Infinite Boston

INFINITE BOSTON ARCHIVE

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:01:00 -0500

Infinite Boston was (and, you know, still is) a limited-run essay series about the real-life Boston area locations figuring in David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was published on this website as a daily feature from July–September 2012. Because this site has no search tool or archive feature, I’ve collected the series’ entire run into a single list, presented here in chronological order of publication for your convenience (and mine).

EXPLORING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S BOSTON
15 Jul

ENFIELD MARINE PUBLIC HEALTH CENTER (BRIGHTON MARINE HEALTH CENTER)
16 Jul

ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (GRANADA HOUSE)
17 Jul

ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (GRANADA HOUSE)
18 Jul

COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
19 Jul

WARREN STREET T-STOP
20 Jul

ENFIELD TENNIS ACADEMY (FIDELIS WAY PARK)
23 Jul

FATHER & SON MARKET
24 Jul

412 W. BRAINERD (BRAINERD ROAD)
25 Jul

ST. ELIZABETH’S HOSPITAL (ST. ELIZABETH’S MEDICAL CENTER)
26 Jul

ST. COLUMBKILL’S (ST. COLUMBKILLE CHURCH)
27 Jul

ENFIELD (ALLSTON-BRIGHTON)
30 Jul

PROFESSIONAL BUILDING (ST. ELIZABETH’S PROFESSIONAL BUILDING)
31 Jul

ST. JOHN’S SEMINARY
1 Aug

DICALCED MONASTERY (MONASTERY OF THE ESPOUSAL OF MARY AND JOSEPH)
2 Aug

REDEMPTION CENTER (ALLSTON REDEMPTION CENTER)
3 Aug

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE
6 Aug

RILEY’S ROAST BEEF (KELLY’S ROAST BEEF)
7 Aug

BLANCHARD’S LIQUORS
8 Aug

HARVARD SQUARE
9 Aug

SHERATON COMMANDER HOTEL
10 Aug

MAYFLOWER POULTRY COMPANY
13 Aug

CHEAP-O RECORDS (CHEAPO RECORDS)
14 Aug

RYLE’S TAVERN (RYLES JAZZ CLUB)
15 Aug

CAMBRIDGE THEATER COMPANY (AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER)
16 Aug

CAMBRIDGE CITY SHELTER (HARVARD SQUARE HOMELESS SHELTER)
17 Aug

ANTITOI ENTERTAINMENT
20 Aug

M.I.T. STUDENT UNION / STRATTON STUDENT CENTER
21 Aug

BOW&ARROW (BOW AND ARROW PUB)
22 Aug

STORROW 500 (STORROW DRIVE)
23 Aug

BOSTON COMMON / PUBLIC GARDEN
24 Aug

NICKERSON FIELD
27 Aug

KENMORE SQUARE
28 Aug

VINEY AND VEALS
29 Aug

TOBIN BRIDGE
30 Aug

CHINA PEARL
31 Aug

THE INFINITE ATLAS PROJECT
4 Sep

BACK BAY HILTON
5 Sep

THE POURHOUSE (THE POUR HOUSE BAR & GRILL)
6 Sep

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
7 Sep

STATE HOUSE ANNEX
10 Sep

SHAW MEMORIAL
11 Sep

A READER’S MEMOIR OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
12 Sep

PARK STREET STATION
13 Sep

JOELLE’S WALK TO THE “VERY LAST PARTY”
14 Sep

PINE STREET INN
17 Sep

JAMAICA WAY (JAMAICAWAY)
18 Sep

SHATTUCK SHELTER
19 Sep

KENKLE AND BRANDT’S APARTMENT
20 Sep

ARMENIAN FOUNDATION LIBRARY (ARMENIAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM OF AMERICA)
21 Sep

MOUNT AUBURN CLUB
24 Sep

412 MOUNT AUBURN STREET / MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY
25 Sep

HILLS OF HEARTBREAK (HEARTBREAK HILL)
26 Sep

2355H.-0005H.
27 Sep

160 FOSTER STREET
28 Sep

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Oct

MISTAKES I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS MAKING #1: BRAINERD ROAD AND HARVARD SQUARE
15 Oct

MISTAKES I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS MAKING #2: RILEY’S ROAST BEEF AND HUNG TOYS COLD TEA EMPORIUM
18 Oct

MISTAKES I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS MAKING #3: I NEVER LEARNED TO READ
14 Nov

MISTAKES I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS MAKING #3: I NEVER LEARNED TO READ

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:00:42 -0500

Two previous posts (#1, #2) have focused on errors of geography in the Infinite Boston series, and today I’d like to add a few non-location-based mistakes. All have since been corrected or clarified, but not fully explained. Here are three I know I screwed up:

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ENTERTAINENT TONIGHT

Somehow I managed to read Infinite Jest twice without it properly registering that the sign for Antitoi Entertainment, the “low-demand old film-cartridge emporium” which ties a few plot strands together, actually reads “Antitoi Entertainent” (note the missing letter “M”). The original version of my post made no such reference until Greg Carlisle, author of the estimable Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest pointed this out in a comment, with reference to a footnote making this unambiguous:

203. Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic.

As Carlisle noted, Anglophone POV characters Poor Tony Krause and Michael Pemulis both refer to it as “Antitoi Entertainment”, adding: “I’m assuming Pemulis, Poor Tony, and you are mentally correcting the sign, right?” It is fine company I keep.

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THE TAO OF STEVEN PINKER’S EMPLOYMENT

In the entry about M.I.T.’s twin student unions (one real but intact contra the novel, one mostly fictional but actually housing similar facilities) I had listed Steven Pinker as “a Harvard man” based on the fact that the Canadian-born cognitive scientist and writer received his Ph.D. at Harvard and teaches there now. Well, I should have read Wikipedia more carefully, because as it states, he taught at M.I.T. from 1982 to 2003, a not-insignificant period of time. To mangle the title of one of Mr. Pinker’s books, it appears my mind was not working.

Somewhat relatedly, the series’ references to Harvard and M.I.T. generated at least one comment based on the schools’ longstanding rivalry; in a post asking why the Harvard Bridge is so much closer to M.I.T., one reader offered this finite jest:

As a side note, I heard that MIT won the right to name the bridge connecting their Cambridge campus with Boston. After discovering many structural defects they decided that they should name the bridge after Harvard.

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THE BURT F. SMITH CONNECTION

Perhaps the most embarrassing textual oversight in the entire series is writing about a connection between scenes without actually realizing they were connected until this was pointed out by readers. In the entry about the difficult-to-locate Cambridge City Shelter I wrote about Burt F. Smith, a resident of Ennet House during the novel’s primary timeline, who had spent “nine months stuck” at this homeless shelter. I didn’t mention how he had come to get stuck there, although in retrospect I clearly should have. Nor did I mention his most prominent physical characteristic: when we meet him he has lost his extremities, and is introduced smoking a cigarette “by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears…”

The following week, I wrote about the defunct Bow and Arrow Pub, outside of which Emil “yrstruly” Minty and two fellow junkies beat up an “older type individual” on Christmas Eve and leave him in a snowy garbage pile. So, you can see where this is going. The error was worse than that; I’d taken away an impression that the victim had died but, as readers pointed out, it would be more correct to say they left him for dead, because there is no question at all that this is Burt F. Smith. From the very same passage introducing him:

Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet.

All I can say is that, in this book of a half million words, if the author can be forgiven for the original mistake, so can the reader.

