To In[Plath]ity and Beyond!

I sat in Java City on Friday morning, reading the last five pages of Infinite Jest. As I read the final sentence, I leaned back in my chair and heaved a tremendous sigh, like a stale breath that had been kept inside of me since September 13, 2009. I looked at the page, then looked up at the coffee shop before me. My first words upon finishing Jest were:

"What the hell?"

The rest of the day I was simultaneously proud of myself and uncomfortable. I couldn't get it out of my head that I didn't understand the ending, I felt no sense of completion, and I just felt like David Foster Wallace was laughing at me from beyond the grave.

A few hours later, I returned to the apartment and immediately went online to see if I could find some sense of closure. I found a few sites, and finally ended up at a website that I will not link here (you'll find it if you need it, I will not be a spoiler enabler!). It brought together details from the written beginning and end of the book, which happen to all be the chronological ending. Some bits I'd pieced together myself, but as far as who had been sending the tapes of the samizdat, I was floored. Once that was revealed, everything from the chronological end seemed to make sense! I leaned back and heaved a sigh of relief. My roommates asked me what was up, and I replied mistily:

"I just got the ending of Infinite Jest."

My brain is at rest.

I started Plath's The Bell Jar last night, and almost couldn't put it down. If I'd really, really wanted to, it probably would have been finished in the wee hours of the morning. However, we're having a party tonight, and I was getting up at 8 to go to Midland with Josh, so that was out of the question. I did get about 100 pages in, though. At one point I texted Sarah and said "I just reached page 20. This was a major feat in Jest." Basically, I've decided that any book after this will be considerably easier to get through (I was going to make an "infinitely easier" pun, but...well I suppose I just did), regardless of its average level of difficulty.

I plan on finishing Bell Jar by Monday evening, seeing as I'll be busy tonight and tomorrow. So far it's really intense. Plath's voice is so distinct and real; I can understand why the author of the foreword said so many writers and readers hear her voice as a contemporary one.

I hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

More like Finite

Reading Infinite Jest lately has been strange lately, because at this point I am on page 951, and have just finished note 381. I have 30 pages of reading left, and only seven notes. To reiterate: thirty pages out of 981. The chunk of book I have left to read is at this point far skinnier than the Notes and Errata section.

I have had a love-hate relationship with this book since the beginning. I loved the idea of the challenge of reading it, and the fact that there seems to be this very exclusive group of people in the world who have read it; I hated that it seemed so dry and verbose at times and the fact that some notes are five, seven, even eighteen pages long. I love the characters and I feel a real connection to ones I felt alienated from at the start, but I still wish there could be more about the samizdat, The Entertainment, the titular film Infinite Jest. In the beginning, I kept having to think back to the foreword, wherein Dave Eggers reminds the reader that everything in this book is there for a reason: the seemingly random anachronistic chapters (particularly at the beginning), the obnoxiously descriptive tennis matches, the tangents upon tangents from AA meetings, the seven-page invented filmography of James Orin Incandenza, the endless two-page sentences, even the sections written entirely in the dialect of a character.

Many were the times I would gush about some hilarious nugget I had just read, while in the same conversation complain about how rough it can be to get through. I remember one specific incident wherein I was attempting to get to page 800, and I was on page 795. Out of nowhere comes this entirely separate section comprised of merely a footnote number. Out popped a four-page footnote. I told Sarah the next day, "David Foster Wallace is laughing me to scorn."

It took me 500 pages to realize that what I am reading is, in fact, a comedy. I always eyed the blurbs and reviews warily, seeing the words "uproarious," "screwball," and "hilarity." 500 pages in, I realized that most of the phrases I was underlining were things I found funny, along with major plot points. "Huh," I grunted to myself, "I guess this is actually a comedy. Whaddaya know." From that point on I regarded it as such.

I'm at the point now, with only thirty pages to go, that I hadn't really thought about almost a year ago on September 13th, my official starting date; much less did I think I would accomplish this much when I finally reached page 500 on August 1st. This was always my ongoing project, something I could always fall back on. My paperback, back in April, still looked untarnished, almost new; now it looks thoroughly loved, all dog-eared and somewhat worn. I've been at the point for about a week now where I no longer need to keep two bookmarks; I only use my bookmark now, making sure to keep a pencil handy. I'm on the last page of notes.

On the one hand, I'm going to miss this book, and I will be sad that it's over. However, finishing this book means that this chapter of my life will be over, but I can always revisit if I so choose. It also means I can move on to other books I have been meaning to read, but always put off because of this one.

It's been a fairly hilly journey with David Foster Wallace, but I think in the end I will always be glad I accepted his challenge and took a year of my life to read his masterpiece.

