Rosenberger Posts

My posts related to Joseph Rosenberger and his Death Merchant books can now be found here.

Future Rosenberger posts will be posted at that blog.

Heylin: "Dylan Delivered An Unceasing Barrage Of Biblical Glossaries"

UPDATED: 15 Songs from the Box Are Streaming!

UPDATED: Links to 9 songs below!

From the Introduction to Clinton Heylin's "Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years - What Really Happened":

Just as from September 1965 to May 1966, the shows which ran from November 1979 to the following May saw the gospel gauntlet thrown down nightly. Dylan delivered an unceasing barrage of biblical glossaries set to the soundtrack of a heavenly choir and a band of unbelievers riding the musical tide all the way to New Jerusalem. ... He would continue beating his ecumenical drum most of the time for the next eighteen months.

For much of this period, his was very much a voice in the wilderness. Much of the media, and a large percentage of his hardcore fan base, simply switched off. ...

As for the shows themselves, journalists delighted in reporting that this 'voice of a generation' couldn't even sell out intimate theatres. ...

So, on the face of it, hardly the sort of period where a thorough revisit would send ripples of excitement through the Dylan world in 2017. And yet, when at the start of the year Dylan's long-time manager hinted to a Rolling Stone reporter that the next Bootleg Series (lucky thirteen!) would re-examine the gospel years afresh, the fan sites were abuzz with anticipation. ...

The good news – praise the Lord of Happenstance – is that the period 1979 to 1981 turns out to be among the best documented eras in Dylan's six-decade-long career as a recording/performance artist. ...

With the release of an 8-CD Deluxe Bootleg Series, the three studio albums [Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love] will no longer be the be-all and end-all of the gospel years, and we are a whole lot closer to knowing what really happened, artistically. As always with Dylan, it turns out that the more we understand, the more we can enjoy...

Box Set: November 3.
Book: November 14.

Bob Dylan - Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series - Volume 13


Slow Train, October 5, 1978 (Soundcheck)


Slow Train, October 2, 1979 (Rehearsal, with horns)


Slow Train, November 16, 1979 (San Francisco, CA)


Making A Liar Out Of Me, September 26, 1980 (Rehearsal, Previously unknown song)


Every Grain Of Sand, September 26, 1980 (Rehearsal)


The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar, November 13, 1980 (San Francisco, CA)


Solid Rock, June 27, 1981 (London, England)


Slow Train, June 29, 1981 (London, England)


When You Gonna Wake Up, July 9, 1981 (Oslo, Norway)

Last Month, The United States Expressed Its Support For The Murder Of People Because Of Their Sexual Orientation, Or Religious Or Personal Beliefs

Pierre Tristam, Flaglerlive:

Last [month] at the United Nations the United States cast a vote that speaks loads about where this country is going ...

The vote was on a resolution condemning the execution of people for their religious or personal beliefs ... [T]he resolution was condemning executions of people for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender ...

It was the first time in the history of the United Nations that the world community had agreed more or less together that killing people for their sexual orientation is as fundamental a violation of human rights as murder. ...

Yet the United States voted against it.

This is not the vote of a great country. It's the vote of a small-minded, a mean and demeaning country. ... You may be proud of it. I'm not.

This is a portion of the resolution rejected by the United States (it can be read in full here):

The Human Rights Council,

Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations ...

Deploring the fact that, frequently ... laws carrying the death penalty are used against persons exercising their rights to freedom of expression, thought, conscience, religion, and peaceful assembly and association ...

Condemning the imposition of the death penalty as a sanction for specific forms of conduct, such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations ...

Also urges States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not imposed as a sanction for specific forms of conduct such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations ...

Andrew Bacevich, Tom Dispatch:

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less. ...

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the "greatest contribution" of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States "to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire." ... [A] half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? ...

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. ...

2. The true costs of Washington's wars go untabulated. ...

5. Blather crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive. ... Cheerleading displaces serious thought.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. ...

Bacevich quotes President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Azeezah Kanji, Toronto Star:

Last month, two well-known Americans — former president Barack Obama, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning — were supposed to visit Canada. ...

Two weeks ago, Canadian border officials prohibited Manning from entering the country ...

Obama, in contrast, was eagerly embraced when he arrived in Toronto to deliver a speech last Friday. He was greeted by throngs of admirers and acclaimed by media commentators ...

As president, Obama claimed the authority to engage in covert wars without congressional authorization, bypassing legal provisions ...

Obama used the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in 2001 ... to justify the campaign against Daesh (also known as ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, even though Daesh publicly split from Al Qaeda in 2014. In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped more than 26,000 bombs on seven different countries.

Obama's manipulation of the AUMF transmuted it into a license for open-ended aggression ... Obama increased the use of drones outside official theaters of war, raining death on thousands of people, including unknown scores of civilians. At the same time, his government successfully fought to preclude judges from reviewing drone killings, keeping the use of lethal force behind a wall of secrecy and unaccountability. ...

Under Obama, the only official punished in connection with the U.S. torture program was John Kiriakou: the ex-CIA employee who blew the whistle on it. ...

Obama prosecuted more than twice as many whistleblowers as all previous administrations combined ...

One of the whistleblowers attacked during Obama's presidency was Chelsea Manning ...

None of the documents that Manning publicized were top secret ... And yet, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, and subjected to treatment the UN described as "cruel and inhuman." ...

In his speech last week in Toronto, Barack Obama hailed those who work to "pull [the arc of the moral universe] in the direction of justice." But as president, Obama not only failed to pull with the champions of justice; he often punished them.

Bill O'Reilly, "Mass Murder In Las Vegas":

Once again, the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display. A psychotic gunman in Las Vegas has committed the worst mass murder in U.S. history. ...

[G]overnment restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people.

They will find a way. ...

This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.

The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.

Michael Harriot, The Root:

News reporters and anchors have repeatedly referred to the recent tragedy in Las Vegas as the "worst mass shooting in U.S. history." Like all things that are constantly repeated, the proclamation has become fact. ...

