IJ study archive

Posthumous Gratitude

source

TL;DR

A 2009 n+1 remembrance by Michael Casper that reads as a piece of amateur detective work: Casper owns a dollar-bin LP, Priorities, credited to an artist named "Michael Pemulis" — the same name as the twitchy Allston drug-dealer best friend of Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest — and sets out to learn whether it is coincidence. It isn't. "Pemulis," "Mr. Wonderful," and "Big" all belong to the Placebo Records circle in Phoenix/Tucson that Wallace knew during his University of Arizona MFA years; a classmate ("Big's big brother") is the man who "played Pemulis" and whose living-room stories became the Girl With Curious Hair title story. The piece advances no reading of Infinite Jest; its value is a documented origin for a character's name, plus a few biographical remarks about Wallace's early sense of having no material to write.

Key claims

  • The coincidence that wasn't. Casper's LP Priorities is credited to "Michael Pemulis" (pronounced, per the label's founder, "PEEM-yoo-lis"), recorded in Phoenix and released in 1987 — the year Wallace graduated with his MFA from the University of Arizona. In IJ, Michael Pemulis is "the twitchy Allstonian best friend cum drug dealer of Hal Incandenza, protagonist of Infinite Jest."
  • The names come from a real Phoenix music circle. "Pemulis," "Mr. Wonderful," and "Big" were all Placebo Records personalities. The label founder ("Tony Victor," itself a pseudonym) first assumed Wallace took the name from a playbill, then realized Wallace "had to have known us or someone who knew us" — because "Big" was an inner-circle bouncer's nickname known to no more than about 20 people, not something a stranger could have found.
  • The conduit was an MFA classmate. A veteran and fellow Arizona MFA candidate — who asked to be identified only as "Big's big brother" — is the source: "I'm the one who played Pemulis for him". He had traveled with the Placebo Records family on a southwest tour and told Wallace the stories that became the Girl With Curious Hair title story — "because I told him stories in my living room while listening to a Keith Jarrett record." (The story opens on a Keith Jarrett concert.)
  • Wallace's early sense of having no material. Per Big's big brother, Wallace "was attracted to stories of experience because he thought his life was bare of detail", and after his first novel "He thought he had used up all he knew in Broom of the System." Wallace's self-caption for that period: he would sit in the library smoking room "trying to think of the next line to write."
  • The musician was unbothered. The real Michael Pemulis, reached by phone, had never read Wallace and reflected only that "It's interesting to me how events that seem like they're meaningless can turn into something else" — the name having itself been borrowed from someone else in the first place.

Themes

The genesis of names and material (how Wallace mined the people and stories around him); the Arizona MFA years; the writer's fear of having nothing to say; serendipity and the afterlife of small facts.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • On Pemulis in IJ: "the twitchy Allstonian best friend cum drug dealer of Hal Incandenza, protagonist of Infinite Jest."
  • Big's big brother: "I'm the one who played Pemulis for him".
  • On the GWCH title story's origin: "because I told him stories in my living room while listening to a Keith Jarrett record."
  • On Wallace's fear of being tapped out: "He thought he had used up all he knew in Broom of the System."
  • The musician's shrug: "It's interesting to me how events that seem like they're meaningless can turn into something else."