stuff to Bob 60

10.11 Bob 60 exchanged cartridges and DMZ for a mirror and a lava lamp

“Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary’s mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one’s most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person’s rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes.”

10.12 AFR found “the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.”

It was Read-Only (a copy from Orin).

“On Fortier’s return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: the found copy was Read-Only.”

10.13 AFR viewed the smile-cartridges stolen by Bertraund, but they appeared to be empty

10.14 AFR missed the master cartridge among them

Endnote 205:

“Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub."

“Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace’s golden goose’s copyrights by specifying that all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run"

“N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m.”

11. The content of the film itself

1. Revolving-door sequence — described by Joelle, confirmed by an AFR guy

“In the first scene I'm going through a revolving door.”

“we whirl in the door like that for several whirls.”

“The actor was male.”

“But the character I recognize in the door is epicene.”

“Hermaphroditic. Androgynous.”

We can also confirm this part from the AFR guy's description of what happens up to a certain point.

After the revolving-door sequence, he is already consumed. So the second scene is...

2. Crib sequence — inferred from Joelle's account

“The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized.”

“Apologized. As in my lines were various apologies. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.’ For a real long time.”

“The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib's-eye view.”

3. Mother-Death/Pam Heath sequence — described by Molly Notkin

"Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera's apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film's camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal.”

“I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother.”

"Molly Notkin said didn’t make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue"

“This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams."

So it's like: Mother -> apologising for killing you in your previous life -> killing you again while simultaneously giving birth -> the woman who killed you becomes your mother in the next life -> endless cycle

12. Pam Heath is the actress who represents both Death and Avril in JOI's films

Pam Heath as a representation of Avril — Various Small Flames:

“a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background’s lit hallway.”

Then Möbius Strips explicitly turns Heath into: “Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath)”

And in Infinite Jest (IV) the cast becomes: “Pam Heath (?), ‘Madame Psychosis’ (?)”

13. The cartridge was an attempt to create a corrective experience that would help Hal escape the womb of solipsism

JOI had already created such films for Hal and himself, such as Widower and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.

Widower (a reimagining of JOI's father's black-widow-spider revenge):

"a cocaine-addicted father ... leads his son around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders."

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat (a reimagining of the book-dropping scene with JOI's father in the garage):

“Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the bureaucrat leaps from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train’s open doors, and right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into an earnest-faced little kid with thick glasses and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who’s tottering along the platform under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they collide.”

“The bureaucrat’s eyes suddenly recede back into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to the kid and asks if he’s OK and says it’ll all be OK. He cleans the kid’s spectacles with his pocket handkerchief, picks the kid’s packages up.”

14. JOI did not understand Hal; he merely projected his own experience with his father onto Hal

“No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out.”

“Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you become just a screen for his own (the Dad's) projections of his own failure and self-loathing…”

“failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really speak…”

15. By the final scene, the war has already started, probably following the pattern foreshadowed by Eschaton

The Year of Glad gives us:

"some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north"

and the Year of Glad is: "the very last year of Subsidized Time."

16. JOI was trying to create a figurantless film. The novel Infinite Jest itself is figurantless

JOI tried to eliminate figurants by recording everyone in a public scene at equal intelligibility:

“you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were”

The result was that viewers:

“could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd”

But the novel is a successful attempt.

Still unclear to me:

• The role of the revolving-door scene
• Why the character is epicene
• Whether DMZ is an antidote, and whether it is a coincidence that it was shipped together with the cartridges

Whenever a similar question is posed here about DFW, the answers are always modern novelists and what not. When you look at pieces like "Lobster...", "Supposedly Fun Thing...", "Tracy Austin...", etc., do any modern journalists/critics carry the banner that DFW did ? Anyone close ?

This movie was good brain-food into the mind of a fascinating character i have stumbled upon, David Foster Wallace, in the wake of just finishing Infinite Jest. Although it did give some good context to Wallace's situation as the book was being published, as well as what was left in the wake of its publishing, but it didn't do much more than that to me. To me, the movie just painted both characters as pricks. Maybe that is accurate to the true experience of both individuals, however it didn't give much more to me than show off how ugly it is trying to get in the mind of an extremely insecure individual while you are constantly clicking a recording device in their face, and then how ugly it is for the extremely insecure person to attempt in any way to vocalize themselves. This didn't seem like the right story to tell for a movie about such a prolific writer. In the end I don't feel like rooting for anyone, ESPECIALLY not David Lipsky. I do not know much about this guy but after seeing this movie I am quite frankly ashamed of how he treated Wallace.

It does break my heart though. Wallace obviously liked the attention enough from his success as a writer that he indulged in all the pursuits of a writer with lots of attention on them - the book tour, the interviews, etc. All that stuff left him broken, and in the end, had no TRUE people to go to. He is left at the end of a book tour, sad, confused, and completely alone with no real human companionship. Unintentionally or not, that is what the true highlight of this movie is. It has nothing to do with whatever relationship the two David's had, nor about Wallace's philosophy on modern American life and morality, or who David REALLY is as a person. Its a movie about what happens when you are driven so far up a wall by how the people you have surrounded yourself with are completely unable to understand your life and your feelings and are absorbed fully in their own agenda. Its easy to speak in whataboutisms with DFW - if only he had friends to support him, if only he had not been a slave to his vices, if only he didn't have such a big ego - however, these all strip his life to nothing more, and disregards the fact that, regardless of whatever accolades we have or how far ahead we are from others, we are all equally struggling and confused in this world and just taking things day by day trying to figure it out.

I fear now that watching a movie this personal about a figure who is no longer alive will now subconsciously view them in a different light than who they really are, when the person who's story this movie is inspired CLEARLY had an agenda. And I think that is the big problem. It's not a biopic, its not giving a voice to DFW on his philosophy - its not REALLY highlighting any of DFW's real flaws or downfall as a person, it just kind of exists in a gray area where everyone sucks.

I'm really interested to hear what anyone says about this movie, and if i'm missing something or not?

Im only 300 pages into IJ and its clearly anti addiction.

Also if I abuse a substance but its not eacapism would that be better ?

I have previously read "The Broom of The System" and a couple of DFW's short stories and essays, which I truly was enamoured by. I loved watching his interviews, and all of his work so I thought to give "The Pale King" a try (I'm doing this in an attempt to build myself up to "Infinite Jest") and I'm only near enough 50 pages in, but it's becoming increasingly more and more difficult to find enjoyment whilst reading it. I understand that a large motif of the book is boredom, and that's the point; but it's not even just the "boring" sections I find a lack enthusiasm for. I don't really want to stop reading it because I love DFW's writing, and the actual idea behind "The Pale King" is one I especially find interesting, but I am finding little to no pleasure from reading the book. For the people who have read it, is it worth finishing now, or should I put it on the shelf to go back to in a couple of years?

I want a pdf I'm able to annotate and I can't find any that are not scanned copies. Thank you in advance

I’ve read everything besides oblivion, girl with curious hair, broom of the system and brief interviews with hideous men; and I’m currently reading the pale king.

Wanted to know if anyone had recommendation on what I should read next?