9
9 Jamie Sharpsteen
CON
table of
TEN TS
Page 4 Chapter 1 Infinite Jest: Conversation Page 20 Chapter 2 Timeline Page 24 Chapter 3 Voicemail Page 28 Chapter 4 Short Story Chapter 5 Recipe
Page 32
Chapter 6 Mallarmé’s translation
Page 36
Page 42 Chapter 7 spoken and Written Page 46 Chapter 8 Diagnosis: Sudden-Onset Maddness Page 52 Chapter 9 Buffalo Bill
Chapter Infinite Jest: Conversation David Foster Wallace
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t tho ‘…’ ‘It’s late, Mario. It’s sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.’
‘That’s what the Moms always says, too.’
‘Always worked for me, Boo.’
fuzzyth ‘You think I think...
...all the time. You let me room with you because you feel sorry for me.’
‘Booboo I’m not even going to dignify that. I’ll regard it as like a warning sign. You always get petulant when you don’t get enough sleep. And here we are seeing petulance already on the western horizon, right here.’
‘When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there, when you were so on, making that guy look sick.’
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thou houghts ough thoughts
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‘This ‘…’ ‘Really don’t think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.’ ‘You ask me this once a week.’ ‘You never say, is why.’ ‘So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.’ ‘You’re talking about since Himself passed away.’ ‘…’ ‘See? You never say.’ ‘I do too say. I just did.’ ‘…’ ‘I just didn’t happen to say what you wanted to hear, Booboo, is all.’ ‘…’
‘There’s a difference.’ ‘…’ ‘I don’t get how you couldn’t feel like you believed, today, out there. It was so right there. You moved like you totally believed.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘How do you feel inside, not? ‘…’ ‘Hal?’ ‘Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let’s lie very quietly and ponder this.’
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again?’
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‘.. ‘...’
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..’ I’m going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterward you shush and let me sleep.’
‘Is it a good one?’
‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’
‘I give.’
‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’
‘That’s a good one!’
‘I give.’
‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’
‘That’s a good one!’
‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’ ‘Shush.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Hey Hal? What’s an insomniac?’
‘Somebody who rooms with you, kid, that’s for sure.’
‘Hey Hal?’ ‘…’
‘How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.’ ‘…’
‘You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.’ ‘…’
‘Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?’ ‘…’
‘It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate-grammar thing. The library-protest thing.’
‘...’
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‘Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she’s got the Headmaster’s House and her office and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She’s a worse workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. When’s the last time you saw a dust-mote in that house?’
‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Now she’s just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?’
‘Her eyes are better. They don’t seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even, now, a lot of the time.’ ‘How come she never got sad?’ ‘She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She got sad, I’m pretty sure.’
‘Hal?’ ‘You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?’
‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?’
‘Hal?’ ‘She’s plenty sad, I bet.’
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Chapter Timeline
2
got my second dog 4 my little sister was born 3 had a petting zoo birthday party 2
got my first dog
1
then now
&
had a quarter life crisis
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went on a vacation to California
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went to college time spent living in Tampa, FL time spent living in Weston, FL time spent living in Sarasota, FL
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18
wrote for a newspaper
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5 moved to weston
6 tried to run away from home
7 Switched elementary schools
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9/11 happened
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my parents opened up a shoe store
10 got my first cat
11 joined a cheerleading team
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quit my cheerleading team
13 began fostering dogs and cats
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15
adopted a puppy
joined my school yearbook staff
16 tried to play the guitar
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Chapter Voicemail
3
hey,
sweets It's me.
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Found your
note in the
crisper. So
Glad to you'll
sneaky!
know
miss me more than
FRESH PRODUCE even when you're facing a year's
worth of
dehydrated broccoli
beefish bits
Spam! Made me smile. And sad
Did you hide more?
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Chapter Short Story
4
for sale B
A
B
-Ernest Hemmingway
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Y
S
H
O
E
S
NEVER WORN
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Chapter Recipe
5
Sourdough
Rye
TOTAL TIME 5 days the first time, overnight subsequently FOR THE SOURDOUGH STARTER 2 2/3 cups rye flour Pinch instant yeast
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To make the starter: In a tall, narrow, nonmetal container (a tall, narrow bowl is fine), mix 2/3 cup rye flour with 1/2 cup water, along with the tiniest pinch of instant yeast — less than 1/16 teaspoon. Cover and let sit for about 24 hours, then add the same amount of both flour and water (no more yeast). Repeat twice more, at 24-hour intervals; 24 hours after the fourth addition, you have your starter. (From now on, keep it in the refrigerator; you don’t need to proceed with the recipe for a day or two if you don’t want to. Before making the dough, take a ladleful — 1/2 to 3/4 cup — of the starter and put it in a container; stir in 1/2 cup rye flour and a scant 1/2 cup water, mix well, cover and refrigerate. This starter will keep for a couple of weeks. If you don’t use it during that time and you wish to keep it alive, add 1/2 cup each flour and water every week or so and stir; you can discard a portion of it if it becomes too voluminous.)
