p 3-17
--
The sections of the book that are demarcated by one of the circular shapes will be discussed individually and the subsections [I'll call these 'parts'--whenever there occurs a break in the text without a circle] will be noted, with a [re]iteration, wherever possible, of the setting. The spoiler-free synopses will precede the notes, which will be somewhat subjective, and may contain suggestions toward unravelling the plot that could be seen to contain spoilers.
--
this section in 5 parts
p 3-10
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal Incandenza
Hal Incandenza is being interviewed by three nameless deans at the University of Arizona [UA], and is accompanied by his uncle Charles Tavis [CT] and Aubrey F. deLint. The scene is related by Hal in first person, but he does not speak. It is related that he is 18 and about to graduate from Enfield Tennis Academy [ETA] in Enfield, MA, where he has been in residence since age 7. The university began courting him in February, and he has brought deLint along because he was also an ETA alum who had gone to UA. Hal is in Arizona to play in a tournament, in which he has performed impressively thus far. Hal's incommunicativeness begins to trouble the deans, CT tries to allay their fear, saying that Hal's all but ready to sign a letter of intent. In his head Hal corrects the word usage errors of the deans, revealing his firm[possibly nerdy] grasp of language. The deans raise questions about the disparity between Hal's abominable test scores, and his 'incredible' grades, which have fallen off to merely outstanding in the last year. They also question whether he wrote the essays on obscure topics included with his application. CT objects to the insinuations, and the deans ask deLint and CT to leave, so they can speak with Hal. Hal alternates his own thoughts with what the deans are saying,confirming that the essays are his, albeit old. Finally he speaks, telling the deans that the grades are his, and that the transcript may have 'dickied' a bit to get him past a 'rough spot' and then says he can't make himself understood--'call it something I ate.'
p 10-11
ca. 1997
Weston MA
narrated in first person: Hal
Hal relates a childhood story from March or April when Hal was around 5. His older brother Orin and his mother [the Moms] were gardening when Hal announced 'I ate this' referring to a nauseous mold. [The scene is mostly described from his brother Orin's questionable perspective.] The Moms is running around screaming hysterically for help.
p 11-13
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
Back at the interview Hal is apparently hysterical himself, telling the deans that his application is not bought, that he's complex and insanely well-read, at which point he apparently has some kind of a seizure and makes some very strange noises causing the deans great alarm, and eventually an ambulance is apparently called.
p 13-15
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
Hal is being dragged into or through a men's room by the deans with whom CT argues that Hal is fine. The deans argue effusively that Hal has serious problems, while on the tennis court he's a 'genius' and they reveal that he has southwest roots, and that his brother is in the NFL. Hal apparently goes in and out of consciousness as they put him in an ambulance.
p 15-17
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
In the ambulance he reveals that his brother Orin lives/lived in Arizona. He says he once dismissed deLint as a '2-D martinet.' Hal is taken to the emergency room in a 'special' ambulance with a psychiatric paramedic on board. He recalls the only other emergency room he has ever been in, almost exactly a year ago, when his stretcher was parked next to a Quebecois with a gigantism in her breast, which she called her 'titty' and went on about for 20 minutes until Hal was rolled away. As he lies in the stretcher he half hallucinates, and his mind flashes briefly on various things-
- having seen the word knife written in the steam of a mirror in a non-public bathroom
-the late Cosgrove Watt
-the hypophalangial grief therapist
-The Moms alphabetizing soup cans
-Himself's [his father] umbrella hanging in the foyer of the Headmaster's house
-the fact that the bad ankle hasn't ached once this whole year
-John NR Wayne [who would have won this year's WhataBurger tournament] in a mask, watching while Donald Gately and Hal dig up the head of Hal's father
-that Venus Williams owns a house in Green Valley and may attend the tennis finals.
He notes that he will be sedated and thus be rested and thus have an advantage in his semifinal match the next day against Dymphna, apparently a blind player who requires special sonic balls. He imagines what will happen as he is diagnosed. he notes that there are 19 words for unresponsive in the OED-6 [way more than there are in the current OED-2]. He speculates that he'll play either Stice or Polep in the finals. He speculates that someone blue-collar will look down at him in the stretcher and ask 'what's your story?'
notes
It's probably crucial to note that the opening scene takes place after everything else in the book--the Year of Glad is the last year of subsidized time, and that Hal has clearly undergone something traumatic in the past year, probably having something to do with digging up the head of his father with Donald Gately.
6/3/09
p 17-27
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment [2009]-- month?
place near Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The episode is told in third person, but the narrator is clearly inside the head of Erdedy who is waiting for an unnamed woman to bring him $1250 worth of marijuana. She is supposed to get the pot from an unpleasant guy with a harelip in Allston. Erdedy has tried many times to quit smoking pot, and each time he starts again he has to locate a new source, because he has asked all of his prior sources to cut him off. The scene is frequently interrupted by descriptions of an insect that goes in and out the holes on the girder holding up the shelf on which his stereo sits. Erdedy is nervously fretting as he awaits his dealer, because he's not entirely sure that she will show. As he does each time he goes on a bender, he has assembled everything he needs to hole up and do nothing but smoke pot for days on end-- a new bong, snack foods, vaseline for masturbation, etc. He remembers the last woman whom he had engaged as his source, an unnamed 'appropriation artist' whom he had tricked into scoring pot for him, by telling her it was to keep from indulging his methamphetamine addiction. After she scored the pot for him, he quickly disposed of her, ending their sexual liaison. He has also had sex with the current supplier, even though she lives with her partner. As he waits he prepares his supply of 'entertainment cartridges' for his bender. The scene ends when the phone and doorbell ring at the same time.
notes:
introduces the paranoid addiction theme and also the idea of the entertainment cartridge. interesting technique of zooming in/out by way of shifting to/from the insect. it's not clear who this character is or how he might relate to characters from the previous scene, other than by proximity to Boston, where Hal was a student at the time.
place near Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The episode is told in third person, but the narrator is clearly inside the head of Erdedy who is waiting for an unnamed woman to bring him $1250 worth of marijuana. She is supposed to get the pot from an unpleasant guy with a harelip in Allston. Erdedy has tried many times to quit smoking pot, and each time he starts again he has to locate a new source, because he has asked all of his prior sources to cut him off. The scene is frequently interrupted by descriptions of an insect that goes in and out the holes on the girder holding up the shelf on which his stereo sits. Erdedy is nervously fretting as he awaits his dealer, because he's not entirely sure that she will show. As he does each time he goes on a bender, he has assembled everything he needs to hole up and do nothing but smoke pot for days on end-- a new bong, snack foods, vaseline for masturbation, etc. He remembers the last woman whom he had engaged as his source, an unnamed 'appropriation artist' whom he had tricked into scoring pot for him, by telling her it was to keep from indulging his methamphetamine addiction. After she scored the pot for him, he quickly disposed of her, ending their sexual liaison. He has also had sex with the current supplier, even though she lives with her partner. As he waits he prepares his supply of 'entertainment cartridges' for his bender. The scene ends when the phone and doorbell ring at the same time.
notes:
introduces the paranoid addiction theme and also the idea of the entertainment cartridge. interesting technique of zooming in/out by way of shifting to/from the insect. it's not clear who this character is or how he might relate to characters from the previous scene, other than by proximity to Boston, where Hal was a student at the time.
p 27-31
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad [2003] April 1
place near Enfield/Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The episode is entirely dialog with no narrator. Hal at age 10 [he'll be 11 in June] has been sent by his father to 'converse' with an unnamed 'professional conversationalist' [PC]. Hal's patience is tried by the PC, whom he sees as his intellectual inferior. When the PC asks Hal if he knows the meaning of 'implore' Hal impatiently quotes the OED definition verbatim, and says that he tends to get beat up for that. Hal gets annoyed when PC looks at his watch, reminding him that Himself has paid for the time. When the PC tries to one-up him with a dictionary quotation, Hal shreds him for using Webster's 7th, which is inferior to the OED and is also out of date. He reveals the nicknames of Himself [as in the man Himself] for his father, and the Moms [which he credits his brother Orin with] for his mother. He says that Himself is having a hallucination that Hal never speaks. The PC reveals that he has done some research on Hal, and knows of his interest in Byzantine erotica, and has researched his connection with the 'intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec' and his family's 'sordid liaison with the Pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. duPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative Luria P------'. Hal asks if he has mixed up his calendar, reminding him that he is the 10 year old tennis prodigy whose mother is a prescriptive grammarian and his father is an avant-garde filmmaker who single handedly founded ETA. The PC continues rambling about how leaked photos of the liaison have caused deaths, and that his mother has had affairs with a bisexual bassoonist and over 30 Near Eastern medical attaches. His mother has introduced esoteric steroids, which are chemically similar to the formula used in both Hal's complimentary tennis racquet, and the cartridge implanted in Himself's cerebrum. At around this point Hal comes to realize that his father is pulling an April Fool's hoax, and has rented the office and the face, in order to have a conversation with his son that doesn't end like all the others, with Hal staring and Himself swallowing. Which this one apparently does.
notes
This scene is clearly crucial in setting up the family's connections to duPlessis, as well as the mysterious steroid/narcotic trade
place near Enfield/Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The episode is entirely dialog with no narrator. Hal at age 10 [he'll be 11 in June] has been sent by his father to 'converse' with an unnamed 'professional conversationalist' [PC]. Hal's patience is tried by the PC, whom he sees as his intellectual inferior. When the PC asks Hal if he knows the meaning of 'implore' Hal impatiently quotes the OED definition verbatim, and says that he tends to get beat up for that. Hal gets annoyed when PC looks at his watch, reminding him that Himself has paid for the time. When the PC tries to one-up him with a dictionary quotation, Hal shreds him for using Webster's 7th, which is inferior to the OED and is also out of date. He reveals the nicknames of Himself [as in the man Himself] for his father, and the Moms [which he credits his brother Orin with] for his mother. He says that Himself is having a hallucination that Hal never speaks. The PC reveals that he has done some research on Hal, and knows of his interest in Byzantine erotica, and has researched his connection with the 'intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec' and his family's 'sordid liaison with the Pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. duPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative Luria P------'. Hal asks if he has mixed up his calendar, reminding him that he is the 10 year old tennis prodigy whose mother is a prescriptive grammarian and his father is an avant-garde filmmaker who single handedly founded ETA. The PC continues rambling about how leaked photos of the liaison have caused deaths, and that his mother has had affairs with a bisexual bassoonist and over 30 Near Eastern medical attaches. His mother has introduced esoteric steroids, which are chemically similar to the formula used in both Hal's complimentary tennis racquet, and the cartridge implanted in Himself's cerebrum. At around this point Hal comes to realize that his father is pulling an April Fool's hoax, and has rented the office and the face, in order to have a conversation with his son that doesn't end like all the others, with Hal staring and Himself swallowing. Which this one apparently does.
notes
This scene is clearly crucial in setting up the family's connections to duPlessis, as well as the mysterious steroid/narcotic trade
p 32-33
YDAU [2009] May 9
place ETA [Boston]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is preparing to leave his dormitory room for his morning tennis practice, and his older brother Mario is still asleep. It is implied that there is something wrong with Mario, he can't play tennis, he needs all the sleep he can get and his enormous head requires 4 pillows to support it. As Hal packs his gear for the day, the phone rings. Hal answers 'Mmmyellow' as his father [who is now possibly dead] had. He has a brief conversation with his brother Orin, who tells him that his head is 'filled with things to say,' Hal answers that he can wait for ever, and Orin retorts 'that's what you think' and hangs up. Mario wakes and asks who it was, Hal answers 'no one you know.'
notes
This scene seems to simply establish the character of Mario, and show the brotherly dynamics between Hal and each of the others. Perhaps there is something meaning to the enigmatic conversation, which will be revealed by way of proximity to the exact date.
place ETA [Boston]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is preparing to leave his dormitory room for his morning tennis practice, and his older brother Mario is still asleep. It is implied that there is something wrong with Mario, he can't play tennis, he needs all the sleep he can get and his enormous head requires 4 pillows to support it. As Hal packs his gear for the day, the phone rings. Hal answers 'Mmmyellow' as his father [who is now possibly dead] had. He has a brief conversation with his brother Orin, who tells him that his head is 'filled with things to say,' Hal answers that he can wait for ever, and Orin retorts 'that's what you think' and hangs up. Mario wakes and asks who it was, Hal answers 'no one you know.'
notes
This scene seems to simply establish the character of Mario, and show the brotherly dynamics between Hal and each of the others. Perhaps there is something meaning to the enigmatic conversation, which will be revealed by way of proximity to the exact date.
p 33-39
This section is divided into three parts
p 33-37 YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part centers around an unnamed medical attache, half Arab but born in and a resident of Canada. He is a consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q----, Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment who is in Boston to cut a 'mammoth' deal with Interlace TelEntertainment. His main duties are to assist in draining the sores of the face and sinus that result from the fact that the Prince eats almost nothing but Toblerone Chocolate. Ordinarily he arrives at home to find that his wife has prepared a piping hot dinner and an evening's worth of entertainment cartridges. She then wordlessly attends to him until he's asleep. But Wednesdays his wife has her weekly tennis league, and this particular Wednesday the attache gets home early and is at a loss as to how to procure the entertainment cartridges he needs. He tries watching the regularly programmed TV, but finds nothing better than an aerobics show which threatens to elicit impure thoughts. He goes in search of cartridges and finds among the days mail a padded cartridge-mailer, with 'happy anniversary' [it's not his anniversary] and a smiley face in place of a return address, postmarked Phoenix, but not with the official stamp of Prince Q----'s legation in Phoenix. Inside is a standard cartridge with no label aside from another smiley face. He heats his dinner in the microwave and begins viewing the cartridge at 1927h.
p 37-38
Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] month?
place Brighton [MA?]
narrated in first person [Clenette]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect by Clenette who tells a very repetitive complicated web of stories which I will try to summarize:
Wardine's mother has beaten her with a coat hanger causing lacerations on her back. Her mother blamed her for 'tempting' her boyfriend Roy Tony 'into sin,' when in reality Roy Tony had molested her (or at least tried to). Much of this told to the narrator by Reginald who is in love with Wardine, but Wardine's mother has threatened to kill her if she has sex with Reginald before she is 16. Roy tony is out on parole for killing Columbus Epps over a lover's spat involving the narrator's mother. Roy Tony's brother is Wardine's father, but he's gone. Wardine begs Reginald and Clenette [the narrator] not to tell their mothers. Wardine also calls Clenette her half sister. Clenette decides not to tell her mother, because her mother is frightened by Roy Tony. However she suspects that Reginald did tell his mother. Reginald says that he is going to stand up to Roy Tony and tell him to leave Wardine alone. Clenette thinks that Roy Tony will then kill Reginald and leave. She thinks that Wardine's mother will beat her to death with the hanger, and she will then be the only one who knows. And she's pregnant.
p 38-39
presumably Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] ?
place Winchester [MA?]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part concerns Bruce Green who in the 8th grade is hopelessly in love with Mildred Bonk, who is a fatally pretty, nubile and wraithlike flaxen-haired beauty. She reaches puberty well ahead of Bruce Green, and drives him crazy with lust. Then in 10th grade she transforms into a pot-smoking, beer drinking vixen with teased up hair who skips school and hangs around guys with low slung cars. So Bruce becomes one of those guys in order to win her. Win her he does, and by the time they would have graduated they are married with a baby living in a trailer in Allston with another couple as well as Tommy Doocey who is a harelipped pot dealer. Mildred gets high and watches serial cartridges, while Bruce works at Leisure Time Ice. Their life is one big party.
notes
April 1 does fall on a Wednesday in 2009, confirming that YDAU is almost certainly 2009. The Near East medical attache in the first part obviously suggests some relation to the Moms, and it's perhaps significant that this episode also takes place on April 1, albeit six years after the 'professional conversationalist' episode [p 27-31]. The anonymous cartridge also portends importance, and it's perhaps important to note that it comes from Phoenix.
If Clenette and Wardine are half-sisters then Roy Tony's brother must be father to both.
The harelipped pot dealer Tommy Doocey, is the same person from whom Erdeddy's source is planning to get the pot [p 17-27]
p 33-37 YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part centers around an unnamed medical attache, half Arab but born in and a resident of Canada. He is a consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q----, Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment who is in Boston to cut a 'mammoth' deal with Interlace TelEntertainment. His main duties are to assist in draining the sores of the face and sinus that result from the fact that the Prince eats almost nothing but Toblerone Chocolate. Ordinarily he arrives at home to find that his wife has prepared a piping hot dinner and an evening's worth of entertainment cartridges. She then wordlessly attends to him until he's asleep. But Wednesdays his wife has her weekly tennis league, and this particular Wednesday the attache gets home early and is at a loss as to how to procure the entertainment cartridges he needs. He tries watching the regularly programmed TV, but finds nothing better than an aerobics show which threatens to elicit impure thoughts. He goes in search of cartridges and finds among the days mail a padded cartridge-mailer, with 'happy anniversary' [it's not his anniversary] and a smiley face in place of a return address, postmarked Phoenix, but not with the official stamp of Prince Q----'s legation in Phoenix. Inside is a standard cartridge with no label aside from another smiley face. He heats his dinner in the microwave and begins viewing the cartridge at 1927h.
p 37-38
Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] month?
place Brighton [MA?]
narrated in first person [Clenette]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect by Clenette who tells a very repetitive complicated web of stories which I will try to summarize:
Wardine's mother has beaten her with a coat hanger causing lacerations on her back. Her mother blamed her for 'tempting' her boyfriend Roy Tony 'into sin,' when in reality Roy Tony had molested her (or at least tried to). Much of this told to the narrator by Reginald who is in love with Wardine, but Wardine's mother has threatened to kill her if she has sex with Reginald before she is 16. Roy tony is out on parole for killing Columbus Epps over a lover's spat involving the narrator's mother. Roy Tony's brother is Wardine's father, but he's gone. Wardine begs Reginald and Clenette [the narrator] not to tell their mothers. Wardine also calls Clenette her half sister. Clenette decides not to tell her mother, because her mother is frightened by Roy Tony. However she suspects that Reginald did tell his mother. Reginald says that he is going to stand up to Roy Tony and tell him to leave Wardine alone. Clenette thinks that Roy Tony will then kill Reginald and leave. She thinks that Wardine's mother will beat her to death with the hanger, and she will then be the only one who knows. And she's pregnant.
p 38-39
presumably Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] ?
place Winchester [MA?]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part concerns Bruce Green who in the 8th grade is hopelessly in love with Mildred Bonk, who is a fatally pretty, nubile and wraithlike flaxen-haired beauty. She reaches puberty well ahead of Bruce Green, and drives him crazy with lust. Then in 10th grade she transforms into a pot-smoking, beer drinking vixen with teased up hair who skips school and hangs around guys with low slung cars. So Bruce becomes one of those guys in order to win her. Win her he does, and by the time they would have graduated they are married with a baby living in a trailer in Allston with another couple as well as Tommy Doocey who is a harelipped pot dealer. Mildred gets high and watches serial cartridges, while Bruce works at Leisure Time Ice. Their life is one big party.
notes
April 1 does fall on a Wednesday in 2009, confirming that YDAU is almost certainly 2009. The Near East medical attache in the first part obviously suggests some relation to the Moms, and it's perhaps significant that this episode also takes place on April 1, albeit six years after the 'professional conversationalist' episode [p 27-31]. The anonymous cartridge also portends importance, and it's perhaps important to note that it comes from Phoenix.
If Clenette and Wardine are half-sisters then Roy Tony's brother must be father to both.
The harelipped pot dealer Tommy Doocey, is the same person from whom Erdeddy's source is planning to get the pot [p 17-27]
p 39-49
this section is in 3 parts.
p 39-42
YDAU [2009] month?
place ETA, Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The scene is purely dialog without narration. Mario and Hal are in their dorm room trying to sleep, and Mario is keeping his brother awake. Mario is lavishly praising Hal's tennis victory earlier in the day. Hal tells him not to rehash these things. and tries to get him to go to sleep. Mario [aka Booboo] says that Hal rooms with him because he feels sorry for him. Hal says petulance is a sign of too little sleep. Mario asks if Hal believed in God while he was winning the game. Hal says 'this again' and then to shush him says he has 'administrative bones to pick' about God's 'laid-back management style' and that unlike him God is 'pro death.' Mario asks if he's talking about the death of Himself. Hal bypasses the question saying they have an 'unbridgeable difference' on the issue. Hal tells Mario a joke:'what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic... someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.' Mario asks why the Moms never cried when Himself died, and asks if she even seems happier now. He says she stopped traveling for the corporate grammar and library protest things. Hal says that she even more OC than ever and that she just goes back in forth in the tunnel between her office and the headmaster's house. Mario says her eyes are better, not so sunk in and she laughs at CT more than she ever did at Himself. Hal says he's pretty sure that she was sad, just in her own way. Hal asks if Mario remembers how the flag was flown at half-mast, and still is once a year. He notes that there are two ways to do this--by lowering the flag halfway, or by raising the pole to twice it's height.
p 42
YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache is still watching the unlabeled cartridge at 2010h [43 minutes later].
p42-49
YDAU [2009] October
place Phoenix
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, but very much from inside Orin's head. Orin [Hal's brother]wakes up alone in his apartment in Phoenix, with his fetally curled impression sweated into the sheets, even though the AC is cranked. Morning is his worst time psychically. He finds an "Ambush" perfume scented note from last night's 'Subject' with her phone #and school-girl handwriting with hearts over the i's. On this October morning the heat outside is 'beastly' while inside it's so cold that the floor hurts his bear feet. He eats breakfast of toast and honey outside by the pool in the center of his ring-shaped apartment complex The plants are described as malevolent and tortured by the weather. He has just returned from a football game in Chicago, where his team was beaten, and he and the place kicker are the only players not still in pain. He recalls sitting in the jacuzzi 5 days ago, 'caring for the leg' [he's a punter] when a bird drops dead and falls into the jacuzzi out of the empty sky. Orin previously played for New Orleans before being traded to Phoenix [for 3 players and cash.] The huge 'sewer roaches' in Phoenix are 'armored-vehicle-type bugs' and Orin has found that the only way to kill them is to cover them with a tumbler until they asphyxiate. He's also not crazy about spiders, but nowhere near as much as Himself [who grew up in Tucson]. Orin's true horror is roaches, and back in New Orleans, he had decided to seek being traded after a spate of flying roaches had been attacking infants, resulting, in combination with flooding, of body parts coming to rest in his yard. Mornings are the worst time for Orin, especially if the Subject is still there wanting to cuddle or make him breakfast. Even when alone 'these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.' His bad dreams have gotten worse here in the land his father abandoned in his unhappy youth. In a nod to his own youth his dreams always open with competitive tennis situation [Orin had apparently been a tennis player before playing football] eventually he is submerged in something that suffocates him only to emerge with his mother's neatly amputated head is attached to his head with the gut string from a tennis racquet. Last night's Subject's note had said that she awakened to him gripping her head. His second to last Subject before the recent one had awakened him watching an extremely gruesome Interlace educational cartridge on schizophrenia,wherein a schizophrenic subject is pumped full of radioactive dye and sent through a PET scanner. Orin waited impatiently for her to leave and then sent her kid a gift and changed his phone number. Orin's team is pressuring him to give an interview, and answer in a 'blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms. Orin shaves in the shower without a mirror using upward strokes.
notes
the first scene reveals a lot more about the family history and the dynamic between the parents, and between Hal and Mario. It's still not exactly clear what's wrong with Mario, but it's clear that Hal kind of looks out for him as if he were the younger.
the natural environment of the third section is almost pre-apocalyptic [was DFW hip to the threat of global warming back then?] The reader is left wondering why Orin is so tormented by morning, by roaches, by intimacy, and what it all has to do with his father's unhappy childhood, with his mother and her severed head, with calling Hal to reopen the Pandora's box of worms.
p 39-42
YDAU [2009] month?
place ETA, Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The scene is purely dialog without narration. Mario and Hal are in their dorm room trying to sleep, and Mario is keeping his brother awake. Mario is lavishly praising Hal's tennis victory earlier in the day. Hal tells him not to rehash these things. and tries to get him to go to sleep. Mario [aka Booboo] says that Hal rooms with him because he feels sorry for him. Hal says petulance is a sign of too little sleep. Mario asks if Hal believed in God while he was winning the game. Hal says 'this again' and then to shush him says he has 'administrative bones to pick' about God's 'laid-back management style' and that unlike him God is 'pro death.' Mario asks if he's talking about the death of Himself. Hal bypasses the question saying they have an 'unbridgeable difference' on the issue. Hal tells Mario a joke:'what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic... someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.' Mario asks why the Moms never cried when Himself died, and asks if she even seems happier now. He says she stopped traveling for the corporate grammar and library protest things. Hal says that she even more OC than ever and that she just goes back in forth in the tunnel between her office and the headmaster's house. Mario says her eyes are better, not so sunk in and she laughs at CT more than she ever did at Himself. Hal says he's pretty sure that she was sad, just in her own way. Hal asks if Mario remembers how the flag was flown at half-mast, and still is once a year. He notes that there are two ways to do this--by lowering the flag halfway, or by raising the pole to twice it's height.
p 42
YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache is still watching the unlabeled cartridge at 2010h [43 minutes later].
p42-49
YDAU [2009] October
place Phoenix
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, but very much from inside Orin's head. Orin [Hal's brother]wakes up alone in his apartment in Phoenix, with his fetally curled impression sweated into the sheets, even though the AC is cranked. Morning is his worst time psychically. He finds an "Ambush" perfume scented note from last night's 'Subject' with her phone #and school-girl handwriting with hearts over the i's. On this October morning the heat outside is 'beastly' while inside it's so cold that the floor hurts his bear feet. He eats breakfast of toast and honey outside by the pool in the center of his ring-shaped apartment complex The plants are described as malevolent and tortured by the weather. He has just returned from a football game in Chicago, where his team was beaten, and he and the place kicker are the only players not still in pain. He recalls sitting in the jacuzzi 5 days ago, 'caring for the leg' [he's a punter] when a bird drops dead and falls into the jacuzzi out of the empty sky. Orin previously played for New Orleans before being traded to Phoenix [for 3 players and cash.] The huge 'sewer roaches' in Phoenix are 'armored-vehicle-type bugs' and Orin has found that the only way to kill them is to cover them with a tumbler until they asphyxiate. He's also not crazy about spiders, but nowhere near as much as Himself [who grew up in Tucson]. Orin's true horror is roaches, and back in New Orleans, he had decided to seek being traded after a spate of flying roaches had been attacking infants, resulting, in combination with flooding, of body parts coming to rest in his yard. Mornings are the worst time for Orin, especially if the Subject is still there wanting to cuddle or make him breakfast. Even when alone 'these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.' His bad dreams have gotten worse here in the land his father abandoned in his unhappy youth. In a nod to his own youth his dreams always open with competitive tennis situation [Orin had apparently been a tennis player before playing football] eventually he is submerged in something that suffocates him only to emerge with his mother's neatly amputated head is attached to his head with the gut string from a tennis racquet. Last night's Subject's note had said that she awakened to him gripping her head. His second to last Subject before the recent one had awakened him watching an extremely gruesome Interlace educational cartridge on schizophrenia,wherein a schizophrenic subject is pumped full of radioactive dye and sent through a PET scanner. Orin waited impatiently for her to leave and then sent her kid a gift and changed his phone number. Orin's team is pressuring him to give an interview, and answer in a 'blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms. Orin shaves in the shower without a mirror using upward strokes.
notes
the first scene reveals a lot more about the family history and the dynamic between the parents, and between Hal and Mario. It's still not exactly clear what's wrong with Mario, but it's clear that Hal kind of looks out for him as if he were the younger.
the natural environment of the third section is almost pre-apocalyptic [was DFW hip to the threat of global warming back then?] The reader is left wondering why Orin is so tormented by morning, by roaches, by intimacy, and what it all has to do with his father's unhappy childhood, with his mother and her severed head, with calling Hal to reopen the Pandora's box of worms.
p 49-63
this section in 7 parts.
p 49-54
YDAU [2009] month?[between June & November]
place ETA/Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part is narrated in third person, but definitely in Hal's head. Hal is 17 and he is covertly smoking pot with a 'brass one-hitter' pipe [which minimizes second hand smoke]. He does this in the ETA's underground 'Lung Pump Room' where he can exhale the smoke into the exhaust fan, and thus be very discreet. Hal thinks of it this way: 'total utilization of available resources=lack of publicly detectable waste.' Hal has a whole system worked out and it's clear that he smokes pot covertly on a regular basis. Hal calculates that only a handful of people know of his habit, but as he does so he thinks of a few more. There are a few of his friends who are known to get high, but only one, Michael Pemulis, with whom Hal has smoked pot. He takes care to note that Ortho ['the Darkness'] Stice also knows, and that Orin seems to know even though he lives in Phoenix. His mother and CT have no idea [although they assume he drinks occasionally] apparently having been reassured that any abuse would interfere with high level academic/tennis performance. Also worth noting that Avril [the Moms] loathes Hal's friends Pemulis and James Struck, and that she dreads the thought that Hal would ever become an alcoholic like his father or his father's father. It is also noted that CT and Dolores Rusk [?] have discussed Avril's phobic dread of any secrecy w/r/t her sons.
