9/21/2019 – Michigan 14, Wisconsin 35 – 2-1, 0-1 Big Ten

The End of the Tour, a movie about Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky glomming on to David Foster Wallace at the end of his Infinite Jest book tour, is immediately good. The first sensory experience the movie gives you is the ultra-deep cut instrumental from REM's Automatic For the People:

This is a song with no oboes in it that sounds like nothing but oboes. It is weird, lilting, and mournful, a funeral for geese. The opening scene of the movie is Lipsky getting a call from someone trying to confirm a rumor that Wallace has committed suicide, because Lipsky once spent a few days on the road with him.

Wallace has. Lipsky goes through his tapes.

[After THE JUMP: marshmallows!]

The rest of the movie is a flashback to those few days on the road. Two highbrow white guys talk to each other about stuff. Mostly about how they are precarious and alone, the guy with the critic-melting novel and the other guy with a novel who also writes for Rolling Stone. Sometimes they bluff. The introduction of a woman, any woman, is cause for a tiff. Jason Segel, the guy who's inserted by default as Affable Stoner in every Judd Apatow movie, plays DFW.

I know, okay? I know. It sat in our Netflix queue for months, looming, more a threat than a promise. But you watch it for a bit and questions surface. Questions like:

• How did this get made?
• How is it good?
• When will my wife stop watching it?

At press time answers were not available for any of these questions, and only the third has even the distant prospect of resolution. I played two seconds of "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1" to confirm it was indeed the song used and she popped her head out of the office. "Ooh," I project she thought.

But anyway because of your living situation this thing has been on a lot. And when you're a guy who writes about Michigan the aftermath-of-spirit-crushing defeat mine has been well and truly depleted. Do you want chipper ha-ha that was weird? Done. Talking people off the ledge? Done. Outright nihilism? Done. Columns about buying a mattress? Done.

So when it's time to write something about a game that Michigan spiritually lost 35-0 after being favored by a touchdown preseason the goose funeral music follows you around. It is my theory that I can get it to stop following me around by loosing it on you, the reader.

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In the aftermath of Wallace's demise there are two great unfortunate things. The first is the relegation of Infinite Jest into the category of intellectual bro-novel that sites like The Toast use as a stand-in for a particular sort of bearded quasi-intellectual who is the seething insecurity the End of the Tour protagonists are enduring minus any offsets like having a face-melting novel or writing for Rolling Stone.

I dunno, I wasn't a woman on a train in Brooklyn in 2013. I'm sure if I'd been subject to hordes of slavering women trying to butter me up with copies of Beloved I'd be pretty negative about Beloved. But this would not make Beloved any less of a banger, as the kids say. IJ's status is increasingly as a punchline in an unfunny joke about the patriarchy of hipster dudebros, and that sucks.

This is painful to me for many reasons. Foremost amongst them is that it says a bunch of things I think everyone should take to heart about entertaining themselves to death. The title is literal: the book weaves back and forth in time and ends abruptly, seemingly unfinished. It was only after I'd gone back to the beginning to try to piece together some plot points that I realized I was re-reading the thing. It was a loop, a literally infinite jest.

The second unfortunate thing is the Hallmark-ization of Wallace's commencement speech to Kenyon College. Titled "This Is Water," it became a minor sensation and became the kind of small book you give to someone at a juncture when they are getting all the small books. The way the thing is discussed is the opposite of ASMR. Your skin crawls backwards into the primordial ooze:

This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, is a timeless trove of wisdom — right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose and living a meaningful life.

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this? But I have to anyway? Holy hopping death, following up "a timeless trove of wisdom" with a link to "Hunter Thompson," no S, on finding your purpose: both of these people murdered themselves and now I know why. It's you, FS dot blog. You did it. Give Thompson his S back.

Despite this, the Kenyon college speech is also good. Its key passage is Wallace envisioning a dreary trip to a mausoleum of a supermarket as part of another routinely long day. There are traffic and lines. This doesn't resonate with my personal experience of shopping, in which I take DRC to Busch's and people there recognize us and he attempts to push the cart at supersonic velocities while cleaning the place out of marshmallows. There one specific domain, however, in which the mental state he describes does apply:

… the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

I can't tell you I'm any good at shaping my attention in this regard. Offseason projects to walk more and drink less have been drilled between the eyes just three games in. But if there is a way out it's probably through that door.

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[Patrick Barron]

The nice thing about a game like Saturday's is that you blaze through the Kubler-Ross stages in a half and are left at acceptance. (Maybe you're still in depression.) This is probably it for the foreseeable future. It's not what we hoped for when Michigan hired Jim Harbaugh and his astonishing track record.

Instead: this. Michigan's SP+ rankings under Harbaugh: 10, 6, 13, 10. Michigan's currently 26 and sinking like a brick. Prior to this year that's remarkably consistent in the face of some difficulties like not having any quarterbacks. It's not what it needs to be for Michigan to be a consistent challenger to Ohio State. It's good enough to make the idea of trying to hire someone else absurd. OSU just hired a short-term coordinator with no head coaching experience; all coach hires except Urban Meyer are crapshoots.

So this is it: pretty good, sabotaged by an instability inherent in the head coach. It is not Infinite Jest's Entertainment, so appealing as to be lethal. Maybe at some point we'll turn a game on and it'll be a nice time. If it's not, oh well. It's time to adapt to the temperature of the water.

BRIC-A-BRAC

is cancelled this week; UFR will address the actual game parts. To be perfectly frank I wasn't paying the usual level of attention.