MISTAKES I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS MAKING #2: RILEY'S ROAST BEEF AND HUNG TOYS COLD TEA EMPORIUM

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:11:00 -0400

Earlier this week, I wrote about two locations from the Infinite Boston series that I got wrong: Brainerd Road, which I had (defensibly, I would argue) interpreted too narrowly, and missed some nearby geography that informed the invention of 412 W. Brainerd; and Harvard Square, where I had (indefensibly, I acknowledge) missed the Au Bon Pain not thirty paces from the T-stop I had exited. Today we’ll tackle a few more errors of location:

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WHERE’S THE ROAST BEEF?

Credit: dickuhne

I went into the Riley’s Roast Beef / Kelly’s Roast Beef entry knowing that it was speculative; months of searching for area fast food establishments specializing in roast beef had led me to conclude that the place was either long-closed or possibly a fictionalized version of another roast beefery. (This was well before I had actually talked with anyone familiar with Allston-Brighton in the 1980s and 90s.)

When I visited Boston in July 2011, I basically just knew that Riley’s Roast Beef would have been somewhere along Don Gately’s driving route from Commonwealth and Warren to the Bread & Circus in Central Square, so when I found only a place called Kelly’s Roast Beef at the corner of Comm & Harvard Aves., I decided this was the best I was likely to do, and went on a-puzzling about other locations.

But when it came time to write the post in August 2012, I had come to realize that very few (if any) locations in the neighborhood were truly fictional, the same was likely the case here, and so the very morning I was ready to publish my findings—or lack thereof—I took another hard look at Google and Lexis-Nexis… and this time found reviews of Riley’s in Allston, including news about closures. (I also learned the above-mentioned Kelly’s location closed about six months after I visited (and I only found out after publishing that this corner was the site of Marty’s Liquors, mentioned in the book, but which I had not pursued in the same way. (Oops.)))

In any case, I revised my conclusions, published my confusions, and that very morning a reader pointed me to an old photograph of Riley’s on Flickr, published there under Creative Commons license and so republished above.

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HUNG LIKE A NOODLE

Writing about the Chinal Pearl restaurant in late August, I said that I would have written about a more interesting location nearby, Hung Toys Cold Tea Emporium, only it seemed to be fictional,

however my best guess is it would be either on Tyler where the China Pearl is located, or else Beach or Kneeland which bookend it.

I received no immediate response, but within a few weeks, two readers had agreed to the notion that it might be

Ho Toy Noodle Co. Inc, over on Oxford St., about a block away from China Pearl.

Indeed, on the corner of Oxford and Essex, there is a place called Ho Toy Noodle Co., Inc. (not pictured above, since I didn’t visit, though it is visible on Google Street View). Better still, a photographer on Flickr snapped a shot of the establishment’s owner in February 2011. Is this nice-looking man the real Dr. Wo? For the sake of all concerned, I hope the answer is no.

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Here are three more minor mistakes I made in first published versions, later updated with corrections:

Boston Common Parking Lot: I didn’t know that Boston Common had an underground parking lot when I asked about where Mike Pemulis might have parked the tow truck in the Park Street Station entry. This is clearly where Mike Pemulis would have parked the tow truck.
“Endless Stem”: In the entry about Joelle’s Walk to the Very Last Party, I listed among my confusions the definition of the term “Endless Stem.” The answer: a reference to panhandlers downtown; Infinite Jest refers to panhandlers as “stem artists”—a fact even discussed by me in the Park Street Station entry.
Boston marathon route: Writing about Heartbreak Hill, I casually repeated my impression that the celebrated Patriots Day marathon continued down Comm. Ave. past the Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House. I should have double-checked: the route actually turns onto Beacon for its final stretch, only a few blocks before.

For errors of geography, I believe that’s pretty much it. Not bad, if I may say so myself! But also not my only errors: at some point in the near future, I’ll get around to discussing other misconceptions and unresolved mysteries from the Infinite Boston series.

MISTAKES I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS MAKING #1: BRAINERD ROAD AND HARVARD SQUARE

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:06:00 -0400

Infinite Boston would not have happened without my summer 2011 visit to Metro Boston, where I searched for and sought to establish the positions of many locations in Infinite Jest. I gave myself four days to hit approximately 100 planned destinations, and I’m still surprised I managed to pull it off.

However, like any exploratory effort, wrong turns and mistaken impressions will be made, and this was no exception. Some of these errors and incomplete observations persisted long after the trip, only coming to light once I had hit publish, upon which readers of this series let me know.

In this post and one more upcoming, I’ll highlight some of my biggest blunders, at least as regards assumptions about geographic locations in the Boston area, though I will probably address other types of mistakes up ahead. For now, I’ll cover just two oversights—my first, and my biggest.

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THE LENGTH OF BRAINERD ROAD

Among the first locations to confound me was the fictional address of “412” said to be found on Brainerd Road along the “downscale north edge” of Brookline. Yet Brainerd signage runs just six blocks between Harvard Ave. and Kelton Street before turning into Corey Ave., and it didn’t seem to match up with the novel’s description as much as I had hoped. In this entry, I listed several inconsistencies, and stated that, unlike the Brainerd of the novel, “the hills in its immediate vicinity are not ‘lung-busting.’” A few readers disagreed, and one who reblogged the post, Adam Lauver, added this perspective:

As a resident of 130 Brainerd for two years (near the Brookline border, but our lease said Brighton and the USPS recognized it as Allston), I must say that there is indeed one lung-busting hill on that street—the one I lived on near its intersection with Kelton St. I’d also point out that when you cross Kelton, Brainerd Rd turns into Corey Rd, and said hill continues for a significant (and, again, lung-busting) while. I’m wondering if Wallace conflated Brainerd and Corey into just Brainerd Rd to simplify things.

While writing out later entries, I would come to find that Wallace had indeed conflated differently named roads, forgetting or choosing to ignore the street name changes at intersections which are surprisingly and infuriatingly common in the Boston area. So I am inclined to agree: I had too narrowly interpreted which stretch of road was meant to be Brainerd. In searching for the “Hawaiianized” F.L.Q. house, it turns out I stopped just a block or two short.

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AU BON PAIN IN HARVARD SQUARE

The original version of my entry about Harvard Square contained the following sentence:

The Au Bon Pain where Poor Tony smokes hash and “where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting” no longer exists (presumably, nor do the 70s-era guys) although the specific address is still a coffee shop, pictured above.

The image (not the one above here) was of the Crema Cafe, a coffee shop about a block from the location I should have identified. Without question, this was my most obvious error, and it was pointed out to me quickly, and repeatedly. A representative comment:

Au Bon Pain and the chess tables still exist (where you can play the ‘Chess Mister’). On Mass Ave on the corner of Dunster St. (next to Cambridge Savings Bank and the main entrance to the T station).

Yep, I blew it: the distinctive orange awnings are visible enough on Google Street View. I corrected the post immediately.

Puzzling as this oversight appears, I can explain well enough how I made it. My pre-visit research consisted largely of punching the names of locations into Google Maps, and I either got the address of the Crema Cafe instead, or misinterpreted what I found. (At least so far as I recall; this is no longer the result.) And serendipity, or its mirror opposite, was at work during my actual visit. I had started at the T stop, headed up Brattle Street to visit the American Repertory Theater and up to Garden Street in search of the Sheraton Commander. Upon coming back to the Square, I took JFK to Winthrop in search of a homeless shelter, and then walked up Bow Street to find the former Bow and Arrow. From here I caught a taxi cab and went off in search of Antitoi Entertainment… which will come up in the second half of this series.