There's a lengthy description of the underground tunnels and how they connect the ETA facility [drawing anyone] which notably mentions 'the former optical and film development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased)]. The pump room is described as like a 'spider hanging upside down.' During the winter [Nov-Mar] when the pump Lung is up and running, Hal is forced to find an alternative, less covert plan for smoking pot, namely going to a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and blowing the smoke into the exhaust fan. This is why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of the WhataBurger classic [which must be in November]. There is apparently a wide range of drugs that are used occasionally by the students, who are often especially as they get older subject to the stress of competitive tennis. The drug policy is strict, but the enforcement is lax in part due to the fact that the prorectors are mostly former students who failed to make 'the Show' and have returned humbly to ETA to live in subterranean dorms and often have habits themselves. The pump room is also connected to the prorectors' dorms, which allows Hal access to the men's room to use toothbrush, eye drops, etc to conceal any residual evidence of his habit. Hal is not sure why he is so obsessed with concealing his habit.
p 54
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part flashes back to the medical attache's wife, who is just leaving after her tennis game, and post game festivities--smoking kif and making fun of their husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile the medicalattache is still watching the cartridge at 0020h [now 3:53 later] , which he has set to loop and which has caused to wet both his pants and the recliner.
p 54-55
YDAU [2009] month ?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part describes how Mario [18 in May] is often assigned to videotape drills and matches, focussing on a certain part of the court, so that Coach Stitt can point out what the players are doing wrong.
p 55-60
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland [2008] Autumn
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Donald Gately a drug addict (Demerol and Talwin) and by necessity a more or less professional burglar. Gately is stealthy in spite of his massive size [including a giant square head] and he is both ferocious and jolly, and he takes 'zero in the way of shit' from anyone. In order to get back at DA who sent him to jail, on suspicion alone, Gately sets up an elaborate prank, where he breaks into the DA's house steals a few things, but leaves the rest piled up to create the illusion that the delayed alarm [which he actually knew about] had caught the burglars by surprise. A month later he sent the DA a photo of him [masked] with his accomplice [id'd in the footnotes as almost surely being Trent Kite] each with a toothbrush belonging to either the DA or his wife stuck up his butt. He avoided working the area ever again, but still got himself into trouble, while attempting what looked to be the easiest burglary imaginable, except the owner of the house turned out to be home sick, instead of with the rest of the family and both of their cars in the Berkshires. Instead of hightailing it, Gately is seduced by the fact that there is wall-safe concealed behind a landscape painting in the bedroom [where, he knows, 90% of wall-safes are concealed] and by his drug-related needs, and the burglary becomes a robbery. The sick man is speaking in Quebecois French, trying to tell Gately where the valuables are, but neither Gately nor his accomplice can understand French. Which is why when Gately bounds and gags the guy, he also can't understand the victims pleading that he not be gagged on account of his very stuffed up nose. But he does gag him and off they go, with a pile of loot including [something mentioned only in footnote 18] some 'upscale arty looking film cartridges' which Gately's accomplice suspects may be valuable 'if they were rare, or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.' It is then revealed that the man about suffocate in his own nasal mucous, is 'the right hand man to probably the most infamous anti-ONAN organizer north of the Great Concavity' and that he had moved his family to Boston to act as a 'liaison between and general leash-holder for' mutually antagonistic Quebecer separatist groups and Albertan ultra-rightists, who are united only in their vilification of the US for the return of the 'so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity' to its northern neighbor and ONAN ally' which was an affront to Canadian honor. The victim is basically a VIP Canadian terrorist organizer by the name of Guillaume DuPlessis. The cops have no trouble linking the crime to Gately and his MO in disarming burglar alarms, and the DA whose wife now needs valium just to floss, is set to get even.
p 60
YDAU [2009]
no narration
synopsis:
This short part is written in the mock style of computer or audio equipment catalog, describing a state of the art 'InterLace Telentertainment' unit. It's kind of an all-in-one computer, videophone, TV, VCR, etc.
p 60-61
YDAU [2009] Nov 2
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Jim Troelsch [ranked #8 in ETA's boys 18 & under] has taken ill. It came on as he was suiting up for morning drills. He blames it on Graham Rader, who sneezed on his lunch tray the day before. His roommates Pemulis and ted Schacht are both gone, and Troelsch lies about in a half-sleep state surrounded by a plethora of drugs, some of which are seemingly illicit [and these he has pilfered from Pemulis]. He listens to the tennis sounds outside sound drifts into a daydream/feverdream state of sleep.
p 61-63
YDAU [2009] [presumably] Nov 2 [?]
place ETA
narrated in first person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in the first person [with a mix of colloquial second person], and although it follows directly after Troelsch falls asleep, it is unclear who the narrator is [he is revealed to be 12 only at the end]. The narrator describes the realization that the sensation of nightmares is the same as their form-- the sudden realization that the essence of the nightmare has been with you all along, it's just been overlooked. 'Your first nightmare away from home' is described as taking place in an academy dorm room, in which there lurks an evil 'for you alone' which does not affect the other boys in the room. The room is described as having a total of 3 bunk beds, the lower level of one being occupied by 'you' [presumably the narrator]. The description of the contents of the room [being illuminated by flashlight] devolves into a dreamlike language describing the possible presence of a nightmarish face on the floor--an 'evil' unfelt by the others whose 'mouth opens at your light.' And 'then you wake' and shine the flashlight all around, unable to find a face in the floor, but still unconvinced that it's not there.
notes
the first section takes place 1 to 1.5 years before the opening interview section, and it's surely worth considering how Hal's drug use and paranoid secrecy about it might well be leading to the 'rough spot' which is months away. Also notable that Himself [who singlehandedly built ETA] would design a pump Lung that resembled an upside down spider in spite of his arachnophobia.
the Gately section [p 55-60] is clearly extremely important given it's probable link to the Incadenza's by way of both the cartridges mentioned in the footnote, and the death of DuPlessis with whom the family [specifically the Moms] had a 'sordid liaison' [p 30] and also of course to the attache who has been tied to the Moms already, and to the mysterious cartridge. It's also notable that DFW introduces some of his weirdest concepts without fanfare, we've encountered but still haven't been told much about subsidized time, ONAN, the Great Concavity.
The raison d'etre for the fever-dream + anonymous nightmare sequence is elusive. Perhaps it's simply a generalizing of the terrors of the light/dark.
p 49-54
YDAU [2009] month?[between June & November]
place ETA/Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part is narrated in third person, but definitely in Hal's head. Hal is 17 and he is covertly smoking pot with a 'brass one-hitter' pipe [which minimizes second hand smoke]. He does this in the ETA's underground 'Lung Pump Room' where he can exhale the smoke into the exhaust fan, and thus be very discreet. Hal thinks of it this way: 'total utilization of available resources=lack of publicly detectable waste.' Hal has a whole system worked out and it's clear that he smokes pot covertly on a regular basis. Hal calculates that only a handful of people know of his habit, but as he does so he thinks of a few more. There are a few of his friends who are known to get high, but only one, Michael Pemulis, with whom Hal has smoked pot. He takes care to note that Ortho ['the Darkness'] Stice also knows, and that Orin seems to know even though he lives in Phoenix. His mother and CT have no idea [although they assume he drinks occasionally] apparently having been reassured that any abuse would interfere with high level academic/tennis performance. Also worth noting that Avril [the Moms] loathes Hal's friends Pemulis and James Struck, and that she dreads the thought that Hal would ever become an alcoholic like his father or his father's father. It is also noted that CT and Dolores Rusk [?] have discussed Avril's phobic dread of any secrecy w/r/t her sons.
There's a lengthy description of the underground tunnels and how they connect the ETA facility [drawing anyone] which notably mentions 'the former optical and film development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased)]. The pump room is described as like a 'spider hanging upside down.' During the winter [Nov-Mar] when the pump Lung is up and running, Hal is forced to find an alternative, less covert plan for smoking pot, namely going to a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and blowing the smoke into the exhaust fan. This is why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of the WhataBurger classic [which must be in November]. There is apparently a wide range of drugs that are used occasionally by the students, who are often especially as they get older subject to the stress of competitive tennis. The drug policy is strict, but the enforcement is lax in part due to the fact that the prorectors are mostly former students who failed to make 'the Show' and have returned humbly to ETA to live in subterranean dorms and often have habits themselves. The pump room is also connected to the prorectors' dorms, which allows Hal access to the men's room to use toothbrush, eye drops, etc to conceal any residual evidence of his habit. Hal is not sure why he is so obsessed with concealing his habit.
p 54
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part flashes back to the medical attache's wife, who is just leaving after her tennis game, and post game festivities--smoking kif and making fun of their husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile the medicalattache is still watching the cartridge at 0020h [now 3:53 later] , which he has set to loop and which has caused to wet both his pants and the recliner.
p 54-55
YDAU [2009] month ?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part describes how Mario [18 in May] is often assigned to videotape drills and matches, focussing on a certain part of the court, so that Coach Stitt can point out what the players are doing wrong.
p 55-60
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland [2008] Autumn
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Donald Gately a drug addict (Demerol and Talwin) and by necessity a more or less professional burglar. Gately is stealthy in spite of his massive size [including a giant square head] and he is both ferocious and jolly, and he takes 'zero in the way of shit' from anyone. In order to get back at DA who sent him to jail, on suspicion alone, Gately sets up an elaborate prank, where he breaks into the DA's house steals a few things, but leaves the rest piled up to create the illusion that the delayed alarm [which he actually knew about] had caught the burglars by surprise. A month later he sent the DA a photo of him [masked] with his accomplice [id'd in the footnotes as almost surely being Trent Kite] each with a toothbrush belonging to either the DA or his wife stuck up his butt. He avoided working the area ever again, but still got himself into trouble, while attempting what looked to be the easiest burglary imaginable, except the owner of the house turned out to be home sick, instead of with the rest of the family and both of their cars in the Berkshires. Instead of hightailing it, Gately is seduced by the fact that there is wall-safe concealed behind a landscape painting in the bedroom [where, he knows, 90% of wall-safes are concealed] and by his drug-related needs, and the burglary becomes a robbery. The sick man is speaking in Quebecois French, trying to tell Gately where the valuables are, but neither Gately nor his accomplice can understand French. Which is why when Gately bounds and gags the guy, he also can't understand the victims pleading that he not be gagged on account of his very stuffed up nose. But he does gag him and off they go, with a pile of loot including [something mentioned only in footnote 18] some 'upscale arty looking film cartridges' which Gately's accomplice suspects may be valuable 'if they were rare, or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.' It is then revealed that the man about suffocate in his own nasal mucous, is 'the right hand man to probably the most infamous anti-ONAN organizer north of the Great Concavity' and that he had moved his family to Boston to act as a 'liaison between and general leash-holder for' mutually antagonistic Quebecer separatist groups and Albertan ultra-rightists, who are united only in their vilification of the US for the return of the 'so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity' to its northern neighbor and ONAN ally' which was an affront to Canadian honor. The victim is basically a VIP Canadian terrorist organizer by the name of Guillaume DuPlessis. The cops have no trouble linking the crime to Gately and his MO in disarming burglar alarms, and the DA whose wife now needs valium just to floss, is set to get even.
p 60
YDAU [2009]
no narration
synopsis:
This short part is written in the mock style of computer or audio equipment catalog, describing a state of the art 'InterLace Telentertainment' unit. It's kind of an all-in-one computer, videophone, TV, VCR, etc.
p 60-61
YDAU [2009] Nov 2
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Jim Troelsch [ranked #8 in ETA's boys 18 & under] has taken ill. It came on as he was suiting up for morning drills. He blames it on Graham Rader, who sneezed on his lunch tray the day before. His roommates Pemulis and ted Schacht are both gone, and Troelsch lies about in a half-sleep state surrounded by a plethora of drugs, some of which are seemingly illicit [and these he has pilfered from Pemulis]. He listens to the tennis sounds outside sound drifts into a daydream/feverdream state of sleep.
p 61-63
YDAU [2009] [presumably] Nov 2 [?]
place ETA
narrated in first person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in the first person [with a mix of colloquial second person], and although it follows directly after Troelsch falls asleep, it is unclear who the narrator is [he is revealed to be 12 only at the end]. The narrator describes the realization that the sensation of nightmares is the same as their form-- the sudden realization that the essence of the nightmare has been with you all along, it's just been overlooked. 'Your first nightmare away from home' is described as taking place in an academy dorm room, in which there lurks an evil 'for you alone' which does not affect the other boys in the room. The room is described as having a total of 3 bunk beds, the lower level of one being occupied by 'you' [presumably the narrator]. The description of the contents of the room [being illuminated by flashlight] devolves into a dreamlike language describing the possible presence of a nightmarish face on the floor--an 'evil' unfelt by the others whose 'mouth opens at your light.' And 'then you wake' and shine the flashlight all around, unable to find a face in the floor, but still unconvinced that it's not there.
notes
the first section takes place 1 to 1.5 years before the opening interview section, and it's surely worth considering how Hal's drug use and paranoid secrecy about it might well be leading to the 'rough spot' which is months away. Also notable that Himself [who singlehandedly built ETA] would design a pump Lung that resembled an upside down spider in spite of his arachnophobia.
the Gately section [p 55-60] is clearly extremely important given it's probable link to the Incadenza's by way of both the cartridges mentioned in the footnote, and the death of DuPlessis with whom the family [specifically the Moms] had a 'sordid liaison' [p 30] and also of course to the attache who has been tied to the Moms already, and to the mysterious cartridge. It's also notable that DFW introduces some of his weirdest concepts without fanfare, we've encountered but still haven't been told much about subsidized time, ONAN, the Great Concavity.
The raison d'etre for the fever-dream + anonymous nightmare sequence is elusive. Perhaps it's simply a generalizing of the terrors of the light/dark.
p 63-66
this section in 2 parts, and one very lengthy footnote
p 63-65
as of YDAU [2009]--ie backstory
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in third person, with a detached tone. ETA has been in operation for 3 pre-subsidized years + 8 subsidized years [ie since 1999] First it was under Dr. James Incandenza then under his half brother-in-law Charles Tavis. Incandenza was the only child of a former Jr. tennis player and then promising pre-Method actor. The father is driven back to his native Tucson, and works as a tennis pro and a low-rent actor. He is crippled by arachnophobia and stage fright, and becomes more obsessed by Method acting. He makes his son into a tennis player 'the way other fathers might restore vintage autos.' James was compliant and became a gifted Jr. player,using tennis scholarships to fund his education, which eventually led to a Navy funded doctorate in optical physics, and top level government defense jobs, where 'his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels' helped make possible cold annular fusion leading to US energy independence. He then made a fortune in related patents and retired to start ETA and begin working on 'apres-garde' experimental film. His film work was still too ahead of [or behind?] it's time to be appreciated at the time of his death in YT-SDB [2004], although much of the film work was plain pretentious, due in part to his descent into alcoholism. [here there is an 8 page footnote listing the complete filmography of JOI, which is discussed separately below]. Incandenza had a May[or July] -October marriage to Avril Mondragon a prescriptive linguist with ties to Quebecois Separatists made obtaining visas difficult, and Orin's birth was in fact partly a legal maneuver. In his last five years, Incandenza liquidated his assets and ceded control of ETA to his wife's half-brother. His subsequent film career earned a small academic following for 'technical fleck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.' His untimely suicide at 54 was held as a great loss in the military, film and tennis worlds.
p 65-66
YDAU [2009] Nov. 1
Denver, CO
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, with close ties to Orin's perspective. Orin and his team are hang-gliding in bird-suits from the top of Mile High Stadium to the football field below, presumably as a pre-game ritual/stunt. Orin hates it 'with a clusterfucking passion.' He has told no one on the team or the counselor about his fear of heights and descent. he whispers 'please lord, spare the Leg' before each landing.
p 985-993
footnote 24, ['James O. Incandenza, a filmography']
by my count there are 78 films listed here. There are several series of films 'Cage' I through V, mostly unreleased; 'Found Drama' I-XI, all 'conceptual, conceptually unfilmable, unreleased.' And most notable 'Infinite Jest' I-V, with each being an attempted remake of it's precursor, and all unreleased. The final 'Infinite Jest (V?)' was his last film [starring only "Madame Psychosis"] and 'though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists' it has been described in journals as his 'most entertaining and compelling work' and allusions have been made to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context.' The 'master cartridge was vaulted sui testador'
Many of the films are unreleased, and the ones that predate subsidized time are not dated exactly. The films vary from documentaries, to narratives to parodies and P/R shorts for advertising. Several synopses sound familiar to events in the book, for example the scene with Hal and Himself posing as the shrink. There are actors and narrators that recur throughout the filmography, notably 'Madame Psychosis,' Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pamela-Sue Vooheis, Paul Anthony [P.A.] Heaven.
notes
The filmography is so rich, that it could almost stand alone as a short story. I'm convinced that most everything in there is relevant to some part of the main story, and I feel like my cursory summary probably warrants expansion.
p 63-65
as of YDAU [2009]--ie backstory
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in third person, with a detached tone. ETA has been in operation for 3 pre-subsidized years + 8 subsidized years [ie since 1999] First it was under Dr. James Incandenza then under his half brother-in-law Charles Tavis. Incandenza was the only child of a former Jr. tennis player and then promising pre-Method actor. The father is driven back to his native Tucson, and works as a tennis pro and a low-rent actor. He is crippled by arachnophobia and stage fright, and becomes more obsessed by Method acting. He makes his son into a tennis player 'the way other fathers might restore vintage autos.' James was compliant and became a gifted Jr. player,using tennis scholarships to fund his education, which eventually led to a Navy funded doctorate in optical physics, and top level government defense jobs, where 'his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels' helped make possible cold annular fusion leading to US energy independence. He then made a fortune in related patents and retired to start ETA and begin working on 'apres-garde' experimental film. His film work was still too ahead of [or behind?] it's time to be appreciated at the time of his death in YT-SDB [2004], although much of the film work was plain pretentious, due in part to his descent into alcoholism. [here there is an 8 page footnote listing the complete filmography of JOI, which is discussed separately below]. Incandenza had a May[or July] -October marriage to Avril Mondragon a prescriptive linguist with ties to Quebecois Separatists made obtaining visas difficult, and Orin's birth was in fact partly a legal maneuver. In his last five years, Incandenza liquidated his assets and ceded control of ETA to his wife's half-brother. His subsequent film career earned a small academic following for 'technical fleck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.' His untimely suicide at 54 was held as a great loss in the military, film and tennis worlds.
p 65-66
YDAU [2009] Nov. 1
Denver, CO
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, with close ties to Orin's perspective. Orin and his team are hang-gliding in bird-suits from the top of Mile High Stadium to the football field below, presumably as a pre-game ritual/stunt. Orin hates it 'with a clusterfucking passion.' He has told no one on the team or the counselor about his fear of heights and descent. he whispers 'please lord, spare the Leg' before each landing.
p 985-993
footnote 24, ['James O. Incandenza, a filmography']
by my count there are 78 films listed here. There are several series of films 'Cage' I through V, mostly unreleased; 'Found Drama' I-XI, all 'conceptual, conceptually unfilmable, unreleased.' And most notable 'Infinite Jest' I-V, with each being an attempted remake of it's precursor, and all unreleased. The final 'Infinite Jest (V?)' was his last film [starring only "Madame Psychosis"] and 'though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists' it has been described in journals as his 'most entertaining and compelling work' and allusions have been made to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context.' The 'master cartridge was vaulted sui testador'
Many of the films are unreleased, and the ones that predate subsidized time are not dated exactly. The films vary from documentaries, to narratives to parodies and P/R shorts for advertising. Several synopses sound familiar to events in the book, for example the scene with Hal and Himself posing as the shrink. There are actors and narrators that recur throughout the filmography, notably 'Madame Psychosis,' Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pamela-Sue Vooheis, Paul Anthony [P.A.] Heaven.
notes
The filmography is so rich, that it could almost stand alone as a short story. I'm convinced that most everything in there is relevant to some part of the main story, and I feel like my cursory summary probably warrants expansion.
p 66-68
this section in 2 parts
p66-67
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is telling the younger kids at the pre-dinner "Big Buddy" powwow, about the organopsychedelic 'muscimole' which is 3 times as potent as psilocybin and causes any of the following semi-sleep-like trance with visions, synesthesia, increased strength, favorable distortions of body image, etc. He tells them that the drug comes from a mushroom revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity.The kids try to stay focussed on his speech.
p 67-68
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in first person [Hal]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in first person, presumably by Hal. He says that some players start using Bob Hope [pot] as early as 12, but he [not wanting to be like his father] didn't start until he was nearly 16 when Bridget Boone offered him a bong hit to help him with his insomnia. The low grade synthetic pot worked like a charm. He then describes a still recurring dream [presumably that he had after that first bong hit] where he is playing a competitive tennis match on a giant court whose baselines are 3 dimensional and very complex. The crowd is a tableau--silent, motionless and highly attentive in summer's citrus colors. The umpire, high overhead whispers play and Hal tries to figure out where exactly to direct his serve. He notices the Moms with her white sun umbrella, in a 'circle of a shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.' The umpire whispers again to play, and they sort of play, hypothetically.
notes
the first part implies that perhaps Pemulis might have been an influence on Hal's drug use, although the second part traces the exact source. The dream implies a pretty heavily idolized view of the Moms, with her all white figure raised above the crowd and with her unconditional support.
p66-67
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is telling the younger kids at the pre-dinner "Big Buddy" powwow, about the organopsychedelic 'muscimole' which is 3 times as potent as psilocybin and causes any of the following semi-sleep-like trance with visions, synesthesia, increased strength, favorable distortions of body image, etc. He tells them that the drug comes from a mushroom revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity.The kids try to stay focussed on his speech.
p 67-68
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in first person [Hal]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in first person, presumably by Hal. He says that some players start using Bob Hope [pot] as early as 12, but he [not wanting to be like his father] didn't start until he was nearly 16 when Bridget Boone offered him a bong hit to help him with his insomnia. The low grade synthetic pot worked like a charm. He then describes a still recurring dream [presumably that he had after that first bong hit] where he is playing a competitive tennis match on a giant court whose baselines are 3 dimensional and very complex. The crowd is a tableau--silent, motionless and highly attentive in summer's citrus colors. The umpire, high overhead whispers play and Hal tries to figure out where exactly to direct his serve. He notices the Moms with her white sun umbrella, in a 'circle of a shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.' The umpire whispers again to play, and they sort of play, hypothetically.
notes
the first part implies that perhaps Pemulis might have been an influence on Hal's drug use, although the second part traces the exact source. The dream implies a pretty heavily idolized view of the Moms, with her all white figure raised above the crowd and with her unconditional support.
p 68-87
this section in 5 parts
p 68-78
YDAU [2009] month?
place Boston area
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part describes a doctor on a psych ward asking questions of Kate Gompert who has just tried to commit suicide. Kate is lying in the fetal position,with long-unwashed hair. She is under 24-hour suicide watch. the doctor who enters the room reads on her chart that she's 21, from Newton MA, data-clerk in a real estate office. This is her 4th hospitalization in 3 years, for unipolar clinical depression, she's had electro-convulsive treatment once, and been on and off various meds, which she has a history of abusing. She has attempted suicide twice, once by carbon monoxide and once by slitting her wrists. this time she took all of her [130+] antidepressants at once. Her mother found her and hallucinated that she was a newborn. The doctor takes out his pen and asks her why she tried to hurt herself, and if she would sit up. She answers that she is sitting up,and when he asks her if she feels as if she is in a sitting position, she sighs and sits u and says she was trying to kill herself, not hurt herself. When he asks the difference, she says she's not one of those self hating ones; she didn't want to punish herself, she just wanted to 'stop playing' or stop being conscious, she would have opted for shock, or a coma, if she could have. The doctor writes as she talks. She says she has a feeling that she feels throughout her body, more like horror than sadness. She fears this feeling more than anything, it's like nausea of every cell of the body. And even though it comes and goes, when she's having the feeling she forgets that. She says that she wants shock [ECT] or to be sedated for a month. She says that she sometimes thinks 'the feeling' has to do with Hope [pot, a nickname she explains: when you call a dealer you ask if Bob is in town in case of surveillance, and dealer answers 'Hope springs eternal' if so]. She explains that although pot is usually considered a minor drug, in her case she loves it so much that it's a whole other problem. She then explains her drug habit and obsession with concealing in what sounds like a combination of Hal's [paranoia about being discovered] and Erdeddy's [habitually quitting/restarting] habits. She explains that when she does manage to quit, 'the feeling' creeps back in, and she doesn't want to do anything. Part of the feeling is being willing to do anything to make it go away. The doctor who has stopped taking notes then asks, 'so this has happened in the past?' She answers 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' The doctor when summarizing her choice of treatment option on her chart, adds his own post assessment question, 'then what?'
p 78-79
YDAU [2009] April 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache's wife returns home at 0145h [6:18 since he began watching] to find her husband unresponsive in his soiled recliner. She tries to unsuccessfully to rouse him, and then noticing the expression on his face is 'positive, ecstatic even,' she turns her head to the cartridge-viewer
p 79-85
YDAU [2009] presumably
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Gerhard Schtitt who is the head coach and athletic director at ETA, who in spite of rumored impropriety involving a riding crop at his former job, was 'wooed fiercely' by James Incandenza. Pretty much everyone at ETA now thinks that the riding crop episode was exaggerated, because the weatherman's pointer he now uses instead, has yet to make 'corrective contact with even one athletic bottom.' He is more of a dispenser of abstractions & philosophy now. Mario is Schtitt's sidekick, and confidante. Mostly Schtitt talks and Mario listens. The fact that Mario is 'visibly damaged' allows Schtitt to let down his guard, as if there's no one in there. Schtitt is described as having a 'creepy wiriness' of old an man who exercises regularly. He has a white crewcut and 'glowingly white' skin. Schtitt argues [Mario listens] against the notion that the quickest path between 2 points is a straight line, saying that one always runs into something. He relates the locker room motto from his youth 'we are what we walk between' which is contrasted with both the original ETA slogan which is Latin for, roughly 'They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier' and the one to which CT changed it after Himself's death: 'the man who knows his limitations has none.' Most of the kids at ETA think Schtitt is bats, and mostly show him respect because he can make their morning workouts very unpleasant. One reason James Incandenza was drawn to Schtitt is that he's not the usual tennis coach, the basic 'hands-on practical straight-ahead problem solving statistical-data wonk.' He understood intuitively [with no knowledge of mathematics] that rather than reducing the chaos into patterns, in order to understand it, one must embrace the expansion to infinite limits of possibility. The infinities are mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, 'bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.' Mario asks with total incomprehension, 'you mean like baselines'? Schtitt was taught that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, but questions what the point of that is in the current state, where the only public consensus a boy has to surrender to is: 'the happy pleasure of the person alone.' He laments that without something bigger, there is 'nothing to contain and give the meaning.' On the way to get ice cream, he tells Mario that as a youth he was in love with a tree and would visit the tree daily. The thrust of Schtitt's view is that the 'true opponent, the enfolding boundary is the player himself.' Mario thinks of a flagpole raised to twice it's normal height. Schtitt says the game that students are at ETA to learn is 'life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.' As he grapples with whether that means 'destroying yourself,' some kids make fun of Mario's appearance. When they get to the ice cream place Mario opts for the old standby, chocolate while Schtitt experiments with something exotic, and concludes 'and so. no different maybe... except the chance to play' and laughs.
p 85-87
YDAU [2009] early November
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Tiny Ewell is 'tiny, an elf sized US male' who is being driven in a taxi from the hospital to the halfway house. He had returned home to find that his wife packed up his clothing, changed the locks and filed a restraining order. His Florsheim shoes still bear a scuff where he kicked the door. This is the first time he's been allowed to wear them [instead of the hospital provided 'happy slippers'] after he had used the to try to whack the mice he hallucinated during detox. Ewell looks like a scaled down Burl Ives, with his round shape white goatee, and 'violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort.' His former roommate at the detox unit is now sitting alone turning the air condition up and down [in November] and amusing himself. He, like Tiny has the 'rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. He gives Tiny the 'screaming meemies.' The rehab staffer accompanies Tiny to Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. The cabbie asks if Tiny is sick, and tiny answers 'so it would seem.'
p 87
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By mid-afternoon the medical attache has been joined by a whole cast of characters in watching the recursive loop from the cartridge, these include
-his wife
-the personal assistant of Prince Q--'s personal physician [who came looking for the attache]
-the personal physician [who came looking for the assistant]
-two armed security guards [dispatched by the prince to find the physician]
-two 7th day adventists [who had happened by]
notes
The Kate Gompert section was awfully sobering for this reader, in light of the author's death. It shows quite clearly an author who, while obviously a master of irony, did not seek refuge behind it.
The Schtitt section points up one of DFW's amazing gifts--switching the voice of the third person narrator to incorporate the way the scene's central character thinks. The Schtitt section is thorny and packed with math/philosphy-related stuff.