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To make the dough: Combine the starter in a big bowl with the rye flour and the whole-wheat or white flour.
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3
Mix well, cover with plastic wrap and let sit overnight, up to 12 hours.
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The next morning, the dough should be bubbly and lovely. Add the salt, the cracked rye and 1 cup water — it will be more of a thick batter than a dough and should be pretty much pourable.
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Pour and scrape it into two 8-by-4-inch nonstick loaf pans. The batter should come to within an inch of the top, no higher.
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Cover (an improvised dome is better than plastic wrap; the dough will stick to whatever it touches) and let rest until it reaches the rim of the pans, about 2 to 3 hours, usually. Preheat the oven to 325 and bake until a skewer comes out almost clean; the internal temperature will measure between 190 and 200. This will take about 1 1/2 hours or a little longer.
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Remove loaves from the pans and cool on a rack. Wrap in plastic and let sit for a day before slicing, if you can manage that; the texture is definitely better the next day
YIELD 2 loaves
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Chapter Mallarmé’s Translation
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‘I would prefer that this Note was not read, or, skimmed, was forgotten; it tells the knowledgeable reader little that is beyond his or her penetration: but may confuse the uninitiated,
prior to their looking at the F I R S T W O R D S of the Poem, since the ensuing words, laid out as they are, lead on to the last, with no novelty except the spacing of the text. The ‘blanks’ indeed take on importance, at first glance; the versification demands them, as a
surrounding silence, to the extent that a fragment, lyrical or of a few beats, occupies, in its midst, a third of the space of paper: I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it. The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing, of regular sonorous lines or verse – rather prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear,
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and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes. The literary value, if I am allowed to say so, of this print-less distance which mentally separates groups of words or words themselves, is to
periodically accelerate
or slow
the movement, the scansion, the sequence even, given one’s simultaneous sight of the page: the latter taken as unity, as elsewhere the Verse is or perfect line. Imagination
flowers and
vanishes,
swiftly, following the flow of the writing, round the fragmentary stations of a capitalised phrase introduced by and extended from the title. Everything takes place, in sections, by supposition; narrative is avoided. In addition this use of the bare thought with its retreats, prolongations, and flights,
by reason of its very design
,
for anyone wishing to read it aloud, results in a score.
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The variation in printed characters between the dominant motif, a secondary one and
those adjacent,
marks its importance for oral utterance and the
scale
mid-way, , at top
or bottom of the page will show how the intonation
rises or falls.
(Only certain very bold instructions of mine, encroachments etc. forming the counterpoint to this prosody, a work which lacks precedent, have been left in a primitive state: not because I agree with being timid in my attempts; but because it is not for me, save by a special pagination or volume of my own, in a Periodical so courageous, gracious and accommodating as it shows itself to be to real freedom, to act too contrary to custom. I will have shown, in the Poem below, more than a sketch, a ‘state’ which yet does not entirely break with tradition; will have furthered its presentation in many ways too, offending anyone; sufficing to
without
open
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a few eyes.
This applies to the 1897 printing
specifically:
translator’s note.) Today, without presuming anything about what will emerge from this in future, nothing, or almost a new art, let us readily accept that the tentative participates, with the unforeseen, in the pursuit, specific and dear to our time, of
free verse and the prose poem.
Their meeting takes place under an influence, alien I know, t hat of Music heard in concert; one finds there several techniques that seem to me to belong to Literature, I reclaim them. The genre, which is becoming one, little by little,
like the symphony,
alongside personal poetry, leaves intact the older verse;
for which I maintain my worship, and to which I attribute the empire of passion and dreams, though this may be the preferred means (as follows) of dealing with subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect:
which there is no remaining justification for excluding from Poetry –
the unique source.
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Chapter Spoken and Written by Ferdinand de Saussure
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Language & are two different systems the only purpose of the latter is to
of
writing
signs;
represent the former.
Linguistics is not concerned
with the connection between the written and spoken word–
its sole object is the latter:
the spoken word.
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But the written word is so closely bound up with the spoken, whose image it is, that it is increasingly arrogating
the main role to itself/
Ultimately the point is reached where more importance is attached to
than to this sign
representation of the spoken sign
itself.