Is 64-year-old Stephen Paddock the worst mass shooter in the long history of America? Does the Las Vegas incident qualify as the "deadliest" mass-shooting incident?

Only if you don't count black people. ...

[1850
Bloody Island Massacre
Pomo Indians Remember 1850 Bloody Island Massacre

1873
The Colfax Massacre
The 1873 Colfax Massacre Crippled the Reconstruction Era

1887
The Thibodaux Massacre

1919
The Elaine Massacre
America's Forgotten Mass Lynching: When 237 People Were Murdered In Arkansas

1921
The Bombing of Black Wall Street
The Legacy of the Tulsa Race Riot
It's Been 96 Years Since White Mobs Destroyed Tulsa's Black Wall Street]

We will not count the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre in Tennessee, when Confederate troops mowed down 164 black soldiers who were surrendering, because that is officially a war crime. The same goes for the 1864 Saltville Massacre in Virginia. The Achulet Massacre of Native Americans in California in 1854 doesn't count, either, because they were killed for their land, so technically that is a robbery. Some say as many as 150 were killed in Rosewood, Fla., in 1923, but the official count is six.

The mass deaths at Philadelphia's MOVE headquarters in 1985 don't make the list because law-enforcement officers bombed the men, women and children living there. And the time whites nearly wiped out the Wiyot Native American tribe in 1860 doesn't belong on this list because the Wiyot were killed with knives and hatchets as well as guns.

The Grapevine, October 9, 2017:
"Chance the Rapper Livestreams Police Stop in Chicago in Case It Goes 'Sideways'"

Gospel Bob: Nine-Disc Set Of Dylan's Christian Recordings Due November 3

Trouble No More – The Bootleg Series Volume 13 / 1979-1981 - eight CDs and one DVD spotlighting Bob Dylan's "gospel period" - will be released on November 3.

Only one of the 102 tracks has been previously released. In addition to dozens of unreleased live performances and studio outtakes, the set features 14 songs which have never appeared on any Dylan album in any form.

Columbia/Legacy:

As the 1970s ended and the 1980s began, Dylan responded to the changing of the decades with a three album trilogy – Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) – of spirit-filled songs of praise, worship and devotion. These songs were as deeply personal and packed with poetics as any Dylan had ever written, but the force of conviction and power of faith evident in these performances baffled segments of Dylan's fanbase (just as Dylan's "going electric" had alienated folk purists in 1965).

I have been fascinated by this short, much-maligned period of Dylan's career for many years. This was a time when Dylan appeared to be performing with a minimum of masks, when he perhaps allowed more of his true self to be seen than at any other. And he was serious. During three short tours in late 1979 and early 1980, Dylan performed only his new religious material; everything else he had written was ignored. He also preached to the audience, sometimes talking for close to ten minutes about world events (especially in Russia and the Middle East), what form the anti-Christ might take, and the coming Battle of Armageddon.

Also available in November: Clinton Heylin's Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years - What Really Happened, described as "the first book to focus on the life and works of Dylan as a born-again Christian from the perspective of both his artistic growth and the development of his eschatological worldview. It will draw on previously undocumented song drafts, rehearsal tapes, and new interviews with engineers, musicians, and girlfriends."

Rolling Stone calls this period "an intense, wildly controversial time that produced three albums and some of the most compelling and confrontational concerts of [Dylan's] long career".

Most [of the 14 unreleased songs from the era] have circulated in fan communities, but "Making a Liar Out of Me" has never been heard anywhere. "It wasn't even known to exist until we started going through the tapes," says the source. "Others were just played a few times on concert. We were able to go to the original sources for everything, even if it's just a cassette source. It's all going to sound better than anyone has ever heard before. ...

None of [Dylan's sermons] will be included on the set. "You had to be there at the time for those things to really work," says the Dylan source. "We wanted to find something that would be a little more dynamic." Heylin, who quotes Dylan's sermons at length in his book, is disappointed by the decision to leave them off the set. "It does slightly dull the edge," he says. "I do think that there was an element of power, particularly in the live performances, that comes from some of the things that Dylan was saying between the songs. This does tone down some of the seriously apocalyptic nature of Dylan's performances and some of the things he was writing. I guess that's understandable in 2017." ...

The deluxe edition of Trouble No More opens with two discs of live material culled from every leg of the gospel tour. They had a breadth of material to draw from since an Otari MX-5050 captured every night of the tour. The tapes are two-track, but the sound quality is extremely high, far better than the many bootlegs from the time that exist.

Disc 1: Live
1. Slow Train (November 16, 1979)
2. Gotta Serve Somebody (November 15, 1979)
3. I Believe in You (May 16, 1980)
4. When You Gonna Wake Up? (July 9, 1981)
5. When He Returns (December 5, 1979)
6. Man Gave Names to All the Animals (January 16, 1980)
7. Precious Angel (November 16, 1979)
8. Covenant Woman (November 20, 1979)
9. Gonna Change My Way of Thinking (January 31, 1980)
10. Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) (January 28, 1980)
11. Solid Rock (November 27, 1979)
12. What Can I Do for You? (November 27, 1979)
13. Saved (January 12, 1980)
14. In the Garden (January 27, 1980)

Disc 2: Live
1. Slow Train (June 29, 1981)
2. Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody (April 24, 1980; unreleased song)
3. Gotta Serve Somebody (July 15, 1981)
4. Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One (November 16, 1979; unreleased song)
5. Saving Grace (November 6, 1979)
6. Blessed Is the Name (November 20, 1979; unreleased song)
7. Solid Rock (October 23, 1981)
8. Are You Ready? (April 30, 1980)
9. Pressing On (November 6, 1979)
10. Shot of Love (July 25, 1981)
11. Dead Man, Dead Man (June 21, 1981)
12. Watered-Down Love (June 12, 1981)
13. In the Summertime (October 21, 1981)
14. The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar (November 13, 1980)
15. Caribbean Wind (November 12, 1980)
16. Every Grain of Sand (November 21, 1981)

[Dylan played Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One only three times; this is the first.]

