“Bigger, more ambitious, and better than anything else being published in the U.S. right now…. Infinite Jest unerringly pinpoints how Americans have turned the pursuit of pleasure into addiction.”
— David Streitfeld, Details
“Brashly funny and genuinely moving…. Infinite Jest will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius.”
— Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune
Notes
1 This, and thus part of this essay’s title, is from a marvelous toss-off in Michael Sorkin’s “Faking It,” published in Todd Gitlin, ed., Watching Television, Random House/Pantheon, 1987.
2 Quoted by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness, Harvard U. Press, 1981; subsequent Emerson quotes ibid.
3 Bernard Nossiter, “The F.C.C.’s Big Giveaway Show,” Nation, 10/26/85, p. 402.
4 Janet Maslin, “It’s Tough for Movies to Get Real,” New York Times Arts & Leisure Section, 8/05/90, p. 9.
5 Stephen Holden, “Strike The Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep,” ibid., p. 1.
6 Sorkin in Gitlin, p. 163.
7 Daniel Hallin, “We Keep America On Top of the World,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 16.
8 Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,” New York Times Magazine, 11/02/80.
9 M. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage, 1945 edition, pp. 57 and 73.
10 I didn’t get this definition from any sort of authoritative source, but it seems pretty modest and commonsensical.
11 Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1985, p. 72.
12 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.
13 This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give you an idea.
14 If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” in the 10/11/87 New York Times Book Review.
15 In Bill Knott’s Love Poems to Myself, Book One, Barn Dream Press, 1974.
16 In Stephen Dobyns’s Heat Death, McLelland and Stewart, 1980.
17 In Bill Knott’s Becos, Vintage, 1983.
18White Noise, pp. 12–13.
19 Martone, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.
20 Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.
21 Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.
22 At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller — so the guy said it in the mid-’80s.
23 A similar point is made about Miami Vice in “We Build Excitement” Todd Gitlin’s own essay in his anthology.
24 Miller in Gitlin, p. 194.
25 Ibid., p. 187.
26 Miller’s “Deride…” has a similar analysis of sitcoms, but Miller ends up arguing that the crux is some weird Freudio-patricidal element in how TV comedy views The Father.
27 Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 1987.
28 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review #146, Summer 1984, pp. 60–66.
29 Pat Auferhode, “The Look of the Sound,” in good old Gitlin’s anthology, p. 113.
30 Miller in Gitlin, p. 199.
31 Greil Marcus, Mystery Train, Dutton, 1976.
32 Hyde, op. cit.
33White Noise, p. 13.
34 A term Gitlin uses in “We Build Excitement.”
1 (I haven’t yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels at the possibilities implicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy….)
2 “M.o.L,” only snippets of which are on BV’s soundtrack, has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time — well worth checking out.
3 (’92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)
4 Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way — the photo on the title page of Lost Highway’s script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half unbelievably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook on extreme dental emergencies. There’s great enthusiasm for this photo around Asymmetrical Productions, and they’re looking into the legalities of using it in Lost Highway’s ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I’d want a truly astronomical permission fee.
5 (And Dune really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet’s giant worm-monsters, who with their tripartitely phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in Eraserhead.)
6 Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducements destroy what’s cool and alive in a director should consider the recent trajectory of Richard Rodriguez, from the plasma-financed vitality of El Mariachi to the gory pretension of Desperado to the empty and embarrassing From Dusk to Dawn. Very sad.
7 (using MacLachlan perfectly this time — since the role of Jeffrey actually calls for potato-faced nerdiness — plus Eraserhead’s Jack Nance and Dune’s Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using Dallas’s Priscilla Pointer and everything’s Hope Lange as scary moms…)
8 TIDBIT: HOW LYNCH AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR BV FILMED THAT HELLACIOUS FORCED “JOYRIDE” IN FRANK BOOTH’S CAR, THE SCENE WHERE FRANK AND JACK NANCE AND BRAD DOURIF HAVE KIDNAPPED JEFFREY BEAUMONT AND ARE MENACING HIM INSIDE THE CAR WHILE THEY’RE GOING WHAT LOOKS LIKE 100+ DOWN A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car’s going so fast is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn’t even moving. A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The whole scene’s got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten if the car’d actually been moving (the production’s insurance wouldn’t have allowed that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.