A coda: When I made my latest visit to Boston earlier this month, I happened to be back in Harvard Square and, with a colleague, I stopped in here for a coffee. The chess tables were exactly as described, although it was a bit too early in the day for actual games to be going on, let alone an appearance by the ‘Chess Mister’. But I am pleased to report I can now personally verify something I needed others to tell me in the first place: there is definitely still an Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:59:00 -0400

Blogger here. No, I couldn’t resist adapting that later DFW-ism, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about the Infinite Boston series’ end. The purpose of this addendum is to acknowledge some of the folks who helped The Infinite Atlas Project become a reality. For this and more, a sincere thanks is owed to:

Olly Ruff, for many, many hours of research assistance and conceptual development from almost the very beginning, including numerous phone conversations to debate the probability of certain locations, the priority of inclusions, and other critical decisions. Without his support, it’s very likely this project would never have happened at all.

Leslie Bradshaw and the team at JESS3 for visual design, including the Infinite Map, plus Ian Spencer and the team at RedEdge for programming, including the Infinite Atlas. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have friends, running their own creative firms, who saw merit in my vision. Thanks to their respective business partners, Jesse Thomas and Bret Jacobson, as well. And a special shout-out to Lydia Wallbaum at JESS3, who fielded my many (many, many) change requests.

Pete Hunt, my lead copy-editor through Infinite Boston’s run. Early in the series I tried to have new posts ready a few days or a week at a time, but for most of its run I was writing rough drafts the evening before publication, then Pete would read and offer suggestions overnight, and I would finalize in the morning. His input made this series considerably better.

The folks behind the maps: Derek Watkins, a supremely talented cartographer who made the Infinite Map look as awesome as it does. Also Lyzi Diamond, who did the early GIS work, and plotted my locations to maps for the first time last summer. And my old friend Dave Crouse, who offered advice from early on. Fun fact: coincidentally, all of the above are fellow Ducks.

Additional support: Rhiannon Ruff, for keeping other projects running smoothly so I could take the time to focus on this; my sister Morgan Wehling, for logistical support on multiple fronts, particularly with web platforms and merchandise; Cory Falk for doing what he could with my decidedly amateur photography.

Special notice to Matt Bucher and Ben O’Connell, two friends with shared literary interests, who made small contributions with big results. Matt was the first to point out that Granada House happened to be this building visible on Google Maps, which was the beginning of the Atlas concept. Ben was the first to suggest I call the whole thing “Infinite Atlas” when the guy who owns InfiniteMap.com was unwilling to deal. Sorry, guy—that was your chance!

Thanks are due as well to the many readers of Infinite Boston and Infinite Atlas, who have offered corrections, clarifications and other feedback in the comments here. This goes double for Allston-Brighton’s Lauren Leja, who became my key correspondent in Boston and, in effect, quality control specialist. Many thanks as well to those uploading photos to Infinite Atlas, now and in the future. It’s these contributions which made this a truly collaborative project.

I suppose I would be remiss if I did not thank the family of David Foster Wallace, his literary executor Bonnie Nadell, and the good folks at Little, Brown and Company. To be truthful, I have had no interaction with any of them at any point in this project, but none have sent any cease-and-desist letters, and for that I am truly grateful.

Thank you all. Although the main series is complete, I do have a few follow-up posts in mind—plus I am sure more will come to me—so make sure to keep an eye on this space in the weeks ahead.

160 FOSTER STREET

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Infinite Boston finally comes to the inevitable end of its daily run with the entry now before you; while this is surely not the last time this site will be updated, it is the final installment of my Boston travelogue. And I would like to close with a location that is not actually from Infinite Jest, but from the life of David Foster Wallace.

The house pictured above is 160 Foster (‘No Relation’) Street, situated within the established boundaries of Enfield, Massachusetts. For a time, including the period when Infinite Jest was first coming together, DFW called it home.

I learned about it shortly before my trip from Matt Bucher, a friend who runs the wallace-l email list. He’d found it written on the inside of a teaching copy of The Silence of the Lambs in the Wallace archive at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. And so I made certain to pay it a visit, even though it took me a bit off my planned path.

The house is described in the D.T. Max biography, following the lead of its former residents, as a “sober house”:

Wallace’s stay at Granada House finished in June. … [He] moved into a transitional facility on Foster Street, just a few blocks away, with Big Craig and two other men from Granada House. … When the other residents went off to their jobs, Wallace would head for the library in bandana with knapsack to spend the day trying to write.

As Max reveals for the first time in his book, Big Craig is a former live-in staffer at Granada House who happens to be the the model for one of Infinite Jest’s central characters, Don Gately. I’ll let that sink in a moment—David Foster Wallace was housemates with Don Gately. (Or close enough.)

Turning back to the novel with this knowledge, I found that once, and only once, does Gately get the same nicknamed treatment, in which a character opines:

Big Don G.’s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said the way he heard it you could fight like you was born in a barfight.

The house at 160 Foster would appear to offer some essential tranquility for recovering addicts and barroom pugilists alike: a pretty, all dormer, three-story home, a front porch end-to-end, set back from an already quiet street, perched above a brief incline in an already hilly neighborhood—the next door neighbors are literally monks, in fact the “Dicalced monastery” we visited early in the series—surrounded by trees, including a large one out front protecting it from looky-loos like yrstruly. Even the power lines in front are like a force field, suggesting that one not get too close. Following a recurring theme in this series, I did not disturb.

And it’s a perfect place to conclude Infinite Boston. While not from the novel, it is of the novel. It also offers a chance to reflect on the real, the fictional and the fictionalized. Like many locations explored in the series, its significance requires special knowledge to appreciate. None remain who could answer the questions I would ask. Yes, this is a house where DFW once lived, but it’s not the same place it once was, nor will be again.

With my words and photos, careful research and chance discoveries, corrections from readers and assists from experts, Infinite Boston has sought to explore hidden corners of a familiar city while bringing new insight to a story experienced by many. Even so: time has passed, absence has entered, memories have faded, and David Foster Wallace’s Boston remains forever overhead.

2355H.-0005H.

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:51:29 -0400

For this penultimate daily installment of Infinite Boston, I’d like to identify not just a location but possibly the inspiration for a particular scene. The passage in question arrives nearly two-thirds of the way through the novel, a dozen or so pages and less than an hour in narrative time following Randy Lenz’s gruesome actions outside 412 W. Brainerd, which readers are likely to recall as one of the story’s key dramatic turning points.

But that scene is prefaced by an enjoyably intricate walk-through of Don Gately’s duties on the night shift at Ennet House, including a comic riff on the bureaucratic ass-painery of Boston’s then-near future:

And since metro Boston’s serious fiscal troubles in the third year of Subsidized Time there’s been this hellish municipal deal where only one side of any street is legal for parking, and the legal side switches abruptly at 0000h., and cruisers and municipal tow trucks prowl the streets from 0001h. on, writing $95.00 tickets and/or towing suddenly-illegally-parked vehicles to a region of the South End so blasted and dangerous no cabbie with anything to live for will even go there. So the interval 2355h.-0005h. in Boston is a time of total but not very spiritual community, with guys in skivvies and ladies in mud-masks staggering out yawning into the crowded midnight streets and disabling their alarms and revving and all trying to pull out and do a U and find a parallel-parking place facing the other way.