Disc 3: Rare and Unreleased
1. Slow Train (October 5, 1978; soundcheck)
2. Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) (December 7, 1978; soundcheck)
3. Help Me Understand (October 5, 1978; unreleased song)
4. Gonna Change My Way of Thinking (October 2, 1979; rehearsal)
5. Gotta Serve Somebody (May 4, 1979; outtake)
6. When He Returns (May 4, 1979; outtake)
7. Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One (May 1, 1979; unreleased song)
8. Trouble in Mind (April 30, 1979; outtake)
9. Ye Shall Be Changed (May 2, 1979; outtake)
10. Covenant Woman (February 11, 1980; outtake)
11. Stand by Faith (September 26, 1979; unreleased song)
12. I Will Love Him (April 19, 1980; unreleased song)
13. Jesus Is the One (July 17, 1981; unreleased song)
14. City of Gold (November 22, 1980; unreleased song)
15. Thief on the Cross (November 10, 1981; unreleased song)
16. Pressing On (February 13, 1980; outtake)

[The first two songs were played at the end of Dylan's Street Legal tour. On Slow Train Coming, Dylan sings When He Returns accompanied by only a piano. He recorded a full-band version and I hope that is what's included here.]

Disc 4: Rare and Unreleased
1. Slow Train (October 2, 1979; rehearsal)
2. Gotta Serve Somebody (October 9, 1979; rehearsal)
3. Making a Liar Out of Me (September 26, 1980; unreleased song)
4. Yonder Comes Sin (October 1, 1980; unreleased song)
5. Radio Spot - January 1980, Portland, OR show
6. Cover Down, Pray Through (May 1, 1980; unreleased song)
7. Rise Again (October 16, 1980; unreleased song)
8. Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody (December 2, 1980; unreleased song)
9. The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar (May 1, 1981; outtake)
10. Caribbean Wind (September 23, 1980; rehearsal)
11. You Changed My Life (April 23, 1981; outtake)
12. Shot of Love (March 25, 1981; outtake)
13. Watered-Down Love (May 15, 1981; outtake)
14. Dead Man, Dead Man (April 24, 1981; outtake)
15. Every Grain of Sand (September 26, 1980)

[An incomplete version of Yonder Comes Sin circulates. Maybe this is the full song. The lyrics to Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody in December 1980 are completely different from (and far more complex than) the April 1980 version. Maybe we'll be able to decipher the words in the second version with a high-quality recording. And while Caribbean Wind is here, it is (inexplicably) not the live version (the only time Dylan played it - a version many fans find superior to the several studio attempts that have been bootlegged).]

Disc 5 – Live in Toronto (April 1980)
1. Gotta Serve Somebody (April 18, 1980)
2. I Believe In You (April 18, 1980)
3. Covenant Woman (April 19, 1980)
4. When You Gonna Wake Up? (April 18, 1980)
5. When He Returns (April 20, 1980)
6. Ain't Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody (April 18, 1980; unreleased song)
7. Cover Down, Pray Through (April 19, 1980; unreleased song)
8. Man Gave Names To All The Animals (April 19, 1980)
9. Precious Angel (April 19, 1980)

Disc 6 – Live in Toronto (April 1980)
1. Slow Train (April 18, 1980)
2. Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others) (April 20, 1980)
3. Solid Rock (April 20, 1980)
4. Saving Grace (April 18, 1980)
5. What Can I Do For You? (April 19, 1980)
6. In The Garden (April 20, 1980)
7. Band Introductions (April 19, 1980)
8. Are You Ready? (April 19, 1980)
9. Pressing On (April 18, 1980)

Disc 7 – Live in Earl's Court, London (June 27, 1981)
1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Believe In You
3. Like A Rolling Stone
4. Man Gave Names To All The Animals
5. Maggie's Farm
6. I Don't Believe You
7. Dead Man, Dead Man
8. Girl From The North Country
9. Ballad Of A Thin Man

[Dylan began re-introducing his other songs into his sets in late 1980.]

Disc 8 – Live in Earl's Court, London (June 27, 1981)
1. Slow Train
2. Let's Begin
3. Lenny Bruce
4. Mr. Tambourine Man
5. Solid Rock
6. Just Like A Woman
7. Watered-Down Love
8. Forever Young
9. When You Gonna Wake Up
10. In The Garden
11. Band Introductions
12. Blowin' In The Wind
13. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
14. Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Disc 9 – DVD
Trouble No More – A Musical Film
DVD Extras:
Shot of Love
Cover Down, Pray Through
Jesus Met the Woman at the Well (Alternate version)
Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody (Complete version)
Precious Angel (Complete version)
Slow Train (Complete version)

The DVD is not of a full concert, as many fans hoped, but "a new feature-length cinematic presentation combining unreleased footage from Dylan's 1980 tours". Variety notes that about three-fourths of the film consists of concert footage. (Dylan's show in Toronto on April 20, 1980 was professionally filmed and bootleg copies have circulated for years. It is essential viewing. Four songs from that show are included on Discs 5 and 6, including Dylan playing piano on a stunning "When He Returns".)

AND ....... If you order the deluxe box set from Dylan's official website, you will also get a bonus two-disc set of the complete show from November 28, 1979 in San Diego. (Only half of that show circulates as a bootleg.)

Still Here

It's been roughly nine months since my last post, but I will be posting again soon.

Democrats Pay A Horrible Price For Abandonment Of Working People

As both parties in the United States have continued to move inexorably to the right, liberals and some progressives feel obligated to vote for "the lesser of two evils". These futile gestures did absolutely nothing to stem the conservative drift and it was only a matter of time before an odious race-baiter like Donald Trump came along to capture the anger and hopelessness and abandonment felt by tens of millions of working class and poor people. (While Trump won't actually do anything beneficial for these people, he at least acknowledged their existence.)

