Literary Paint Chips - Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. (The Paris Review)
Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We’re coming to the crux of what I have to try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force — used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential.
The Decemberists recreate the Eschaton scene from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for their new music video “Calamity Song”. The lyrics also contain a reference to the book, try to find it ;)
Watch the video on npr/ More behind the scenes on the NYT/ And a fascinating infographic exploring the game
White Flag is one of the area AA meetings Ennet House requires its residents to attend. You have to be seen at a designated AA or NA meeting every single night of the week or out you go, discharged. A House Staff member has to accompany the residents when they go to the designated meetings, so they can be officially seen there. The residents’ House counselors suggest that they sit right up at the front of the hall where they can see the pores in the speaker’s nose and try to Identify instead of Compare. Again, Identify means empathize. Identifying, unless you’ve got a stake in Comparing, isn’t very hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers’ stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own: fun with the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next to somebody who doesn’t even resemble any known sort of mammal, three-day blackouts you come out of and have to buy a newspaper to even know what town you’re in; yes gradually less and less actual fun but with some physical need for the Substance, now, instead of the former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined with terrible daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias, dim siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted authorities, knee-buckling headaches, mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses — ‘Then come the day I lost my job to drinking.’ […] ‘Lost my damn job,’ he says. ‘I mean to say I still knew where it was and whatnot. I just went in as usual one day and there was some other fellow doing it,’ which gets another laugh.
— then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you’re in Denial about it being the Substance that’s causing the very Losses it’s consoling you about —
‘Alcohol destroys slowly but thoroughly is what a fellow said to me the first night I Come In, up in Concord, and that fellow ended up becoming my sponsor.’
via pooryorickentertainment (originally pooryorickentertainment)
Design by Chris Ayers
Infinite Jest (VI). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. ‘Madame Psychosis’; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. Incandenza’s last film, Incandenza’s death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used ‘Psychosis,’ thus list the film under Incandenza’s output for Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to the film as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘far and away [James O. Incandenza’s] most entertaining and compelling work.’ West Coast archivists list the film’s gauge as ‘16…78…n mm.,’ basing the gauge on critical allusions to ‘radical experiments in viewers’ optical perspective and context’ as IJ(VI)’s distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.
