Also, I have mentioned this before, but DFW's unfinished project The Pale King looks a lot at the subject of boredom, and several excerpts have been published in the New Yorker. Here's one for those of you who are interested. It's about an IRS agent who starts hallucinating due to boredom, which in my opinion makes boredom just like any other drug in it's own way.
But in honor of 09/09/09 I have some quotes from pages whose number includes the number 9, and see how their meaning has been informed by our further reading, or in the case of some of the things we haven't gotten to, what do you think they mean.
- "I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear" (9)
- "The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this." (90)
- "Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces." (99)
- "I kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness." (900)
- "'Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?' he said. 'We're conversing here,' Pemulis told him." (909)
- "Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED." (990)
- "And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond farewells from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond the grave were, after a breif and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only by the tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/the tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous dead Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells. (999)
- "'I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said, 'My head is filled with things to say.'" (32)
One final note: as Jacob mentioned, classes start this week at Williams. This of course means it will be incredibly difficult for some of us to stay on pace. I was wondering if anyone on campus who has been following this blog would be interested in actually meeting up to discuss or just give moral support as we come to the end of our Infinite Summer. Post a comment with your ideas of what kind of Infinite Jestivities you'd like to see on campus this month.
I'm all for descending on Tunnel City some afternoon, even if it's only to share a few favorite quotes. If anybody's really motivated, we could persuade the WCFM people to let us do a show, say on Interdependence Day (11/8), of just shooting the breeze about the book. People following the blog from off-campus could participate by listening over the web. If anybody calls in, though, we shouldn't answer a la Madame P. :)
ReplyDeleteAnother niner-page to go along with Chris's page 9:
ReplyDelete• Cosgrove Watt and Gerhard Schtitt in The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass: "A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic." (989)
One running theme has been people worried about not being understood. Kate is called "unipolar" for having this worry (75), JOI's character in Insubstantial Country might well be mute as long as everybody else thinks he's mute, and when Hal confides to Pemulis in note 321 about a recurring nightmare, Pemulis laughs it off as a "standard nobody-understands-me dream."
From the filmography, you can see Watt plays JOI in other films besides Insubstantial Country, ones that actually depict scenes from the text, including It Was A Great Marvel... and Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed. So if we can assume it's JOI in the film who's wondering if he's totally transparent, then that's an opposite worry from not being understood. Yet this also might lead to schizophrenia, the film holds.
What looks to some people like schizophrenia in JOI--doing optics, then suddenly tennis, then suddenly avant-garde film--might be his way to battle it, to keep from being totally transparent. But JOI's distance depresses Hal, who in turn becomes so mute that JOI worries he's seriously damaged the boy. Hal and Orin lean toward Avril, who is totally transparent. Joelle however, leans toward JOI and is frightened by Avril at the dinner table. None of this seems like a route toward transcendental enlightenment...