lack
In every house I pass there is someone I should meet.
The things you don't have are the heaviest. You will drag them to the grave.
The narrative function N is nothing more than dp/dt, where p is pain.
I poked my head up for pop-culture air and came away bemused: a musical of Gregory Maguire's Wicked? Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath? Jack White is in Cold Mountain and has a car accident with Renee Zellweger? See, it's better in the burrow.
Or maybe not. I went to Powell's and skimmed that new Infinite Jest reader's guide, which didn't take long as it's under 100 pages. Mostly I was curious what it had to say about some of the plot ambiguities. The guide claims that [spoiler] the most likely reason Hal ends up neurologically damaged at the start/end of the book is not because he took the DMZ, but because he was captured by the wheelchair assassins, who at the end of the book were about to take over the tennis tournament bus, and who presumably subjected him to the Entertainment. That might explain why he and Don Gately are forced to dig up his father's head to retrieve the original cartridge. The guide also sees a direct homage to Joyce in that the book is stalked by the ghost of a tall, alcoholic, avant-garde author named James.
Past that I started skimming faster, because it started getting dry, and sort of obvious, and sort of like someone's Ph.D. dissertation—and I don't want to read anyone's Ph.D. dissertation. I am not reconciled to the fact that the way of the world might force me to one day write a dissertation, and then go on to read other people's dissertations for a living. Slim choices. I don't have the constitution to go work in an Alaska fishery, or whatever the Non-University Real Manly Writers do these days. I don't have a lot of things. And the stupid thing is, that statement will always be true.