For Gately the nightly alternation is a logistical problem and figurative headache, because he first must lock up everything in the house’s front office that’s lock-upable, then “personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside into the little nameless streetlet” next to the Enfield Marine complex. The routine is always the same: Gately ushers them outside, and then herds them back inside, night after night. But following this particular ten-minute interval—and with a big no-thanks to Randy Lenz—nothing at Ennet House is ever quite the same again.

More to the point of this entry, the streetlet does in fact have a name: it’s simply a service road of Commonwealth Avenue, which is the street name in the address of real-life locations from the novel, such as the former Provident Nursing Home.

And toward the point of identifying a circumstance as opposed to mere location, the second image above is a street sign I happened to notice at the intersection of Comm. Ave. and a street that David Foster Wallace himself once lived on. It’s a simple tow notice, applicable just two days a month—a much different time interval than DFW’s invented annoyance. But I couldn’t look up at it without wondering if he’d once looked up at it, too, and got the idea for this passage.

HILLS OF HEARTBREAK (HEARTBREAK HILL)

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:56:00 -0400

Heartbreak Hill is the nickname for a long stretch of Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, Massachusetts, which rises to a crest just outside the border of Boston proper before leveling off and gradually descending toward city center:

…where the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is collectively called the historic April Marathon’s ‛Heartbreak Hill’…

Its reputation as the undoing of many participants in Boston’s Patriots Day marathon is almost a good metaphor for the struggles of the book’s characters, who buckle and break under the weight of their own addictions, psyches and other pressures.

The Marathon itself does not figure into the story, even though a few scenes occur in April and the marathon’s route almost passes right by E.T.A. and Ennet House. [Update: This entry originally, erroneously, stated that the course went right past them. D’oh!] But running is very much present in the book. The Enfield Tennis Academy’s student-athletes, struggling to succeed in amateur and (with a lot of hard work and luck) professional tennis, run this stretch on the regular:

Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and down urban Commonwealth Avenue even though you would rather set your hair on fire than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge. Your brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of them laughing and screaming Schnell. Enfield is due east of the Marathon’s Hills of Heartbreak, which are just up Commonwealth past the Reservoir in Newton. Urban jogging in a sweaty pack is tedious.

The slightly odd phrasing—“Hills of Heartbreak,” I mean—sounds more like the garbled English of the Wheelchair Assassin Rémy Marathe than the O.E.D.-reading Hal Incandenza, but this line is in fact voiced by Hal, narrating Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, a short film by his brother Mario—the very one riding shotgun with the certifiable Head Coach and Athletic Director Gerhardt Schtitt.

Schtitt is actually Austrian, and not altogether un-avuncular, despite making “judicious use of his pea-shooter to discourage straggling sluggards” from the seat of his “war-surplus” motorcycle. Yet it is the physically malformed, non-tennis playing Incandenza Mario with whom he pals around:

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW, bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.

Visiting this infamous incline myself, I could easily see how its long, slow ascent might cause a runner to lose all hope, especially after mile twenty. Turning around and facing the other way, I could also see how terrifically fun it would be to bomb down it at excessive speeds, especially with a crazy old Teutonic mentor. Heartbreak Hill doesn’t have to be: it just depends on how you approach it.

412 MOUNT AUBURN STREET / MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0400

The conclusion of our Watertown trilogy is a split-location entry, and coincides with our final look at gender-dysphoric junkie thief Poor Tony Krause. You may have noticed that Infinite Boston has spent a disproportionate amount of time tracking Poor Tony’s unsavory activities, first through the eyes of fellow addict Emil Minty (Harvard Square), then escapades with the Antitois (Sheraton Commander Hotel), and a haphazardly violent mugging of two Ennet residents (Antitoi Entertainment).

His seeming ubiquity is unusual considering that he is one of the few recurring characters—if not quite a major character, nor is he a minor one—whom Wallace does not invite the reader to empathize with. I would argue that these two facts are related.

It is fairly evident that the novel consists of two parallel stories—the tennis academy and the halfway house—bound together by a third—the absurdist international intrigue of the Organization of North American Nations, the wheelchair assassins, and so forth.

It may help to think of Poor Tony as a joint or ligament between two of these, connecting the Québecois separatists and Ennet residents through the streets of Boston. It therefore seems plausible, if not probable, that Wallace created Poor Tony’s unattractive exterior for purposes of plot, and only later sketched out his unattractive interior. And whether DFW intended for Poor Tony to be purposefully unlovable, or could not fully relate to the character—Poor Tony’s thoughts turn to fashionable clothing at the least opportune of moments—I sure don’t recall Infinite Jest winning any awards from transgender advocacy groups.

Which is not to say he is entirely unsympathetic. Although unlikable for better reasons still—note that he is responsible for the deaths of multiple persons in the story, something even the loathsome Randy Lenz cannot claim—we are of course granted access to Poor Tony’s inner thoughts, including his deep agitation at his past estrangement from his late father. And today’s entry focuses on two locations related to the unhappy Krause family. First:

He kept seeing his sonless father again — removing the training wheels, looking at his pager, wearing a green gown and mask, pouring iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial woe, grabbing his shoulder, sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark glasses from a distance.

I don’t have too much to say about the Mount Auburn Cemetery; like many places, I visited briefly, photographing its only its frontal regions, before moving on to the next photo op. Its Wikipedia article, however, is not bad, and includes a list of its many notable permanent residents, among them: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Buckminster Fuller, both Henry Cabot Lodges.

More interesting to me is the Krause family home, which appears twice, near the beginning and the end, so the following ellipsis snips out literally hundreds of pages:

His own late obstetrician father had rended his own clothing in symbolic shiva in the Year of the Whopper in the kitchen of the Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn Street, horrid central Watertown. … Poor Tony’s father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s green strings had dug into the head.

About that address: careful readers may recall that 412 is also the address of the F.L.Q. house at 412 W. Brainerd Road. A question for Wallace scholars and enthusiasts: what—if anything—is the significance of the number “412”? (Thanks, but no thanks, numerologists.)

Unlike the Brainerd Road address, which could not possibly exist, the Mount Auburn Street address very well may, although I’m not absolutely certain it does. Whereas Brainerd Road is just a few blocks long, Mount Auburn Street runs west from Cambridge through nearly the entirely length of Watertown. The street here is pretty non-descript, split between fairly large homes and apparently small businesses, with an elementary school and church each a few blocks away. Given its four-lane width, this may not be the best place to raise children, but “horrid” is not the word I would choose.

The house pictured above is where Google Maps drops the pin. However, it seemed to be split up into multiple apartments, none of whose addresses were visible from the street, and I declined to be the suspicious fellow climbing up the steps to look at your front door, only to mysteriously disappear. You’re welcome, Watertown.

MOUNT AUBURN CLUB

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:57:00 -0400

Over the past ten weeks, a few of the locations from Infinite Jest this series has explored relate in some way to David Foster Wallace’s own life and times in Boston. The most prominent among them is the former Granada House, an addiction treatment center where he was a patient in 1989-90, and the obvious model for Ennet House. As D.T. Max explains in his recently published biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Wallace was required to hold job outside the house—just like his novel’s characters—and one of these was at the Mount Auburn Club in Watertown. But he did not stay long:

He went to work as a front desk attendant at the Mount Auburn Club, a health club in Watertown. His job was to check members in—he called himself a glorified towel boy—but one day Michael Ryan, a poet who had received a Whiting Award alongside him two years before, came to exercise. Wallace dove below the reception desk and quit that day.