The Enfield VA hospital is presumably near the Enfield Tennis Academy, although I cannot recall any mention of the street location, that would place it on or near Commonwealth Ave.
p 68-78
YDAU [2009] month?
place Boston area
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part describes a doctor on a psych ward asking questions of Kate Gompert who has just tried to commit suicide. Kate is lying in the fetal position,with long-unwashed hair. She is under 24-hour suicide watch. the doctor who enters the room reads on her chart that she's 21, from Newton MA, data-clerk in a real estate office. This is her 4th hospitalization in 3 years, for unipolar clinical depression, she's had electro-convulsive treatment once, and been on and off various meds, which she has a history of abusing. She has attempted suicide twice, once by carbon monoxide and once by slitting her wrists. this time she took all of her [130+] antidepressants at once. Her mother found her and hallucinated that she was a newborn. The doctor takes out his pen and asks her why she tried to hurt herself, and if she would sit up. She answers that she is sitting up,and when he asks her if she feels as if she is in a sitting position, she sighs and sits u and says she was trying to kill herself, not hurt herself. When he asks the difference, she says she's not one of those self hating ones; she didn't want to punish herself, she just wanted to 'stop playing' or stop being conscious, she would have opted for shock, or a coma, if she could have. The doctor writes as she talks. She says she has a feeling that she feels throughout her body, more like horror than sadness. She fears this feeling more than anything, it's like nausea of every cell of the body. And even though it comes and goes, when she's having the feeling she forgets that. She says that she wants shock [ECT] or to be sedated for a month. She says that she sometimes thinks 'the feeling' has to do with Hope [pot, a nickname she explains: when you call a dealer you ask if Bob is in town in case of surveillance, and dealer answers 'Hope springs eternal' if so]. She explains that although pot is usually considered a minor drug, in her case she loves it so much that it's a whole other problem. She then explains her drug habit and obsession with concealing in what sounds like a combination of Hal's [paranoia about being discovered] and Erdeddy's [habitually quitting/restarting] habits. She explains that when she does manage to quit, 'the feeling' creeps back in, and she doesn't want to do anything. Part of the feeling is being willing to do anything to make it go away. The doctor who has stopped taking notes then asks, 'so this has happened in the past?' She answers 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' The doctor when summarizing her choice of treatment option on her chart, adds his own post assessment question, 'then what?'
p 78-79
YDAU [2009] April 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache's wife returns home at 0145h [6:18 since he began watching] to find her husband unresponsive in his soiled recliner. She tries to unsuccessfully to rouse him, and then noticing the expression on his face is 'positive, ecstatic even,' she turns her head to the cartridge-viewer
p 79-85
YDAU [2009] presumably
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Gerhard Schtitt who is the head coach and athletic director at ETA, who in spite of rumored impropriety involving a riding crop at his former job, was 'wooed fiercely' by James Incandenza. Pretty much everyone at ETA now thinks that the riding crop episode was exaggerated, because the weatherman's pointer he now uses instead, has yet to make 'corrective contact with even one athletic bottom.' He is more of a dispenser of abstractions & philosophy now. Mario is Schtitt's sidekick, and confidante. Mostly Schtitt talks and Mario listens. The fact that Mario is 'visibly damaged' allows Schtitt to let down his guard, as if there's no one in there. Schtitt is described as having a 'creepy wiriness' of old an man who exercises regularly. He has a white crewcut and 'glowingly white' skin. Schtitt argues [Mario listens] against the notion that the quickest path between 2 points is a straight line, saying that one always runs into something. He relates the locker room motto from his youth 'we are what we walk between' which is contrasted with both the original ETA slogan which is Latin for, roughly 'They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier' and the one to which CT changed it after Himself's death: 'the man who knows his limitations has none.' Most of the kids at ETA think Schtitt is bats, and mostly show him respect because he can make their morning workouts very unpleasant. One reason James Incandenza was drawn to Schtitt is that he's not the usual tennis coach, the basic 'hands-on practical straight-ahead problem solving statistical-data wonk.' He understood intuitively [with no knowledge of mathematics] that rather than reducing the chaos into patterns, in order to understand it, one must embrace the expansion to infinite limits of possibility. The infinities are mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, 'bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.' Mario asks with total incomprehension, 'you mean like baselines'? Schtitt was taught that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, but questions what the point of that is in the current state, where the only public consensus a boy has to surrender to is: 'the happy pleasure of the person alone.' He laments that without something bigger, there is 'nothing to contain and give the meaning.' On the way to get ice cream, he tells Mario that as a youth he was in love with a tree and would visit the tree daily. The thrust of Schtitt's view is that the 'true opponent, the enfolding boundary is the player himself.' Mario thinks of a flagpole raised to twice it's normal height. Schtitt says the game that students are at ETA to learn is 'life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.' As he grapples with whether that means 'destroying yourself,' some kids make fun of Mario's appearance. When they get to the ice cream place Mario opts for the old standby, chocolate while Schtitt experiments with something exotic, and concludes 'and so. no different maybe... except the chance to play' and laughs.
p 85-87
YDAU [2009] early November
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Tiny Ewell is 'tiny, an elf sized US male' who is being driven in a taxi from the hospital to the halfway house. He had returned home to find that his wife packed up his clothing, changed the locks and filed a restraining order. His Florsheim shoes still bear a scuff where he kicked the door. This is the first time he's been allowed to wear them [instead of the hospital provided 'happy slippers'] after he had used the to try to whack the mice he hallucinated during detox. Ewell looks like a scaled down Burl Ives, with his round shape white goatee, and 'violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort.' His former roommate at the detox unit is now sitting alone turning the air condition up and down [in November] and amusing himself. He, like Tiny has the 'rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. He gives Tiny the 'screaming meemies.' The rehab staffer accompanies Tiny to Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. The cabbie asks if Tiny is sick, and tiny answers 'so it would seem.'
p 87
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By mid-afternoon the medical attache has been joined by a whole cast of characters in watching the recursive loop from the cartridge, these include
-his wife
-the personal assistant of Prince Q--'s personal physician [who came looking for the attache]
-the personal physician [who came looking for the assistant]
-two armed security guards [dispatched by the prince to find the physician]
-two 7th day adventists [who had happened by]
notes
The Kate Gompert section was awfully sobering for this reader, in light of the author's death. It shows quite clearly an author who, while obviously a master of irony, did not seek refuge behind it.
The Schtitt section points up one of DFW's amazing gifts--switching the voice of the third person narrator to incorporate the way the scene's central character thinks. The Schtitt section is thorny and packed with math/philosphy-related stuff.
The Enfield VA hospital is presumably near the Enfield Tennis Academy, although I cannot recall any mention of the street location, that would place it on or near Commonwealth Ave.
p 87-127
this section in 11 parts
p 87-92
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section introduces the characters Remy Marathe and M. Hugh Steeply, who meet in the desert outside Tucson AZ,presumably in secret. Steeply is a transvestite operative for the [USA] Office of Unspecified Services,or BSS as the Quebecois separatists refer to it. He is a large man, who seems to appear rather absurd in drag, and has trouble controlling his giant prosthetic breasts and his wig. Marathe is a member of the AFR --'Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [wheelchair assassins]. Even though Steeply's Quebecois is better than Marathe's English, they usually converse in English, because Marathe has chosen to betray the AFR in order to secure medical treatment for his wife, back in Quebec. Plus, he now pretends to his superiors that he's pretending to feed info to the BSS, but Steeply apparently knows about this false double-double-agent status, which gives Steeply the upper hand-- ergo they converse in English. Steeply asks how he got up there [in a wheelchair] and Marathe dodges the question. Steeply asks if he has heard about the incident in which the cartridge [referred to as 'the Entertainment'] was delivered to the medical attache, with connections to the Saudi ministry of Entertainment, by postal routes that track back to the Phoenix area, apparently implicating Marathe's organization. Steeply explains around 20 people were done in by the incident including police, and also that the attache had diplomatic status and connections to the royal family and plus he was a compatriot of Marathe's. Marathe responds that they have no such names on the AFR list [which Steeply has seen,] that they have 'larger seafood to cook.' Marathe sniffs his nose a lot, they face the same direction as they speak. Steeply points out that the attache was Ottowan [much hated by Marathe] and that he was possibly connected to the widow of the 'auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment.' The wife was teaching at Brandeis where the victim did his residency, and she was known to sleep with 'just about everything with a pulse... particularly a Canadian pulse.' Marathe denies knowledge, saying that 'civilians as individual warnings to ONAN are not out desire. Steeply says he was asked to seek personal verification. Marathe asks if he was asked by Rodney [Rod the God] Tine, chief of Unspecified Services and 'acknowledged architect of ONAN and continental Reconfiguration' who by the way shared a personal stenographer [and love interest]-- Luria Perec--with M. DuPlessis former assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance. And there's the question of whether Tine was doubling or possibly tripling [only pretending to divulge secrets].
p 93
presumably YDAU [2009]?
place [what used to be] Vermont
narrated in third person [as if a public service announcement]
synopsis:
A herd of feral hamsters is thundering across the southern part of the Great Concavity [in former Vermont], creating a cloud which is visible as far away as boston and Montreal. the herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free 'at the beginning of Experialist Migration' in Year of the Whopper [2002]. the herd is relentlessly crossing the denuded terrain toward the forests of what used to be Maine. All these territories are now property of Canada. People are advised to steer clear of the hamsters, and the southwest Concavity for that matter. Americans are advised to head south toward a metropolis or the points between where the giant ATHSCME fans blow the toxic clouds back toward Canada.
p 93-95
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply is trying to light a cigarette, and not being able to do so in a lady-like fashion. Marathe has his wheelchair's brakes locked and his hand on the grip of his machine-pistol. Steeply asks if Marathe will report the incident back to Fortier, and Marathe answers 'bien sur' [of course]. Steeply says that he must be tripling or quadrupling since he knows that Fortier and the AFR know that Marathe is here. Marathe asks but do they know that you know this. In a footnote it's explained that the important thing is that Marathe's superiors seem to believe that he is only pretending to betray them [to get medical technology for his wife] but in reality is betraying them by pretending to pretend. Steeply says it's not personal, it's just obsessive caution. He says that DuPlessis always suspected Tine 'tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.' And Marathe says that DuPlessis is now dead under 'circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion... an inept burglary and grippe.' Marathe says that if 'Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware,' because of Luria.
p 95-97
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person [partly as if a diary entry]
synopsis:
The section starts with a day in the life of ETA student, with all the drills classes etc, ending with him slumped on the locker room floor with the other players. '...to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness?' Which turns out to be a question about the exam the boys have just taken. Hal answers that the exam was asking about Tolstoy's syntax, not about real unhappy families. The cast of characters includes John (N.R.) Wayne, Troelsch, Pemulis, Schacht, Ortho Stice and others. They discuss a possible test question on Disney R.Leith's [prof of History of Entertainment I & II] pop quiz--the most crucial difference between historical broadcast TV and cartridge-capable TP. Troelsch then quizzes the others to define 'acutance' which Hal does without trouble. The rest of the boys tease him and say they'll be vying for seats next to him for the quiz.
p 97
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. This odd little section contains no dialog. It describes dusk in the desert--the violet sky and the rustling of things about to emerge for the night. Steeply examines a scratch on his arm.
p 97-105
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to the locker room. Everyone has a white towel around his waist, except for Stice with his trademark black towel. The big Buddy system is described-- each 18 & under has a group of 14 & unders assigned to him. Beak, Blott and [the ethnically vague, but non-causcasian] Arslanian are all in Hal's group, plus effectively Ingersoll, whom he traded for Possalthwaite. Axford was supposed tobe Ingersoll's Buddy, but inexplicably despised the kid and begged Hal to make the trade. Big Buddies are there to show the little kids the rope and act as liaison between the kids and the prorectors, but also to keep the prorectors informed on who seems on shaky ground. Hal also feels the strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, but resists. He likes being a Big Buddy. Back in the locker room-- other than Hal 'who's atavistically dark-complected,' the players have either weirdly piebald suntans or they spray themselves with Lemon Pledge which acts as the world's most effective sunscreen, if you can stand the smell. Stice says he's tired [pronounced 'tard'] and the boys all chime in with hyperbolic and 'hyperbolicker' words describing their fatigue. Stice request only black form the companies that give him clothes/gear,and has the nickname 'The Darkness.' The kids tease Hal some more about being freakishly smart, he flips them offby the method of using the left hand to slowly crank up the right's middle finger. Hal takes after Himself in appearing slightly ethnic, while Orin 'got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype,' and Mario resembles no one they know. Most days Hal sneaks away from the locker room to get high. The boys talk about how it would be a more pleasant exhaustion if only they could...[get high, get laid etc]. Ingersoll interjects that they get Saturday off for Interdependence Day. It's revealed that Schacht, who is in one of the toilet stalls has Crohn's disease [inflammation of the ileum]. The boys come to a consensus that they had 5 hours of continuous exertion. John Wayne has said nothing the whole time. He buttons his shirt all the way as if he were going to put on a tie. The others argue whether it's Tavis or Schtitt who's more responsible for their personal pain. A jocular fight ensues.
p 105-109
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. The sun has set and Tucson begins to twinkle below them. Steeply says that the love of Rod Tine for Luria was great and timeless, the kind that is sung about, the kind people die for,and then rattles off pairs of star-crossed lovers, notably mistakenly pairing Agamemnon and Helen. Marathe corrects him-- Paris and Helen--and decries his ignorance. Steeply recalls the anonymous gift that was not a gift, brought to the door. Marathe scoffs that Paris and Helen were the *excuse* for the war, that the real reasons for the war were political. He says that Steeply likes to believe that the love of one woman could do this. Steeply counters that those around Rod The God say he would die twice for Luria, which is why he still has the presidents ear, divided loyalties or no-- 'if he does it for love-- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political.' Marathe sniffs scornfully,and says that Tines love is only a fanatical attachment, a temple at which he worships, and that the problem with those from the USA is that they do not choose attachments carefully. He says dying for one person is craziness, but your nation and your cause outlive you. He asks 'you would die without thinking for what?' Steeply knows that the AFR file on him makes reference to his recent divorce and to the fact that on assignment he had to drive a green sedan with an aspirin advertisement on it. Steeply counters that sometimes there is no choice what to love, and Marathe answers that in that case you become a slave, not even tragic. Tucson appears ghostly white below, and Black Widows' spider webs are on the outcroppings just below them. Marathe 'thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs,' [here there is a lengthy footnote,see below] and began singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' out of tune. The cold desert night was coming on, but they themselves were not chilled because their proximity created a 'form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth.' Marathe thinks that AFR Ops base here is like the surface of the moon.
p 109-121
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is conducting his Big Buddy group with a hypnotic cartridge in the TP of Stan Smith hitting one perfect forehand [and later backhand] after another. He tells them that the end of the day fighting is part of Schtitt and deLint's plan. The kids are struggling with how anyone can put up with the day in/day out difficulty of the academy for years. One suggests it's because they want the Show [the ATP tour with fame & fortune etc] another suggests that it's for scholarships. Hal dismisses all of this. He tells them to consider that they're all sitting around bitching and moaning *together* even though the system has 'inequality as an axiom.' Everyone knows where they're ranked [ John Wayne> Hal> Struck, Shaw>Troeltsch>Freer>Schacht>Pemulis] and they're all in one another's food chain. What they share is this aloneness. 'The suffering unites us' he tells them, and Schtitt and deLint set it up this way on purpose. it's not the bodies they're working on here, it's the heads. They purposely give them unstructured time after the most grueling workout, so that they'll get together and complain. Hal realizes that Ingersoll is so repellant to Hal because he sees in things about himself that he can't or won't accept. Hal broods on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high more than the getting high itself. If he doesn't get high by dinnertime, his eyes water and his mouth fills with spit, and he feels sick to his stomach and can't eat, and so when he gets high later he overeats later and wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
Down the hall John Wayne conducts his Big Buddy group [LaMont Chu, 'Sleepy TP' Peterson, Kieran McKenna, Brian van Vleck]. The mood in Wayne's group is quite different, essentially pedagogical. Chu acts as Wayne's mouthpiece, explaining to the others what Wayne thinks: that you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus [plateuax, corrects Wayne] and that the ones who don't hang in there are three. [1] the despairing type who can't stand the stall of improvement when he hits the plateau, and gives up in frustration [2] the obsessive type who when he hits the plateau tries to will himself upward by force and ends up injured [3] the complacent type who just accepts it when he hits the plateau and little by little his rank slides as others get better. Van Vleck asks wayne for verification that this is not just Chu palming his advice disguised as Wayne's. Wayne says he's said all he has to say [nothing]. Due to his continental #2 ranking [possibly #1 after the WhataBurger] he is the most sought after Big Buddy.
Pemulis plays poker [?] with his group [which includes Todd Posalthwaite (wasn't he traded to Axford?), Otis P. Lord and 2 others], Schacht gives his 5 kids a demonstration on flossing on a dental mock-up. Troeltsch tells his group that until they're 15 it's all about repetition until the mechanics are hardwired in, and then they really come after you with the 'concentration and character shit.'
Struck leads a Q&A with his kids. Traub asks if he should reciprocate when his opponent is kertwanging [presumably an obnoxious and only semi-legal act], Struck answers no, but if you lose, you can spike the opponents water after the match. 'Violently cross-eyed Carl Whale asks what if you have to fart, but there's the possibility that you might actually need to defecate. Struck answers that you resist: 'nothing leaves my bottom during play.' Stice lectures his boys [on Schtitt, presumably] telling them that he says it's about more than tennis, it's about sacrifice and suffering to get at the parts of yourself you didn't know were there. he says he'd 'chew fiberglass for that old man.' With dinner about to begin Hal contemplates getting high, as he spits he feels a twinge in a tooth on the left side of his mouth.
p 121-126
YDAU [2009] mid October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section has a title 'Mario Incandenza's first and only even remotely romantic experience, thus far.' After he drifts away from during a stroll together [sensing that Hal needs some alone time] Mario is confronted the USS Millicent Kent, 16 year old, 400 lb girl, ranked #1, who can take on any of the guys at the bench press. The USSMK takes Mario on a hunt for a Husky VI telescoping tripod that she says is hidden in the thickets. She grabs Mario's 'claw' and proceeds to drag him to show him. Millicent reveals that she has always thought Mario had the 'prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents.' She also reveals that even though she's a great tennis player, her true love is modern interpretive dance, and that when she was a kid she would spend hours in her leotard before the mirror. She also reveals that after her mother ran off with the ConEdison repair man,that she came in to find her very obese father dressed in her leotard posing before the mirror. Mario tries to tell a joke about inbreeding in West Virginia. As fate would have it she was recruited by ETA that same day. She also asks if Mario has ever seen a girls 'yin-yang' and reveals that her sister also had a similar experience with the father, for which she was seeing a counselor at the Ice Capades, where she's a skater. She then smashes Mario's head against her stomach and confesses that his eyelashes drive her 'right around the bend with sensual feeling.'When she eventually gets her hands inside his elaborate outfit and starts 'rooting around for a penis' he becomes so ticklish that he bursts into laughter, allowing Hal to find him. On the way back, they find the tripod in the middle of a not very tall or thick thicket at all.
p 126-127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply says he thinks they chose Boston as the Ops center because it's the 'place of the supposed Entertainment's origin.' Marathe counters simply that it's the closest USA city to the Convexity, and Quebec. Steeply says they're not sure that they have copies, and asks if the supposed 'anti-Entertainment' [which counters the lethality of the cartridge] even exists. Marathe answers that they have no evidence except rumors. Marathe asks why they never send Steeply into the field as himself, last time it was as a negro. Steeply corrects him--a Haitian. A coyote howls a car horn sounds repeatedly, and the cold wind gives Steeply's bare arms a 'plucked-chicken look.' Marathe can't remember Steeply removing his sunglasses but considers this detail unimportant to his report of 'every word and gesture' to M. Fortier [an AFR comrade] who considers Marathe to have near perfect recall of details.
p 127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This one sentence section says that Marathe has several times called the USA 'your walled nation' or your 'murated nation' \
on p 108 is footnote 45 which in turn refers us to footnote 304:
p 1055-1062 [footnote 304]
YDAU[2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis
Struck is working on a term paper for his 'History of Canadian Unpleasantness Course thing.' He is basically plagiarizing an article about the AFR from an article on something like the internet [BPL ArchFax database]. The article he is plagiarizing says that unlike the 'massive feral infants formed by toxicity' which are 'essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt' the legless wheelchair assassins have wreaked havoc disrupting 'Empire Waste Displacement's launch and reception facilities' and most infamously assassinating certain Canadian officials who have a passive position on 'Sudetenlandization' which seems to be essestially the foisting of contaminated land and waste in the northern US onto Canada. The AFR are feared and mythologized in Canadian culture. Apparently they are very stealthy and you only get 'to hear the squeak' when it's too late. And they leave a signature set of tracks in a double S pattern. While most of the separatist groups simply call for Quebec's secession, the AFR call for returning all 'Reconfigured territories' to USA and the cessation of all waste disposal and 'ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity.' The AFR formed in the wake of the 'nearly simultaneous inaugurations of ONAN-ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar ONAN calendar.' Struck struggles to taylor his plagiarism to avoid sounding unlike a student. The AFR has it's roots in a cult of 'Le Jeu du Prochain Train' which is a game where players try to be the last of the six to jump across the tracks in front of a speeding train [and live]. It's also noted that to not jump at all is unimaginable, the only known non jumper was Bernard Wayne, who was disgraced and later drowned [this fails to set off any light bulbs in Struck's head.] There is little doubt that the legless assassins of the AFR came up through the ranks of cult of Prochain train.
notes
The introduction of Marathe and Steeply begins the third thread of the book in earnest, and on my second reading of the book, I was struck by just how blatantly DFW spells things out here. All the reviewers who claimed that the threads never come together must have snoozed through this section [and the book's opening]--because it's all here plain as day. Here we learn that the mysterious cartridge 'the Entertainment' was in fact made by Himself [and is presumably his final film, 'Infinite Jest (V?)'] and that Marathe's organization is at least suspected of having sent the tape to the attache, and also that DuPlessis, the unfortunate victim of Gately's robbery was connected to Marathe's organization [as well as, we have already learned, the Incadenzas], suggesting the connection to the Gately thread of the novel. We're also seeing the concepts of identity and self emerge time and again, and in this thread they are flagrantly parodied, with Steeply's ridiculous drag get-up, and Marathe's double, triple, quadruple-crossing, and pretending to pretend to be pretending.
The ETA scenes in this chapter are hilariously sad in a special DFW way. We definitely get some more character insight into the tennis players--something sure is strange about John Wayne, he seems to have no sense of humor or anything else personality-trait-wise for that matter. I thought for sure that I would find the hypnotic Stan Smith cartridge listed in the filmography, but I have yet to. I also thought it a curious coincidence that Hal and Marathe share DFW's eidetic abilities.
The OED defines murated as 'walled or encompassed with walls' not as mutated as some have suggested. But why two ways to say 'walled'?
The OED contains no entry for kertwanging, I have a feeling it's simply onomatopoeic.
p 87-92
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section introduces the characters Remy Marathe and M. Hugh Steeply, who meet in the desert outside Tucson AZ,presumably in secret. Steeply is a transvestite operative for the [USA] Office of Unspecified Services,or BSS as the Quebecois separatists refer to it. He is a large man, who seems to appear rather absurd in drag, and has trouble controlling his giant prosthetic breasts and his wig. Marathe is a member of the AFR --'Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [wheelchair assassins]. Even though Steeply's Quebecois is better than Marathe's English, they usually converse in English, because Marathe has chosen to betray the AFR in order to secure medical treatment for his wife, back in Quebec. Plus, he now pretends to his superiors that he's pretending to feed info to the BSS, but Steeply apparently knows about this false double-double-agent status, which gives Steeply the upper hand-- ergo they converse in English. Steeply asks how he got up there [in a wheelchair] and Marathe dodges the question. Steeply asks if he has heard about the incident in which the cartridge [referred to as 'the Entertainment'] was delivered to the medical attache, with connections to the Saudi ministry of Entertainment, by postal routes that track back to the Phoenix area, apparently implicating Marathe's organization. Steeply explains around 20 people were done in by the incident including police, and also that the attache had diplomatic status and connections to the royal family and plus he was a compatriot of Marathe's. Marathe responds that they have no such names on the AFR list [which Steeply has seen,] that they have 'larger seafood to cook.' Marathe sniffs his nose a lot, they face the same direction as they speak. Steeply points out that the attache was Ottowan [much hated by Marathe] and that he was possibly connected to the widow of the 'auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment.' The wife was teaching at Brandeis where the victim did his residency, and she was known to sleep with 'just about everything with a pulse... particularly a Canadian pulse.' Marathe denies knowledge, saying that 'civilians as individual warnings to ONAN are not out desire. Steeply says he was asked to seek personal verification. Marathe asks if he was asked by Rodney [Rod the God] Tine, chief of Unspecified Services and 'acknowledged architect of ONAN and continental Reconfiguration' who by the way shared a personal stenographer [and love interest]-- Luria Perec--with M. DuPlessis former assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance. And there's the question of whether Tine was doubling or possibly tripling [only pretending to divulge secrets].
p 93
presumably YDAU [2009]?
place [what used to be] Vermont
narrated in third person [as if a public service announcement]
synopsis:
A herd of feral hamsters is thundering across the southern part of the Great Concavity [in former Vermont], creating a cloud which is visible as far away as boston and Montreal. the herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free 'at the beginning of Experialist Migration' in Year of the Whopper [2002]. the herd is relentlessly crossing the denuded terrain toward the forests of what used to be Maine. All these territories are now property of Canada. People are advised to steer clear of the hamsters, and the southwest Concavity for that matter. Americans are advised to head south toward a metropolis or the points between where the giant ATHSCME fans blow the toxic clouds back toward Canada.
p 93-95
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply is trying to light a cigarette, and not being able to do so in a lady-like fashion. Marathe has his wheelchair's brakes locked and his hand on the grip of his machine-pistol. Steeply asks if Marathe will report the incident back to Fortier, and Marathe answers 'bien sur' [of course]. Steeply says that he must be tripling or quadrupling since he knows that Fortier and the AFR know that Marathe is here. Marathe asks but do they know that you know this. In a footnote it's explained that the important thing is that Marathe's superiors seem to believe that he is only pretending to betray them [to get medical technology for his wife] but in reality is betraying them by pretending to pretend. Steeply says it's not personal, it's just obsessive caution. He says that DuPlessis always suspected Tine 'tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.' And Marathe says that DuPlessis is now dead under 'circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion... an inept burglary and grippe.' Marathe says that if 'Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware,' because of Luria.
p 95-97
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person [partly as if a diary entry]
synopsis:
The section starts with a day in the life of ETA student, with all the drills classes etc, ending with him slumped on the locker room floor with the other players. '...to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness?' Which turns out to be a question about the exam the boys have just taken. Hal answers that the exam was asking about Tolstoy's syntax, not about real unhappy families. The cast of characters includes John (N.R.) Wayne, Troelsch, Pemulis, Schacht, Ortho Stice and others. They discuss a possible test question on Disney R.Leith's [prof of History of Entertainment I & II] pop quiz--the most crucial difference between historical broadcast TV and cartridge-capable TP. Troelsch then quizzes the others to define 'acutance' which Hal does without trouble. The rest of the boys tease him and say they'll be vying for seats next to him for the quiz.
p 97
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. This odd little section contains no dialog. It describes dusk in the desert--the violet sky and the rustling of things about to emerge for the night. Steeply examines a scratch on his arm.
p 97-105
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to the locker room. Everyone has a white towel around his waist, except for Stice with his trademark black towel. The big Buddy system is described-- each 18 & under has a group of 14 & unders assigned to him. Beak, Blott and [the ethnically vague, but non-causcasian] Arslanian are all in Hal's group, plus effectively Ingersoll, whom he traded for Possalthwaite. Axford was supposed tobe Ingersoll's Buddy, but inexplicably despised the kid and begged Hal to make the trade. Big Buddies are there to show the little kids the rope and act as liaison between the kids and the prorectors, but also to keep the prorectors informed on who seems on shaky ground. Hal also feels the strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, but resists. He likes being a Big Buddy. Back in the locker room-- other than Hal 'who's atavistically dark-complected,' the players have either weirdly piebald suntans or they spray themselves with Lemon Pledge which acts as the world's most effective sunscreen, if you can stand the smell. Stice says he's tired [pronounced 'tard'] and the boys all chime in with hyperbolic and 'hyperbolicker' words describing their fatigue. Stice request only black form the companies that give him clothes/gear,and has the nickname 'The Darkness.' The kids tease Hal some more about being freakishly smart, he flips them offby the method of using the left hand to slowly crank up the right's middle finger. Hal takes after Himself in appearing slightly ethnic, while Orin 'got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype,' and Mario resembles no one they know. Most days Hal sneaks away from the locker room to get high. The boys talk about how it would be a more pleasant exhaustion if only they could...[get high, get laid etc]. Ingersoll interjects that they get Saturday off for Interdependence Day. It's revealed that Schacht, who is in one of the toilet stalls has Crohn's disease [inflammation of the ileum]. The boys come to a consensus that they had 5 hours of continuous exertion. John Wayne has said nothing the whole time. He buttons his shirt all the way as if he were going to put on a tie. The others argue whether it's Tavis or Schtitt who's more responsible for their personal pain. A jocular fight ensues.
p 105-109
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. The sun has set and Tucson begins to twinkle below them. Steeply says that the love of Rod Tine for Luria was great and timeless, the kind that is sung about, the kind people die for,and then rattles off pairs of star-crossed lovers, notably mistakenly pairing Agamemnon and Helen. Marathe corrects him-- Paris and Helen--and decries his ignorance. Steeply recalls the anonymous gift that was not a gift, brought to the door. Marathe scoffs that Paris and Helen were the *excuse* for the war, that the real reasons for the war were political. He says that Steeply likes to believe that the love of one woman could do this. Steeply counters that those around Rod The God say he would die twice for Luria, which is why he still has the presidents ear, divided loyalties or no-- 'if he does it for love-- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political.' Marathe sniffs scornfully,and says that Tines love is only a fanatical attachment, a temple at which he worships, and that the problem with those from the USA is that they do not choose attachments carefully. He says dying for one person is craziness, but your nation and your cause outlive you. He asks 'you would die without thinking for what?' Steeply knows that the AFR file on him makes reference to his recent divorce and to the fact that on assignment he had to drive a green sedan with an aspirin advertisement on it. Steeply counters that sometimes there is no choice what to love, and Marathe answers that in that case you become a slave, not even tragic. Tucson appears ghostly white below, and Black Widows' spider webs are on the outcroppings just below them. Marathe 'thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs,' [here there is a lengthy footnote,see below] and began singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' out of tune. The cold desert night was coming on, but they themselves were not chilled because their proximity created a 'form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth.' Marathe thinks that AFR Ops base here is like the surface of the moon.
p 109-121
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is conducting his Big Buddy group with a hypnotic cartridge in the TP of Stan Smith hitting one perfect forehand [and later backhand] after another. He tells them that the end of the day fighting is part of Schtitt and deLint's plan. The kids are struggling with how anyone can put up with the day in/day out difficulty of the academy for years. One suggests it's because they want the Show [the ATP tour with fame & fortune etc] another suggests that it's for scholarships. Hal dismisses all of this. He tells them to consider that they're all sitting around bitching and moaning *together* even though the system has 'inequality as an axiom.' Everyone knows where they're ranked [ John Wayne> Hal> Struck, Shaw>Troeltsch>Freer>Schacht>Pemulis] and they're all in one another's food chain. What they share is this aloneness. 'The suffering unites us' he tells them, and Schtitt and deLint set it up this way on purpose. it's not the bodies they're working on here, it's the heads. They purposely give them unstructured time after the most grueling workout, so that they'll get together and complain. Hal realizes that Ingersoll is so repellant to Hal because he sees in things about himself that he can't or won't accept. Hal broods on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high more than the getting high itself. If he doesn't get high by dinnertime, his eyes water and his mouth fills with spit, and he feels sick to his stomach and can't eat, and so when he gets high later he overeats later and wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
Down the hall John Wayne conducts his Big Buddy group [LaMont Chu, 'Sleepy TP' Peterson, Kieran McKenna, Brian van Vleck]. The mood in Wayne's group is quite different, essentially pedagogical. Chu acts as Wayne's mouthpiece, explaining to the others what Wayne thinks: that you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus [plateuax, corrects Wayne] and that the ones who don't hang in there are three. [1] the despairing type who can't stand the stall of improvement when he hits the plateau, and gives up in frustration [2] the obsessive type who when he hits the plateau tries to will himself upward by force and ends up injured [3] the complacent type who just accepts it when he hits the plateau and little by little his rank slides as others get better. Van Vleck asks wayne for verification that this is not just Chu palming his advice disguised as Wayne's. Wayne says he's said all he has to say [nothing]. Due to his continental #2 ranking [possibly #1 after the WhataBurger] he is the most sought after Big Buddy.