Robert Scheer, Truth Dig:

The people Hillary Clinton derided as a "basket of deplorables" have spoken. They have voted out of the pain of their economic misfortune, which Clinton's branch of the Democratic Party helped engender.

What you have is a defeat of elitism. Clinton's arrogance was on full display with the revelation of her speeches cozying up to Goldman Sachs—the bank that caused this misery more than any other—and the irony of this is not lost on the people who are hurting and can't pay their bills. ...

It's a repudiation of the arrogant elitism of the Democratic Party machine as represented by the Clintons, whose radical deregulation of Wall Street created this mess. And instead of recognizing the error of their ways and standing up to the banks, Clinton's campaign cozied up to them, and that did not give people who are hurting confidence that she would respond to their needs or that she gave a damn about their suffering. She's terminally tone-deaf.

So too were the mainstream media, which treated the wreckage of the Great Recession as a minor inconvenience, ignoring the deep suffering of the many millions who lost their homes, savings and jobs. The candidate of Goldman Sachs was defeated, unfortunately by a billionaire exemplar of everything that's evil in late-stage capitalism, who will now worsen instead of fix the system. Thanks to the arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very dangerous period with a Trump presidency ...

Thomas Frank, The Guardian:

Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine. ...

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party's number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. ...

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. ...

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they'd chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn't mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country's well-being, or maybe both. ...

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the "last thing standing" between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.

Joshua Frank, Counterpunch:

[N]o matter what bullshit excuse Democrats come up with for Hillary's historic embarrassment, they have only themselves to blame. She lost because she deserved to lose. She ran an awful campaign, mired in controversy, and was unable to excite voters to the polls. She believed neoliberalism could carry the day, but she was wrong. The DNC was wrong. The establishment lost because the establishment deserved its fate.

By no means does this imply Trump will overthrow the status quo, it only means the outsider Trump was better able to exploit the boiling rage of middle America. All the workers who were undercut by Bill Clinton's NAFTA. The hundreds of thousands that never rebounded from the Bush recession. Trump provided an outlet of hope for these lost souls – a fabricated hope no doubt, but hope nonetheless – gift wrapped in rage. His mastery of social media, of vindictive and racist rhetoric, helped him gut the provincial electorate.

Michael Laxer, The Left Chapter:

Much of the worst damage actually happened under Democrats. It should never be forgotten that it was Bill Clinton who helped to destroy the American liberal post-war state. Nor the role the Clinton Presidency played in the passing of sweeping and deeply racist crime bills that imprisoned and also disenfranchised millions of people-of-colour in the United States. ...

It was bizarre, as so many apologists for Clinton and the Democrats did, to go on about the alleged achievements of "incrementalism" or Democratic governance when it is easy to prove that the United States has gone dramatically to the right in every meaningful economic sense and when inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

This did not change in any real way at all under Obama, a fact that is easily demonstrated.

Liberals and social democrats have failed workers and people living in poverty so spectacularly that it is impossible to overstate the extent.

This is a day-to-day lived reality for staggering numbers of people and telling those who might well be inclined to support something that rejects what has happened around them that your candidate and party are singularly qualified to stay the course due to their experience over this time in having done so, was both typically liberal and the worst form of political folly. It was a blind and bizarre self-defeating arrogance, that was profoundly, truly, madly, deeply foolhardy in its timing.

Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch:

The DNC rigged their primaries to insure the nomination of the only candidate who could lose to Trump. Is it any wonder that same brain trust, high on the fumes of their own hubris, lost all those senate seats, too?

The DNC spent more time conspiring to defeat Bernie Sanders, than they did the Republicans. They absorbed nothing from the Sanders campaign, from the issues that resonated with his followers: a corrupt system fueled by corporate cash and militarism, working class people demeaned and ridiculed, the American youth burdened by debt with no opportunity for advancement, blacks and Hispanics treated as political chattel, captives to a party that demands their loyalty yet does nothing for them. The Clinton team vanquished Sanders, paid him off and then marched on arrogantly toward their doom.

Clinton herself showed a singular lack of courage to the very end of her campaign. She couldn't even speak out against the brutalization of tribal people in North Dakota defending their water and burial grounds against the mercenaries of Big Oil. How could anyone look at her silence in the face of those ongoing atrocities and believe that she'd ever stand up for them?

Richard Moser, Counterpunch:

The Democrats were oblivious to the deep discontent among the American people because that simply does not figure into their clever and cunning calculations. Why should it? Fear, lesser of two evils, scapegoating, palace politics — all these things worked in the past, didn't they?

So all the discontent and unhappiness from years of economic distress fed right into the only other choice. We have the "great two party system" don't we? Both Democrats and Republicans insist there is no alternative. ...

The Democrats run a candidate who spent eight years in the White House, crow about her experience, even when the experience included the fact that Bill Clinton was IMPEACHED and widely viewed as a bum. The Democrats embrace a family dynasty the includes one of the two presidents in all of American history impeached by the House of Representatives. Good choice!

This has to be one of the most amazing proofs that the Democratic Party echo chamber is truly deafening.

Coming In November: Bob Dylan - The 1966 Live Recordings - 36 CDs

Bob Dylan - The 1966 Live Recordings (36 CD)
To be released: November 11, 2016

CD 1/2 - Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
CD 3 - Melbourne, April 20, 1966 (Soundboard/unknown broadcast)
CD 4 - Copenhagen, May 1, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 5/6 - Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 7/8 - Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 9/10 - Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard/audience; Soundboard)
CD 11 - Cardiff, May 11, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 12/13 - Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 14 - Liverpool, May 14, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 15/16 - Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 17/18 - Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (CBS Records recording; Soundboard)
CD 19/20 - Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording except soundcheck: Soundboard)
CD 21 - Glasgow, May 19, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 22/23 - Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 24/25 - Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 26/27 - Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
CD 28/29 - London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
CD 30/31 - London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
CD 32 - White Plains, NY, February 5, 1966 (Audience tape)
CD 33 - Pittsburgh, PA, February 6, 1966 (Audience tape)
CD 34 - Hempstead, NY, February 26, 1966 (Audience tape)
CD 35 - Melbourne, April 19, 1966 (Audience tape)
CD 36 - Stockholm, April 29, 1966 (Audience tape)

***

Listen to "Tell Me Momma" from May 26, 1966 here.