The club’s role in Infinite Jest is just as brief, and concerns a character we never really come to know, the wife of the “Near Eastern medical attaché” who figured in the Back Bay Hilton entry. Living under the strict, patriarchal rules of Saudi society, the club is a rare environment where she can find a measure of freedom:

Wednesday nights … are permitted to be his wife’s Arab Women’s Advanced League tennis night with the other legation wives and companions at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown. … At 0015h., 2 April, the medical attache’s wife is just leaving the Mount Auburn Total Fitness Center, having played five six-game pro-sets in her little Mideast-diplomatic-wife-tennis-circle’s weekly round-robin, then hung around the special Silver-Key-Members’ Lounge with the other ladies, unwrapping her face and hair and playing Narjees and all smoking kif and making extremely delicate and oblique fun of their husbands’ sexual idiosyncrasies, laughing softly with their hands over their mouths.

I had intended for my own visit to the Mount Auburn Club, toward the end of the second day of my trip, to be similarly discreet. While my cab driver waited in a parking spot, I snapped a few shots of its front door, then its uncovered courts, and headed back out to the street for the entrance sign I’d first seen in Tim Bean’s 2008 Flickr set. With photos obtained, I was making for the cab when a late middle-aged man exited the building and began calling to me, asking what I was doing. I had run into minor trouble with authority figures at previous locations, so I was a little worried about being considered a trespasser. But I had the shots I needed, and took a chance on meeting the proprietors and telling something new about their own place of business.

This is how I came to meet Bill and Paul Crowley, the two brothers who have operated the club since opening it 1974. Following them inside the club, I explained the gist of my project, their health club’s bit part in a gargantuan novel, and the late author’s brief employment here. Neither remembered him—no surprise, considering just how low a profile Wallace intended to keep, not to mention his hasty exit. The Crowleys seemed amused by their appearance in this unfamiliar book, and readily agreed to give me a look inside their tennis dome (as I’ve since learned these things are called). In the novel, it is simply called “the Lung,” described as an

…inflatable dendriurethane dome, known as the Lung, that covers the middle row of courts for the winter indoor season.

Like the Enfield Tennis Academy, the Mount Auburn Club raises the domes seasonally, though this one had been left up over a little-used court. To enter, one must pass through a narrow, pneumatic revolving door; because they are air-supported, the PSI change is instantly noticeable. Neither brother had ever heard of it referred to as “the Lung” before—a touch that seems to be all DFW. Alas, I forgot to ask if there was a “Silver-Key-Members’ Lounge”—although I probably didn’t need to ask whether anyone there might be smoking kif. Perhaps better to leave both a mystery.

ARMENIAN FOUNDATION LIBRARY (ARMENIAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM OF AMERICA)

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0400

For the first time in a few weeks, today we venture back outside of Boston proper; from now through early next week—the last of Infinite Boston’s daily updates—we’ll visit a few locations in Watertown, north of the Charles, west of Cambridge. First among them, let’s check back in with one of Infinite Jest’s least appealing characters in one of his most appalling circumstances.

Since the “affairs of Wo and Copley Library and heart”—each covered in the China Pearl, Boston Public Library and Harvard Square entries—Poor Tony’s “entire set of interpersonal associations” has dwindled to “persons who did not care about him plus persons who wished him harm.” He has has nowhere to run, and fewer, decreasingly tolerable places to hide.

Unable to cop, Poor Tony first seeks refuge in a “dumpster-complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W. Local #4 Hall” in the Fort Point neighborhood, and begins to “Withdraw From Heroin.” The stay is short-lived: after he accidentally befouls his formerly “new and unutilized” dumpster, Poor Tony is forced back out on the street.

It was the incontinence plus the prospect of 11/4’s monthly Social Assistance checks that drove Poor Tony out for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men’s room in Watertown Center, wherein he tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with shiny magazine photos and cherished knickknacks and toilet paper laid down around the seat, and flushed repeatedly, and tried to keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay with bottles of Codinex Plus.

The Codinex does not so much lessen the withdrawal as draw it out, slowing Poor Tony’s perception of time down to a crawl. If the narrator is to be believed, he spends more than a week in this stall, lifting his feet off the floor when the library staff makes a final check and turns off the lights at night. In the dark, Poor Tony begins to hallucinate: first a “red martial column” of fire ants, and then an orange-eyed bird that is a metaphor for The Bird he is unwillingly Kicking. In this basement (?) library bathroom, Poor Tony comes to know “the experience of time with a shape and an odor”; for the reader, the experience is harrowing, disgusting, and exhilarating—an example of DFW at his best.

And hey, what do you know? It turns out there is a real-world counterpart: the Armenian Library and Museum of America, located at the wholesome, all-Armenian-American address of 65 Main Street. It even has a Wikipedia article. The Armenian Library was among the first places I was surprised to find really existed—a discovery which was soon and often to be repeated.

But even after coming all the way to Watertown, my investigation ended at the front door. I suppose I had the opportunity to inspect its restrooms for plausible withdrawal sanctuaries, whether in the basement or simply a windowless, interior room. But when I arrived on a Friday afternoon in July, I just couldn’t bring myself to go inside and look around. After all: what could I possibly say at the front desk?

KENKLE AND BRANDT'S APARTMENT

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:49:00 -0400

(click to enlarge panorama)

The astute reader expects a few references to Hamlet in a novel titled Infinite Jest and, indeed, fans of the Bard will not be disappointed. Hal Incandenza corresponds to Prince Hamlet in some interesting ways: he is introspective, passionate, considered insane by some, and has to watch out for his uncle (see the first chapter of Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity for more examples than you might think). One of the late James Incandenza’s production companies was called Poor Yorick Entertainment. There might even be ghosts and grave-digging. Listing too many more would not only require not only a spoiler warning, but an unnecessary tangent; the synchronicities make for some good “aha” moments, but they’re not necessary to understand the work.

One imperfect but fun example may be the Enfield Tennis Academy custodians E.J. Kenkle and Otto Brandt, “inseparable and essentially unemployable,” whose occasional appearances—typically heard coming or going, just off-stage—may remind one of Hamlet’s old pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Others have suggested Steeply and Marathe for the characters, and Carlisle briefly compares them to Elsinore’s gravedigger, but hear me out.

The similarities are apparent: they come as a pair; they’re not to be taken entirely seriously (they ride “the T at night, recreationally”); and crucially, they are in the employ of Hal’s uncle. In the one late scene Hal shares with Kenkle and Brandt, they each once refer to him, in a slightly different manner, as “Good prince Hal.” Not that it’s a perfect match: they don’t have any particular relationship with Hal; they are not quite interchangeable (Brandt’s IQ is said to be “Submoronic-to-Moronic” while Kenkle once earned a Ph.D. in “low-temperature physics”); and (again) crucially, they are not killed by pirates.

The reason I thought of them during my visit to Boston last summer was the description of their apartment:

[Brandt] lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in Roxbury Crossing overlooking Madison Park High School’s locked and cordoned playground … His major attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he neither walked away nor interrupted when Kenkle was speaking.

The neighborhood is called Roxbury; Roxbury Crossing is a T-stop, but this is easily accounted for. The apartment itself is said to be on New Dudley Street, although so far as I could tell there is only a Dudley Street—and it happens to be a block away from Madison Park High School. I made a point of directing my cab driver to this area, expecting to find nothing too interesting.

I was surprised: directly across the street to the south was a hill tall enough to overlook the school, and a block from Dudley Street I came across the building pictured above, which certainly has an attic accessible from the outside. And while the high school has no playground of which I am aware, there is one right next door to this building, as you can see at far left in the panorama.

There were many locations along this journey that I knew David Foster Wallace had eyes laid upon, especially those easily recognizable and / or commercial: the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square, the Father & Son Market, or Cheapo Records. But this was the lone occasion during my travels through Boston where I was struck by the notion that—just maybe? almost certainly?—no one since DFW had stood where I stood and recognized what I saw.

SHATTUCK SHELTER

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:57:03 -0400

(click to enlarge panorama)

Although Infinite Jest calls the Pine Street Inn the “biggest and foulest” homeless shelter in the Boston area, anecdotal evidence presented repeatedly throughout the novel would suggest it’s actually the Shattuck Shelter which truly deserves this designation—at least the “foulest” part.

We accumulate plenty of incriminating details as we follow Ennet House live-in staffer Don Gately, who spends “five A.M.s a week” cleaning the “Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain.” We also learn—with seemingly no detail spared—what the job of janitor at a homeless shelter entails:

The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck’s toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area, with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There’s human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance before Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.

And yet there is redemption to be found here, in the “very grossest corner[s] of the Shattuck Shelter,” as Gately finds to his surprise and discomfort:

Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually remembered’s probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost reexperience things that he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in the first place.

During my research process, I was surprised to learn that this vividly depicted setting was in fact a real place. On the final day of my Boston trip, I paid a taxi driver handsomely to drive me around to what must have seemed like the strangest, least photogenic parts of Boston: a seemingly random skyscraper, unremarkable city streets and parking lots, not one but two homeless shelters.

The second of these was the Shattuck Shelter, and near the critical point of the endless drive around Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain—seriously, you could fit like ten Boston Commons in there—it became apparent the Google Maps pin drop was not precisely accurate (another issue I encountered repeatedly during my research). I basically had one chance to redirect the cab at a roundabout before I’d just have to move on.

Luckily, I made the right guess, and we found it: not on the road where I’d expected to, but one over, tucked into a plot of land hidden by a patch of woods just west of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. I felt as much an intruder snapping a photograph at this place as any (let alone the above panorama) likely because of what I’d read about what goes on inside. At least from the exterior, it was serene, unbusy—sober, if you will—and then I was off again, leaving the Shattuck Shelter to its improbable tranquility.

JAMAICA WAY (JAMAICAWAY)

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 08:58:00 -0400

This series has previously identified several fictional locations whose real-world counterparts differ in name only very slightly. In some cases, it’s a single letter (St. Columbkille) or placement of punctuation (Ryles Jazz Club) but none differ quite so slightly as the subject of today’s entry, which is distinguished only by the presence of a single empty space.

This is Jamaica Way, or the Jamaicaway—so fine, there’s a definite article in the mix as well—in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. It is a street with some history, featuring many large homes more than a century old, facing Jamaica Pond. Like Commonwealth Avenue, it was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, and early and influential landscape architect who also helped create New York City’s Central Park. And though it’s Comm. Avenue which is described as a “sine wave,” this four-lane parkway between the Arborway to the south and the Riverway to the north is probably more deserving of the metaphor. Not to mention, it really tests the limit of the number of -way suffixed words permissible in one sentence.

The peculiarity of its name and my minor quibble over its comparative description serve to remind the reader—at least, this reader—how different the reference tools available to writers were not so long ago. MapQuest launched the same year Infinite Jest was published, and Wikipedia’s humble beginnings were still five years off. With these services available to him, would DFW have made the same orthographic choice, or switched descriptions? Perhaps not; he was never much of an email user, for example, but it’s interesting to think about.

The Jamaicaway’s appearance in the novel is more interesting still, the basis of a morbid joke that I completely missed on my two full readings, and only finally picked up on while researching this project. It involves characters previously unmentioned in this series, although not much setup is needed to get the point across. First, know that Marlon and Kevin Bain are brothers, the former being Orin Incandenza’s doubles partner at E.T.A. Each makes a solitary, memorable appearance, in which neither fails to mention how their parents died.

Marlon:

After my own parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston.

Kevin:

Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.

The setup—or, as I experienced it, the punchline—is found (not easily) hundreds of pages away:

The E.T.A. Headmaster’s receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with another station’s airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour’s Jamaica Way six-laner below — had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side. So hence the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore.

As far as I can tell, the connection is never made by the characters. Fair enough: I’m willing to bet the connection is rarely made even by readers.

PINE STREET INN

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:56:48 -0400

With but two fleeting mentions in all of Infinite Jest, and no scenes taking actually place within its walls, the Pine Street Inn is only a peripheral setting, albeit one bestowed with an unappealingly memorable designation: “the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston.”

It is first referenced in a terrific early Ennet House chapter consisting solely of unattributed resident dialogue. The attentive reader will recognize it is Bruce Green who stayed there for a time with his girlfriend, Mildred Bonk, and their daughter, Harriet Bonk-Green, once Mildred could no longer put up with their trailermate, the “infamous harelipped” pot dealer and snake owner Tommy Doocy (or Doocey). Unfortunately for Bruce, it is also where he soon loses the “fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike” Mildred L. Bonk, to a “guy with a hat” who claimed to ranch “longhorn cows east of Atlantic City NJ.”

Much later, in a section about Don Gately’s horrendous graveyard-and-day shift work schedule, we hear that it is where Stavros Lobokulas, “a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women’s-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4,” oversees the cleaning efforts of two “broke and desperate yutzes” from area halfway houses.

The Pine Street Inn is described in a bit more detail in author Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, as occupying “an entire city block of Boston’s South End,” the building itself “a landmark, a replica of a Sienese tower, marking the entrance into Boston as you drive north on I-93. The tower was used by fireman for a hundred years to practice jumping from a burning building into a net below. Then it became a shelter.”

Elsewhere in American letters, it is favorably reviewed on Yelp (!), where one contributor advises that “[c]ontrary to the name, Pine Street Inn is not a top notch Maine Bed and Breakfast” but in fact a “a top notch Boston homeless shelter” and one of “the few good things founded in 1969.”

My own visit was very brief and exterior only. The shelter was just one spot on the itinerary of a taxi cab tour of South Boston and Jamaica Plain, locations that will be profiled here later in the week. Ultimately, I can’t really say whether the Pine Street Inn is the foulest homeless shelter in the Boston area—let’s just say the reviews are mixed—but I can confirm that it is pretty big.

JOELLE'S WALK TO THE "VERY LAST PARTY"

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:54:00 -0400

If there is a grim inversion of Don Gately’s exuberant excursion in Pat M.’s mythical Ford coupe, it is Joelle van Dyne’s deliberate downtown walk past Boston Common and into the Back Bay toward her “Very Last Party,” as she carries out her plan to have “Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure.” Infinite Atlas includes this as a collected set of locations under a story I’ve simply called “Joelle’s walk”; in this entry we’ll do our best to trace her actual route.

We are introduced to Joelle in media res at Molly Notkin’s apartment—in a scene she intends to be her last. No single location in this entire project gave me fits like this “third floor cooperative apartment on the East Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay.” Just in case anyone isn’t aware, the Back Bay is a neighborhood in Boston. East Cambridge is a neighborhood in Cambridge. While no other neighborhood lies between them, something else does: the Charles River. Nevertheless, a number of clues suggest this is indeed the Back Bay, but narrowing it down any further is a fool’s errand (as this fool discovered). In the end, I placed this dot on Back Street, by the Storrow. I figured it was fringey, and about as close to East Cambridge as anyone in the Back Bay could be.