Pemulis plays poker [?] with his group [which includes Todd Posalthwaite (wasn't he traded to Axford?), Otis P. Lord and 2 others], Schacht gives his 5 kids a demonstration on flossing on a dental mock-up. Troeltsch tells his group that until they're 15 it's all about repetition until the mechanics are hardwired in, and then they really come after you with the 'concentration and character shit.'
Struck leads a Q&A with his kids. Traub asks if he should reciprocate when his opponent is kertwanging [presumably an obnoxious and only semi-legal act], Struck answers no, but if you lose, you can spike the opponents water after the match. 'Violently cross-eyed Carl Whale asks what if you have to fart, but there's the possibility that you might actually need to defecate. Struck answers that you resist: 'nothing leaves my bottom during play.' Stice lectures his boys [on Schtitt, presumably] telling them that he says it's about more than tennis, it's about sacrifice and suffering to get at the parts of yourself you didn't know were there. he says he'd 'chew fiberglass for that old man.' With dinner about to begin Hal contemplates getting high, as he spits he feels a twinge in a tooth on the left side of his mouth.
p 121-126
YDAU [2009] mid October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section has a title 'Mario Incandenza's first and only even remotely romantic experience, thus far.' After he drifts away from during a stroll together [sensing that Hal needs some alone time] Mario is confronted the USS Millicent Kent, 16 year old, 400 lb girl, ranked #1, who can take on any of the guys at the bench press. The USSMK takes Mario on a hunt for a Husky VI telescoping tripod that she says is hidden in the thickets. She grabs Mario's 'claw' and proceeds to drag him to show him. Millicent reveals that she has always thought Mario had the 'prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents.' She also reveals that even though she's a great tennis player, her true love is modern interpretive dance, and that when she was a kid she would spend hours in her leotard before the mirror. She also reveals that after her mother ran off with the ConEdison repair man,that she came in to find her very obese father dressed in her leotard posing before the mirror. Mario tries to tell a joke about inbreeding in West Virginia. As fate would have it she was recruited by ETA that same day. She also asks if Mario has ever seen a girls 'yin-yang' and reveals that her sister also had a similar experience with the father, for which she was seeing a counselor at the Ice Capades, where she's a skater. She then smashes Mario's head against her stomach and confesses that his eyelashes drive her 'right around the bend with sensual feeling.'When she eventually gets her hands inside his elaborate outfit and starts 'rooting around for a penis' he becomes so ticklish that he bursts into laughter, allowing Hal to find him. On the way back, they find the tripod in the middle of a not very tall or thick thicket at all.
p 126-127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply says he thinks they chose Boston as the Ops center because it's the 'place of the supposed Entertainment's origin.' Marathe counters simply that it's the closest USA city to the Convexity, and Quebec. Steeply says they're not sure that they have copies, and asks if the supposed 'anti-Entertainment' [which counters the lethality of the cartridge] even exists. Marathe answers that they have no evidence except rumors. Marathe asks why they never send Steeply into the field as himself, last time it was as a negro. Steeply corrects him--a Haitian. A coyote howls a car horn sounds repeatedly, and the cold wind gives Steeply's bare arms a 'plucked-chicken look.' Marathe can't remember Steeply removing his sunglasses but considers this detail unimportant to his report of 'every word and gesture' to M. Fortier [an AFR comrade] who considers Marathe to have near perfect recall of details.
p 127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This one sentence section says that Marathe has several times called the USA 'your walled nation' or your 'murated nation' \
on p 108 is footnote 45 which in turn refers us to footnote 304:
p 1055-1062 [footnote 304]
YDAU[2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis
Struck is working on a term paper for his 'History of Canadian Unpleasantness Course thing.' He is basically plagiarizing an article about the AFR from an article on something like the internet [BPL ArchFax database]. The article he is plagiarizing says that unlike the 'massive feral infants formed by toxicity' which are 'essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt' the legless wheelchair assassins have wreaked havoc disrupting 'Empire Waste Displacement's launch and reception facilities' and most infamously assassinating certain Canadian officials who have a passive position on 'Sudetenlandization' which seems to be essestially the foisting of contaminated land and waste in the northern US onto Canada. The AFR are feared and mythologized in Canadian culture. Apparently they are very stealthy and you only get 'to hear the squeak' when it's too late. And they leave a signature set of tracks in a double S pattern. While most of the separatist groups simply call for Quebec's secession, the AFR call for returning all 'Reconfigured territories' to USA and the cessation of all waste disposal and 'ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity.' The AFR formed in the wake of the 'nearly simultaneous inaugurations of ONAN-ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar ONAN calendar.' Struck struggles to taylor his plagiarism to avoid sounding unlike a student. The AFR has it's roots in a cult of 'Le Jeu du Prochain Train' which is a game where players try to be the last of the six to jump across the tracks in front of a speeding train [and live]. It's also noted that to not jump at all is unimaginable, the only known non jumper was Bernard Wayne, who was disgraced and later drowned [this fails to set off any light bulbs in Struck's head.] There is little doubt that the legless assassins of the AFR came up through the ranks of cult of Prochain train.
notes
The introduction of Marathe and Steeply begins the third thread of the book in earnest, and on my second reading of the book, I was struck by just how blatantly DFW spells things out here. All the reviewers who claimed that the threads never come together must have snoozed through this section [and the book's opening]--because it's all here plain as day. Here we learn that the mysterious cartridge 'the Entertainment' was in fact made by Himself [and is presumably his final film, 'Infinite Jest (V?)'] and that Marathe's organization is at least suspected of having sent the tape to the attache, and also that DuPlessis, the unfortunate victim of Gately's robbery was connected to Marathe's organization [as well as, we have already learned, the Incadenzas], suggesting the connection to the Gately thread of the novel. We're also seeing the concepts of identity and self emerge time and again, and in this thread they are flagrantly parodied, with Steeply's ridiculous drag get-up, and Marathe's double, triple, quadruple-crossing, and pretending to pretend to be pretending.
The ETA scenes in this chapter are hilariously sad in a special DFW way. We definitely get some more character insight into the tennis players--something sure is strange about John Wayne, he seems to have no sense of humor or anything else personality-trait-wise for that matter. I thought for sure that I would find the hypnotic Stan Smith cartridge listed in the filmography, but I have yet to. I also thought it a curious coincidence that Hal and Marathe share DFW's eidetic abilities.
The OED defines murated as 'walled or encompassed with walls' not as mutated as some have suggested. But why two ways to say 'walled'?
The OED contains no entry for kertwanging, I have a feeling it's simply onomatopoeic.
p 127-135
this section in 2 parts
p 127-128
year unknown
place ETA
narrated in first person [an ETA student, not Hal]
synopsis:
There's an 'oiled guru' who sits in 'yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top' in the weight room at ETA. No one one knows where he comes from or why he's allowed to stay. He licks the sweat of the arms and foreheads of kids after their workout, but it's not, we're assured, a 'faggy or sexual thing.' Some of the younger kids won't go near him, and so he contentedly watches as they're lifted off the ground try to pull an weight greater than their own body on the shoulder-pull weight machine. His name is supposedly Kyle, he's around 40,and supposedly he goes way back with Dr. Incandenza.
p 128-135
year unknown, Dec. 24
place Boston
narrated in first person ['yrstruly']
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect, by someone who identifies himself only as 'yrstruly.' The narrator is a drug addict who, along with 'C' and 'Poor Tony' [a transvestite] are trying to score drugs on Christmas Eve. They assault and rob several people [including someone with no legs], and make several minor scores. They attempt unsuccessfully to locate Roy Tony, they consider raping a nurse on the train, but it's mostly all leading to the big score they're going to make at Dr. Wo's in chinatown. As payback to Poor Tony, Wo sells them heroin laced with Drano, and C [who is first to shoot up] goes into convulsions and dies. Poor Tony and yrstrly hide C's body in a dumpster. Yrstrly ponders whether he should 'elemonade Poor Tony's map for keeps' as retribution for letting C die,even though he knew the heroin was probably bad.
Other characters mentioned are Kely Vinoy [hooker], Eckwus [junky], Stokely Darkstar [junky with AIDS], Lolasister & Susan T. Cheese [junkies], Delphina [dealer]
notes
The yrstrly section is pretty chaotic and free associative, and I 'elemonaded' a lot of the little details, mostly about looking for dope. Clearly this section relates to the one on p 37-38, by way of the dialect [childlike in the first, adult in the second], and the one common character, Roy Tony. Also notable is the parody of Marathe & Steeply [transvestite & amputee] embedded here. Also, one can't help but wonder how these junkies and dealers might be related to the more suburban addicts we've already come across.
p 127-128
year unknown
place ETA
narrated in first person [an ETA student, not Hal]
synopsis:
There's an 'oiled guru' who sits in 'yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top' in the weight room at ETA. No one one knows where he comes from or why he's allowed to stay. He licks the sweat of the arms and foreheads of kids after their workout, but it's not, we're assured, a 'faggy or sexual thing.' Some of the younger kids won't go near him, and so he contentedly watches as they're lifted off the ground try to pull an weight greater than their own body on the shoulder-pull weight machine. His name is supposedly Kyle, he's around 40,and supposedly he goes way back with Dr. Incandenza.
p 128-135
year unknown, Dec. 24
place Boston
narrated in first person ['yrstruly']
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect, by someone who identifies himself only as 'yrstruly.' The narrator is a drug addict who, along with 'C' and 'Poor Tony' [a transvestite] are trying to score drugs on Christmas Eve. They assault and rob several people [including someone with no legs], and make several minor scores. They attempt unsuccessfully to locate Roy Tony, they consider raping a nurse on the train, but it's mostly all leading to the big score they're going to make at Dr. Wo's in chinatown. As payback to Poor Tony, Wo sells them heroin laced with Drano, and C [who is first to shoot up] goes into convulsions and dies. Poor Tony and yrstrly hide C's body in a dumpster. Yrstrly ponders whether he should 'elemonade Poor Tony's map for keeps' as retribution for letting C die,even though he knew the heroin was probably bad.
Other characters mentioned are Kely Vinoy [hooker], Eckwus [junky], Stokely Darkstar [junky with AIDS], Lolasister & Susan T. Cheese [junkies], Delphina [dealer]
notes
The yrstrly section is pretty chaotic and free associative, and I 'elemonaded' a lot of the little details, mostly about looking for dope. Clearly this section relates to the one on p 37-38, by way of the dialect [childlike in the first, adult in the second], and the one common character, Roy Tony. Also notable is the parody of Marathe & Steeply [transvestite & amputee] embedded here. Also, one can't help but wonder how these junkies and dealers might be related to the more suburban addicts we've already come across.
p 135-151
this section in 7 parts
p 135-137
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal receives a phone call from Orin, who asks why he always feels like he's interrupting Hal in the middle of masturbating. Hal dislikes talking on the phone when he's high. Hal estimates that 60% of the things he tells Orin on the phone are lies. Orin says it's 90+ degrees [in Nov] and that he just witnessed a pedestrian in a pith helmet, collapse on the street from the heat, and just lie there while everyone else avoided him. Hal wonders if his lying to Orin is reciprocated, and this leads him to question his intelligence. He tells Orin that SATs are in 6 weeks, and Pemulis isn't really helping him with the math. Orin jokes that he's considering starting a kleenex and lubricant concession at ETA. Orin says he's missing New Orleans, especially during advent. Hal says that Orin seems 'a little off.' Orin says it's the heat, but also that he's met somebody, 'a possibly very special somebody,' and then asks Hal what he knows about Separatism.
p 137-138
no year-backstory
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy noted as sic] was founded in Year of the Whopper [2002] by an anonymous [last name not Ennet] chronic drug addict who spent most of his life in prison, and had a spiritual awakening in the shower after his fourth sober month in AA. Ennet House is located in the former physicians dormitory of the VA hospital, and can hold 22 clients. The anonymous founder would at times lead the newly sober addicts in burglary expeditions, and it's said that in the early days incoming residents were required to eat rocks. The founder died in Year of the Yushiyu...[2007]
p 138-140
Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland [2008]
place boston/Bloomington IL
no narration--this part in the form of email correspondence
synopsis:
An email from one insurance worker to several others describes an incident in Boston that spring where the claimant was impaired [blood alcohol of .3+] so even though the insurers are probably off the hook, the first page of the claimants letter is included. In the letter, the claimant, a bricklayer explains how he was attempting to lower 900 kg of bricks, using a pulley, and due to the fact that he weighs 75 kg, he was jerked off the ground and hit in the head with the barrel of bricks on its way down. He then fell back to ground when the bottom of the barrel gave way and left the bricks on the ground, after which the now empty barrel crashed on top of him.
p 140-142
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken [2005]
place ETA
no narration--this part in the form of an essay that Hal wrote
synopsis:
Hal's essay is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's his first 'remotely filmic' writing for his 7th grade class 'Introduction to Entertainment Studies.' He received only a B/B+ because the concluding paragraph was deemed as unsupported. The essay itself compares 70s era police chief Steve McGarrett [Hawaii Five-O] with the 80s era Captain Frank Furillo [Hill Street Blues]. McGarrett is a classic modern hero-- the camera is always on him, he always has a single case at a time and the audience always knows who's guilty, so there's no drama aside from watching him home in on the truth. In contrast Furillo is a post-modern hero-- he commands a precinct,and is beset by a complex tangle of multiple cases, and conflicts within the precinct. His heroism is one of 'triage and compromise and administration' and is infinitely more complex than the simple heroism of McGarrett. In the notorious final paragraph Hal ponders what kind of hero comes next, and predicts that he will be the 'hero of non-action, the catatonic hero' who is 'divorced from all stimulus' and carried around by drugged up extras.
p 142-144
YDAU[2009] Aug 10
no place or narration
this part in the form of a magazine article by 'Helen' Steeply
synopsis:
Steeply's article is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's the 'electrolysis-rashed' journalists only published article before beginning her 'soft profile' on Orin Incadenza, that had anything to do with Boston. It notes that the article was published 4 years after James Incadenza committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven. The Moment Magazine article describes the tragic death of the second person to have received a 'Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.' The heart was stored in the woman's purse, and pumped blood through tubes into the woman's arms. While window shopping in Cambridge MA, the woman's purse was stolen, by a transvestite purse snatcher, after whom she chased shouting 'stop her, she stole my heart.' After four blocks she expired and the heart was found later behind the library in a Copley Square, having been smashed with stone or hammer.
p 144
no year
no place or narration
this part in the form of a list of anti ONAN terrorist groups
synopsis:
The list is preceded by an explanation that the groups 'opposition to interdependence/reconfiguration is designated by RCMP and USOUS are terrorist/exortionist.' Each group is rated Quebecois, Environmental Separatist, violent or very violent
-Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [q, s, vv]
-Le Bloc Quebecois [q,s,e]
-Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx [e,v]
-Les fils de Montcalm [q, e]
-Les fils de Pampineau [q,s,v]
-Le Front de la Liberation de la quebec [q, s, vv]
-Le Parti Quebecois [q,s,e]
p 144-151
YDAU [2009]
no place or narration
this part in the form of a catechism explaining the failure of video-telephony
synopsis:
A page-long single sentence poses the question of how and why video telephones came and went so that by YDAU [2009] only 10% of calls used any video component, and the majority of people prefer the old voice-only phones. The answer is given in 3 parts
1. emotional stress -- with traditional voice phones it was possible conceal the fact that neither the caller nor receiver were giving the other his/her undivided attention. the video phones made this fantasy apparent, and it was especially difficult to realize that you were commanding as little attention as you were paying.
2. vanity-- people became so obsessed with how they looked that eventually led to the development of formfitting masks [which produced fears of going outside without the masks], and then to 'Transmittable Tableaux' in which a carefully doctored photograph was transmitted instead of the converser's face.
3. 'a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of high tech'-- the curve followed by videophony is: first an amazing hi-tech advance occurs, then the advance is revealed to have unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer which are in turn addressed by entrepreneurial verve producing compensation for the disadvantages, which in turn reveals the limitations in the original high tech advance, and the consumers are back where they started, thus leading to 'massive shirt loss for precipitant investors.' Eventually the tableaux were shelved and people simply the black lens cover on their cameras.
notes
There is a concordance between the videophony section and the first section where Hal wonders if his lies to Orin are reciprocated. Orin's special someone is presumably connected to Separatism. Could it be 'Helen' Steeply, interviewing him in the fifth section? Presumably Steeply is interviewing Orin as a cover for tracking and/or protecting him from the AFR. The purse snatcher in Steeply's earlier article is clearly Poor Tony, but why would Steeply have been interested in this story?
Has Hal become his own projected 'catatonic hero' in the opening scene of the novel?
The bricklayer's accident is a parody [or is it the other way around] of the young weightlifters in the 'oiled guru' section [p 127-128]
p 135-137
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal receives a phone call from Orin, who asks why he always feels like he's interrupting Hal in the middle of masturbating. Hal dislikes talking on the phone when he's high. Hal estimates that 60% of the things he tells Orin on the phone are lies. Orin says it's 90+ degrees [in Nov] and that he just witnessed a pedestrian in a pith helmet, collapse on the street from the heat, and just lie there while everyone else avoided him. Hal wonders if his lying to Orin is reciprocated, and this leads him to question his intelligence. He tells Orin that SATs are in 6 weeks, and Pemulis isn't really helping him with the math. Orin jokes that he's considering starting a kleenex and lubricant concession at ETA. Orin says he's missing New Orleans, especially during advent. Hal says that Orin seems 'a little off.' Orin says it's the heat, but also that he's met somebody, 'a possibly very special somebody,' and then asks Hal what he knows about Separatism.
p 137-138
no year-backstory
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy noted as sic] was founded in Year of the Whopper [2002] by an anonymous [last name not Ennet] chronic drug addict who spent most of his life in prison, and had a spiritual awakening in the shower after his fourth sober month in AA. Ennet House is located in the former physicians dormitory of the VA hospital, and can hold 22 clients. The anonymous founder would at times lead the newly sober addicts in burglary expeditions, and it's said that in the early days incoming residents were required to eat rocks. The founder died in Year of the Yushiyu...[2007]
p 138-140
Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland [2008]
place boston/Bloomington IL
no narration--this part in the form of email correspondence
synopsis:
An email from one insurance worker to several others describes an incident in Boston that spring where the claimant was impaired [blood alcohol of .3+] so even though the insurers are probably off the hook, the first page of the claimants letter is included. In the letter, the claimant, a bricklayer explains how he was attempting to lower 900 kg of bricks, using a pulley, and due to the fact that he weighs 75 kg, he was jerked off the ground and hit in the head with the barrel of bricks on its way down. He then fell back to ground when the bottom of the barrel gave way and left the bricks on the ground, after which the now empty barrel crashed on top of him.
p 140-142
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken [2005]
place ETA
no narration--this part in the form of an essay that Hal wrote
synopsis:
Hal's essay is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's his first 'remotely filmic' writing for his 7th grade class 'Introduction to Entertainment Studies.' He received only a B/B+ because the concluding paragraph was deemed as unsupported. The essay itself compares 70s era police chief Steve McGarrett [Hawaii Five-O] with the 80s era Captain Frank Furillo [Hill Street Blues]. McGarrett is a classic modern hero-- the camera is always on him, he always has a single case at a time and the audience always knows who's guilty, so there's no drama aside from watching him home in on the truth. In contrast Furillo is a post-modern hero-- he commands a precinct,and is beset by a complex tangle of multiple cases, and conflicts within the precinct. His heroism is one of 'triage and compromise and administration' and is infinitely more complex than the simple heroism of McGarrett. In the notorious final paragraph Hal ponders what kind of hero comes next, and predicts that he will be the 'hero of non-action, the catatonic hero' who is 'divorced from all stimulus' and carried around by drugged up extras.
p 142-144
YDAU[2009] Aug 10
no place or narration
this part in the form of a magazine article by 'Helen' Steeply
synopsis:
Steeply's article is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's the 'electrolysis-rashed' journalists only published article before beginning her 'soft profile' on Orin Incadenza, that had anything to do with Boston. It notes that the article was published 4 years after James Incadenza committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven. The Moment Magazine article describes the tragic death of the second person to have received a 'Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.' The heart was stored in the woman's purse, and pumped blood through tubes into the woman's arms. While window shopping in Cambridge MA, the woman's purse was stolen, by a transvestite purse snatcher, after whom she chased shouting 'stop her, she stole my heart.' After four blocks she expired and the heart was found later behind the library in a Copley Square, having been smashed with stone or hammer.
p 144
no year
no place or narration
this part in the form of a list of anti ONAN terrorist groups
synopsis:
The list is preceded by an explanation that the groups 'opposition to interdependence/reconfiguration is designated by RCMP and USOUS are terrorist/exortionist.' Each group is rated Quebecois, Environmental Separatist, violent or very violent
-Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [q, s, vv]
-Le Bloc Quebecois [q,s,e]
-Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx [e,v]
-Les fils de Montcalm [q, e]
-Les fils de Pampineau [q,s,v]
-Le Front de la Liberation de la quebec [q, s, vv]
-Le Parti Quebecois [q,s,e]
p 144-151
YDAU [2009]
no place or narration
this part in the form of a catechism explaining the failure of video-telephony
synopsis:
A page-long single sentence poses the question of how and why video telephones came and went so that by YDAU [2009] only 10% of calls used any video component, and the majority of people prefer the old voice-only phones. The answer is given in 3 parts
1. emotional stress -- with traditional voice phones it was possible conceal the fact that neither the caller nor receiver were giving the other his/her undivided attention. the video phones made this fantasy apparent, and it was especially difficult to realize that you were commanding as little attention as you were paying.
2. vanity-- people became so obsessed with how they looked that eventually led to the development of formfitting masks [which produced fears of going outside without the masks], and then to 'Transmittable Tableaux' in which a carefully doctored photograph was transmitted instead of the converser's face.
3. 'a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of high tech'-- the curve followed by videophony is: first an amazing hi-tech advance occurs, then the advance is revealed to have unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer which are in turn addressed by entrepreneurial verve producing compensation for the disadvantages, which in turn reveals the limitations in the original high tech advance, and the consumers are back where they started, thus leading to 'massive shirt loss for precipitant investors.' Eventually the tableaux were shelved and people simply the black lens cover on their cameras.
notes
There is a concordance between the videophony section and the first section where Hal wonders if his lies to Orin are reciprocated. Orin's special someone is presumably connected to Separatism. Could it be 'Helen' Steeply, interviewing him in the fifth section? Presumably Steeply is interviewing Orin as a cover for tracking and/or protecting him from the AFR. The purse snatcher in Steeply's earlier article is clearly Poor Tony, but why would Steeply have been interested in this story?
Has Hal become his own projected 'catatonic hero' in the opening scene of the novel?
The bricklayer's accident is a parody [or is it the other way around] of the young weightlifters in the 'oiled guru' section [p 127-128]
p 151-156
YDAU [2009] Oct 15
place ETA
narrated in third person
It is one of the quarterly urine checks for drug use at ETA, conducted by the ONANTA on all players in the top 64 in their division, which an impressive percentage of ETA players are. Pemulis is now selling 'clean urine' to the same 1/4 of the students to whom he sells drugs. He collects urine from the younger students and sells it from a hot dog vendor's tub during the tests. The urine is stored in Visine bottles which he employs Mario to rescue from the dumpsters the day after the drug tests. It's revealed that in addition to the regular janitor, Dave ['fall down very'] Harde, some of the janitorial work is done by 'sullen and shifty eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill.' In the months between the testing, the hot dog vendor rig and visine bottles are all stored in the refurbished tow truck that Pemulis and his urine sales partner Trevor Ashford co-own with Hal and Jim Struck. The truck is painted in school colors [red and gray] and features the ONAN ensign- 'a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star studded cloth.'
Mario, who although he cannot even play recreational tennis, is allowed by the dean to bunk with Hal [in a double room], holds up his weight at ETA by recording matches and drills for the staff. Today, however he is filming the urine sales using his 'strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle.' Pemulis and Ashford aren't worried because no one except Mario will see the footage, which Mario will edit into a 'Himself-inspired conceptual' cartridge. It's revealed that Pemulis is a scholarship student who was discovered playing in a 'grim section of tract housing and vacant lots' in nearby Allston, who is known less for his rather mediocre game, than for providing reasonably priced narcotics to a good portion of the junior-circuit. He is also on academic probation, because even Hal's best attempts at tutelage barely get him through Avril's rigorous grammar classes. He is however a math and science whiz, and for this he is the JOI geometrical optics scholarship which allows him access to all of 'the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Hal and Mario both consider Pemulis a good friend, and Hal gets his urine for free, an account of his assistance with grammar. Hal, who has always been a lexical prodigy is now turning out to be something of an 'erumpent' tennis prodigy, now rated 4th best in USA. Pemulis is not ranked high enough to get sponsorship clothes, so he wears T-shirtsand a painter's cap. He fears the potential of being wiretapped, so he has developed a system wherein the caller in search of drugs has to ask him to commit a crime and threaten him if he refuses, then Pemulis makes an appointment to plead for his safety, thereby allowing him to claim entrapment if the phone is tapped. Those substituting the clean urine are encouraged to stow the Visine bottle in their armpit to bring it up to body temperature.
notes
We see in this section how the Ennet House thread might overlap with the ETA thread of the story, by way of drugs, proxity and perhaps the Ennet House residents working at ETA. Also we start to get more of an idea about Mario, and what he inherited [if not the athletic ability] from his parents. Is he somehow carrying on the work of Himself? And what other activities might Pemulis use the optics for?
place ETA
narrated in third person
It is one of the quarterly urine checks for drug use at ETA, conducted by the ONANTA on all players in the top 64 in their division, which an impressive percentage of ETA players are. Pemulis is now selling 'clean urine' to the same 1/4 of the students to whom he sells drugs. He collects urine from the younger students and sells it from a hot dog vendor's tub during the tests. The urine is stored in Visine bottles which he employs Mario to rescue from the dumpsters the day after the drug tests. It's revealed that in addition to the regular janitor, Dave ['fall down very'] Harde, some of the janitorial work is done by 'sullen and shifty eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill.' In the months between the testing, the hot dog vendor rig and visine bottles are all stored in the refurbished tow truck that Pemulis and his urine sales partner Trevor Ashford co-own with Hal and Jim Struck. The truck is painted in school colors [red and gray] and features the ONAN ensign- 'a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star studded cloth.'
Mario, who although he cannot even play recreational tennis, is allowed by the dean to bunk with Hal [in a double room], holds up his weight at ETA by recording matches and drills for the staff. Today, however he is filming the urine sales using his 'strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle.' Pemulis and Ashford aren't worried because no one except Mario will see the footage, which Mario will edit into a 'Himself-inspired conceptual' cartridge. It's revealed that Pemulis is a scholarship student who was discovered playing in a 'grim section of tract housing and vacant lots' in nearby Allston, who is known less for his rather mediocre game, than for providing reasonably priced narcotics to a good portion of the junior-circuit. He is also on academic probation, because even Hal's best attempts at tutelage barely get him through Avril's rigorous grammar classes. He is however a math and science whiz, and for this he is the JOI geometrical optics scholarship which allows him access to all of 'the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Hal and Mario both consider Pemulis a good friend, and Hal gets his urine for free, an account of his assistance with grammar. Hal, who has always been a lexical prodigy is now turning out to be something of an 'erumpent' tennis prodigy, now rated 4th best in USA. Pemulis is not ranked high enough to get sponsorship clothes, so he wears T-shirtsand a painter's cap. He fears the potential of being wiretapped, so he has developed a system wherein the caller in search of drugs has to ask him to commit a crime and threaten him if he refuses, then Pemulis makes an appointment to plead for his safety, thereby allowing him to claim entrapment if the phone is tapped. Those substituting the clean urine are encouraged to stow the Visine bottle in their armpit to bring it up to body temperature.
notes
We see in this section how the Ennet House thread might overlap with the ETA thread of the story, by way of drugs, proxity and perhaps the Ennet House residents working at ETA. Also we start to get more of an idea about Mario, and what he inherited [if not the athletic ability] from his parents. Is he somehow carrying on the work of Himself? And what other activities might Pemulis use the optics for?
p 157-181
this section in 4 parts
p 157-169
BS 1960 winter
place Tucson AZ
narrated as a monologue by the father of James Incandenza
synopsis:
This part features a 10-year-old James Incandenza [Jim] being lectured by his increasingly intoxicated father. He begins his lecture berating Jim for opening the garage door improperly. He blames Jim's mother and by turn Marlon Brando whom she reveres, having had a bit part in one of his films. He then goes on a tirade accusing the mother of misunderstanding Brando's 'animal grace' and hence passing to young Jim all manner of bad habits, eg the garage door. He then shifts to praising Jim's tennis potential, saying he will a great player, while he himself was only nearly great. He compares him to the 1956 Mercury Montclair in the garage. He tells him that the 'head is body' and that he is 'a machine a body an object' like the car. He's distracted from his monologue long enough to ask Jim to use his racquet to kill a 'nasty fat spider.' He announces that he's coming to the crux of what he's trying to impart to his son before actually getting out there to actuate his tennis potential. He says the tennis ball is the 'ultimate body. Perfectly round... but empty inside.' He cuts the ball open to show him. he shows him his gnarled thumb. He offers Jim a drink from his flask, and then tries to force it into his hands, telling him he'll first have to put down the 'Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices.' Jim drops the book, and his father scolds him and then scolds him further for being 'oversensitive.' He waxes poetic on the sounds his flask produces, and then on the sound of a well-hit tennis ball. He tells Jim that they're soon to move to California so he can give it the one last shot his waning [film] talent deserves. He says he's just giving him advance notice, because Jim had made it so clear that their previous move [to the mobile home in Tucson] had been traumatic. He invites Jim to go ahead and cry, but that it gets less effective each time, except with Jim's mother. He then launches into a story about his own father who had 'never once' come to see him play, even though he was winning trophies and excelling at tennis-- his father was 'a golf man' [contemptuous tone]. He notes that the flask is nearly empty and suggests that they rain-check the tennis lesson, and tell his mother that Jim's 'not feeling up to snuff.' He suggests postponing until the weekend, when they can rent the courts for $10 [for which he lays a guilt trip on Jim.] He returns to the story of his own father, who finally did come to a match, because he was playing against a client's son. Jim's father was 'handing the dandy his pampered ass' while his own father sat not in the shade of the palm [due to his 'healthy respect' for spiders] but right out in the 95 degree heat, and without sweating. As the game progresses, he's handily beating his opponent when by luck the opponent hits a 'lucky dribbler of a drop-shot' and instead of conceding the point he goes all out to try to hit the ball and ends up face down on the court, having permanently ruined his knees. But, he's careful to point out he had already fallen when he heard his father reply to the opponent's father's comment that Jim was a good player--'but he'll never be great.' He theorizes it may have been a spider or a palm frond that caused him to slip. His speech becomes more and more disjointed, presumably due to the contents of his flask. He admits to respecting his father, comparing the situation to his with Jim-- saying that Jim takes him for granted. He confesses his fear of dying without ever being really *seen* He wants Jim to understand that he was giving it his all that day, when he ruined his chances of ever being a great player and his opportunity to get parts in any of those beach movies. He says that he learned what it is to be a body. He compares being dragged off the court with being dragged home drunk, saying that 'both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.'
p 169-171
YDAU [2009] Nov 4
place ETA and environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis takes a circuitous route by public transportation [to throw off would be pursuers] to pickup the tow truck which is parked in an underground lot. He's wearing his white yachting hat, which Mario refers to as his Mr. Howell hat and which has a detachable lining in which Pemulis can store drugs. He's driving the tow truck back to Enfield after his transaction, and after ingesting '150 mg of very mild 'drines.' Pemulis has presumably just scored some DMZ which is an incredibly potent amphetamine but 'resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid [footnote 56 compares it with 'fly agaric fungus's well-known muscimole]. It's effects differ from LSD, in that they're 'more like *temporally*-cerebral and almost ontological,' and the 'ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically and euphorically...altered.' DMZ is synthesized from an obscure mold that grows on other molds and was discovered by the same Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD, who as a result of DMZ was sent into an 'early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching.' It is known as the 'single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube' and the hardest recreational drug to acquire. DMZ is sometimes referred to as 'Madame Psychosis' after an early morning cult radio personality. Pemulis has a policy of not selling drugs to Ennet House residents, since they have unscheduled urine tests, and since his tennis and math talents have helped him get away from just that sort of character. When Pemulis pulls up to ETA, Hal is reading 'Hamlet' in order to help Mario with a conceptual film on the subject,and has his phone ready for Pemulis's call, but still waits until the third ring. He asks Pemulis to 'please commit a crime'
p 172-176
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile [2007]
place ETA
film narrated by Hal
synopsis:
Hal gives the narration to Mario's film 'Tennis and the the Feral Prodigy' which received honorable mention in the 'New Eyes, New Voices' young filmmakers' contest. The description implies that Mario was spuriously credited as writer, as Hal's narration is pretty clearly his own. He describes [presumably to an accompanying visual] virtually every aspect of his routine at ETA. 'Here's how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a a log.' He describes hitting serves to no one, how to call your racquet a stick, how to grip it, how to squeeze a tennis ball in your right hand at all times,except during meals. He describes drills, jogging, his father's expectations, his father's expectations of himself, and how surpassing them still left him unhappy. He describes escaping these thoughts by practicing until things run on autopilot. He describes 'justifying your seed' [reaching at least the round that you're supposed to at a tournament.] He describes playing fair and learning to let what is unfair teach you. He describes the use of lemon Pledge and muscle relaxants. He describes sitting through his father's art film openings. He says to expect rough dreams, and keep a flashlight by the bed. He says 'turn down dates' and shows how. he shows how to read the monthly ratings, and learn to care and not care-- never tell anyone where you are. This is also how not fear sleep or dreams. he says be a student of the game,and see yourself in your opponents. Accept that the game is about managed fear,that 'its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.'
p 176-181
YDAU [2009] Nov 4 1300-1500h
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in first person in 18 parts by different residents of EH
synopsis:
The all caps title of this part explains that it is transcripts from the drop-in office hours of the Ennet House director, Patricia Montesian, although she never speaks.
1. [176] A woman explains that another resident was drumming his fingers on the table at dinner. She likens the sound to what a girl hears in her head before she kills her family for taking the last of the peanut butter. She became rather homicidally agitated and 'sort of poked him' with her fork [it appears in reality that she stabbed him in the hand.] She says she's ready to own her part and wants to know if she can still go on her 'overnight' that Gene had previously approved.
2. [177] A man who identities himself as having been a personal-injury attorney for 16 years, is asking Patricia to define 'alcoholic.' He is claiming that he can hold his liquor--aside from a single incident at a Bar Association dinner, where he accused a judge of secretly masturbating in court. He admits to experiencing formication [sensation of insects crawling on the skin] during detox. He says that he is not in denial about anything 'empirical and objective' and states his lawyerly opinion that it's not denial unless 'the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties.'
3. [177] The victim of the knife incident gives his side. He says he's waiting for his meatloaf to cool and hears a 'sphincter-loosening shriek' and sees Nell leaping across the table [parallel to its surface] screaming about the sound of peanut butter. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of his hand and the table. He says the pain was unbearable but he refused the Percocet at the emergency room. He expresses outrage that she will apologize *if he will* and suggests that she be kicked out. He says that the 'pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough,' and pleads for the 'safe and nurturing environment' promised in the handbook.
3. [178] 'Im awfully sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if there's any sort of special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.'
4. [178] Alfonso speaks in broken English and acknowledges that he is a drug addict, and powerless.He fears that even so, he cannot stop. He asks if it's bad to hope for power.
5.[178] 'Sorry to barge in, there, PM division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was *ultimatum* that they said.'
6. [178] The person apologizes for bothering Pat about something not related to treatment, and describes try to do his [?] assigned Chore. There is something indescribable in the toilet of the mens room that won't flush
7. [179] The resident describes putting a pudding cup in the fridge and coming back for it later to find it gone. McDade offers to help look for it, but has pudding on his chin.
8. [179] The resident is clearly Bruce Green [p. 38-39]. He describes his harelipped [bad-speed/good-pot dealer] housemate who kept snakes, and gave Bruce and his girlfriend Mildred free pot in exchange for procurement of mice for the snakes. The harelip dealer wanted to have sex with Mildred and never washed his hair. Harriet makes Bruce leave after the dealer describes having sex with chickens. They move to a shelter where Harriet meets a guy in a hat who says he has a ranch in New Jersey., and off she goes taking their daughter Harriet with her. He says he was delivering ice to machines at gas stations, and 'who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?'
9. [180] The resident balks at the idea that s/he is being asked to pray to treat an alleged disease, asking if s/he has been transported to another sociohistorical era.
10. [180] The resident says s/he's happy to be there and that the tooth-grinding and the 'thing with the eyelid' are just tics.
11. [180] The resident is objecting [inner city dialect] to getting kicked out, and claiming to be 'trying' to get a job. S/he cites Clenette and 'the Thrale girl' as witnesses. S/he asks where s/he's supposed to go.
12. [180] Resident objects to being on House Restriction for using mouthwash, which is 2% proof, and is spit out.
13. [181] 'It's about somebody *else's* farting, why I'm here.'
14. [181] The lawyer says he's being asked to attest to facts he does not possess, which he calls 'duress.'
15. [181] 'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?'
16. [181] 'I'll come back when you're free.'
17. [181] 'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.'
18. [181] 'Fine just let me say one thing'
notes
The Tucson episode is [for this reader] among the saddest in the book. Sections like this really set DFW apart from his postmodern predecessors, by my lights. It's also notable that the dread inflicted on young Jim seems to have been passed on to Hal [whether inadvertently or not] as evidenced in the pathos he injects into the documentary film when speaking of his father.
The Pemulis episode is dragging the ETA thread of the story closer and closer to the Ennet House thread even as he categorically refuses to get involved with those people. Likewise the Ennet House interviews tie together some of the loose ends, we've encountered [eg, Clenette and Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk], and presumably will encounter [it would be interesting to come back later and attempt to track each interview to it's source character.] The third interview was pretty chilling for this reader, for obvious reasons.
p 157-169
BS 1960 winter
place Tucson AZ
narrated as a monologue by the father of James Incandenza
synopsis:
This part features a 10-year-old James Incandenza [Jim] being lectured by his increasingly intoxicated father. He begins his lecture berating Jim for opening the garage door improperly. He blames Jim's mother and by turn Marlon Brando whom she reveres, having had a bit part in one of his films. He then goes on a tirade accusing the mother of misunderstanding Brando's 'animal grace' and hence passing to young Jim all manner of bad habits, eg the garage door. He then shifts to praising Jim's tennis potential, saying he will a great player, while he himself was only nearly great. He compares him to the 1956 Mercury Montclair in the garage. He tells him that the 'head is body' and that he is 'a machine a body an object' like the car. He's distracted from his monologue long enough to ask Jim to use his racquet to kill a 'nasty fat spider.' He announces that he's coming to the crux of what he's trying to impart to his son before actually getting out there to actuate his tennis potential. He says the tennis ball is the 'ultimate body. Perfectly round... but empty inside.' He cuts the ball open to show him. he shows him his gnarled thumb. He offers Jim a drink from his flask, and then tries to force it into his hands, telling him he'll first have to put down the 'Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices.' Jim drops the book, and his father scolds him and then scolds him further for being 'oversensitive.' He waxes poetic on the sounds his flask produces, and then on the sound of a well-hit tennis ball. He tells Jim that they're soon to move to California so he can give it the one last shot his waning [film] talent deserves. He says he's just giving him advance notice, because Jim had made it so clear that their previous move [to the mobile home in Tucson] had been traumatic. He invites Jim to go ahead and cry, but that it gets less effective each time, except with Jim's mother. He then launches into a story about his own father who had 'never once' come to see him play, even though he was winning trophies and excelling at tennis-- his father was 'a golf man' [contemptuous tone]. He notes that the flask is nearly empty and suggests that they rain-check the tennis lesson, and tell his mother that Jim's 'not feeling up to snuff.' He suggests postponing until the weekend, when they can rent the courts for $10 [for which he lays a guilt trip on Jim.] He returns to the story of his own father, who finally did come to a match, because he was playing against a client's son. Jim's father was 'handing the dandy his pampered ass' while his own father sat not in the shade of the palm [due to his 'healthy respect' for spiders] but right out in the 95 degree heat, and without sweating. As the game progresses, he's handily beating his opponent when by luck the opponent hits a 'lucky dribbler of a drop-shot' and instead of conceding the point he goes all out to try to hit the ball and ends up face down on the court, having permanently ruined his knees. But, he's careful to point out he had already fallen when he heard his father reply to the opponent's father's comment that Jim was a good player--'but he'll never be great.' He theorizes it may have been a spider or a palm frond that caused him to slip. His speech becomes more and more disjointed, presumably due to the contents of his flask. He admits to respecting his father, comparing the situation to his with Jim-- saying that Jim takes him for granted. He confesses his fear of dying without ever being really *seen* He wants Jim to understand that he was giving it his all that day, when he ruined his chances of ever being a great player and his opportunity to get parts in any of those beach movies. He says that he learned what it is to be a body. He compares being dragged off the court with being dragged home drunk, saying that 'both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.'
p 169-171
YDAU [2009] Nov 4
place ETA and environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis takes a circuitous route by public transportation [to throw off would be pursuers] to pickup the tow truck which is parked in an underground lot. He's wearing his white yachting hat, which Mario refers to as his Mr. Howell hat and which has a detachable lining in which Pemulis can store drugs. He's driving the tow truck back to Enfield after his transaction, and after ingesting '150 mg of very mild 'drines.' Pemulis has presumably just scored some DMZ which is an incredibly potent amphetamine but 'resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid [footnote 56 compares it with 'fly agaric fungus's well-known muscimole]. It's effects differ from LSD, in that they're 'more like *temporally*-cerebral and almost ontological,' and the 'ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically and euphorically...altered.' DMZ is synthesized from an obscure mold that grows on other molds and was discovered by the same Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD, who as a result of DMZ was sent into an 'early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching.' It is known as the 'single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube' and the hardest recreational drug to acquire. DMZ is sometimes referred to as 'Madame Psychosis' after an early morning cult radio personality. Pemulis has a policy of not selling drugs to Ennet House residents, since they have unscheduled urine tests, and since his tennis and math talents have helped him get away from just that sort of character. When Pemulis pulls up to ETA, Hal is reading 'Hamlet' in order to help Mario with a conceptual film on the subject,and has his phone ready for Pemulis's call, but still waits until the third ring. He asks Pemulis to 'please commit a crime'
p 172-176
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile [2007]
place ETA
film narrated by Hal
synopsis:
Hal gives the narration to Mario's film 'Tennis and the the Feral Prodigy' which received honorable mention in the 'New Eyes, New Voices' young filmmakers' contest. The description implies that Mario was spuriously credited as writer, as Hal's narration is pretty clearly his own. He describes [presumably to an accompanying visual] virtually every aspect of his routine at ETA. 'Here's how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a a log.' He describes hitting serves to no one, how to call your racquet a stick, how to grip it, how to squeeze a tennis ball in your right hand at all times,except during meals. He describes drills, jogging, his father's expectations, his father's expectations of himself, and how surpassing them still left him unhappy. He describes escaping these thoughts by practicing until things run on autopilot. He describes 'justifying your seed' [reaching at least the round that you're supposed to at a tournament.] He describes playing fair and learning to let what is unfair teach you. He describes the use of lemon Pledge and muscle relaxants. He describes sitting through his father's art film openings. He says to expect rough dreams, and keep a flashlight by the bed. He says 'turn down dates' and shows how. he shows how to read the monthly ratings, and learn to care and not care-- never tell anyone where you are. This is also how not fear sleep or dreams. he says be a student of the game,and see yourself in your opponents. Accept that the game is about managed fear,that 'its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.'
p 176-181
YDAU [2009] Nov 4 1300-1500h
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in first person in 18 parts by different residents of EH
synopsis:
The all caps title of this part explains that it is transcripts from the drop-in office hours of the Ennet House director, Patricia Montesian, although she never speaks.
1. [176] A woman explains that another resident was drumming his fingers on the table at dinner. She likens the sound to what a girl hears in her head before she kills her family for taking the last of the peanut butter. She became rather homicidally agitated and 'sort of poked him' with her fork [it appears in reality that she stabbed him in the hand.] She says she's ready to own her part and wants to know if she can still go on her 'overnight' that Gene had previously approved.
2. [177] A man who identities himself as having been a personal-injury attorney for 16 years, is asking Patricia to define 'alcoholic.' He is claiming that he can hold his liquor--aside from a single incident at a Bar Association dinner, where he accused a judge of secretly masturbating in court. He admits to experiencing formication [sensation of insects crawling on the skin] during detox. He says that he is not in denial about anything 'empirical and objective' and states his lawyerly opinion that it's not denial unless 'the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties.'
3. [177] The victim of the knife incident gives his side. He says he's waiting for his meatloaf to cool and hears a 'sphincter-loosening shriek' and sees Nell leaping across the table [parallel to its surface] screaming about the sound of peanut butter. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of his hand and the table. He says the pain was unbearable but he refused the Percocet at the emergency room. He expresses outrage that she will apologize *if he will* and suggests that she be kicked out. He says that the 'pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough,' and pleads for the 'safe and nurturing environment' promised in the handbook.
3. [178] 'Im awfully sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if there's any sort of special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.'
4. [178] Alfonso speaks in broken English and acknowledges that he is a drug addict, and powerless.He fears that even so, he cannot stop. He asks if it's bad to hope for power.
5.[178] 'Sorry to barge in, there, PM division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was *ultimatum* that they said.'
6. [178] The person apologizes for bothering Pat about something not related to treatment, and describes try to do his [?] assigned Chore. There is something indescribable in the toilet of the mens room that won't flush
7. [179] The resident describes putting a pudding cup in the fridge and coming back for it later to find it gone. McDade offers to help look for it, but has pudding on his chin.
8. [179] The resident is clearly Bruce Green [p. 38-39]. He describes his harelipped [bad-speed/good-pot dealer] housemate who kept snakes, and gave Bruce and his girlfriend Mildred free pot in exchange for procurement of mice for the snakes. The harelip dealer wanted to have sex with Mildred and never washed his hair. Harriet makes Bruce leave after the dealer describes having sex with chickens. They move to a shelter where Harriet meets a guy in a hat who says he has a ranch in New Jersey., and off she goes taking their daughter Harriet with her. He says he was delivering ice to machines at gas stations, and 'who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?'
9. [180] The resident balks at the idea that s/he is being asked to pray to treat an alleged disease, asking if s/he has been transported to another sociohistorical era.
10. [180] The resident says s/he's happy to be there and that the tooth-grinding and the 'thing with the eyelid' are just tics.
11. [180] The resident is objecting [inner city dialect] to getting kicked out, and claiming to be 'trying' to get a job. S/he cites Clenette and 'the Thrale girl' as witnesses. S/he asks where s/he's supposed to go.
12. [180] Resident objects to being on House Restriction for using mouthwash, which is 2% proof, and is spit out.
13. [181] 'It's about somebody *else's* farting, why I'm here.'
14. [181] The lawyer says he's being asked to attest to facts he does not possess, which he calls 'duress.'
15. [181] 'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?'
16. [181] 'I'll come back when you're free.'
17. [181] 'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.'
18. [181] 'Fine just let me say one thing'
notes
The Tucson episode is [for this reader] among the saddest in the book. Sections like this really set DFW apart from his postmodern predecessors, by my lights. It's also notable that the dread inflicted on young Jim seems to have been passed on to Hal [whether inadvertently or not] as evidenced in the pathos he injects into the documentary film when speaking of his father.
The Pemulis episode is dragging the ETA thread of the story closer and closer to the Ennet House thread even as he categorically refuses to get involved with those people. Likewise the Ennet House interviews tie together some of the loose ends, we've encountered [eg, Clenette and Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk], and presumably will encounter [it would be interesting to come back later and attempt to track each interview to it's source character.] The third interview was pretty chilling for this reader, for obvious reasons.
p 181-219
this section in 5 parts
p 181-193
YDAU [2009] late Oct [22nd actually]
place Boston [ETA and WYYY at MIT]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section starts out with a literally sophomoric radio program about a record-setting punt, read in the voice of Elmer Fudd. We eventually find out this is part of nerdy MIT radio program that precedes the 'rabidly popular Madam Psychosis Hour' which airs weeknights from midnight to 1am. Although the narration is in third person, the surroundings and action at WYYY 109 [the largest Whole prime on the FM band] are described in painfully academic language suggesting the POV of the unnamed late-shift student engineer, a grad student with 'bad lungs and occluded pores' who handles the technical aspects of the Madame Psychosis show. He has never seen Madam P, because she sits behind a 'jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon' and she sound-checks her plosives uncommunicatively with phrases like 'attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object' and 'like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.' After the 5 minutes of dead air that contractually precedes her show, she starts with her usual opening [which, it's noted, the thoroughly uncynical Mario, who is listening, always finds terribly compelling]: 'And lo the earth was empty of form, and void. / And darkness was all over the face of the deep. / And We said: / Look at that fucker Dance.' Even with it's small range of broadcast power, WYYY's ratings, especially for Madam P are rock solid, and if you're on the hill in Enfield, your reception is clear. After the music fades, she starts right in reading a list of what appear to be affliction, 'the acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. the enuretic...' The engineer leaves Madam P alone, as is SOP, and it's noted she rarely has guests. She just delivers her 'free-associative and intricately-structured' monologues, while smoking behind the screen. Sometimes she goes into film at length [never New Wave rather--early neorealist and expressionist, also apres garde and anticonfluential cinema] and then sometimes US sports, football in particular. The engineer monitors the program from the rooftop. In the one conversation he's had with her, she had him write out the home lab process for making Uranium 235, and to the consternation of MIT admin, she read the recipe on air. There's an impossibly complex passage describing the place on the roof where the engineer sits in his parka and fake-fur hat, as Madame P continues her list, revealing that she's reading it '...the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says.' The circular is apparently from a 12 -step program for the 'Hideously and Improbably Deformed.'
The narration shifts-- and Avril James Incadenza's marriage is described as 'an evolved product of concordance and compromise' [see soundcheck above]. Likewise the curriculum at ETA, which thanks to Avril is the 'only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium' [which a footnote explains is a hardcore 18th century style of education where grammar/logic/rhetoric precede math/geometry/astonomy/music]. Avril, however had to make some allowances for the fact that it was a tennis academy, and to the optic specialization that James was interested in and later willed into being maintained in the curriculum. And of course the Entertainment classes that James insisted on. Mario who was finally allowed to disenroll from the special school after refusing to even try to learn to read, insisting that he'd rather listen and watch, listens to Madam P with his ear right up the radio in the Headmaster's House [HmH] where the Moms lives with CT.Mario has to turn the radio down low on account of the Moms's 'thing about sound' and then listen very intently on account of her 'issues about enclosure' which result in there being very few internal walls. Also it's noted that the Moms has a green thumb. Madam P continues her list in a notably non-Boston accent. Her voice seems familiar to Mario like a childhood smell, as she continues reading the circular 'come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what's hidden inside.' The music she ahs chosen to accompany her program evokes 'something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.' Mario and Hal had come to HmH for a late night meal after Hal ad disappeared for half an hour. Mario is in part obsessed with Madam P's show, because he is sure that she can't herself 'sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air.' Madam P is 'one of only two people Mario would love to talk to, but would be scared to try. The word "periodic" pops into his head.' The music is periodic in that it 'leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.' The music she brings in is always obscure, and often very compelling. The Moms has maintained the L'Islet region practice of eating a late dinner, and Mario and Hal join her twice a week which is the maximum deLint will allow. Avril and CT have separate but adjacent bedrooms, and the only other room upstairs is Avril's office which has a poster of the wicked witch of the west on the door, and custom wiring for a [presumably never installed] TP console. Her office is connected by an underground tunnel to ETA, but luckily for Hal, in a way that doesn't require her to pass by the Pump room. The Moms approves of Hal occasionally bringing John [NR] Wayne [who rarely talks and eats like a horse] or Axford [who has trouble eating] but clearly disapproves of Pemulis and Struck, whom he no longer brings. Near the end of her program Madam P takes her usual lone caller, who informs her and the listeners that the moon revolves around the earth but does not itself revolve. The engineer heads back inside, but predicts that she'll make no reply. Madam P's sign-off is more dead air. For dessert Avril serves 'Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares.' Hal makes to leave at 1am, and the Moms says jokingly 'do not, under any circumstances, have fun' which cracks Mario up every time.
p 193-198
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The environs of Ennet House are described looking like 7 moons orbiting a dead planet. The VA hospital itself is abandoned, but the smaller buildings on the grounds are leased to various health agencies. The unit #s increase as they get further from hospital. Unit #1 houses an agency that counsels Vietnam vets, and Unit #2 is a methadone clinic. Visitors to both begin lining up around dawn. Don Gately was nearly discharged for [along with a meth addict] a hanging a fake 'Closed Until Further Notice' sign on the door of the Methadone clinic, which caused a panic among the former junkies, and Gately and the meth addict watching from the balcony accidently dropped the binoculars on the roof of EH counselor Calvin Thrust's corvette. The meth addict relapsed shortly thereafter, was arrested and then was killed in jail. Unit #3 is empty and #4 houses Alzheimer's patients, who 'wear jammies 24/7' and one of whom screams 'help!' constantly. Unit #6 is referred to as 'the Shed' and houses catatonic patients, a lengthy footnote explains [by way of mentioning that Hal, Axford, Struck and Troeltsch visit a bar called The Unexamined Life, and sometimes converse with security guards who were extras in Himself's films] that this is because the patients don't seem to live there so much as they're stored there. Unit #6 is a 3-story brick building at the end of the road, up against the ravine that houses Ennet House. Across the road is Unit #7 which was abandoned after an incident involving rubble from the construction of ETA [specifically the shaving off of the top of the mountain] which is directly up the hill. Unit #7 is now boarded up and serves as a secret locale for illicit drug intake by relapsers.
p 198-200
YDAU [2009] Nov 6, 1610h
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal and co are in the ETA weight room, with Lyle doing his sweat-licking thing with Graham Rader. The boys are groaning and grimacing as they lift weights and teasing one another. Pemulis is doing facial imitations [deLint jerking off, Schacht in a stall, etc.]
p 200-211
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Although in third person, this part is told through the voice of an insider at Ennet House--in a compulsive and free associative way, suggestive of a recovering addict. It starts by chronicling things that you'd know if you were to spend time around EH. That the once the state has taken a mother's children once, it can do so again and again, for next to no reason. That people in detox often get acne, that you can get an amphetamine-ish buzz from large quantities of oreos and soda on an empty stomach. That the 'God' of AA/NA doesn't require that you believe in him to help you. That half of addicts suffer from some other psychiatric disorder. That it's harder for people with high IQs to kick an addiction. That most substance-abusers are addicted to thinking. That 'bit' means jail sentence, and that Don Gately did 6 month bit in Billerica. That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' is more than a cliche. The slogan 'you can't Unring a bell' refers to the fact that people under the influence of Substance will often do things they'd never do when sober, and some of the consequences of these things can never be erased. At this point the narrative changes to describe Tiny Ewell's obsessive survey of the tattoos at Ennet House. To tiny the tattoo is a symbol of the 'chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.' He repeats his thoughts on this to all of the tattooed residents without much interest. Bruce Green listens politely, and Kate Gompert [who is untattooed, and clinically depressed] doesn't 'have the juice' to walk away. But the residents with tattoos readily show them off, and Tiny discerns two types in this regard--those without remorse, usually younger and filled with fake pride, and those older and more numerous types who show their tattoos with a stoic regret. Wade McDade has nest of serpents running down his arms. Former skinhead Doony Glynn has a black dotted line around his neck, and instructions on maintenance of his head, once severed, on his skull. In the regret department, Bruce Green has "Mildred Bonk" on his triceps, Emil Minty has "Doris" below his left breast, as well as "Fuck Nigers" on his biceps, which he is encouraged to keep covered at EH. Chandler Foss tried to de-regret his "Mary" tattoo by carving "Blessed Virgin" above it with a razor and Bic pen. Randy Lenz has "Pamela"tattooed by remembers neither getting the tattoo nor anyone by that name. Counselor and former porn actor Calvin Thrust supposedly has a tatoo on his penis which changes from his initials to his full name with erection. Tiny finds the faded tattoos of the decades-sober elder-statesmen guys who attend his Sunday night group. Near the end of his study, Tiny approaches Don Gately about his jailhouse tattoos, which Tiny considers a whole class of its own. Gately [who finds Tiny Ewell incomprehensible] tells him how the tattoos are done with sewing needles and a pen, which explains why they are always less than perfect. Gately has a square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on his [massive] left forearm. Gately is polite but curt in his answers, forcing Tiny to ask very specific questions. Gately considers the tattoos as minor 'Rung bells' compared to some of the really irrevocable impulsive mistakes he's made.
p 211-219
YDAU [2009] Nov 4-5
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is in his room with Hal and Axford and shows them the DMZ that he has procured. He uses a series of hyperbolic phrases to describe its potency. He says the pills are from the BS 1970s and that the CIA used them in shady mind-control experiments. They try to decide what an appropriate dose would be, and joke about slipping the drug into the Gatorade at a tournament. Pemulis had tried to research DMZ at Med.Com but found only vague references to the drug. Hal chides him about not going to the actual library. Pemulis relates an article he found in Moment magazine about an army convict in Leavenworth who lost his mind after being injected with DMZ,and spent the rest of his life singing show tunes in an Ethel-Merman voice.' Axford suggests that they designate the code-name Ethel for phone use. Pemulis scored the DMZ from a 'small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents' who run Antitoi Entertainment as a front for their 'small and probably pathetic outdated insurgency-projects.' They had to conduct the transaction without speaking because of the language barrier, and Pemulis feels like he got the better end of the deal. Hal insists that they go to the BU or MIT library and confirm that DMZ is organic and nonaddictive, which he and Pemulis do with Mario [and his head-mounted camera] in tow. Pemulis decides that a 36 hour window will be necessary to try the DMZ, and the next such window will occur Nov 20-21[the weekend before the WhataBurger], because they have tournament on Friday and a series of exhibition games on Saturday, one of them involving the Vaught [Siamese] twins. Pemulis has left out of his calculations the fact that he won't get that Saturday afternoon off if he doesn't make the traveling list for the WhataBurger, and he may not.
notes
The introduction to Madame Psychosis and the Ennet House section beginning on p 200 really allow DFW to show off what this reader finds to be one of his most amazing gifts-- tailoring a third person narrative to show the metal workings of a central character by way of language. The Madame P episode would have taken me weeks to read, had I looked up every obscure word DFW employs here. But it's more than showing off; it serves the story; likewise the amphetamine-fueled jitters that characterize the Ennet Hoiuse section.
This chapter also brings a lot of things together both explicitly and implicitly. We find a lot of the lesser characters finally showing up together under one roof at Ennet House, just down the hill from ETA. We find Pemulis dealing with some pretty shady Canadian separatist characters to buy the DMZ, which sounds like a drug that tthe ETA players have no business messing with. The fact that one of the only articles Pemulis could find on DMZ was in Moment magazine also raises the specter of a connection to Steeply.
We meet Madame Psychosis, another mysterious character with clear ties to the Incadenza's [she is mentioned repeatedly in the filmography [p 985-993], most notably in the final film 'Infinite Jest (V?)']. Mario clearly has some kind of connection with her. And then there's her love of football-- could that connect her to Orin?The Moms is beginning to sound seriously damaged, or at least rife with 'issues.'
p 181-193
YDAU [2009] late Oct [22nd actually]
place Boston [ETA and WYYY at MIT]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section starts out with a literally sophomoric radio program about a record-setting punt, read in the voice of Elmer Fudd. We eventually find out this is part of nerdy MIT radio program that precedes the 'rabidly popular Madam Psychosis Hour' which airs weeknights from midnight to 1am. Although the narration is in third person, the surroundings and action at WYYY 109 [the largest Whole prime on the FM band] are described in painfully academic language suggesting the POV of the unnamed late-shift student engineer, a grad student with 'bad lungs and occluded pores' who handles the technical aspects of the Madame Psychosis show. He has never seen Madam P, because she sits behind a 'jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon' and she sound-checks her plosives uncommunicatively with phrases like 'attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object' and 'like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.' After the 5 minutes of dead air that contractually precedes her show, she starts with her usual opening [which, it's noted, the thoroughly uncynical Mario, who is listening, always finds terribly compelling]: 'And lo the earth was empty of form, and void. / And darkness was all over the face of the deep. / And We said: / Look at that fucker Dance.' Even with it's small range of broadcast power, WYYY's ratings, especially for Madam P are rock solid, and if you're on the hill in Enfield, your reception is clear. After the music fades, she starts right in reading a list of what appear to be affliction, 'the acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. the enuretic...' The engineer leaves Madam P alone, as is SOP, and it's noted she rarely has guests. She just delivers her 'free-associative and intricately-structured' monologues, while smoking behind the screen. Sometimes she goes into film at length [never New Wave rather--early neorealist and expressionist, also apres garde and anticonfluential cinema] and then sometimes US sports, football in particular. The engineer monitors the program from the rooftop. In the one conversation he's had with her, she had him write out the home lab process for making Uranium 235, and to the consternation of MIT admin, she read the recipe on air. There's an impossibly complex passage describing the place on the roof where the engineer sits in his parka and fake-fur hat, as Madame P continues her list, revealing that she's reading it '...the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says.' The circular is apparently from a 12 -step program for the 'Hideously and Improbably Deformed.'
The narration shifts-- and Avril James Incadenza's marriage is described as 'an evolved product of concordance and compromise' [see soundcheck above]. Likewise the curriculum at ETA, which thanks to Avril is the 'only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium' [which a footnote explains is a hardcore 18th century style of education where grammar/logic/rhetoric precede math/geometry/astonomy/music]. Avril, however had to make some allowances for the fact that it was a tennis academy, and to the optic specialization that James was interested in and later willed into being maintained in the curriculum. And of course the Entertainment classes that James insisted on. Mario who was finally allowed to disenroll from the special school after refusing to even try to learn to read, insisting that he'd rather listen and watch, listens to Madam P with his ear right up the radio in the Headmaster's House [HmH] where the Moms lives with CT.Mario has to turn the radio down low on account of the Moms's 'thing about sound' and then listen very intently on account of her 'issues about enclosure' which result in there being very few internal walls. Also it's noted that the Moms has a green thumb. Madam P continues her list in a notably non-Boston accent. Her voice seems familiar to Mario like a childhood smell, as she continues reading the circular 'come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what's hidden inside.' The music she ahs chosen to accompany her program evokes 'something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.' Mario and Hal had come to HmH for a late night meal after Hal ad disappeared for half an hour. Mario is in part obsessed with Madam P's show, because he is sure that she can't herself 'sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air.' Madam P is 'one of only two people Mario would love to talk to, but would be scared to try. The word "periodic" pops into his head.' The music is periodic in that it 'leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.' The music she brings in is always obscure, and often very compelling. The Moms has maintained the L'Islet region practice of eating a late dinner, and Mario and Hal join her twice a week which is the maximum deLint will allow. Avril and CT have separate but adjacent bedrooms, and the only other room upstairs is Avril's office which has a poster of the wicked witch of the west on the door, and custom wiring for a [presumably never installed] TP console. Her office is connected by an underground tunnel to ETA, but luckily for Hal, in a way that doesn't require her to pass by the Pump room. The Moms approves of Hal occasionally bringing John [NR] Wayne [who rarely talks and eats like a horse] or Axford [who has trouble eating] but clearly disapproves of Pemulis and Struck, whom he no longer brings. Near the end of her program Madam P takes her usual lone caller, who informs her and the listeners that the moon revolves around the earth but does not itself revolve. The engineer heads back inside, but predicts that she'll make no reply. Madam P's sign-off is more dead air. For dessert Avril serves 'Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares.' Hal makes to leave at 1am, and the Moms says jokingly 'do not, under any circumstances, have fun' which cracks Mario up every time.
p 193-198
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The environs of Ennet House are described looking like 7 moons orbiting a dead planet. The VA hospital itself is abandoned, but the smaller buildings on the grounds are leased to various health agencies. The unit #s increase as they get further from hospital. Unit #1 houses an agency that counsels Vietnam vets, and Unit #2 is a methadone clinic. Visitors to both begin lining up around dawn. Don Gately was nearly discharged for [along with a meth addict] a hanging a fake 'Closed Until Further Notice' sign on the door of the Methadone clinic, which caused a panic among the former junkies, and Gately and the meth addict watching from the balcony accidently dropped the binoculars on the roof of EH counselor Calvin Thrust's corvette. The meth addict relapsed shortly thereafter, was arrested and then was killed in jail. Unit #3 is empty and #4 houses Alzheimer's patients, who 'wear jammies 24/7' and one of whom screams 'help!' constantly. Unit #6 is referred to as 'the Shed' and houses catatonic patients, a lengthy footnote explains [by way of mentioning that Hal, Axford, Struck and Troeltsch visit a bar called The Unexamined Life, and sometimes converse with security guards who were extras in Himself's films] that this is because the patients don't seem to live there so much as they're stored there. Unit #6 is a 3-story brick building at the end of the road, up against the ravine that houses Ennet House. Across the road is Unit #7 which was abandoned after an incident involving rubble from the construction of ETA [specifically the shaving off of the top of the mountain] which is directly up the hill. Unit #7 is now boarded up and serves as a secret locale for illicit drug intake by relapsers.
p 198-200
YDAU [2009] Nov 6, 1610h
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal and co are in the ETA weight room, with Lyle doing his sweat-licking thing with Graham Rader. The boys are groaning and grimacing as they lift weights and teasing one another. Pemulis is doing facial imitations [deLint jerking off, Schacht in a stall, etc.]
p 200-211
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Although in third person, this part is told through the voice of an insider at Ennet House--in a compulsive and free associative way, suggestive of a recovering addict. It starts by chronicling things that you'd know if you were to spend time around EH. That the once the state has taken a mother's children once, it can do so again and again, for next to no reason. That people in detox often get acne, that you can get an amphetamine-ish buzz from large quantities of oreos and soda on an empty stomach. That the 'God' of AA/NA doesn't require that you believe in him to help you. That half of addicts suffer from some other psychiatric disorder. That it's harder for people with high IQs to kick an addiction. That most substance-abusers are addicted to thinking. That 'bit' means jail sentence, and that Don Gately did 6 month bit in Billerica. That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' is more than a cliche. The slogan 'you can't Unring a bell' refers to the fact that people under the influence of Substance will often do things they'd never do when sober, and some of the consequences of these things can never be erased. At this point the narrative changes to describe Tiny Ewell's obsessive survey of the tattoos at Ennet House. To tiny the tattoo is a symbol of the 'chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.' He repeats his thoughts on this to all of the tattooed residents without much interest. Bruce Green listens politely, and Kate Gompert [who is untattooed, and clinically depressed] doesn't 'have the juice' to walk away. But the residents with tattoos readily show them off, and Tiny discerns two types in this regard--those without remorse, usually younger and filled with fake pride, and those older and more numerous types who show their tattoos with a stoic regret. Wade McDade has nest of serpents running down his arms. Former skinhead Doony Glynn has a black dotted line around his neck, and instructions on maintenance of his head, once severed, on his skull. In the regret department, Bruce Green has "Mildred Bonk" on his triceps, Emil Minty has "Doris" below his left breast, as well as "Fuck Nigers" on his biceps, which he is encouraged to keep covered at EH. Chandler Foss tried to de-regret his "Mary" tattoo by carving "Blessed Virgin" above it with a razor and Bic pen. Randy Lenz has "Pamela"tattooed by remembers neither getting the tattoo nor anyone by that name. Counselor and former porn actor Calvin Thrust supposedly has a tatoo on his penis which changes from his initials to his full name with erection. Tiny finds the faded tattoos of the decades-sober elder-statesmen guys who attend his Sunday night group. Near the end of his study, Tiny approaches Don Gately about his jailhouse tattoos, which Tiny considers a whole class of its own. Gately [who finds Tiny Ewell incomprehensible] tells him how the tattoos are done with sewing needles and a pen, which explains why they are always less than perfect. Gately has a square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on his [massive] left forearm. Gately is polite but curt in his answers, forcing Tiny to ask very specific questions. Gately considers the tattoos as minor 'Rung bells' compared to some of the really irrevocable impulsive mistakes he's made.
p 211-219
YDAU [2009] Nov 4-5
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is in his room with Hal and Axford and shows them the DMZ that he has procured. He uses a series of hyperbolic phrases to describe its potency. He says the pills are from the BS 1970s and that the CIA used them in shady mind-control experiments. They try to decide what an appropriate dose would be, and joke about slipping the drug into the Gatorade at a tournament. Pemulis had tried to research DMZ at Med.Com but found only vague references to the drug. Hal chides him about not going to the actual library. Pemulis relates an article he found in Moment magazine about an army convict in Leavenworth who lost his mind after being injected with DMZ,and spent the rest of his life singing show tunes in an Ethel-Merman voice.' Axford suggests that they designate the code-name Ethel for phone use. Pemulis scored the DMZ from a 'small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents' who run Antitoi Entertainment as a front for their 'small and probably pathetic outdated insurgency-projects.' They had to conduct the transaction without speaking because of the language barrier, and Pemulis feels like he got the better end of the deal. Hal insists that they go to the BU or MIT library and confirm that DMZ is organic and nonaddictive, which he and Pemulis do with Mario [and his head-mounted camera] in tow. Pemulis decides that a 36 hour window will be necessary to try the DMZ, and the next such window will occur Nov 20-21[the weekend before the WhataBurger], because they have tournament on Friday and a series of exhibition games on Saturday, one of them involving the Vaught [Siamese] twins. Pemulis has left out of his calculations the fact that he won't get that Saturday afternoon off if he doesn't make the traveling list for the WhataBurger, and he may not.
notes
The introduction to Madame Psychosis and the Ennet House section beginning on p 200 really allow DFW to show off what this reader finds to be one of his most amazing gifts-- tailoring a third person narrative to show the metal workings of a central character by way of language. The Madame P episode would have taken me weeks to read, had I looked up every obscure word DFW employs here. But it's more than showing off; it serves the story; likewise the amphetamine-fueled jitters that characterize the Ennet Hoiuse section.
This chapter also brings a lot of things together both explicitly and implicitly. We find a lot of the lesser characters finally showing up together under one roof at Ennet House, just down the hill from ETA. We find Pemulis dealing with some pretty shady Canadian separatist characters to buy the DMZ, which sounds like a drug that tthe ETA players have no business messing with. The fact that one of the only articles Pemulis could find on DMZ was in Moment magazine also raises the specter of a connection to Steeply.
We meet Madame Psychosis, another mysterious character with clear ties to the Incadenza's [she is mentioned repeatedly in the filmography [p 985-993], most notably in the final film 'Infinite Jest (V?)']. Mario clearly has some kind of connection with her. And then there's her love of football-- could that connect her to Orin?The Moms is beginning to sound seriously damaged, or at least rife with 'issues.'
p 219-240
this section in 5 parts
p 219-223
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
We meet Joelle van Dyne literally at the end of her rope. She is in Molly Notkin's apartment preparing to kill herself. She thinks of how you can be at a party and not really be there. She thinks that the 'invisible pivot' where a party ends is one of the saddest times she knows. She is perched on one of Molly's chairs [molded in the likeness of great film directors] and her 'feet dangle well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn.' Joelle is the daughter of a chemist and a homemaker from Kentucky and 'a lot of fun to be with normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.' She was formally a doctoral student in film theory before 'her retreat into broadcast sound.' She feels like she is 'sub-rosa twins' with Molly, whose one true love was/is a film scholar who suffers guilt with each erection, because he believes there are a finite number of erections, and his is depriving a more deserving person. She ponders what if heredity is branching instead of linear, and there are only two people in 'history's mist' and that their differences account for all differences-- 'the deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful...the hidden and the blindingly open.' As she contemplates the end of her life, she sees it as a 'stuttered old hand-held 16mm... from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY.' She thinks back to the walk [to arrive at Molly's] through the rainy streets-- she buys a cigar in a glass tube and throws away the cigar, keeping the tube in her purse. She gives out change to homeless people, and gives one of them [with a Notre Ray Pays' sign] $20. she buys a pepsi and pours it out,and puts the empty bottle in her purse. She is 'excruciatingly alive' and contemplating that 'most self involved act' of locking herself in the bathroom and getting 'so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth.' On her walk, she gets called 'bitch' approvingly by three young black men. 'No more deciding to stop at 2300h and then barely getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0130h.' No more throwing away 'Material' and then scrounging later for enough to smoke. She likens the blur of the rain's 'wet veil' to the blur created by Jim's lenses-- 'more deforming than fuzzy.' She contemplates the drugs she's about to intake-- 'what looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.' She thinks of Jim's film 'Cage III: Free Show'. She no longer enjoys the drugs, nor can she lie to herself about being able to quit. She thinks about the caller saying that the moon never looks away. She contemplates her powerlessness to quit even though she hates it, likening it to what 'they'd made Jim do near the end.' She finally takes the drugs 'weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little rooms walls.'
p 223
no narration
synopsis:
Chronology of Organization of North American Nations' revenue-enhancing Subsidized Time, by year
[the text has them numbered 1-9 instead of giving the numerical year]
2002 Year of the Whopper
2003 Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
2004 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
2005 Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
2006 Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
2007 Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
2008 Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
2009 Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
2010 Year of Glad
p 223-226
YDAU [2009] Nov 8
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin had once showed Joelle his collection of 'husks of Lemon Pledge' from childhood. Joelle hurries along Boylston St. where the drug dealers are lined up, cops are removing anti-ONAN flags hung in the night by separatists. There is a 2-D display of a man without legs in a wheelchair, with his arms upraised in an ecstatic gesture, with a film cartridge sticking out of a slot in his palm. There is however no title of the cartridge being advertised, and the display cartridge which Joelle removes from the ad's hand is blank. Jim had filmed her at the end of his career. 'After the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came... only to leave...after taking the veil' Joelle liked to get high and imitate the obsessive cleaning of 'the wife and mother they both declined to shoot.' Joelle 'aka Madame P.' remembers that Jim was the 'world's best hailer of Boston cabs' and hence never rides in cabs. She had smoked freebase cocaine 'for the last time' this morning, and then an hour later gone to find her dealer Lady Delphina to get more. While waiting for the subway, an older man remarks about her veil, and she explains the history of the 'Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed' which was formed in the 40's when Winston Churchill, while inebriated had placed a napkin over the deformed face of wife of a member of the House of Commons.
p 226
no narration-- this section in the form of a resume
synopsis:
The 'putative curriculum vitae of Helen P. Steeply' is given here. She worked successively for Time, Decade, Southwest Annual, Newsweek, Ladies Day, and Moment magazines. While at Ladies Day,she had he purse snatched and vowed never again to live in Manhattan. She's now at the Southwest Bureau of Moment in Erythema, AZ writing about 'medical, soft sports, personality' etc.
p 226-240
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Joelle is returning from buying drugs to Molly's apartment, where she once lived with Orin, and where she had performed in his father's films. Molly is throwing a party for herself after competing her oral examinations in 'post-millennial Marxist Film-cartridge theory' dressed as Karl Marx. Molly has no idea that Joelle has been 'in a cage' ever since Jim's death in YTSDB [2004]. She has no idea whether they were lovers, or whether Orin left her because they were lovers. [The footnote explains that Orin knew they were not lovers, but Avril did not, and it was learning of Avril's own infidelity which had caused Jim to shoot Joelle 'the weird wobble-lensed maternal "I'm-so-terribly-sorry"-monologue-scene' of his last work.] Nor does she know that Joelle now lives off of a trust willed to her by 'a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away.' Joelle arrives at the party and Molly partially lifts the veil to kiss Joelle on the cheek, and offers her some of the 'muddy' apple juice they both love. Joelle feels the urge to 'raise the veil before a mirror' and 'breathe the only uncloth'd gas' she can stand. 'She feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death.' People at the party watch cartridges and listen to a 'Latin revival CD.'Joelle remembers Orin's 'forearm the size of a leg of lamb.' She had been his only lover for 26 months and his father's optical beloved for 21 months. A beautiful girl on Ecstasy watches herself dance in a mirror that Jim had made Joelle stand before and recite the lines of his final film. The girl exclaims 'aren't they beautiful' referring to her breasts, which Joelle finds heartbreakingly sincere. Joelle ponders the difference between suicide and homicide, wondering if she would kill someone else to 'get out of the cage.' She wonders whether Jim's last film was a cage or a door, and wonders whether he had ever edited the 'mother-death-cosmology and apologies she repeated over and over' into anything coherent. He had killed himself less than 90 days later by putting his head in a microwave oven. She wonders how he even rigged it to go on with the door open. She wonders if she killed him 'somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens.' People are applauding the woman's breasts and Joelle's empathy dissipates, and she becomes suicidal. She waits for the bathroom off the bedroom, and ignores party guest who asks about her veil. She half hears the mingling voices of the party, as they discuss everything from the Brady Bunch to Eisenstein to Jim's rumored cartridge, and whether the Great Concavity should be called the Great Convexity. Joelle enters the bathroom and contemplates 'the last thing she will ever smell.' She lifts her veil back 'to cover her skull like a bride' and empties her purse to remove the plastic Pepsi bottle, matches, the glass cigar tube, baking soda, aluminum foil and 4 grams of cocaine. While she freebases the cocaine, a 'bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill... a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper' hurtles northward in the sky. Joelle recalls as a child that she and 'her own personal Daddy' would sit in the front row at movies, not one of which she 'didn't just about die of love for' and that she'd never again felt so 'taken care of.' While the average freebase rock 'looks like a .38 round' hers looks like a 'county-fair corn dog.' She contemplates things she will never again get to do like 'invite people to watch darkness dance on the face of the deep' and this reminds her that she had suggested 'Face of the Deep' as the title for Jim's last film, but he had thought it too pretentious and instead chose 'that skull fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene.' She hears a helicopter as she makes a pipe for the cocaine, and thinks of all the people she'll never see again, a thought which she considers banal. Someone is knocking and asking whether the bathroom is occupied as she smokes the cocaine, which sends her sliding down the wall 'deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest GOAT).' She pulls herself up somehow and vomits into the claw-foot tub as a search helicopter flies overhead.
notes
Joelle is an amazing DFW construction. The prettiest girl of all time who veils her face to the world. Or is she hideously and improbably deformed under that veil. The end of this section seems to spell out that it's the former, and but then somehow we are unsure. She is also the saddest character of all time. Was cocaine ever freebased so wistfully? I wonder if the thumping noise from Enfield Hill and the search helicopters might be a clue to tie the time of this thread to something that happens in another thread on Nov 7. It first seemed to me that the p 226-240 happened the day after 219-223, but I have now decided that they are alternate takes on the same overdose scene.
p 219-223
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
We meet Joelle van Dyne literally at the end of her rope. She is in Molly Notkin's apartment preparing to kill herself. She thinks of how you can be at a party and not really be there. She thinks that the 'invisible pivot' where a party ends is one of the saddest times she knows. She is perched on one of Molly's chairs [molded in the likeness of great film directors] and her 'feet dangle well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn.' Joelle is the daughter of a chemist and a homemaker from Kentucky and 'a lot of fun to be with normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.' She was formally a doctoral student in film theory before 'her retreat into broadcast sound.' She feels like she is 'sub-rosa twins' with Molly, whose one true love was/is a film scholar who suffers guilt with each erection, because he believes there are a finite number of erections, and his is depriving a more deserving person. She ponders what if heredity is branching instead of linear, and there are only two people in 'history's mist' and that their differences account for all differences-- 'the deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful...the hidden and the blindingly open.' As she contemplates the end of her life, she sees it as a 'stuttered old hand-held 16mm... from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY.' She thinks back to the walk [to arrive at Molly's] through the rainy streets-- she buys a cigar in a glass tube and throws away the cigar, keeping the tube in her purse. She gives out change to homeless people, and gives one of them [with a Notre Ray Pays' sign] $20. she buys a pepsi and pours it out,and puts the empty bottle in her purse. She is 'excruciatingly alive' and contemplating that 'most self involved act' of locking herself in the bathroom and getting 'so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth.' On her walk, she gets called 'bitch' approvingly by three young black men. 'No more deciding to stop at 2300h and then barely getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0130h.' No more throwing away 'Material' and then scrounging later for enough to smoke. She likens the blur of the rain's 'wet veil' to the blur created by Jim's lenses-- 'more deforming than fuzzy.' She contemplates the drugs she's about to intake-- 'what looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.' She thinks of Jim's film 'Cage III: Free Show'. She no longer enjoys the drugs, nor can she lie to herself about being able to quit. She thinks about the caller saying that the moon never looks away. She contemplates her powerlessness to quit even though she hates it, likening it to what 'they'd made Jim do near the end.' She finally takes the drugs 'weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little rooms walls.'
p 223
no narration
synopsis:
Chronology of Organization of North American Nations' revenue-enhancing Subsidized Time, by year
[the text has them numbered 1-9 instead of giving the numerical year]
2002 Year of the Whopper
2003 Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
2004 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
2005 Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
2006 Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
2007 Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
2008 Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
2009 Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
2010 Year of Glad
p 223-226
YDAU [2009] Nov 8
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin had once showed Joelle his collection of 'husks of Lemon Pledge' from childhood. Joelle hurries along Boylston St. where the drug dealers are lined up, cops are removing anti-ONAN flags hung in the night by separatists. There is a 2-D display of a man without legs in a wheelchair, with his arms upraised in an ecstatic gesture, with a film cartridge sticking out of a slot in his palm. There is however no title of the cartridge being advertised, and the display cartridge which Joelle removes from the ad's hand is blank. Jim had filmed her at the end of his career. 'After the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came... only to leave...after taking the veil' Joelle liked to get high and imitate the obsessive cleaning of 'the wife and mother they both declined to shoot.' Joelle 'aka Madame P.' remembers that Jim was the 'world's best hailer of Boston cabs' and hence never rides in cabs. She had smoked freebase cocaine 'for the last time' this morning, and then an hour later gone to find her dealer Lady Delphina to get more. While waiting for the subway, an older man remarks about her veil, and she explains the history of the 'Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed' which was formed in the 40's when Winston Churchill, while inebriated had placed a napkin over the deformed face of wife of a member of the House of Commons.
p 226
no narration-- this section in the form of a resume
synopsis:
The 'putative curriculum vitae of Helen P. Steeply' is given here. She worked successively for Time, Decade, Southwest Annual, Newsweek, Ladies Day, and Moment magazines. While at Ladies Day,she had he purse snatched and vowed never again to live in Manhattan. She's now at the Southwest Bureau of Moment in Erythema, AZ writing about 'medical, soft sports, personality' etc.