***

Before this release, only two soundboards circulated: Sydney and Manchester.

We will soon have fourteen!

Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard/audience)
Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
Liverpool, May 14, 1966 (Soundboard)
Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recording)

***

For the electric portions of the shows, Dylan was backed by the Hawks (later known as The Band): Robbie Robertson (guitar), Rick Danko (bass, backing vocals), Richard Manuel (piano), Garth Hudson (organ) and Mickey Jones (drums). Sandy Konikoff plays drums on the White Plains and Pittsburgh shows only.

CD 1 - Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
1. She Belongs to Me (Incomplete)
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 2 - Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Positively 4th Street

CD 3 - Melbourne, April 20, 1966 (Soundboard / unknown broadcast)
1. She Belongs to Me (Incomplete)
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Tell Me, Momma (Fragment)
8. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
9. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

CD 4 - Copenhagen, May 1, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around (Fragment)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Incomplete)
6. Ballad of a Thin Man
7. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 5 - Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 6 - Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 7 - Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. Desolation Row
5. Just Like a Woman
6. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 8 - Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 9 - Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard / audience)
1. Fourth Time Around
2. Mr. Tambourine Man
3. She Belongs to Me
4. Vision of Johanna
5. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
6. Desolation Row
7. Just Like a Woman

CD 10 - Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings (Incomplete)
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 11 - Cardiff, May 11, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 12 - Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna (Incomplete)
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 13 - Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 14 - Liverpool, May 14, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
2. Desolation Row
3. Just Like a Woman
4. Mr. Tambourine Man
5. Tell Me, Momma (Incomplete – Drop Out)
6. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
7. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
9. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
10. One Too Many Mornings
11. Ballad of a Thin Man
12. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 15 - Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 16 - Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 17 - Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 18 - Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 19 - Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 20 - Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording except Soundcheck/ Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone
9. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Incomplete) Soundcheck

CD 21 - Glasgow, May 19, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
2. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
3. Just Like a Woman
4. Mr. Tambourine Man
5. Tell Me, Momma
6. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
7. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
9. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
10. One Too Many Mornings (Incomplete)
11. Ballad of a Thin Man
12. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 22 - Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 23 - Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 24 - Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me (Incomplete)
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 25 - Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 26 - Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 27 - Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 28 - London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 29 - London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 30 - London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 31 - London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recordings)
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 32 - White Plains, NY, February 5, 1966 (Audience tape)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. To Ramona
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Love Minus Zero / No Limit
7. Mr. Tambourine Man
8. Tell Me, Momma
9. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) [Incomplete]

CD 33 - Pittsburgh, PA, February 6, 1966 (Audience tape)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. To Ramona
3. Visions of Johanna
4. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
5. Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Incomplete)
6. Mr. Tambourine Man
7. Positively 4th Street
8. Like a Rolling Stone

CD 34 - Hempstead, NY, February 26, 1966 (Audience tape)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Love Minus Zero / No Limit
7. Mr. Tambourine Man
8. Tell Me, Momma
9. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
10. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
11. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
12. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
13. One Too Many Mornings (Incomplete)

CD 35 - Melbourne, April 19, 1966 (Audience tape)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man
8. Tell Me, Momma
9. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
10. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
11. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
12. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Fragment)

CD 36 - Stockholm, April 29, 1966 (Audience tape)
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row (Incomplete)
6. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
7. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Fragment)
9. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Incomplete)
10. One Too Many Mornings (Incomplete)
11. Ballad of a Thin Man (Incomplete)

Stephen King: Just After Sunset (2008)

Just After Sunset is Stephen King's fifth collection of short stories, following Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and Everything's Eventual.

Twelve of the 13 stories in this volume appeared in publications ranging from The New Yorker and The Paris Review to Cavalier and Playboy; one story ("N.") was previously unpublished. And except for "The Cat From Hell" (1977), the stories all date from 2003-2008.

In his introduction, King states that his desire and ability to write short stories had stagnated and it was his work as an editor on the 2006 edition of the Best American Short Stories that kick-started his creativity. The first story he wrote after that - "Willa", about a group of travelers abandoned in Wyoming after a train derailment - begins this collection.

Most of the stories in Just After Sunset did nothing for me, but a there were a few that grabbed my interest. The best, by far, was "The Gingerbread Girl". After the death of her young daughter, a young woman begins running. Eventually, she leaves her husband and moves to her father's beach house in Florida. One day while jogging past one of the nearby McMansions, she sees what she thinks is the body of a young girl hanging out of the trunk of a car. When she gets closer, she is knocked unconscious - and awakens in the house's kitchen, duct-taped to a chair, and sees a man washing off a knife in the sink. Emily attempts to escape from the house.

This is a stunning piece of work, right up there with King's finest work. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "A story of abuse, psychosis and loneliness, it is physically exhausting to read — an astounding thing to say for a short work of fiction." The Toronto Star described it as "a flat-out suspense novella that could have been penned by Richard Bachman, King's literary alter ego".

The spirit of Bachman also lingers over "Rest Stop", in which a traveller overhears a man beating his wife/girlfriend. In "Mute", a man picks up a hitchhiker who is apparently both deaf and mute. As they drive along, the driver starts complaining about his wife and the affair she has been having. In light of subsequent events, perhaps the hitchhiker was not so deaf after all. And if you have ever wondered what it would be like to be trapped in a tipped-over port-o-potty with no way to escape, then "A Very Tight Space" will answer all your questions.

Next: Under The Dome.

Poor Yoricks' Summer - Infinite Jest, Pages 941-981

941-958: Hal returns to his room where Mario and Kyle Coyle are watching a cartridge. Hal is told that Ortho Stice was pulled off the window but some of his face is still stuck to the cold glass. Mario reports that Stice's bed was bolted to the ceiling during the night.

