Having just a moment ago finished the section WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ, all I can say is this: Holy. Cow.
Brando, tennis, father-son relationships, and a smattering of mysticism all wrapped up in the slow slide into drunk, done in twelve and a half dense pages.
He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you. (p.158)
This mention of the Beats, like the scene with the yogi in the locker room, makes the pervasive Zen/yogic/Tao references more overt than usual.
See simplicity in the complicated.
Achieve greatness in little things.
In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy.
In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.
The sage does not attempt anything very big,
And thus achieved greatness.
Easy promises make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.
Because the sage always confronts difficulties,
He never experiences them.
It both is and is not an accident that Infinite Summer started the day before Wimbledon. The latter always starts around the first day of summer so by choosing the solstice for its start, Infinite Summer placed itself serendipitously in Wimbledon’s court.
My mother played tennis all while growing up, and while I was little. She had to quit due to damage to her elbow, caused by the old wooden rackets, but I have vague memories of seeing her on court. More clear are the memories of watching Wimbledon and other tennis tournaments with her. Most especially, though, those memories are of getting up early, early to watch Martina and Chris, John and Jimmy — and later Boris and Stephie, Pete and Andre, poor Jennifer and Monica with their cut-short careers, Venus and Serena — on the green courts of Wimbledon. Sometimes we even had strawberries for our cereal in celebration.
This only matters, of course, because tennis takes up so much space in Infinite Jest, which most likely only happened because DFW was himself quite a good tennis player (he writes amazingly well about it in this piece on Roger Federer — well worth the read even if you don’t know tennis, first because it will teach you and second because it’s indicative of DFW’s writing style and acumen).
And so in celebration of tennis, here’s a favorite bit:
The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. … Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is essentially a tragic experience…. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within to be killed and mourned over and over again. (p. 84)
But because my own practice is of the yogic variety, here’s also this:
Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn’t laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me…. (p. 128)
These two quotes keep circling each other like a yin-yang symbol ( no, not the one referred to by the U.S.S. Millicent Kent).
A good farmers’ market, for me, is like a toy store to a kid; I want one of everything. The above was me showing restraint at the OSU-OKC market, which is easily the best one I’ve been to in the area. From the left: free range eggs (from a wool farm, oddly enough), Thai basil, shallots (which now reside in the white bowl on the toaster oven), mint (put one stem in a glass of water to be potted later), wheat rolls, cheddar goat cheese (made in the town I recently moved from), purple bell peppers, multi-hued carrots, and yellow roma tomatos.
Here I am three days and 54 pages into this weighty tome and guess what: I’m loving it!
Despite my recent inability to closely read anything more complex than a Regency — grad school does odd things to a person — I’m finding myself wallowing in DFW’s prose, reading slowly and with greater attention than I’ve given anything since The Faerie Queene in my very first English major course in college.
Reading in short bursts and with great attention will, I’m beginning to think, be my best strategy for staying on course and making it through with at least a modicum of an idea as to what has occurred. First, because I definitely need time to let the back of my brain mull over all the recently-ingested characters, references, and random details between readings. Just as it’s best to take a little stroll between Thanksgiving dinner and desert, turning to mundane daily tasks insures that there will be room for more Infinite Jest when the time comes to partake again.
Second, because, well, I’m a glutton. I want to still be able to read other things this summer — though not anything so complex, certainly — without feeling the need to plow through this one in order to get to them. So IJ has become my lunch book. No matter what, I only get to read it one hour per day. This has the added benefit of ensuring that I actually take a lunch break; something at which I tend to be remiss.
So far, my favourite bit:
He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away… but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which has retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between two sounds, without a thought in his head. (p26-7)
At first I wasn’t entirely sure that spending a few hours outside in 90+ temps was really something I wanted to do, but the four-hour, eleven inning game turned out to be perfect. There was just enough breeze to keep from feeling overly warm, and just enough seats in the shade for those who wanted them. There isn’t much shade between 11 and 3, but then not many folks come to such early games. The Oklahoma City Redhawks lost, but I got to see former Cardinal So Taguchi in person. Happy birthday to me!
Last weekend was the annual Red Earth Festival, here in Oklahoma City. I hadn’t attended since sometime in college, so it was a lot of fun to go back. The art portion was interesting, with representatives from all over the country. But the dancing and drumming was my favourite.
My niece’s birthday party was this weekend, at a place with five of these big, bouncy, blow-up things. This one was a bit of a maze — that’s R sitting at the top of the first slide, near the beginning. The bit to the left is the big slide at the end. Here’s my nephew and me at the end of it:
G wasn’t quite big enough to get up the two ladders entirely on his own, which was good. It gave the adults an excuse to play, too.
Recently we had a nearly unheard-of weather phenomenon here in the Oklahoma City area: an almost un-windy day. My niece, of course, wanted to fly kites and her dad did a marvelous job of teasing one up. I suspect the empty lot helped things along, as the houses to either side funneled the little sips of wind into an almost-respectable breeze.
On Friday I had no plans for this weekend other than to sleep a lot.
So far, I have:
moved my bed from the front bedroom, which has three outside walls and gets little air circulation from the AC in the living room, to the small bedroom, which has two doors and so gets plenty of airflow. This means that the front bedroom is now a combo dressing room/ yoga room — the other is too small for the dresser and cedar chest. I just hope Bikram doesn’t decide to sue me for doing hot yoga ’round about July!
gone to my niece’s dance recital. R is almost 4, so her little ballet group’s dance wasn’t exactly coordinated. They were, however, full of energy and enjoyed every moment up on that stage, and were an absolute delight to watch. Unfortunately, I forgot my good camera and had to make due with my little, old point-n-shoot. If you’re so inclined, head over to my flickr page for a couple of blurry shots.
scored three shirts for $12 at a second-hand store. Actually went in looking for dresses, but oh well.
went to Home Depot with my sweetie to get the sink and vent/light for the bathroom he’s adding to his house.
bought a lovely, impressionistic oil painting (pic at the link above) at the Paseo Arts Festival. The festival has grown quite a bit since my last visit in the early 90’s and I probably would have stayed longer if I hadn’t been so warm and a little worried about getting a sun burn. In the hour-plus I was there, however, I saw some beautiful art, including everything from plain white pottery baking dishes to turned wood bowls to Audubon-like illustrations of birds. Other than the piece I bought, my favourite was a set of stained glass windows that used Depression-era glass plates as center medallions. It was a very pretty way to repurpose the dishes and if he’d had one in the pattern I collect I probably would have bought it.
popped into an open house in the neighborhood, just out of curiosity. It’s a darling house, built in the 1930’s and with a master suite added on the back at some later point. The back yard is shaded and has a small pond with fountain. My favourite bit: the original black and white tile in the front bathroom.
And I’ve still got a whole day of weekend left! Good thing, too, since that whole sleep thing? Not so much.
"Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever- lengthening, ever- ascending, ever- improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb."
~Sir Winston Churchill
My niece’s birthday party was this weekend, at a place with five of these big, bouncy, blow-up things. This one was a bit of a maze — that’s R sitting at the top of the first slide, near the beginning. The bit to the left is the big slide at the end. Here’s my nephew and me at the end of it:
