Okay so this was going to be in response to GrumpyMutt's post from below, but it got too long. Although they are indeed not for the faint of heart, the commercials from that post are fascinating (http://www.montanameth.org/View_Ads/index.php), especially in the context of Infinite Jest, and I would recommend everyone watch them. Okay so here's my reaction: first of all, these advertisements reminded me immediately of Requiem For a Dream. Like the film, they were effective not so much in staving off drug use (I didn't plan to start using meth or heroin anyway) but rather in burning an incredibly disturbing imprint into my mind.

Okay, can someone please explain the last scene with Orin and Luria P--- that starts on 971?

As for the ending, as someone has already mentioned in their blog, it is definitely not a very cheery scene. I'm not very surprised that the ending wasn't anything more conclusive or uplifting, because, quite frankly, this book was just depressing. It had its moments of ludicrous hilarity, but overall, I just felt really bad for a lot of, if not all of, the characters. Everyone is so emotionally messed up that they deserve a hug...or maybe not (if you remember that scene with Ken Erdedy and Poor Tony that starts on 503). It's fitting that the ending matches the criticism what people expect out of entertainment. We want something that is wrapped up neatly at the end and leaves us with warm, fuzzy feelings; instead, we get relapse and a feeling that nothing changed for the better.

Hal and Gately converged in some ways near the end. Both end up attending Ennet house meetings, and are connected to Joelle, and have a dangerous addiction to drugs, but there's more....

I feel like we a got a lot of horizontal or reposed imagery near the end, especially with the two of them. There was the scene where Hal was lying in his room and can't get up (902), and the scene with Gately falling onto the floor when he's really drugged up (938), Gately being stuck in the hospital bed, and of course the end, with Gately lying on the cold sand at the beach. All of these reposed positions kept evoking a death/corpse image for me.

The last word of Underworld was "Peace", which obviously had some deeper meaning.
Here, however, the last words are "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was out."
Not a very cheery scene really. At first, I found it interesting that Wallace decided to end with Gately and not one of the Incandenza's. But then I decided I knew most about Gately anyway- he was the most transparent character in the end. Or the character tha we know the most about. Most of the questions about Gately were resolved (unlike Hal and Orin, I thought, but maybe I missed something. always a possibility)

I just wanted to explain my take on why Infinite Jest, a video of mother saying "i'm sorry" over and over again is as entertaining as it is. My reasoning may seem childish if not outright silly but I think that part of the reason this video is as addicting as it is because the idea of a motherly apology is so remote. Call me crazy and playing on exaggerations and jokes, but I don't think anyone can deny that at some point in their life before adulthood, they were "wronged" in some way and felt they deserved an apology they never received. What's more, you probably were forced to admit that you were at fault even when you truly believed otherwise; in a sense, a false forced confession. This double whammy makes people loose faith in any idea of justice and fairness. Moreover, because parents are the authority and monopolizer of power within a family unit, we as children view such an act as an abuse of power.

We've been here before, with the other novels, especially GR, and I'd like to revisit.

As I read this book, the vast majority of the characters are male and even in the relatively major female characters I never really sensed much of what would be considered conventional femininity. We've encountered the USSMK, Ann Kittenplan who's about as feminine as the East German women's swim team, Avril, the Incandenzas' mother but also for the most part serves both the role of mother and father, Kate Gompert who's nothing but horridly depressed and finally Joelle who we see mostly as the "pretty girl" and not particularly feminine. At the same time, Infinite Jest IV or V tells its viewer, "Death is always female and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother" (788). Why such a strong focus on death as female? Why is this what people want to hear? that their mothers are "SO VERY SORRY" (839)? Or more puzzling why can Jim Incandenza alone endure the film?

So. Upon taking a break around midnight I decided to unwind with a bit of ye old Entertainment. The hows and the whys escape me--the interwebs, like a magical forest, tend to lead to many unsettling discoveries--but I stumbled upon this little... gem, the website for the Montana Meth Project. Warning: The videos and the ads aren't exactly for the faint of heart. The blurb on the site sums it all up pretty nicely, 70-90% of teens in Montana are supposedly seeing these about three times a week--saturation-level advertising they're calling it. The ads themselves are... well... abhorrently grotesque. Like the Nunhagen-Aspirin ads, but there's nothing remotely artistic or what have you about this. "Not even once" is the general theme...

Finished! 3 down, 1 to go. I'm not sure I fully understood everything that happened in the end, but hopefully some of the pieces will click soon.

So. There was one scene that really tied in to the whole "family relations" thing that a lot of groups were talking about yesterday:

"What moved *me* to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin. I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself" (956).

Okay, so I finished Infinite Jest this morning, and I don't really feel closure. We had some guesses reaffirmed by Hal near the end, and some light was certainly shed on Gately's past, but I didn't really feel an end. I guess I was hoping to see a little more of Joelle and to figure out more about Marathe. To tell you the truth, I am still confused about Marathe. What became of him and the wheelchair gang? Does anybody know? Were we supposed to know? I wish we knew what became of my favorite character, Pemulis. He was expelled (right?) and now he is just waiting out the semester before he leaves? I'm also guessing he wants to talk to Hal about doping him up.

so ive been meaning to post links to these two new york times articles for a while,

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=daa22e9836cf2a402e2fb3491b03b936&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkVA&_md5=b52a186aa4abdebf78414e9453b17b0d

"Your Brain on Baseball" by David Brooks

this is by the times's conservative pundit and it's about the exact same type of automated brain functions that wallace attirbutes to tennis players (bottom of page 260 is one example) only with baseball players at spring training, pretty interesting stuff

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=9d550e9075d64e6301e2d7646ec1bf4a&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkVA&_md5=946b019e72aad143a1d68a83a16f758d