Chronologically, Joelle’s expedition begins much earlier in the day, at her apartment in Somerville or Cambridge (it’s never specified). From this depature point, she proceeds to Davis Station and then to the unfindable Lady Delphina’s in “Upper Brighton” to buy “serious weight.” The stream-of-consciousness and shuffled timeline makes it difficult to piece together the chronology precisely. Even the third person narration becomes jittery and unreliable, as if affected by her free-associating, freebased mindset.

Sometime after visiting Lady Delphina’s for the “real” last time and the party at Molly Notkin’s, we begin the final walk with her at the Charles/MGH Station, which is simply called the “Red Line’s Downtown stop.” She heads south on Charles Street, which is lightly fictionalized as “East Charles St.,” although it is described accurately enough: “brick sidewalks” lining “sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script.”

Joelle first visits a “discount tobacconist” which I cannot place; I can’t say if there was a tobacco shop along Charles at one time, but there is not now. Here she buys a “quality cigar in a glass tube” and not for the cigar, which she throws away at the nearest opportunity.

As Joelle “approaches Boston Common” the geography becomes jumbled. She is said to move “westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles,” though I haven’t the foggiest idea what the “Endless Stem” is supposed to be—a defunct wine shop, maybe? (Per the comment below, it turns out this is a reference to panhandling, termed “stemming” elsewhere in the story.)

Nor could she really be moving “westward” on the north-south Charles, which if anything leans eastward. Unless, that is, she’s completely overshot the Common, and eventually westward the course of Charles does take its way, although it then becomes Tremont. As we learned in the 412 W. Brainerd and Storrow Drive entries, Wallace often overlooked Boston’s crazy street name changes, either for simplicity, or because he’d forgotten where they changed, or both.

But I don’t think Joelle is truly “near the end” of Charles St., because her walk takes her to a Store 24 to buy a “.473 liter Pepsi Cola”—which equals one pint, whatever that is supposed to mean—and, by consensus, this Store 24 was once at the corner of Charles and Mt. Vernon. Store 24 was acquired by Tedeschi in 2002, and this particular location is now the world’s quaintest 7-11, although when I visited it was unaffiliated.

Joelle next finds herself at Boston Common, a “lush hole Boston’s built itself around,” and continues to the “Common’s south edge” along Boylston Street (true) “with its 24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves” for sale (close enough).

But now things start to get really screwy. The narrator continues: “Boylston St. east means she passes again the black-bronze equestrian Statue of Boston’s Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th”—which means we’re again quoting from the same passage as the Shaw Memorial entry from earlier this week. The problem here is rather glaring: the Shaw Memorial is actually on the opposite end of the Common, occupying its northwesternmost corner, at Beacon and Park, just north of the Park Street Station.

And though Joelle is said to be moving east, the rest of her trek is obviously in a westerly direction. Soon after, she passes the curiously misspelled “F.A.O. Schwartz”—there is no “T”—which no longer operates in Boston, however at least once was on Boylston, with Berkeley as its cross street, in the Back Bay. From the last mention of Boylston, we lack details to follow Joelle’s peregrination as she moves toward the “cooperative Back Bay-edge brownstone” where her friend-that-she-has-no-more-use-for Molly Notkin lives.

Marching toward her own intended doom, she reminisces about working with the late filmmaker James Incandenza. A cheerleader and the love of Orin Incandenza’s life when they first met, Joelle was one of the few recruits to J.O.I.’s circle who was not then down on her luck. However, by the time we meet her, she has regressed to the addicted mean. Cocaine has compounded deep-rooted problems that Joelle cannot face, and here she is “at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it.” Not that she is intending to do it by hanging; the contents of her purse give a better indication.

It is a long setup for a scene as mesmerizing as it is heartbreaking, concluding with one of the two or three very best sentences in the entire novel, and plunging the reader alongside the character into the realm of unfathomable despair, a place not findable on any map, though one which Infinite Jest will assuredly visit again.

PARK STREET STATION

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:06:00 -0400

Infinite Jest makes three stops at Boston Common’s Park Street Station. Two of these take absolutely no more time than is strictly necessary, while the third is troublingly overstayed. The first occurs early on, in which

Michael Pemulis, nobody’s fool at all, rides one necessary bus to Central Square and then an unnecessary bus to Davis Square and a train back to Central. This is to throw off the slightest possible chance of pursuit. At Central he catches the Red Line to Park St. Station, where he’s parked the tow truck in an underground lot he can more than afford.

Pemulis is returning from a clandestine visit to Antitoi Entertainment—make that “Entertainent”—whence he has obtained the hallucinogenic drug DMZ, or “Madame Psychosis,” as it is known in “Boston chemical circles.”

Pemulis’ zig-zagging and backtracking is easy enough to follow, at least until he departs the Park Street Station for the parking garage. The station occupies a wide, clear spot on one of the Common’s two northwestern corners—the Shaw Memorial occupies the other, but more about that tomorrow—and has no parking structure attached. On the other hand, directly across the street begins Boston’s Financial District, where I’m sure underground lots are plentiful. Maybe this was DFW’s surmise as well; readers familiar with the area are invited to share which one is closest. [Update: Albeit not in the comments, I’ve been reliably informed there is in fact a parking garage underneath the Common. This is probably the one.]

The T-stop makes its second appearance when Kate Gompert’s narrator describes her unhappy trek from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Cambridge back to the Ennet House, where she resides in Enfield:

But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave.

The third and most interesting reference finally closes the loop on a promise back in the entry on St. John’s Seminary to explain what happens to poor Barry Loach in between dropping out of Boston College and finding employment at the Enfield Tennis Academy:

Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags…

Loach takes up residence—maybe “transience” is more appropriate—at the Park Street Station with the other panhandlers. His appeal consists of “begging for one touch of a human hand,” and one day that hand belongs to none other than Mario Incandenza, accompanying his then-living father to the Common for the filming of what appears to be Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell.

Mario has “no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted” and, through a series of “convoluted” events, Loach becomes Assistant Trainer and then Head Trainer

when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas’ doors and the saunas’ maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C.

The overt act of compassion here is Mario’s, but we can also detect, like scientists crashing particles, a significant one by James O. Incandenza. Loach is not unusual in being a societal cast-off taken on by J.O.I. In fact, the opposite is true: nearly all of his recruits, whether to the Enfield Tennis Academy or to his “après-garde” film circle, are lost souls, damaged in some way. Next week, we’ll visit the somewhat more permanent residence of two more.

A READER'S MEMOIR OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:54:00 -0400

Today is the fourth anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s passing, and it seems appropriate that this space should offer an observance of some kind. Because I neither met nor corresponded with him, what I have to offer is something a bit more personal, about my experience of encountering his work as a young man.

Like many readers, I was first introduced to David Foster Wallace in college. I don’t recall exactly what it was that I first read, though it was probably either a short story in Girl With Curious Hair or the first essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

I remember being assigned “Everything is Green” in a creative writing class, and joining a college magazine where DFW was perhaps second only to Hunter S. Thompson as inspiration in that cohort. While Hunter’s impossibly drug-fueled antics and lionization of an era before mine held some interest, I was drawn even more to Wallace’s impossibly accomplished prose, what I recognized immediately as—to borrow a phrase from a dimmer star in the same orbit—staggering genius.