p 226-240
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Joelle is returning from buying drugs to Molly's apartment, where she once lived with Orin, and where she had performed in his father's films. Molly is throwing a party for herself after competing her oral examinations in 'post-millennial Marxist Film-cartridge theory' dressed as Karl Marx. Molly has no idea that Joelle has been 'in a cage' ever since Jim's death in YTSDB [2004]. She has no idea whether they were lovers, or whether Orin left her because they were lovers. [The footnote explains that Orin knew they were not lovers, but Avril did not, and it was learning of Avril's own infidelity which had caused Jim to shoot Joelle 'the weird wobble-lensed maternal "I'm-so-terribly-sorry"-monologue-scene' of his last work.] Nor does she know that Joelle now lives off of a trust willed to her by 'a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away.' Joelle arrives at the party and Molly partially lifts the veil to kiss Joelle on the cheek, and offers her some of the 'muddy' apple juice they both love. Joelle feels the urge to 'raise the veil before a mirror' and 'breathe the only uncloth'd gas' she can stand. 'She feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death.' People at the party watch cartridges and listen to a 'Latin revival CD.'Joelle remembers Orin's 'forearm the size of a leg of lamb.' She had been his only lover for 26 months and his father's optical beloved for 21 months. A beautiful girl on Ecstasy watches herself dance in a mirror that Jim had made Joelle stand before and recite the lines of his final film. The girl exclaims 'aren't they beautiful' referring to her breasts, which Joelle finds heartbreakingly sincere. Joelle ponders the difference between suicide and homicide, wondering if she would kill someone else to 'get out of the cage.' She wonders whether Jim's last film was a cage or a door, and wonders whether he had ever edited the 'mother-death-cosmology and apologies she repeated over and over' into anything coherent. He had killed himself less than 90 days later by putting his head in a microwave oven. She wonders how he even rigged it to go on with the door open. She wonders if she killed him 'somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens.' People are applauding the woman's breasts and Joelle's empathy dissipates, and she becomes suicidal. She waits for the bathroom off the bedroom, and ignores party guest who asks about her veil. She half hears the mingling voices of the party, as they discuss everything from the Brady Bunch to Eisenstein to Jim's rumored cartridge, and whether the Great Concavity should be called the Great Convexity. Joelle enters the bathroom and contemplates 'the last thing she will ever smell.' She lifts her veil back 'to cover her skull like a bride' and empties her purse to remove the plastic Pepsi bottle, matches, the glass cigar tube, baking soda, aluminum foil and 4 grams of cocaine. While she freebases the cocaine, a 'bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill... a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper' hurtles northward in the sky. Joelle recalls as a child that she and 'her own personal Daddy' would sit in the front row at movies, not one of which she 'didn't just about die of love for' and that she'd never again felt so 'taken care of.' While the average freebase rock 'looks like a .38 round' hers looks like a 'county-fair corn dog.' She contemplates things she will never again get to do like 'invite people to watch darkness dance on the face of the deep' and this reminds her that she had suggested 'Face of the Deep' as the title for Jim's last film, but he had thought it too pretentious and instead chose 'that skull fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene.' She hears a helicopter as she makes a pipe for the cocaine, and thinks of all the people she'll never see again, a thought which she considers banal. Someone is knocking and asking whether the bathroom is occupied as she smokes the cocaine, which sends her sliding down the wall 'deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest GOAT).' She pulls herself up somehow and vomits into the claw-foot tub as a search helicopter flies overhead.
notes
Joelle is an amazing DFW construction. The prettiest girl of all time who veils her face to the world. Or is she hideously and improbably deformed under that veil. The end of this section seems to spell out that it's the former, and but then somehow we are unsure. She is also the saddest character of all time. Was cocaine ever freebased so wistfully? I wonder if the thumping noise from Enfield Hill and the search helicopters might be a clue to tie the time of this thread to something that happens in another thread on Nov 7. It first seemed to me that the p 226-240 happened the day after 219-223, but I have now decided that they are alternate takes on the same overdose scene.
p 240-258
this section in 2 parts
p 240-242
place ETA
narrated in first person [unknown]
synopsis:
Enfield MA is described as being comprised of almost entirely medical, corporate and spiritual facilities. These include the ATHSCME headquarters [they make the 'really big fans'], The National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Empire Waste Displacement Co.[they make huge catapults, that fling giant bundles of waste into the Great Concavity, producing a sound like a giant stamping foot], and of course ETA which occupies what is now possibly the nicest spot in Enfield, kind of perched on a hill above the squalor. To 'I think it must be the southwest' of ETA is Sunstrand, where the 'annular-generated' electricity is produced.To the north ETA overlooks 'its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine.
p 242-258
YDAU[2009] Nov 5
place ETA [&Tucson]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin calls Hal again and catches him shooting baskets with his toenail clippings into the wastebasket. They discuss superstitions around breaking your streak, Hal quotes legends of the 'Ahts of Vancouver' from the 'Discursive OED' while Orin talks about what some football players will do to maintain a streak. Orin says that he thinks he's being followed by handicapped people. Hal is more interested in the trailer park where the woman Orin has most recently seduced resides. But the real reason that Orin has called is that someone from Moment Magazine is doing a 'soft profile' on him and wants to know about Himself, aka the Mad Stork. The woman from Moment is 'a girl and a half in all directions' and has the linemen gaga. Hal sums up what the reporter might want to know 'you and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and CT, you v. the Moms, ETA, nonexistent films, etc.' Hal reveals that Orin did not come to Himself's funeral, and Hal clearly holds it against him. Hal begrudgingly tells him that CT moved upstairs 2 days before Himself's suicide, and that it had been Hal who had found Himself, who had put his head in the microwave oven, and asks why the sudden interest 'after 4 years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once calling.' Orin says he needs to get a handle on what he's not saying when answering Helen's questions. Orin asks if the PGOAT was there. Hal answers that she hadn't been around since she and Orin split up, and that Himself met her at the brownstone for shooting. Himself had gone underground and barely emerged from his editing, except for a 3 day film related trip on which Kyle probably accompanied him, and a 2 day purge and detox. His suicide was April 1. Orin is surprised because Joelle had told him that Himself had quit drinking in January as a condition of her appearing in his films. Hal explains that Himself had cut a head-sized hole in the microwave door and packed aluminum foil around his neck, and that he had a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey next to him. Hal explains that the scene had to be 'reconstructed' because Himself's head had exploded. Hal describes his grief [he dropped weight, had nightmares of a face in the floor, got Bs on quizzes, but mostly was obsessed with how to outwit his grief counselor. He studies upon exactly how he is supposed to feel, but the counselor doesn't buy it. Finally Lyle suggests that he tackle it from the perspective of what the counselor is 'professionally required to want.' Hal studies up again and then unleashes a tirade at the counselor replete with therapy terms like validate, process and toxic guilt. As he tells about his faux-catharsis, however, it becomes clear that it had become in part a real one. He says that it wasn't his fault that he had found Himself, but that he was hungry and 'something smelled delicious!' He then tells Orin that he has omitted the 'most nightmarishly compelling thing' about the grief therapist was that his hands were never visible,and it was only after the catharsis, on the last day of therapy Hal held out his hand and the therapist revealed that he had extremely tiny hands, and Hal barely made it out of the office before he was overcome with laughter. Hal deflects any further grief-related talk by asking about the trailer's interior.
notes
The opening part explains the mysterious thumping sound during Joelle's bathroom scene. It's curious how the narration lapses into first person just once. The second section explains at least a few things, eg the nightmare [p 61-63] is Hal's and not Troelsch's. And of course fills in many details about Himself's suicide and Orin's absence,and Hal's trauma.
p 240-242
place ETA
narrated in first person [unknown]
synopsis:
Enfield MA is described as being comprised of almost entirely medical, corporate and spiritual facilities. These include the ATHSCME headquarters [they make the 'really big fans'], The National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Empire Waste Displacement Co.[they make huge catapults, that fling giant bundles of waste into the Great Concavity, producing a sound like a giant stamping foot], and of course ETA which occupies what is now possibly the nicest spot in Enfield, kind of perched on a hill above the squalor. To 'I think it must be the southwest' of ETA is Sunstrand, where the 'annular-generated' electricity is produced.To the north ETA overlooks 'its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine.
p 242-258
YDAU[2009] Nov 5
place ETA [&Tucson]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin calls Hal again and catches him shooting baskets with his toenail clippings into the wastebasket. They discuss superstitions around breaking your streak, Hal quotes legends of the 'Ahts of Vancouver' from the 'Discursive OED' while Orin talks about what some football players will do to maintain a streak. Orin says that he thinks he's being followed by handicapped people. Hal is more interested in the trailer park where the woman Orin has most recently seduced resides. But the real reason that Orin has called is that someone from Moment Magazine is doing a 'soft profile' on him and wants to know about Himself, aka the Mad Stork. The woman from Moment is 'a girl and a half in all directions' and has the linemen gaga. Hal sums up what the reporter might want to know 'you and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and CT, you v. the Moms, ETA, nonexistent films, etc.' Hal reveals that Orin did not come to Himself's funeral, and Hal clearly holds it against him. Hal begrudgingly tells him that CT moved upstairs 2 days before Himself's suicide, and that it had been Hal who had found Himself, who had put his head in the microwave oven, and asks why the sudden interest 'after 4 years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once calling.' Orin says he needs to get a handle on what he's not saying when answering Helen's questions. Orin asks if the PGOAT was there. Hal answers that she hadn't been around since she and Orin split up, and that Himself met her at the brownstone for shooting. Himself had gone underground and barely emerged from his editing, except for a 3 day film related trip on which Kyle probably accompanied him, and a 2 day purge and detox. His suicide was April 1. Orin is surprised because Joelle had told him that Himself had quit drinking in January as a condition of her appearing in his films. Hal explains that Himself had cut a head-sized hole in the microwave door and packed aluminum foil around his neck, and that he had a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey next to him. Hal explains that the scene had to be 'reconstructed' because Himself's head had exploded. Hal describes his grief [he dropped weight, had nightmares of a face in the floor, got Bs on quizzes, but mostly was obsessed with how to outwit his grief counselor. He studies upon exactly how he is supposed to feel, but the counselor doesn't buy it. Finally Lyle suggests that he tackle it from the perspective of what the counselor is 'professionally required to want.' Hal studies up again and then unleashes a tirade at the counselor replete with therapy terms like validate, process and toxic guilt. As he tells about his faux-catharsis, however, it becomes clear that it had become in part a real one. He says that it wasn't his fault that he had found Himself, but that he was hungry and 'something smelled delicious!' He then tells Orin that he has omitted the 'most nightmarishly compelling thing' about the grief therapist was that his hands were never visible,and it was only after the catharsis, on the last day of therapy Hal held out his hand and the therapist revealed that he had extremely tiny hands, and Hal barely made it out of the office before he was overcome with laughter. Hal deflects any further grief-related talk by asking about the trailer's interior.
notes
The opening part explains the mysterious thumping sound during Joelle's bathroom scene. It's curious how the narration lapses into first person just once. The second section explains at least a few things, eg the nightmare [p 61-63] is Hal's and not Troelsch's. And of course fills in many details about Himself's suicide and Orin's absence,and Hal's trauma.
p 258-383
this section in 3 parts
p 258-270
YDAU [2009] Nov 6
place Port Washington Tennis Academy [Long Island]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The ETA team is at Port Washington Tennis Academy [PWTA] for a meet. In any age group. the top 6 players from each team play one another, and then the top 3 doubles teams, which are usually comprised of the top 6 players, except for infrequent cases like Schacht and Troeltsch who grew up together playing doubles. There are 108 total matches, and each year the overall losing team has to sing an embarrassing song, and an even more embarrassing transaction is rumored to take place between the two headmasters. Last year ETA lost, but that was before they had John Wayne,and before Hal's competitive explosion. John Wayne, originally from Montcerf Quebec, near the 'infamously rupture-prone Mercier Dam,'is ranked #2 in the US, and will probably go to #1 at the WhataBurger, where he'll play the #1 player, who seems to be avoiding him. Hal has gone from 43rd to 4th nationally in a year. James Incandenza had spotted John Wayne at age 6, while making a film about people other than the actor with the name John Wayne. Currently Wayne is beating his opponent handily, with his emotionless precision. Pemulis and Schacht are on their way to their matches, and Pemulis is vomiting from pre-game nerves [this match is a must win for him to go to the WhataBurger]. Mario is following them trying to accumulate footage for his annual documentary. The PWTA players all have matching outfits, where the ETA players wear a mix and match of free stuff from corporate sponsors. Schacht has stopped caring about winning [and hence playing better] since his knee injury. Schacht thinks that Pemulis' pre-game nausea has something to do with his withdrawal from substance use before play. Schacht ingests the occasional substance, but doesn't care for the way Pemulis et al ingest/recover from substances and have a whole jargon around it. Schacht is warming up with his opponent, and his knee is OK on the indoor composite surfaces [unlike ETA's outdoor cement courts, which are about to become indoor with the yearly inflation of the lung which requires an ATHSCME fan and helicopters]. Hal considers Schacht's new laissez-faire attitude as a surrender of childhood promise for adult mediocrity, but considers him pleasanter to be around since the knee, and a dependable designated driver. He even sort of admires his stoic relinquishment of the Show, but can't relate it exactly because he's pretty much the opposite. They tacitly agree to not talk about it, or what Schacht thinks of Hal's devolution from occasional to compulsive substance use--which is that Hal's explosion in the rankings has to be a temporary thing,and something has to give. Meanwhile, as Schacht is about to begin playing, Hal is handily beating his opponent.
p 270-281
YDAU [2009] Nov
Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
[Much of this section is Gately's stream of consciousness]
Gately is having his patience tested by new resident Geoffrey Day, who is complaining to anyone within earshot about the fact that he is being asked to live by a bunch of cliches-- 'one day at a time, easy does it..'[etc] Day is driving the other residents crazy, and they look to Gately who is the resident staffer on duty for help. Day was a junior college professor 'who taught something horseshit sounding like social historicity' and 'manned the helm of a Scholarly Quaterly' and had recently driven his Saab through the window of a sporting goods store, while on Quaaludes. According the Gene M [Gately's counselor], it's the educated newcomers who are the worst, because they identify themselves with their heads, and that's where the 'Disease makes its command headquarters.' Gately has just pulled all night duty and then gone to his janitor shift 4-7am and now is back until 9am. In the morning Gately often still feels a sense of loss [of 'what they'd thought was their one true best friend and lover.'] Gately has seen people like Day before,either they leave early and wind up dead or in jail,or they break down and really ask for help. He thinks Day is the former, but tries to remember that Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. His gifts as a burglar helped him to 'screen input, to do sensory triage' even during his 9 months as a resident. His counselor Gene M [Eugenio Martinez] called Gately's selective attention into question, saying it could be the Spider doing the screening. Gately has been clean for 421 days. Geoffrey Day turns from Charlotte Treat, looking for the next person to engage and piss off, and thus prove he doesn't belong here. Burt F. Smith is 45 going on 70, and lost his hands and feet when he was mugged and left for dead on Xmas eve; he's on about his 50th attempt at sobriety. Gately wonders what color he'd call the ceiling if he had to [white/gray/brown/yellow]. Emil Minty is a former smack-addict punk with an orange mohawk. Gately likes Bruce Green, because he keeps 'his map shut' most of the time. Randy Lenz was a small time coke dealer wanted by both sides of the law, after he freebased 100 g of coke that he was fronted as part of a sting operation. Lenz wears sportcoats and Gately figures him for a knife carrier. Charlotte Treat has crayon-red hair, ghastly wounds in her cheeks, and is a former prostitute with HIV. Gately is 29, and his intimidating size was clearly a factor in him getting the staffer job. Gately is on duty until Pat comes back at 9am. Gately thinks of what he'd say to Day about cliches;that they're soothing, common sense, and that they 'license the universal assent that drowns out silence' and silence is 'pure Spider-food.' Gately thinks that Day will provoke Lenz in order to get himself kicked out and then blame his relapse on Ennet House. Ennet House 'reeks of passing time,' and Lenz is obsessed with knowing the exact time, and gets angry when Day gives him the time as 'right around 0830.' Gately tries to defuse the situation by giving Lenz the exact time.
YDAU [2009] Nov 6
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The team returns triumphant from Port Washington. John Wayne and Hal both won easily as did the doubles and B teams. PWTA had to sing the silly song this year. Coyle, Troeltsch and Schacht all lost, and Schacht doesn't seem to mind. Pemulis won by default when his opponent became disoriented and decided the balls were too pretty to hit, and then later told the Headmaster's wife that he'd 'always wanted to do her from behind.' On the bus on the way back Hal is reading an SAT prep guide, Mario is playing rock-paper-scissors with a dejected Coyle, and Tavis is talking nonstop at John Wayne who is staring out the window. Bernadette Longley gets very upset because someone has circulated a pamphlet referring to her back-of-the-bus tryst with Keith Freer. They all get to have Mega-breakfast at Denny's next to Empire Waste at 0030.
notes
Burt F. smith was clearly a victim of 'yrstruly' and his crew from the episode on p 128-135. The fact that addiction is nicknamed 'the Spider' may explain, if only metaphorically the Incandenzas' arachnophobia.
p 258-270
YDAU [2009] Nov 6
place Port Washington Tennis Academy [Long Island]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The ETA team is at Port Washington Tennis Academy [PWTA] for a meet. In any age group. the top 6 players from each team play one another, and then the top 3 doubles teams, which are usually comprised of the top 6 players, except for infrequent cases like Schacht and Troeltsch who grew up together playing doubles. There are 108 total matches, and each year the overall losing team has to sing an embarrassing song, and an even more embarrassing transaction is rumored to take place between the two headmasters. Last year ETA lost, but that was before they had John Wayne,and before Hal's competitive explosion. John Wayne, originally from Montcerf Quebec, near the 'infamously rupture-prone Mercier Dam,'is ranked #2 in the US, and will probably go to #1 at the WhataBurger, where he'll play the #1 player, who seems to be avoiding him. Hal has gone from 43rd to 4th nationally in a year. James Incandenza had spotted John Wayne at age 6, while making a film about people other than the actor with the name John Wayne. Currently Wayne is beating his opponent handily, with his emotionless precision. Pemulis and Schacht are on their way to their matches, and Pemulis is vomiting from pre-game nerves [this match is a must win for him to go to the WhataBurger]. Mario is following them trying to accumulate footage for his annual documentary. The PWTA players all have matching outfits, where the ETA players wear a mix and match of free stuff from corporate sponsors. Schacht has stopped caring about winning [and hence playing better] since his knee injury. Schacht thinks that Pemulis' pre-game nausea has something to do with his withdrawal from substance use before play. Schacht ingests the occasional substance, but doesn't care for the way Pemulis et al ingest/recover from substances and have a whole jargon around it. Schacht is warming up with his opponent, and his knee is OK on the indoor composite surfaces [unlike ETA's outdoor cement courts, which are about to become indoor with the yearly inflation of the lung which requires an ATHSCME fan and helicopters]. Hal considers Schacht's new laissez-faire attitude as a surrender of childhood promise for adult mediocrity, but considers him pleasanter to be around since the knee, and a dependable designated driver. He even sort of admires his stoic relinquishment of the Show, but can't relate it exactly because he's pretty much the opposite. They tacitly agree to not talk about it, or what Schacht thinks of Hal's devolution from occasional to compulsive substance use--which is that Hal's explosion in the rankings has to be a temporary thing,and something has to give. Meanwhile, as Schacht is about to begin playing, Hal is handily beating his opponent.
p 270-281
YDAU [2009] Nov
Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
[Much of this section is Gately's stream of consciousness]
Gately is having his patience tested by new resident Geoffrey Day, who is complaining to anyone within earshot about the fact that he is being asked to live by a bunch of cliches-- 'one day at a time, easy does it..'[etc] Day is driving the other residents crazy, and they look to Gately who is the resident staffer on duty for help. Day was a junior college professor 'who taught something horseshit sounding like social historicity' and 'manned the helm of a Scholarly Quaterly' and had recently driven his Saab through the window of a sporting goods store, while on Quaaludes. According the Gene M [Gately's counselor], it's the educated newcomers who are the worst, because they identify themselves with their heads, and that's where the 'Disease makes its command headquarters.' Gately has just pulled all night duty and then gone to his janitor shift 4-7am and now is back until 9am. In the morning Gately often still feels a sense of loss [of 'what they'd thought was their one true best friend and lover.'] Gately has seen people like Day before,either they leave early and wind up dead or in jail,or they break down and really ask for help. He thinks Day is the former, but tries to remember that Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. His gifts as a burglar helped him to 'screen input, to do sensory triage' even during his 9 months as a resident. His counselor Gene M [Eugenio Martinez] called Gately's selective attention into question, saying it could be the Spider doing the screening. Gately has been clean for 421 days. Geoffrey Day turns from Charlotte Treat, looking for the next person to engage and piss off, and thus prove he doesn't belong here. Burt F. Smith is 45 going on 70, and lost his hands and feet when he was mugged and left for dead on Xmas eve; he's on about his 50th attempt at sobriety. Gately wonders what color he'd call the ceiling if he had to [white/gray/brown/yellow]. Emil Minty is a former smack-addict punk with an orange mohawk. Gately likes Bruce Green, because he keeps 'his map shut' most of the time. Randy Lenz was a small time coke dealer wanted by both sides of the law, after he freebased 100 g of coke that he was fronted as part of a sting operation. Lenz wears sportcoats and Gately figures him for a knife carrier. Charlotte Treat has crayon-red hair, ghastly wounds in her cheeks, and is a former prostitute with HIV. Gately is 29, and his intimidating size was clearly a factor in him getting the staffer job. Gately is on duty until Pat comes back at 9am. Gately thinks of what he'd say to Day about cliches;that they're soothing, common sense, and that they 'license the universal assent that drowns out silence' and silence is 'pure Spider-food.' Gately thinks that Day will provoke Lenz in order to get himself kicked out and then blame his relapse on Ennet House. Ennet House 'reeks of passing time,' and Lenz is obsessed with knowing the exact time, and gets angry when Day gives him the time as 'right around 0830.' Gately tries to defuse the situation by giving Lenz the exact time.
YDAU [2009] Nov 6
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The team returns triumphant from Port Washington. John Wayne and Hal both won easily as did the doubles and B teams. PWTA had to sing the silly song this year. Coyle, Troeltsch and Schacht all lost, and Schacht doesn't seem to mind. Pemulis won by default when his opponent became disoriented and decided the balls were too pretty to hit, and then later told the Headmaster's wife that he'd 'always wanted to do her from behind.' On the bus on the way back Hal is reading an SAT prep guide, Mario is playing rock-paper-scissors with a dejected Coyle, and Tavis is talking nonstop at John Wayne who is staring out the window. Bernadette Longley gets very upset because someone has circulated a pamphlet referring to her back-of-the-bus tryst with Keith Freer. They all get to have Mega-breakfast at Denny's next to Empire Waste at 0030.
notes
Burt F. smith was clearly a victim of 'yrstruly' and his crew from the episode on p 128-135. The fact that addiction is nicknamed 'the Spider' may explain, if only metaphorically the Incandenzas' arachnophobia.
p 283-306
this section in 2 parts
p 283-299
no year--backstory
ETA and Boston University
narrated in third person
Orin got out of competitive tennis at age 17 during a period of 'great pre-Experialist upheaval.' He was ranked in the low 70s nationwide, meaning that he had little hope of making the 'Show' and had to settle either for college tennis, or for 'Eurasian satellite pro tour.' Orin decides to attend college at Boston University, much to his mother's delight. Himself probably thought it best for Orin to 'get the hell out of Dodge' but had little input to offer. The Moms on the other hand, passive-aggressively lobbied for Orin to be a away from home, but close enough that he could return when desirable. Orin was easily the best player on the BU team [the low 70s national ranking put him well above anyone at BU] and he immediately exhausted the usefulness of the coach, who seemed as interested in the Moms, as he was in Orin. Tavis had also contributed to getting Orin into BU's program on full scholarship, but it is suggested here that resentment may have played some part in Orin's lack of acknowledgment. Tavis had taken on the the Headmaster duties just as Orin had moved out, during a period when Himself was either shut in his editing studio or in rehab. CT acknowledged that people might resent him, but was also aware that someone had to fill the void. By his third week at college, Orin was attempting a defection to college football. The reason for this was despite his total ignorance of football's rules etc, he had developed an enormous crush on a 'certain big-haired baton twirler.' Although Orin had some experience in this department, he had never been 'decapitated' before. He and his roommate had invented the epithet, 'PGOAT, for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time.' She was 'almost grotesquely lovely' and inspired in Orin and every other male in her vicinity a 'deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty' [aka Actaeon Complex.] None of the players had gotten close enough to hear her Southern accent, let alone asked her to dance. Needless to say, the tennis team had no cheerleaders, and so Orin pulls some strings to get a tryout, which is a disaster-- the football coach tells him he has 'some kind of empty swinging sack where his balls ought to be.' As fate would have it, just as Orin was leaving the field in humiliation, the team's punter was rushed by an over zealous tackle and put out of commission. Orin returns the wayward ball by punting it, and the jaws drop all around. Within weeks the 'empty swinging sack' comments were apologized for and Orin was on his way to becoming a football star. Also he was on his way to 'the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship' of his life as his gazes at the baton twirler began to be reciprocated, and by Columbus Day, *she* approached *him* asking him to autograph a deflated football, he had kicked a hole in, for 'her own personal Daddy' a low pH chemist named Joe Lon van Dyne from Shiny Prize KY. Orin is disarmed and abandons his practiced seduction routine in favor of blurting out that punting is nearly spiritual for him. He has no problem keeping her interest, on account of the fact that no other males dare approach her. By the end of football season, Orin and Joelle had moved in together. Joelle had done Thanksgiving at ETA and Orin Xmas at the von Dyne home in Kentucky, each surviving the dread induced by the Moms and the Personal Daddy. That New Year's Eve [the last before Subsidization] was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest cocaine. He had declined to take part [if for no other reason- to be mindful of his urine] but not in a 'judgmental or killjoy' way. He actually liked being with her when she was high. Joelle was studying film, and Orin turned her on to art film, partially by way of Himself. Eventually Himself brings Joelle in as an understudy and eventually as an actress [under a pseudonym.] After Orin's only mildly disappointing sophomore season, he went with Joelle and Himself to Toronto to make a film and ingest excessive amounts of alcohol. The next summer Joelle quit her baton twirling and left Orin behind to travel with Himself and make another film. Orin while recuperating from surgery, apparently did a bit of philandering. But Joelle's true ambitions were for behind the camera, and she began filming him, and to his surprise he found her little mini-films highly captivating. Joelle had been 'a maiden' when Orin met her, having repelled every male with her excessive prettiness. Joelle cleans house with a fervor reminiscent of the Moms, the mess 'just disappears sometime during the night.' Orin becomes obsessive about her little 10-second clips of him punting, including one where the recordable disc runs out just as he's about to get pummeled after a bad snap from the center.
p 299-306
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the metro train, after holing up in a bathroom for a week drinking codeine cough syrup. After he had stolen a woman's purse that contained her artificial heart, and also the incident with Wo and Bobby C, he cannot show his face in public and thus cannot score drugs from any of his usual connections. For a while he had lived in a dumpster and relied on a few lowlifes to score for him, but eventually those sources were eliminated and Poor Tony is forced to rely on the cough syrup. He eventually moves into the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library because of his incontinence plus his hope of getting his social security check. He sat on the toilet day and night, staving off withdrawal with the cough syrup. [In a passage almost too brutal to summarize] tony goes from bad to worse, to beyond worse as the Withdrawal decimates his body and eventually his mind. He has visions of his dead father and fixates on the sound of the word 'Zuckung.' On his second day after the syrup runs out, he decides to venture to Cambridge in search of the Antitoi brothers, whom he thinks he can maybe turn to for a favor. On the train he imagines ants are crawling over him; he keeps his screams silent, but people keep their distance on account of the incontinence etc. He eventually has a seizure and swallows his tongue while hallucinating that his father is looking up his dress.
notes
The roots of Madam Psychosis and her veil are perhaps laid bare here, in the inference that her beauty was so extreme as to be repellent. Also the fact that her mini-films are so compelling seems to signify something more than just Orin's narcissism. And of course Joelle's similarity to the Moms is as curious as her relation to her own Personal Daddy. Poor Tony of p 128-135 is perhaps drawn closer to the ETA story by way of the Antitoi brothers who supplied the DMZ to Pemulis [p 211-219] just a week prior to this episode.