'The Darkness thinks ghosts.' Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. 'Stice's explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he's been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.'

Hal thinks of Cosgrove Watt and the JOI film he starred in, Accomplice! A detailed plot of the film is given. Hal watches a weather report on the blizzard and recalls a blizzard roughly a decade earlier (1998). Hal has some recollections from childhood, but "I had no childhood memory of eating fungus." He considers jumping out of a window and ruining his ankle and thus never having to play tennis again.

958: Hugh Steeply lets Joelle leave after her interrogation and she goes back to Ennet House. "She figured if she could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince her to dismantle the ramp."

958-960: "I'm Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I'm saying?" An unnamed AA speaker is described as "rocking the podium slightly, blurred a bit through the linen, smearing one side of his face with a laborer's hand as he tries to think what to say". No date is given. Is it November YDAU or some time in the future? Are we supposed to think Joelle is in attendance?

960-964: Pat M. talks with the Suffolk County A.D.A., who is in recovery (Phob-Comp-Anon) and wants to make amends to Gately.

The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness in their sharing. 'I'm told — I owe the — Mr. Gately — an amend. I need to make an amend to Mr. Gately.' He looked up. 'You too — this remains within these walls, as if it were my anonymity. All right? ... I've harbored a resentment, against this Gately, concerning an incident I'd considered responsible for making Tooty's phobia reflare. ... I've hated, hated this man. You know that Enfield's Suffolk County. This incident with the Canadian assault, the alleged firearm, the witnesses who can't depose because of their own exposure. . . . My sponsor, my entire Group — they say if I act on the resentment I'm doomed. I'll get no relief. It won't help Tooty. ... I need to let it go. I've come to believe that. Not just the prosecution — that's the easy part. I've already tossed the file, though whatever civil liability the — Mr. Gately might face is another matter, not my concern. It's so damnably ironic. The man's going to two-step out of at the very least a probation-violation and prosecution on all his old highly convictable charges because I have to pitch the case, for the sake of my own recovery ...

'But listen. I can't do it. Cannot. I've sat outside that hospital room saying the Serenity Prayer over and over and praying for willingness and thinking of my own spiritual interests and believing this amend is my Higher Power's will for my own growth and I haven't been able to go in. I go and sit paralyzed outside the room for several hours and drive home and pry Tooty away from the sink. It can't go on. I have to look that rotten — no, evil, I'm convinced in my heart, that son of a bitch is evil and deserves to be removed from the community. I have to walk in there and extend my hand and tell him I've wished him ill and blamed him and ask for forgiveness — him — if you knew what sick, twisted, sadistically evil and sick thing he did to us, to her — and ask him for forgiveness. Whether he forgives or not is not the issue. It's my own side of the street I need to clean.'

964-971: November 20, Immediately Pre-Fundraiser-Exhibition-Fete. Who is the narrator? Prep for tennis exhibitions. hal is gettting his ankle taped for the exhibition, which has been moved indoors to M.I.T. We hear ETA Head Trainer Barry Loach's story, of how he tried to stop his brother's spiritual decline, to try and demonstrate to his brother "the redeemability of man".

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach ... Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow — risking his own time, Barry's, and maybe safety somehow — that the basic human character wasn't as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother's present depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach's desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community's lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It's not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him. It's possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little red sweater-vests thought that sticking one's hand way out and crying 'Touch me, just touch me, please' was some kind of new stem-type argot for 'Lay some change on me,' because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ — significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach's brother — who often stood there in collar less mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-station's exit, slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands — was always quick to point out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry Loach's hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.'s way, much less ever getting their hand anywhere close to contact with B.L.'s disreputable hand. ...

[Months go by and] Barry 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, when along toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal — and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their hands out — when all these appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm handshake — which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn't recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach — by E.T.A.'s own Mario Incandenza, who'd been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario'd been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpster-fire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had 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 Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach's own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer's job at E.T.A. ...

971-972: Undated. Orin has been taken prisoner by the AFR and is trapped under a huge inverted glass tumbler.

[T]he remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a dream. It was like the minute he'd come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he'd opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried ...

As roaches "began pouring blackly and shinily through" the open screen and into the tumbler, Orin shouts "Do it to her! Do it to her!" Who is "her"? Avril? Joelle?

972-981: Gately in hospital. There is a flurry of activity at his bedside.

Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp. ... Gately felt physically hotter than he'd ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined himself on the House's aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let's Try Doris [Doryx], that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn't talking to Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately's only conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict. ... Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn't calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. ... He was the object of much bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. ... The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they pound on dying people's chests. ... It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. ... It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. ... Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately's head and gripped Gately's head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up.

That is the last mention of Don Gately in November YDAU. The narrative switches in mid-paragraph, back to Gately's memory of the epic Dilaudid debauch with Facklemann (who knows he will be killed by Sorkin) in the stripped luxury apartment. Bobby C and his crew arrive. There are allusions to both A Clockwork Orange and 1984. Gately is given a huge dose of drugs, not to kill him (Sorkin understands DG was not involved in the Faxster's embezzlement) but to keep him out of the way and unable to prevent C and his crew from torturing and killing Facklemann.

Gately couldn't feel his legs. He could feel C's arm around him taking more and more of his weight. C's arms's muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called '32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.' C was starting to let him down easy. Strong squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor's assault. The supported swoon spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the whole room in almost untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily. Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting and Pointgravè was taking the TP's viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax's eyes was as open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. He was no longer struggling. He stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his Japel and he'd put on glasses with metal lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax's eye with the dropper half the time, saying something to Pointgravè. A transvestal had P.H.-J.'s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.'s face was gray and blue. The floor came up slowly. Bobby C's squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately's spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A favorite of Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced 'saddism.' The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C's grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Poor Yoricks' Summer - Infinite Jest, Pages 906-941

906-911: Michael Pemulis (with the threat of being kicked out of ETA fresh in his mind) comes into the room where Hal Incandenza is lying on the floor and says, "We've got some really important interfacing to do, brother." Hal tells Pemulis that the "synthetic bacchanal" with the DMZ is "definitely off". Pemulis: "That's part of what we need to interface about". Hal asks Pemulis to cue up a cartridge: Himself's Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency so he can listen to Paul Anthony Heaven's climatic lecture, given "in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave".

