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?

This section has ventured away from the goings-on of Europe for some time, which was refreshing, since war clearly affects more regions than the West. It ventured into the Middle East, as well as China presumably near or around the time of the opium wars (certainly during the time when the economy was thriving due to opium sales, but the people were falling into addiction and not able to alleviate their despair --> discussed on pg 346-347 in my book).

The book addressed colonialism rather poignantly, in one of my favorite passages: "Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul [...] Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death, and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marbel statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enought to absorb all behavior[...]" (317).