Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 1

Infinite Jest pp1-21

‘I am not what you see and hear.’

And we’re off. How about those first ~21 pages? Having read at least the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest on three prior occasions this fourth foray into the early passages of the book are suffused with a kind of hazy, half-there familiarity. I remember the nightmarish picture of the Moms, running in perfectly geometric routes around the garden, lost to blind panic. I remember too, laughing out loud at the dialogue between CT and the frantic Deans:

‘So suddenly a bit of excited waggling’s a crime, now?’ ’You, sir, are in trouble. You are in trouble‘

&

‘The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’

What struck me reading the scene in the admissions office this time was how much of it is preoccupied with appearances: the disparity between how things are and how they might seem. It’s there in the equivocation in both Hal’s narration—‘I believe I appear neutral’; ‘I try to be perceived as limp and pliable’—and throughout multiple characters’ dialogue, such as when the yellow Dean remarks to Hal that deLint ‘appears also to be with you here today’.

Hal refrains from running away, knowing that that isn’t what would be perceived:

I would yield to the urge to bolt for the door ahead of them if I could know that bolting for the door is what the men in this room would see

and, at first, does not speak:

I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

This whole scene is obsessed with these mismatches - it even features two uses of the word ‘incongruity’. (When was the last time you read a chapter that used that word twice?) They’re both doozies too:

The incongruity between Admissions’s hand and face-color is almost wild

and, my personal favourite:

‘We thus invite you to explain the appearance of incongruity if not out-right shenanigans’

What’s up with all this? Thoughts, theories? Maybe leave these and anything else in the comments - perhaps a favourite sentence or construction… I think my highlight from the first 20 pages is the brilliant simile ‘My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it’.