A year after reading it, things I remember about 'Infinite Jest' (a partial list)

Quebecois wheelchair assassins

Repeated and varied descriptions of the largeness of Don Gately's head

A Las Vegas crooner became president, the first president to twirl his microphone during the state of the union or whatever its called in the book, because the USA, Canada and Mexico are some sort of unified political entity

Interlace entertainment/cartridges - essentially this is Netflix

Subsidized Time - i.e. The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment

Ambiguity as to whether one character is deformed by beauty or acid

John "No Relation" Wayne

Microwave suicide

Waste disposal via trebuchet into the 'The Great Concavity'

'The Entertainment' being fatal in that no one can ever stop watching

Mario Incandenza is a homodontic midget

The reprehensible cocaine addict from the AA recovery house who kills dogs

A kid running around with a computer monitor smashed on his head, that they can't remove right away because of the sharp screen fragments proximity to his neck

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.)

Mount Dilaudid and Lake Urine

There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.

-Run of Play essaying Pele and David Foster Wallace is good

A perhaps inevitable post about DFW and tennis

Watching the U.S. Open tennis for potential brawls, then flipping television channels back and forth between that and a FIBA basketball game between the United States and Angola which was being playing in Turkey barely held my attention. I will say Gael Monfils was mildly amusing, in attempting a between the legs shot in the first set for no apparent reason other than style (pictured). It's unfortunate that shot failed and that he lost to Djokovic, at least from a personal ratings standpoint.

It's natural when watching tennis that my mind, which has read much David Foster Wallace, will start thinking about the things he wrote about the sport. Because they are very smart. There is of course the Federer piece, which is widely read due to its internet availability. And there are other essays too because the dude was way into tennis, having played it as an amateur youth. Many pages of Infinite Jest are dedicated to how pupils at a tennis academy constantly squeeze tennis balls in the hand at the end of their disproportionately larger forehand arm. Hypertrophy. I think "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" a book review/essay on Austin's awful autobiography is notable in its ability to break down the athlete-fan dichotomy. Or maybe the pro athlete-amateur athlete-fan trichotomy. Ugh.

Its easy to fall into the black-white assumption of superhuman-pro-athlete v. fat-idiot-fan. But as with all things stark comparisons fall short. Fat slobs like to throw footballs too, and much appreciation of sport comes from playing. Thus a middle ground, in which amateur soccer players like myself watch the World Cup obsessively and those with country club memberships enjoy tennis and golf I assume. Playing a sport gives one more knowledge regarding the intricacies of how the game works -- call it muscle memory maybe -- than one can ever get watching it on a brightly lit screen.

I don't know if this was a point Wallace made in his Austin essay, or if the point is adequately described here, even. There really is no way to know right now because I donated that book to a vacation home. Because it was called "Consider the Lobster" and the cabin is in Maine, a state known lobster. And also because of gin.