This would have been my sophomore year, a time of inchoate goals and uncertain direction—I would eventually graduate with a degree in English that I was sure I only mostly deserved—where I was looking for something without really knowing what. I made a few important discoveries in this period, one of which began when I finally decided to pick up Infinite Jest in summer 1999, and had become fully realized when finished it a few months later, as a matter of fact on Thanksgiving Day.

I spent many hours sitting and reading on the front porch at 1456 E. 19th in Eugene that summer, my first away from home. My experience was probably not significantly different from that of many who read it or, at least, those who finished it. Two bookmarks, marathon reading sessions—it certainly didn’t hurt that I was under-employed and between school terms—alternately delighted and flummoxed. It was no easy task, particularly with no Internet ready to fill in the gaps of my understanding, and at times required a sustained effort I’d never really given anything. I’d like to think that Infinite Jest has made me a better person, but there’s no question it made me a better reader.

The first section to really grab me was the tragicomic introduction to Don Gately, describing his bungled burgling of a home in a “wildly upscale part of Brookline” with sentences and paragraphs so long and yet so precise that it was nothing short of breathtaking. Probably the most likely thing is that I was holding my breath, trying to maintain concentration and straining keep to up with DFW’s astonishing, exhausting thought process.

As a young adult and young reader, I respected very little at all, but two things I respected for sure were ambition and genius. Other favorite writers and artists of this period included: Tom Stoppard, Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Pynchon. What these others have in common is the primacy of intellect before emotion. In this novel and other works from his middle period onward, David Foster Wallace reworked this equation, showing how intellect and emotion could coexist in equal parts, that one need not sacrifice one for the other. I’m still an admirer of all of the names above, but their output seemed a bit stunted in comparison.

Re-reading Infinite Jest again in my late twenties, at a time where, once again, I was trying to figure out my own trajectory, I found it this time not just entertaining and accomplished—it had already opened my eyes once—but an instructive meditation on making wise choices about how and what to be.

D.T. Max’s worthwhile (if occasionally underwhelming) biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, makes clear in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated before how personal the rebalancing of thoughts and feelings was for DFW himself. His career began as a highly gifted imitator of Pynchon and DeLillo, and because of his own struggles had to overcome his own overactive brain and find a center within that his earlier self would not have understood, or at least respected.

While there are certainly universal themes here, they appeal particularly to a recognizable stereotype of a Wallace fan—I’m describing myself here—young, white, educated, middle-class, clever but not as much as one thinks, etc. Additionally, a good number who are drawn to DFW—though I can’t put myself in this group—themselves have struggled with clinical depression or mental illness or twelve-step recovery programs. There is much in Wallace’s own story that is recognizable to his readers, and identification is a key reason why so many are so passionate.

These demographics are all over-represented on the Internet—and are ones I hoped to reach with The Infinite Atlas Project. As I often like to say, the Internet loves David Foster Wallace. There are too many of us who think we see a bit of ourselves in him.

SHAW MEMORIAL

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:58:50 -0400

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial is going to come up again soon, so today we’ll focus on its appearance and unsuspecting role in a very different kind of civil war than the one in which its subject(s) fought. In the first of the statue’s two sightings in Infinite Jest, it is briefly described as a “black-bronze equestrian statue of Boston’s Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th” with a “raised sword.”

This is a pretty spot-on description for a passage that may have been written far away from Boston and in a time before the proliferation of the World Wide Web, let alone Wikipedia. The Shaw Memorial—full name: Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment—is indeed bronze, prominently features Col. Shaw (portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1989 film Glory) on a horse leading the all-black 54th down Beacon Street, sword in hand. To nitpick, its pigment is more of a blackish-bronze; black bronze apparently refers to a lost alloy of antiquity, which this surely is not. A less pedantic discrepancy is the positioning of Shaw’s blade: in the text it is held aloft, but in reality it is lowered in front of him.

The discrepancy at first seems less of an oversight than a narrative decision to facilitate the Shaw Memorial’s unwilling involvement in another prank by ex-F.L.Q. operative / Antitoi Entertainment proprietor Bertraund Antitoi. Since the attack on a Canadian official at the Sheraton Commander—and following the untimely demise of the Antitoi cell’s leader, much earlier in the story—Bertraund has apparently set his sights a bit lower. And so Shaw’s sword is

illicitly draped in a large Québecois fleur-de-lis flag with all four irises’ stems altered to red blades, so it’s absurdly now a red white and blue flag…

Or else Bertraund’s “harebrained” plan is, as it is described a few hundred pages later,

hanging a sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero’s … statue when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courants gendarmes the next morning…

In which case the raised hand is no longer a necessity, besides it seems apparent that Shaw’s schnoz is not quite prominent enough to hang a flag from. Whether the reshuffling of details was intentional or oversight I can’t say, though it’s at least a fair description of the flag, intentional alteration notwithstanding.

Astute readers will notice that I am leaving out a few details, including the free entertainment cartridges available within the vicinity; this is plot-relevant to be sure, but then again it’s also rather complicated to unpack, and best left alone here. Then there is the matter of the statue’s location itself—which I have purposefully excluded—and that we’ll talk about before the week is out.

STATE HOUSE ANNEX

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0400

The Massachusetts State House Annex is one of the few settings in the novel used for almost entirely satirical purposes. It is the site of a late November meeting between the United States Office of Unspecified Services chief Rod “the God” Tine—think Karl Rove meets J. Edgar Hoover—and representatives from important corporate allies: InterLace TelEntertainment Networks, Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, producers of the children’s television show Mr. Bouncety-Bounce and, of course, Tom Veals of Viney and Veals. Their meeting is one of a few scenes rendered not as straight prose, but as a kind of playlet, in which they discuss using the popular children’s show to warn children not to take entertainment cartridges from strangers.

Although this scene stands alone, our first tentative visit occurs much earlier, in a passage immediately following the one which describes the draining of the pond in the Public Garden, as we look over the shoulder of R. Tine himself,

standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks…

Of two buildings to be found at the corner of Beacon and Joy, across the street from Boston Common, only the one at right in the first photo above has an eighth floor—its top floor—therefore it stands to reason that this is the building Wallace intended. As far as I know, this particular Beacon Hill building is residential, not governmental (nor commercial, and in the novel’s near future, the two are, familiarly, not separated by much). Although I’m sure a man whose unironic nickname is “the God” can meet just about anywhere he pleases.

However, it’s a considerable distance from the Public Garden, and not at all suited to looking down upon its supposed annual drainage. Enter now an observation from Danielle Dreilinger, the Boston writer whose 2008 Globe piece on Wallace’s Boston was an early influence on this series, in a comment on the Boston Common / Public Garden entry:

DFW seems to conflate elements of the Common and the Garden. For example, the “duck pond” … is indeed in the Garden and the site of the Make Way for Ducklings sculpture, but the Frog Pond in the Common is the one that is regularly drained and cleaned as described in the text.

The Frog Pond is even just southwest of Beacon and Joy, so let’s put this down as another piece of evidence that the physical integrity of Garden and Common have been surrendered to artistic license.

One last note: while I didn’t get any closer to the Massachusetts State House than its front steps, it turns out that it does have an “annex,” however it is much different than the one described here; it is not detached from the main building and not accessible from Beacon Street. From the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s website:

Looking back at the building, the yellow brick rear of the State House looks far different in comparison with its older sibling in front, especially in its materials. This is the 1889-1895 Annex, designed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style by Charles Brigham. The exterior is in harmony with the Bulfinch front, but the interior is another style unto itself.

Whether or not DFW knew there really was an Annex on the State House grounds, who’s to say? Even though one really exists, he invented it anyway.