911-916: Gately in hospital. From age 18-23, Gately worked full-time for a North Shore bookmaker named Whitey Sorkin. He and Gene Fackelmann "served as like Whitey Sorkin's operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts". They were known as the Twin Towers. They were paid well and spent their money on drugs. Gately later brought Trent Kite into the crew. Gately recalls watching a college bowl game on New Year's Eve 2001:

The winter daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the viewer's big flat screen and made the players look bleached and ghostly. Through the windows off in the distance was the Atlantic O., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter was a hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an inspirational story that had never played a major sport until college and now was already one of the finest punt-specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the carrot. The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately. ... [H]e stared at the punter's ghostly digital image until he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It came out of emotional nowheres all of a sudden, and he found himself blubbering at the loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love, his own stupidity and lack of discipline, that blasted cocksucking Ethan From, his Mom's Sir Osis and vegetabilization and his failure after four years ever yet to visit, feeling suddenly lower than bottom-feeder-shit ... It was two days later he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another bouncer, in Danvers MA, and three months after that that he went to Billerica Minimum.

916: Pemulis.

Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, rounding the curve of Subdormitory B's hall with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor ... No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts' lattice.

Is the incredibly-potent DMZ gone? Who could have taken it?

916-934: Gately in hospital. He recalls that Gene Fackelmann had for years been scamming small amounts of money from Whitey Sorkin's bookmaking operation, unbeknowst to both Gately and Trent Kite (and obviously Sorkin). A huge scam that Fackelman eventually pulled is described in extreme detail, as his subsequent realization that Sorkin cannot help but find out about the scam (and so Facklemann is a dead man) and his decision in light of that realization to simply do a shitton of drugs. In addition to this memory, Gately had other dreams.

His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist aspect he associates in memory with childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. One dream consists only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps coming up his throat. He's both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out, but never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there's people in his room but he's not one of them. He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.

This sounds a lot like the memory Hal will have one year from now (page 17). BUT in Gately's dream, there is a naked Joelle wearing wings asking if they knew "him" (Himself) - something that Hal did not mention. Can we assume that Gately's dream/vision is not real and is placed in his mind by the wraith, but that Hal's memory is real? (Perhaps Gately thinks he knows Himself because of his experience with the wraith in the hospital.)

934: Coming out of St. Elizabeth's Hospital (presumably after visiting Gately), Joelle is grabbed by "a grotesquely huge woman whose hose bulged with stubble" who tells her that she is in "almost mind-boggling danger". Joelle calmly replies: "This is supposed to be news?"

934-938: Gately in hospital. His memory of his Dilaudid binge with Fackelmann continues.

It became the ICBM of binges. The Substance seemed inexhaustible; Mt. Dilaudid changed shapes but never really much shrank that they could see. It was the first and only time ever that Gately I.V.'d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out of arm-vein and had to switch to the other arm. Fackelmann was no longer coordinated enough to help him tie off and boot. Fackelmann kept making a string of chocolaty drool appear and distend almost down to the floor. The acidity of their urine was corroding the apt.'s hardwood floor's finish in an observable way. The puddle had grown many arms like a Hindu god. Gately couldn't quite tell if the urine had explored its way almost back to their feet or if they were already sitting in urine.

938-941: Joelle is questioned by USOUS's Hugh Steeply and discusses what she knows about JOI's Infinite Jest V (aka the Entertainment).

I was in two scenes. What else is in there I do not know. In the first scene I'm going through a revolving door. You know, around in this glass revolving door, and going around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven't seen for a long time, because the recognition calls for a shocked look, and the person sees me and gives an equally shocked look — we're supposedly formerly very close and now haven't seen each other in the longest time, and the meeting is random chance. And instead of going in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person is also still revolving in the door to follow me in, and we whirl in the door like that for several whirls.

The actor was male. He wasn't one of Jim's regulars. But the character I recognize in the door is epicene. ...

The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized. ...

As in my lines were various apologies. "I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am." For a real long time. I doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were at least twenty minutes of permutations of "I'm sorry." ...

Not exactly veiled.

The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib's-eye view. But that's not what I mean by driving the scene. The camera was fitted with a lens with something Jim called I think an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket joint behind the mount that made the lens wobble a little bit. It made a weird little tiny whirring noise, I recollect. ...

I never saw it. I've got no idea.

They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was in his will. ...

I don't know that he ever even got a finished Master. That's your story. There wasn't anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something quote too perfect. But as a joke. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized about entertainment v. nonentertainment and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as "entertainments." He always meant it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God's sake. ... When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling — it was always ironic — he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release — it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me. ...

If it got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess. But I bet you.

Joelle's responses to Steeply might answer the question of what is behind Joelle's veil. Her comments give credence to the theory that she was disfigured by acid and is not otherworldly beautiful.

Poor Yoricks' Summer - Infinite Jest, Pages 876-906

876-883: November 20. Transcript of meeting (headed by Rodney Tine, Sr.) discussing a commercial designed to help kids resist the lure of "the Canadian cartridge". The warning is scheduled to be broadcast in the coming year, the Year Of Glad.

883-896: Gately in the hospital. His sponsor, Ferocious Francis G., visits. Gately also has a notepad and pencil, but has trouble writing left-handed.

Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he's discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn't think he can stand it one more second.

A Pakistani M.D. is talking to Gately about possible pain meds he should be taking.

'And so you are now ready to let us provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache ibuprofen, which these medications are boys doing a large man's duty here, yes? There has been reconsidering in light of the level? Yes? ... For I am Moslem, and abstain also, by religious law, from all abusive compounds as well,' the M.D. says. 'Yet if I have suffered trauma, or the dentist of my teeth proposes to perform a painful process, I submit as a Moslem to the imperative of my pain and will accept relief, knowing no established religion's God wills needless suffering for His children. ...

'Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young sir,' the Pakistani sums up, standing right up next to the bed, the left side, his professional lab-coat hiding F.F., hands behind his back, the dull glint of the metal corner of Gately's chart just visible between his legs, immaculate of posture, smiling cheerily down, the whites of his eyes as ungodly white as his teeth. The memory of Talwin makes parts of his body Gately didn't know could drool drool. He knows what's coming next, Gately does. And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again Gately won't resist. And who the fuck'll be able to blame him, after all. Why should he have to resist? He'd received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot with a professionally modified .44 Item. He's post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain. This was a trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney heard him; what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him? This wasn't hardly like slipping over to Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God. A quick Rx-squirt of Demerol — probably at the outside two, three days of a Demerol drip, maybe even one where they'd hook the drip to a rubber bulb he could hold and self-administer the Demerol only As Needed. Maybe it was the Disease itself telling him to be scared a medically necessary squirt would pull all his old triggers again, put him back in the cage.

The M.D. thinks that Francis G. is Gately's father and suggests he tell his son to let the hospital staff give him the necessary pain meds. But Francis G. says: "Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself. He's the one that's feeling it. He's the only one can decide." Though as he leaves the room, he does add: "Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding."

When the M.D. continues to pressure Gately, Don G. finally reacts:

Gately's good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.'s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy's balls and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn't rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and bends forward, crumpling around Gately's hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams higher and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately up with a start, his left arm through the railing and twisted with the force of his attempt to sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note as the dream's foreign M.D. ...

The dream's vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking seriously rattled his cage. He heard the singsong voice promising about increasing discomfort. His shoulder beat like a big heart, and the pain was sickeninger than ever. No single second was past standing. Memories of good old Demerol rose up, clamoring to be Entertained. The thing in Boston AA is they try to teach you to accept occasional cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substance-cravings will rise unbidden in a true addict's mind like bubbles in a toddler's bath. It's a lifelong Disease: you can't keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will, but do not Entertain them. No need to invite a Substance-thought or -memory in, offer it a tonic and your favorite chair, and chat with it about old times.

Awakening from his dream (it was a dream, right? It's hard to tell.), Gately recalls crewing with Trent Kite and Gene Fackelmann and his relationship with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep (cf. possibly Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow's Nora Dodson-Truck?)

When McDade and Diehl from Ennet House stop by and present him with a card they stole from a store, Gately starts feeling sorry for himself:

It's probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately's suddenly stricken by the heat of the waves of self-pity and resentment he feels about not only the card but about the prospect of these booger-chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness for his se offendendo after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now lying here in a level of increasing dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn't imagine if they tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his Disease's drug of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked for one, and needing to shit and to know the day and no big black nurse in view, and unable to move — it suddenly seems awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on the course of events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power — it's a bit hard to see why a quote Loving God would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn't have the brass to make these selfish bottom-feeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The resentment and fear make cords stand out on Gately's purple neck, and he looks ferocious but not at all jolly. — Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He's got lined up for you? — Because why the fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol's somnolent hum, if these are the quote rewards of sobriety and rabidly-active work in AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing.

896-902: Undated (probably November 20). Hal Incandenza walking the halls at ETA.

I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don't know where it came from. It was some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match. I'd never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn't wholly unpleasant. Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this. You perceive things very intensely. Lyle's counsel had been to turn the perception and attention on the fear itself, but he'd shown us how to do this only on-court, in play. Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn't disorienting. The intensity wasn't unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting. ... But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcognitive, bad-trip-like element that I didn't recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The concentration of attention did something to it. What didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect.

Hall starts to think of the total times he's schlepped up a particular stairwell or how much food he will eat over the rest of his life. Day after day after day. And he imagines a room full of the waste he will produce. It's the opposite of Gately thinking about building a wall around each second and concentrating on abiding for that one second.

Hal recalls many things, family history included (on page 898, we get the book's only mention of Avril Incandenza's full name!), and the reader gets the clear impression that these are important facts and should be remembered, but there are so many of them. (It's the same feeling reading the Gately sections.)

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? ... To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. ... The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning.

902-906: Gately in hospital. He recalls parts of his childhood and teenaged years, playing middle school football and his introduction to alcohol and various drugs. It is amazing that Wallace holds back - until page 900 - a lot of meaningful childhood incidents pertaining to one of the novel's two main characters and its probable hero.

His head had been huge, even as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A regulation football helmet was like a beanie on him. His coaches had to order special helmets. Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school's junior year. ...

He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off jr.-high niggers and smoked with three other grade-school football players in a vacant summer cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in a flaming L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst way. Then his first real drunk a few months later, after he and the players'd hooked up with an Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore brownshirts and jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and The Turner Diaries ...

He was classified Attention-Deficit and Special-Ed, from grade school on, with particular Deficits in 'Language Arts,' but that was at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately wasn't interested in making her feel worse. And but there was no Deficit in his attention to ball, or to cold foamers or screwdrivers or high-resin desBois, or especially to applied pharmacology, not once he'd done his first Quaalude at age thirteen.

Just as Gately's whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to telescope into one memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic ... in just the same way, the whole couple years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13-15 when he was a devotee of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer-brand beer collapses and gathers itself under what he still recalls as 'The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.' ...

It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately's performance playing ball, but then he was as devoted to football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. At least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed Substances only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 0900h. and 1800h. during the seasons of practice and play, and he settled for just a single duBois on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks and the somnolent hum. ...

Gately's sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother's new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist's assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts. ... When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic, and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old oxycodone hydro-chloride out of his pocket's Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was like a huge confused kitten out on the field ... On offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately was getting ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and then to a Medicaid L.T.I. out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley. ... The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother's generics, that she left. He didn't even ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.