It’s like thinking that to know someone, It is better to look at his
photograph than his
face. 49
Chapter Diagnosis: Sudden-Onset Maddness
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Diagnosis: Sudden-Onset Madness DR. Lisa Sanders, MD THE PRESENTING PROBLEM:
What could be driving this man crazy?
A CRY FOR HELP ‘‘Get me out of here!’’
the middle-aged man shouted to his sister from his hospital bed.
‘‘They’re coming to get me.’’
His eyes darted from side to side as if searching for someone who was after
him. His arms and legs shook. She had never seen him like this.
He looked terrified.
A TERRIBLE FALL Three months earlier, the patient,
a 55-year-old man who suffered from
depression and alcoholism,
was admitted to the same hospital after falling down the stairs in his home.
He wasn’t found for two, possibly three days.
Because of his injuries and this delay, when he was
discovered, he was close to death. His kidneys had stopped working, and
his body chemistry was completely out of whack.
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On the way to the hospital, his heart stopped, and he had to be shocked back to life.
A SLOW RECOVERY The patient remained in
Waterbury Hospital in
Connecticut for
five weeks (where I was one of his doctors), three of them in intensive care. Even after these weeks of care,
terrible:
the toll of his injury was
his kidneys were still not working, so he required hemodialysis
three times a week; his arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them.
He was unable to swallow and had to be fed through a tube.
When his sister visited him there, she barely recognized him.
His slender body was bloated.
He had tubes everywhere.
He could do little more than whisper. Still,
she saw that he was slowly improving. He had started to smile and make jokes
despite his many disabilities. After five weeks in the hospital, he was transferred to a short-term rehabilitation facility.
SEEING THINGS After two weeks in rehab, something changed. He started talking to people no one else could see. He feared they wanted to harm him.
When the hallucinations persisted for a second day, he was sent to
the emergency room at Waterbury. The patient told the E.R. psychiatrist that he was seeing people he knew couldn’t be there.
Despite the
hallucinations,
he was calm and clear.
He told the doctor that he thought the visions began after he recently started taking a new sleeping pill. That made sense to the doctor. Delirium is an unusual but known side effect of that drug. He put the patient on a different sleep medication
and returned him to rehab.
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DELIRIUM Two days later he was back.
He was still seeing people who weren’t there,
but now he was also
frantic and confused. He knew his name but little more. All he was certain of was that he was in
danger.
Because of his confusion, Dr. Brian Linde, the intern on call,
couldn’t rely on the patient to tell his own story.
Instead the doctor had to depend on
the patient’s records to make sense of the situation in front of him:
the hospital notes provided an outline of the patient’s earlier admissions.
The rehab-center records showed some details of his recovery from the
serious injury. It also included a long list of the medications he was taking
and reported that he had
been confused for the past four days.
On examination, the patient had a fever. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was
high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his muscles were hyperreactive.
TEST RESULTS Blood count: Anemic but unchanged from previous tests. Blood chemistry: Abnormal because of the kidney failure, but unchanged from previous tests. Urine test: Abnormal, with white blood cells and bacteria suggestive of an infection. Head CT: Unremarkable. Chest X-ray:
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Unremarkable.
INFECTION AND CONFUSION Dr. Donna Windish,
the attending physician,
first heard about the patient during rounds the next morning.
She stood with her team outside the patient’s room
as Linde described a man recovering from a severe injury who had suddenly begun seeing things. The cause wasn’t clear, Linde told Windish. It wasn’t from the sleeping pill, because
eliminating it didn’t help.
Tests indicated that the patient had a urinary-tract infection.
Could that be the cause of the patient’s delirium? Although disorientation linked to an infection is more common in the elderly,
Linde said he thought that this patient’s weakened state might make him more susceptible.
If they treated the infection, the confusion
should clear.
WORSE AND WORSE
The next day the patient’s sister arrived and was
greeted with his paranoid entreaty for help.
She was bewildered;
he had been improving.
She demanded to know what was going on with her brother.
But no one knew. Windish was also worried.
Patients usually improve rapidly when urinary infections are treated with antibiotics.
But he was no better than he was the day before. Windish told her team that she didn’t think this confusion was
caused by his infection.
She had another idea. He was on two antidepressants at the
time of his admission. These medications help allay depression by increasing the amount of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, in the brain. But too much serotonin can confuse
the mind and hurt the body.
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Chapter Buffalo Bill
9
Buffalo Bill 's defunct
who used to ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
Jesus
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
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he was a
handsome
man
and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death 59
Colophon Jamie Sharpsteen GC246_02 Instructor: Edwin Utermohlen Spring 2013 Typeface: Bodoni
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