A Childhood of Terror

It has been almost a month since my last update, and for that I do apologize. There has been a lot going on, and when I finally wanted to update this blog, my computer decided that it was going to be a filthy strumpet and get all sorts of viruses that destroyed everything. It is currently out being fixed, and I should get it back in a few weeks, though maybe not up and in proper working order for another week after that. So, there it is. It's computer labs and the generosity of my fellow people for me.

I'm currently in the Music Resource Center after my first day of fall classes, having just rerouted the delivery of my new phone to the UPS delivery place tomorrow. Yes, new phone from the insurance company, because my screen has a crack in it. All of my technology seems to just detest me lately.

But that is not what I am here to tell you. I am here to tell you about the wonderful relationship I have with my dear older sister, Linden Lea. Linden has always been a wonderful older sister, setting a wonderful example of how to do well in school, do well in music, interact with friends, and of course interact with our parents (the last of which I of course entirely ignored, to my parents' chagrin). Wonderful.

Most of my friends know that she and I have a relationship that is at once loving, understanding, and riddled with silly inside jokes that only we understand. What most of them don't realize is that she was also a very typical older sister, who enjoyed terrorizing her young, naive wittle sister Kiki.

My first real memory of Din taking delight in scaring me was playing cards. This is the first instance because it is also the silliest. We would play Crazy 8's quite a bit when I was little, as it was a simple, Uno-like game I understood easily, without too many rules. I have a very distinct memory of Linden and myself sitting at the red card table in our basement, playing Crazy 8's, and Linden all of a sudden holding her cards up to her face so that I could only see her eyes, which were narrowed to evil slits. For some reason this scared the ever living crap out of me, and I believe I first started whining, then probably bawling because I thought for some reason that something terrible would happen.
This happened every time we played cards for probably a year. Honestly it's probably one of those things where she was like "Hey, look at this, isn't it weird that she's scared of this? I know right?" And it was just kind of funny. I mean it's not something I'm still scared of to this day, and it's actually pretty funny and cute looking back. I mean, I was probably 5 or 6 at the time.

Some years later, when I was probably 10 or so, we were moving around some of my parents' posters from Royal Shakespeare Company plays they'd been to in the '70s and '80s. There were some Much Ado About Nothing posters, which consisted of a poster for the show, and two black & white prints of Beatrice and Benedick in scenes. I think Derek Jacobi was in that show, was the big deal. They also have a framed picture from that show in our basement. It used to sit by our television, if anyone can specifically remember that.

Well, there was also a poster from the RSC's production of a certain play connected with Scotland with a character named Macbeth. This poster was illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Go on, google him. I'll wait.

Ready? Okay. Linden told me to come over to the shelving in the basement, where the posters were being kept. "Kirsten!" She called, "Come look!" At which point she flipped forward the Much Ado poster to reveal this monstrosity:

This is much more terrifying when 2'x3' and in higher definition.

I dimly recall shrieking and then, in a shocking turn of events, crying. This time, Linden was taken aback and apologized for scaring me, and we talked about how stupid that poster is, because it's not even of a character in the play, I mean really.

End result? Kind of a funny story, but I'm still uneasy around that poster.


This last one is not really Linden's fault, but more the fault of my overactive imagination and clearly overactive sense of worry. Right.

All of our Christmas supplies and decorations are kept in this closet under the basement stairs, in the laundry room. Every year we open it and every year it looks smaller and smaller. There is a bare light bulb that you turn on by pulling a taut string after you open the door, and the words MRS. DYL are illuminated in dripping white paint on the board right in front of your face. It's really kind of creepy.

One year I finally asked Linden who this MRS. DYL person was. Her reply began innocently enough: "She's the first lady who lived in this house."
"Really?"
"Yeah." Short pause. "This is the room she was murdered in."

At this point I believe I made a face similar to D: or maybe O.O and proceeded to wonder about how she could have been murdered, who could have painted her name in the closet, why they did so, if she was buried under the house, if she would haunt my dreams or maybe just every Christmas from this point onward...you know, the usual things a worrywart worries about.

I never asked Linden about it until several years later, when I reminded her that she said that and she said she was kidding, and she didn't think I'd taken it seriously. Even though I'd stopped really believing it was the case, it has always made me wary of opening that closet door after a year has gone by.

I think the scary stories and attempts to give me jolts were either conscious or unconscious acts of revenge for all the times my clumsy self accidentally hurt her: I slammed a car door on her hand, I dropped a bowling ball on her toe, and I accidentally wounded my sister countless times by doing stupid things. I love my sister though, and I love that we have these stories to share.