And while I find this incredibly fun (in a way, it's like a neverending cascading of concepts inside concepts (speaking of which, I'm not sure whether this was seen as revolutionary when Infinite Jest was first published (1996) or if, as I feel, it was seen as a formal literary version of the sort of games children's books would play (I would always run out of fingers marking the different paths I'd taken in Choose Your Own Adventure books))) there is something about it that doesn't lend itself to reading in the doctor's waiting room.
I went there straight after work, thinking I could get some study done in the hour or so before my appointment. Unfortunately a small girl with a beautiful smile was busy running back and forth across the waiting room and shouting with the glee of childhood. This was nice, but I was trying to infer the verb conjugation-form of the なあ ending ("to state one's feeling emphatically") when the example given was only the たいなあ form ("to state one's wish emotively", viz.:
一度南極へ行きたいなあ。"I wish I could go to Antarctica just once."
So I pulled Infinite Jest out of my bag (no small feat in itself) and thus bring you to the point of the post. Mea maxima culpa, for my last post's suggestion that an Australian man of a certain age wouldn't have used the term "minor-leaguers". Less than 24 hours later, I was walking along the seafront and remembered the following lines from TISM's "The Back upon which Jezza Jumped":
The minor-leaguers, the average markers, the consistent second raters;
The stay at homers, the timid loners, the habitual masturbators;
The ugly girls, the amputees, the screaming mongoloid;
The senile old, the deformed young, the bladders that unwillingly void...
I was wrong.
But the connection between one of the stories in How We are Hungry and the very start of Infinite Jest lies here:
Jerry has an accent that sounds British but possesses the round vowels of an Australian. (Eggers, 150)
The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. (Wallace, 6)
As an Australian whose accent has never matched the stereotype, I think I know what Eggers and Wallace are saying here. That there would be gradations of accents in Australia, whether geographic or cultural, based on class or local demography of immigrants, is not so much denied or unknown or unworthy of even being speculated upon; it is in fact that the non-Australian reader, on being introduced to an Australian character, needs to be told that this one isn't the guy you're thinking of.
I have no doubt that the Wallace's tennis coach character is Australian, even though the text doesn't state it directly. And I know it from a brilliant line of wipe-your-glosses genius that follows thereafter. Hal interlocks his fingers "into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X."
His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. (Wallace, 6)
It takes another eight pages before Coach White refers to someone as "mate".
Anyway I didn't get very far through Note 304 (which is a fantastic, horrific description of an incredibly violent pastime reminiscent of the sport-based society of Georges Perec's W) before the doctor was able to see me, and I went upstairs to see her, and the long and short of it is that despite being accidentally hit quite hard in the groin three weeks ago by a tennis ball, the cremasteric muscle is undamaged and the bruising is only painful (as opposed to painful and worrying).
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