p 283-299
no year--backstory
ETA and Boston University
narrated in third person
Orin got out of competitive tennis at age 17 during a period of 'great pre-Experialist upheaval.' He was ranked in the low 70s nationwide, meaning that he had little hope of making the 'Show' and had to settle either for college tennis, or for 'Eurasian satellite pro tour.' Orin decides to attend college at Boston University, much to his mother's delight. Himself probably thought it best for Orin to 'get the hell out of Dodge' but had little input to offer. The Moms on the other hand, passive-aggressively lobbied for Orin to be a away from home, but close enough that he could return when desirable. Orin was easily the best player on the BU team [the low 70s national ranking put him well above anyone at BU] and he immediately exhausted the usefulness of the coach, who seemed as interested in the Moms, as he was in Orin. Tavis had also contributed to getting Orin into BU's program on full scholarship, but it is suggested here that resentment may have played some part in Orin's lack of acknowledgment. Tavis had taken on the the Headmaster duties just as Orin had moved out, during a period when Himself was either shut in his editing studio or in rehab. CT acknowledged that people might resent him, but was also aware that someone had to fill the void. By his third week at college, Orin was attempting a defection to college football. The reason for this was despite his total ignorance of football's rules etc, he had developed an enormous crush on a 'certain big-haired baton twirler.' Although Orin had some experience in this department, he had never been 'decapitated' before. He and his roommate had invented the epithet, 'PGOAT, for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time.' She was 'almost grotesquely lovely' and inspired in Orin and every other male in her vicinity a 'deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty' [aka Actaeon Complex.] None of the players had gotten close enough to hear her Southern accent, let alone asked her to dance. Needless to say, the tennis team had no cheerleaders, and so Orin pulls some strings to get a tryout, which is a disaster-- the football coach tells him he has 'some kind of empty swinging sack where his balls ought to be.' As fate would have it, just as Orin was leaving the field in humiliation, the team's punter was rushed by an over zealous tackle and put out of commission. Orin returns the wayward ball by punting it, and the jaws drop all around. Within weeks the 'empty swinging sack' comments were apologized for and Orin was on his way to becoming a football star. Also he was on his way to 'the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship' of his life as his gazes at the baton twirler began to be reciprocated, and by Columbus Day, *she* approached *him* asking him to autograph a deflated football, he had kicked a hole in, for 'her own personal Daddy' a low pH chemist named Joe Lon van Dyne from Shiny Prize KY. Orin is disarmed and abandons his practiced seduction routine in favor of blurting out that punting is nearly spiritual for him. He has no problem keeping her interest, on account of the fact that no other males dare approach her. By the end of football season, Orin and Joelle had moved in together. Joelle had done Thanksgiving at ETA and Orin Xmas at the von Dyne home in Kentucky, each surviving the dread induced by the Moms and the Personal Daddy. That New Year's Eve [the last before Subsidization] was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest cocaine. He had declined to take part [if for no other reason- to be mindful of his urine] but not in a 'judgmental or killjoy' way. He actually liked being with her when she was high. Joelle was studying film, and Orin turned her on to art film, partially by way of Himself. Eventually Himself brings Joelle in as an understudy and eventually as an actress [under a pseudonym.] After Orin's only mildly disappointing sophomore season, he went with Joelle and Himself to Toronto to make a film and ingest excessive amounts of alcohol. The next summer Joelle quit her baton twirling and left Orin behind to travel with Himself and make another film. Orin while recuperating from surgery, apparently did a bit of philandering. But Joelle's true ambitions were for behind the camera, and she began filming him, and to his surprise he found her little mini-films highly captivating. Joelle had been 'a maiden' when Orin met her, having repelled every male with her excessive prettiness. Joelle cleans house with a fervor reminiscent of the Moms, the mess 'just disappears sometime during the night.' Orin becomes obsessive about her little 10-second clips of him punting, including one where the recordable disc runs out just as he's about to get pummeled after a bad snap from the center.
p 299-306
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the metro train, after holing up in a bathroom for a week drinking codeine cough syrup. After he had stolen a woman's purse that contained her artificial heart, and also the incident with Wo and Bobby C, he cannot show his face in public and thus cannot score drugs from any of his usual connections. For a while he had lived in a dumpster and relied on a few lowlifes to score for him, but eventually those sources were eliminated and Poor Tony is forced to rely on the cough syrup. He eventually moves into the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library because of his incontinence plus his hope of getting his social security check. He sat on the toilet day and night, staving off withdrawal with the cough syrup. [In a passage almost too brutal to summarize] tony goes from bad to worse, to beyond worse as the Withdrawal decimates his body and eventually his mind. He has visions of his dead father and fixates on the sound of the word 'Zuckung.' On his second day after the syrup runs out, he decides to venture to Cambridge in search of the Antitoi brothers, whom he thinks he can maybe turn to for a favor. On the train he imagines ants are crawling over him; he keeps his screams silent, but people keep their distance on account of the incontinence etc. He eventually has a seizure and swallows his tongue while hallucinating that his father is looking up his dress.
notes
The roots of Madam Psychosis and her veil are perhaps laid bare here, in the inference that her beauty was so extreme as to be repellent. Also the fact that her mini-films are so compelling seems to signify something more than just Orin's narcissism. And of course Joelle's similarity to the Moms is as curious as her relation to her own Personal Daddy. Poor Tony of p 128-135 is perhaps drawn closer to the ETA story by way of the Antitoi brothers who supplied the DMZ to Pemulis [p 211-219] just a week prior to this episode.
p 306-321
this section in 3 parts with a lengthy footnote [p 1004-1022]
p 306-312
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The prorectors at ETA are required to teach one academic class per semester, and these classes tend to be popular electives among the older ETA students because the classes like the prorectors tend to be kind of nuts. For example Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Throde's classes for the past 3 years. This year's 'The Personal is the Political is the Psychopathological: The Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds' in which the exam asks what does an agoraphobic kleptomaniac do to overcome that s/he cannot leave the house but must steal. Schacht is about to loop the d in 'mail fraud' when Jim Troeltsch's pseudo-radio program comes over the intercom as it does twice weekly in the last period of the day. Troeltsch knows that he'll never make the Show, but has his sights set on broadcasting. Since the sports portion is mostly just reading the scores of matches from the week, Troeltsch invents ever more colorful synonyms for 'beat' and 'got beat by.' Of all the prorectors' classes, the only challenging one for Hal thus far has been Thierry Potrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Quebecois History from Frotenac through the Age of Interdependence.' Although he initially found the topic dull and even distasteful, he has developed 'something of a layman's savvy for Canadianism and ONANite politics.' He sees no way Orin could have known he was taking the class, when he called to enlist Hal's help with Separatism [see footnote below]. Hal had found most of the early Quebec stuff to be dry and repetitive, but as the class started to cover more contemporary stuff, Hal finds it 'more high concept and less dull' than he expected, even though he considers himself apolitical. He is 'both com-and repelled' by the fact that the topic provokes in him a 'queasy feeling' in a 'furtively nauseous kind of sense.' After the Reconfiguration, annexation, the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity [or from US perspective, the Great Concavity] and the establishment of the ONAN, Quebecois separatists had turned their attention away from the rest of Canada [who for the most part took all this 'like good sports'] toward the US. One notable stunt was hauling giant mirrors in front of northbound cars in the region of the Concavity, thus scaring them off the road trying to avoid what the driver assumed would be a head-on collision. It was all a mystery until a drug-addicted would-be suicide drove her car into one of the mirrors instead of veering off the road, much to the embarrassment of Rodney Tine, chief of Unspecified Services who had publicly pressed for anti-driving-when-drowsy public service spots.
p 312-317
no date-- backstory
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's 'first birth' happens when the 'tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous' Avril is only 7 months pregnant and not showing. Himself thinks she is dying when her water breaks, and luckily Charles Tavis is there on an extended visit, and gets her to a hospital where Mario is 'scraped out...like the meat of an oyster.' His birth was a complete surprise, and his first months are spent in incubators. He is given the name of his father's grandfather who had invented X-Ray Specs, and left his fortune to his son enabling him to retire from his sad acting career and drink himself to death. Mario's premature and 'arachnoidal birth' left him with a host of physical challenges, and his parents soon became familiar with the prefix 'brady-' which means slow developing. His arms are S shaped [without proper hands] and usable for rudimentary forms of eating, slapping at doorknobs, and tossing tennis balls short distances, and they're pain-resistant, which fact is exploited by his brother Orin. His feet are square blocks that are not great for balance [or much else] which means that Mario falls face first occasionally, in part accounting for his flattened nose which caused breathing trouble, especially at night. His eyes protrude a little further than normal and one eyelid is prosthetic [the original had stuck and peeled away at birth] and has long horsehair lashes. His skin is gray-green with a bark-like reptilian texture, and his thin hair is styled in a comb-over. Mario is slow but *not* retarded. Mario and Himself are inseparable; Mario serves as honorary production assistant, carrying his lenses in a backpack, and occasionally bringing a 'Big Red Soda Water...to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel's hall.' When required to stand upright on a shoot, Mario is supported by a police lock, a steel pole that attaches his vest to a slotted lead block on the floor. For his 13th birthday, his father built and willed him a Bolex camera bolted to an aviator's helmet that fits over his oversized head like a scuba mask, and is controlled by a foot treadle. After some practice this has allowed Mario to become the documentary filmer at ETA. Mario is well-liked even idealized by Hal as some kind of walking miracle. Hal fears that the Moms sees Mario as the true prodigy of the family, although his 'academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each AM without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry.' Hal suspects that it was Mario and the not the Moms who obtained for him his first copies of the unabridged OED. It was the Moms who insisted that Mario live in the subdorms with Hal, but it was Hal who chased off the rep from the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed.
p 317-321
YDAU [2009] Apr 30-May 1
place Tucson AZ
narrated in third person
synopsis:
It's now 'deep at night' as Marathe and Steeply continue their conversation. Marathe suggests that Canadians are not the root of the threat, that the problem is with the USA citizens: 'This is a USA production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the USA. The appetite for the appeal of it: this is also USA.' Marathe refers to the Entertainment as 'samizdat' and asks 'who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons?' He says that it's not necessary for his organization to force anything on Americans, but they simply need to make the Entertainment available and Americans will choose their demise. He asks how USA will protect itself against that-- by killing Quebecois? He says the death itself will be a formality, because the real death is this 'appetite of your people unable to choose appetites.' He says that this is something that DuPlessis taught the cells, but only the AFR understood. He scoffs at President Gentle's claim that someone is to blame saying that that someone had let Americans forget how to choose. Steeply counters this argument saying that 'there are no choices without personal freedom.' But Marathe shrugs this off saying 'your freedom is the freedom-from... but what of the freedom-to?' He then tells a story of a rich father who allowed his children to choose to eat only candy. Steeply asks rhetorically 'no? you say, not children?... you say what your Fortier believes that we *are* children.... and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within arms reach.' Marathe admonishes him for putting words in his mouth. Neither has mentioned how on earth they intend to get down from the mountain in the dark.
p 1004-1022 [footnote 110 from p 311]
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is sitting in his room icing his ankle after his match was truncated because his opponent Pemberton took a ball in the eye. Mario is gone preparing his film for the big post-prandial gala and film fest. There's a message on the machine from Orin asking if Hal had ever noticed that all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' In Mario's closet is a box of postal correspondence that he has rescued from waste baskets [none of it to or from Mario himself] including a quoted letter from the Moms to Orin [addressed as Filbert] from June 20YW-QMD [2006]. The letter is haughty and formal but still reveals that the Moms 'cried like a fool... embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.' The invariant response is also quoted-- a form letter from the New Orleans Saints acknowledging her letter, and including an autographed photo. Orin calls back and proceeds to tell Hal about 'Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7' in which he pretends to be happily married and completely oblivious to the charms of the Subject until she starts to draw it out that he is attracted to her and that this makes him a bad husband and eventually the 'doomed involuntary conflicted good-man's-downfall-type quality' proves irresistible. Hal explains why he's back early, Orin says he might make it to see Hal play at the WhataBurger. Hal asks about the wheelchair-stalkers, but Orin says he hasn't seen them recently. Orin explains that he has called to ask two questions, first what the word 'samizdat' means. Hal rattles off an OED style answer and says that now it pretty much means any kind of politically underground press or the stuff they publish. He says that there's no real samizdat in the US, but perhaps some of the radical Quebecois stuff could be considered ONANite samizdat. Orin asks why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection to samizdat. Hal can't think of an explanation, and suggests Orin speak to the 'one person who's really the person to chat with about all issues Canadian.' Orin says the question is why the Quebecois dropped the independence thing overnight and took up the anti-ONAN, and anti-Reconfiguration activities. Orin says he needs 'depth' from Hal, not expertise, as Hal reminds him that the Moms is the one to talk to. Hal recounts what little he knows, which is that the Quebecois separatists' 'hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything they could work up against ONAN. Just mention 1859 and the Moms' lips disappear.' Hal confesses to a curiosity about the reporter/Subject, but says 'please don't let it just be that you've just discovered she's married with little kids,' and recounts Orin's reputation as 'home-wrecker' and ties it in to Orin's [lack of] relationship to the Moms: 'wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or worse even acknowledge her.' This he connects with Orin's 'rapacious fetish for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe damaging their kids for all time.' Orin lets all of this bounce off of him, and returns the discussion to the separatists. Hal suggests that Orin just tell the reporter that, it's 'wacko' and shrug it off. As Pemulis comes in the room to fetch Hal and his 'Bob Hope' for their planned Interdependence Day Eve excursion, Orin is trying to raise another question-- even though Quebec bears almost the entire brunt of the Concavity, it doesn't really have a chance of convincing Gentle and ONAN to take it back, why don't they use it as a bargaining tool with Canada to get the independence they always wanted, as in take the Concavity off of Canada's hands. And why then are the Quebecois separatists making a point of carrying out anti-ONAN activities in the name of *all* of Canada-- what if they know well that if ONAN sees all of Canada as the culprits they will make things very difficult for Canada, and what if the separatists are actually doing this as some kind of meta-extortion against Canada-- as in let us separate and we'll take full credit for the terrorism. Hal's response is that all of their terrorism has been 'too hapless and small potato for her theory to work.' At which point Orin says that now Hal is with him, and this is where he needs Hal's hope because it was at this point that she raised the issue of the samizdat. At this point the increasingly impatient Pemulis hangs up the phone on Orin.
notes
The backstory on Mario clears up a lot of the weirdness we've encountered thus far. Is Mario DFW's nod to southern gothic? The other sections, especially the footnote, draw the story lines inextricably together, around the samizdat. The footnote also explains, at least by Hal's lights, the sad roots of Orin's lechery.
p 306-312
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The prorectors at ETA are required to teach one academic class per semester, and these classes tend to be popular electives among the older ETA students because the classes like the prorectors tend to be kind of nuts. For example Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Throde's classes for the past 3 years. This year's 'The Personal is the Political is the Psychopathological: The Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds' in which the exam asks what does an agoraphobic kleptomaniac do to overcome that s/he cannot leave the house but must steal. Schacht is about to loop the d in 'mail fraud' when Jim Troeltsch's pseudo-radio program comes over the intercom as it does twice weekly in the last period of the day. Troeltsch knows that he'll never make the Show, but has his sights set on broadcasting. Since the sports portion is mostly just reading the scores of matches from the week, Troeltsch invents ever more colorful synonyms for 'beat' and 'got beat by.' Of all the prorectors' classes, the only challenging one for Hal thus far has been Thierry Potrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Quebecois History from Frotenac through the Age of Interdependence.' Although he initially found the topic dull and even distasteful, he has developed 'something of a layman's savvy for Canadianism and ONANite politics.' He sees no way Orin could have known he was taking the class, when he called to enlist Hal's help with Separatism [see footnote below]. Hal had found most of the early Quebec stuff to be dry and repetitive, but as the class started to cover more contemporary stuff, Hal finds it 'more high concept and less dull' than he expected, even though he considers himself apolitical. He is 'both com-and repelled' by the fact that the topic provokes in him a 'queasy feeling' in a 'furtively nauseous kind of sense.' After the Reconfiguration, annexation, the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity [or from US perspective, the Great Concavity] and the establishment of the ONAN, Quebecois separatists had turned their attention away from the rest of Canada [who for the most part took all this 'like good sports'] toward the US. One notable stunt was hauling giant mirrors in front of northbound cars in the region of the Concavity, thus scaring them off the road trying to avoid what the driver assumed would be a head-on collision. It was all a mystery until a drug-addicted would-be suicide drove her car into one of the mirrors instead of veering off the road, much to the embarrassment of Rodney Tine, chief of Unspecified Services who had publicly pressed for anti-driving-when-drowsy public service spots.
p 312-317
no date-- backstory
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's 'first birth' happens when the 'tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous' Avril is only 7 months pregnant and not showing. Himself thinks she is dying when her water breaks, and luckily Charles Tavis is there on an extended visit, and gets her to a hospital where Mario is 'scraped out...like the meat of an oyster.' His birth was a complete surprise, and his first months are spent in incubators. He is given the name of his father's grandfather who had invented X-Ray Specs, and left his fortune to his son enabling him to retire from his sad acting career and drink himself to death. Mario's premature and 'arachnoidal birth' left him with a host of physical challenges, and his parents soon became familiar with the prefix 'brady-' which means slow developing. His arms are S shaped [without proper hands] and usable for rudimentary forms of eating, slapping at doorknobs, and tossing tennis balls short distances, and they're pain-resistant, which fact is exploited by his brother Orin. His feet are square blocks that are not great for balance [or much else] which means that Mario falls face first occasionally, in part accounting for his flattened nose which caused breathing trouble, especially at night. His eyes protrude a little further than normal and one eyelid is prosthetic [the original had stuck and peeled away at birth] and has long horsehair lashes. His skin is gray-green with a bark-like reptilian texture, and his thin hair is styled in a comb-over. Mario is slow but *not* retarded. Mario and Himself are inseparable; Mario serves as honorary production assistant, carrying his lenses in a backpack, and occasionally bringing a 'Big Red Soda Water...to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel's hall.' When required to stand upright on a shoot, Mario is supported by a police lock, a steel pole that attaches his vest to a slotted lead block on the floor. For his 13th birthday, his father built and willed him a Bolex camera bolted to an aviator's helmet that fits over his oversized head like a scuba mask, and is controlled by a foot treadle. After some practice this has allowed Mario to become the documentary filmer at ETA. Mario is well-liked even idealized by Hal as some kind of walking miracle. Hal fears that the Moms sees Mario as the true prodigy of the family, although his 'academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each AM without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry.' Hal suspects that it was Mario and the not the Moms who obtained for him his first copies of the unabridged OED. It was the Moms who insisted that Mario live in the subdorms with Hal, but it was Hal who chased off the rep from the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed.
p 317-321
YDAU [2009] Apr 30-May 1
place Tucson AZ
narrated in third person
synopsis:
It's now 'deep at night' as Marathe and Steeply continue their conversation. Marathe suggests that Canadians are not the root of the threat, that the problem is with the USA citizens: 'This is a USA production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the USA. The appetite for the appeal of it: this is also USA.' Marathe refers to the Entertainment as 'samizdat' and asks 'who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons?' He says that it's not necessary for his organization to force anything on Americans, but they simply need to make the Entertainment available and Americans will choose their demise. He asks how USA will protect itself against that-- by killing Quebecois? He says the death itself will be a formality, because the real death is this 'appetite of your people unable to choose appetites.' He says that this is something that DuPlessis taught the cells, but only the AFR understood. He scoffs at President Gentle's claim that someone is to blame saying that that someone had let Americans forget how to choose. Steeply counters this argument saying that 'there are no choices without personal freedom.' But Marathe shrugs this off saying 'your freedom is the freedom-from... but what of the freedom-to?' He then tells a story of a rich father who allowed his children to choose to eat only candy. Steeply asks rhetorically 'no? you say, not children?... you say what your Fortier believes that we *are* children.... and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within arms reach.' Marathe admonishes him for putting words in his mouth. Neither has mentioned how on earth they intend to get down from the mountain in the dark.
p 1004-1022 [footnote 110 from p 311]
YDAU [2009] Nov 7
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is sitting in his room icing his ankle after his match was truncated because his opponent Pemberton took a ball in the eye. Mario is gone preparing his film for the big post-prandial gala and film fest. There's a message on the machine from Orin asking if Hal had ever noticed that all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' In Mario's closet is a box of postal correspondence that he has rescued from waste baskets [none of it to or from Mario himself] including a quoted letter from the Moms to Orin [addressed as Filbert] from June 20YW-QMD [2006]. The letter is haughty and formal but still reveals that the Moms 'cried like a fool... embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.' The invariant response is also quoted-- a form letter from the New Orleans Saints acknowledging her letter, and including an autographed photo. Orin calls back and proceeds to tell Hal about 'Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7' in which he pretends to be happily married and completely oblivious to the charms of the Subject until she starts to draw it out that he is attracted to her and that this makes him a bad husband and eventually the 'doomed involuntary conflicted good-man's-downfall-type quality' proves irresistible. Hal explains why he's back early, Orin says he might make it to see Hal play at the WhataBurger. Hal asks about the wheelchair-stalkers, but Orin says he hasn't seen them recently. Orin explains that he has called to ask two questions, first what the word 'samizdat' means. Hal rattles off an OED style answer and says that now it pretty much means any kind of politically underground press or the stuff they publish. He says that there's no real samizdat in the US, but perhaps some of the radical Quebecois stuff could be considered ONANite samizdat. Orin asks why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection to samizdat. Hal can't think of an explanation, and suggests Orin speak to the 'one person who's really the person to chat with about all issues Canadian.' Orin says the question is why the Quebecois dropped the independence thing overnight and took up the anti-ONAN, and anti-Reconfiguration activities. Orin says he needs 'depth' from Hal, not expertise, as Hal reminds him that the Moms is the one to talk to. Hal recounts what little he knows, which is that the Quebecois separatists' 'hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything they could work up against ONAN. Just mention 1859 and the Moms' lips disappear.' Hal confesses to a curiosity about the reporter/Subject, but says 'please don't let it just be that you've just discovered she's married with little kids,' and recounts Orin's reputation as 'home-wrecker' and ties it in to Orin's [lack of] relationship to the Moms: 'wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or worse even acknowledge her.' This he connects with Orin's 'rapacious fetish for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe damaging their kids for all time.' Orin lets all of this bounce off of him, and returns the discussion to the separatists. Hal suggests that Orin just tell the reporter that, it's 'wacko' and shrug it off. As Pemulis comes in the room to fetch Hal and his 'Bob Hope' for their planned Interdependence Day Eve excursion, Orin is trying to raise another question-- even though Quebec bears almost the entire brunt of the Concavity, it doesn't really have a chance of convincing Gentle and ONAN to take it back, why don't they use it as a bargaining tool with Canada to get the independence they always wanted, as in take the Concavity off of Canada's hands. And why then are the Quebecois separatists making a point of carrying out anti-ONAN activities in the name of *all* of Canada-- what if they know well that if ONAN sees all of Canada as the culprits they will make things very difficult for Canada, and what if the separatists are actually doing this as some kind of meta-extortion against Canada-- as in let us separate and we'll take full credit for the terrorism. Hal's response is that all of their terrorism has been 'too hapless and small potato for her theory to work.' At which point Orin says that now Hal is with him, and this is where he needs Hal's hope because it was at this point that she raised the issue of the samizdat. At this point the increasingly impatient Pemulis hangs up the phone on Orin.
notes
The backstory on Mario clears up a lot of the weirdness we've encountered thus far. Is Mario DFW's nod to southern gothic? The other sections, especially the footnote, draw the story lines inextricably together, around the samizdat. The footnote also explains, at least by Hal's lights, the sad roots of Orin's lechery.
p 321-379
this section in 8 parts
p 321-342
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place ETA
narrated in third person [revealed to be Hal's transcription]
synopsis:
This section lays out the ground rules for a game played by younger kids at ETA called Eschaton. While he didn't invent it, Pemulis, when he was 12, had 'helped make it way more compelling.' The game requires 8-12 players and 400 old tennis balls, representing nuclear warheads. The players are divided into teams representing nations/alliances--AMNAT, SOVWAR, REDCHI, LIBSYR, or IRLYBSYR, and sometimes SOUTHAF and INDPAK. Distribution of the warheads/balls requires a knowledge of calculus, and a computer armed with number crunching software. Different T-shirts and wrist bands are distributed throughout each team's map to signify metropolitan areas and other strategic areas. The warheads can launched only with a racquet [requiring good lobbing skills] which is why the academy tacitly permits the game. This year's gamemaster is Otis P. Lord, whose responsibilities are to be statistician and also to come up with the 'Triggering Mechanism' that starts the game-- an impossibly convoluted set of circumstances which in the end requires AMNAT to initiate attacks against SOVWAR. One might expect that the game consists of 'warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place' but in reality an Eschaton game more resembles a restrained game of chess. The Nov 8 game proceeds with even more 'probity and cold deliberation' than is the norm. Since 11/8 is a mandatory R&R day, Hal watches the game with Troeltsch [who is calling the game as announcer] and Pemulis [who has ingested Tenuate] s Hal is suppressing the urge to get high for the second time today, due to his distaste for doing so in public, especially in front of the 'little buddies.' There is a mysterious mention of an 'idling Ford sedan... conspicuous for the excruciated full color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of it's right rear door.' About half the megatonnage has been expended and SOVWAR [Sleepy TP Peterson] petitions to have a meeting with AMNAT [LaMont Chu] to avoid an all out escalation, that would probably ensure that neither won the game. While this is happening REDCHI sends a warhead lob to INDPAK, and there is some disagreement as to whether it was a direct hit, which would be Lord's call, but his attention was elsewhere at the time. Lord appeals to the Eschaton guru Pemulis for an independent ruling, but Pemulis refuses. There is then an argument over whether as INDPAK's Penn suggests that the snow on the court would diffuse the effects of the warhead. Pemulis objects strenuously saying that it's 'snowing on the goddamn *map,* not the *territory*' Hal decides to smoke the pot after all. Ingersoll [IRLIBSYR] decides, in order to prevent the AMNAT/SOVWAR summit, and to everyone's surprise, to send a forehand straight into the back of Ann Kittenplan's head. He claims that he has just taken out both AMNAT and SOVWAR's heads of state in the blast kill radius. Lord, over Pemulis' strenuous objections dons the red beanie that means utter global crisis. Pemulis claims that it's a precondition of the game that you can only launch an attack on the territory and not on the players themselves, and that this is the only thing that keeps the game from devolving into chaos. And that's exactly what happens next. The chaos ends when Lord, in a mad dash to try to save the computer from crashing to the ground, stumbles and crashes head first into the monitor screen. Meanwhile 'the idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver's-side window.'
p 343-367
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
Ennet House members are required to attend the 'White Flag' AA meeting once a week in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home off Commonwealth Ave [a few blocks from ETA]. At these meetings the speakers are visitors from another Boston AA group, part of an exchange agreement called a 'Commitment.' John L. from Concord is this week's speaker, and his speech is intercut with an explanation [presumably from Gately's perspective] of what it's like to break down and enter AA. John L tells how he lost his job-- one day he showed up for work, and someone else was there doing his job,and his wife-- same story. Meanwhile the other narrative explains that all the speakers' narratives of decline and fall and surrender are alike. It appears that the Substance is the only consolation against the pain of the Losses [suffered because of the substance] and eventually you can't even get that relief anymore, but still you cannot quit. When you hit bottom you have two choices-- you can 'eliminate your own map for keeps' or you can try AA which seems at best like 'Unitarian happy horseshit' or at worst like 'cover for some glazed and canny cult-type thing.' But then comes the shocking discovery that this 'actually does seem to work.' No one knows how it works, you just have to 'Hang In' and keep repeating the cliches. The second speaker is an Irish immigrant who tells the story of his first solid bowel movement in adult life. Gately's gift as a staffer [besides his formidable size] is his ability to explain to newcomers his own initial skepticism, about how he raised his hand at a meeting early on and said that he hates AA, thinks it's 'horseshit' and 'drivel' and how he hates all the people who propagate it, which ended up making him sort of a hero, since as everyone told him, they had felt exactly the same way but hadn't the guts to say it out loud. However one of the 'Crocodiles' [as the old-timers are called] tells him he might be OK if he Keeps Coming, and starts to *listen* in stead of talk. Gately eventually started hanging out with them at their haunt,the 'Elit Diner' next to Steve's Donuts at Enfield Center, where they sit around and relate stories of all the guys who have Come In only to go back Out There and die or go back to 'not living.' Boston's AA is like a 'benign anarchy' --there are no rules only 'suggestions' and you have to *want* to follow them. But if you don't, no one will kick you out; they won't have to. Early in his AA tenure Gately had a dream where he was kneeling in a church basement with many others, when he notices some of the others are being sucked out through the glass wall silently. He then sees the 'authoritative figure' with a giant shepherd's crook who radiates 'good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience.' The 'slow silent stick with the hook' is what keeps them all kneeling in the basement. Gately didn't have to get assistance from the staffer on 'Dream Duty' to understand the meaning-- AA has 'the planet's most remorselessly hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms' and he was always on duty 'Out There.' Gately likes the new member Ken Erdedy, although he can't relate to the fact that marijuana could be responsible for landing someone in Ennet House. Erdedy along with the brand new girl Joelle, both object to the AA terms, especially 'miracle' and 'for the grace of God.' Gately explains to Erdedy and Joelle that the phrase 'good to hear you' is used instead of 'you spoke well' because it can't be anybody's place to judge, and that it means two things-- that what the speaker said was helpful, and that the listener was glad to be *able* to hear it. Gately has no handle yet on Joelle, who was admitted overnight without being on the waiting list, after a 'horrific O.D.-type situation.' To Gately's utter incomprehension, Joelle complains that 'But for the grace of God' is a subjunctive, and makes no sense introducing anything but a conditional clause. 'I'm here but for the grace of God' is senseless, regardless of whether she 'hears' it or not. Looking into her veil, Gately is baffled and for a moment seized with panic, that he will someday succumb, and get high again.
p 367
no date/place [backstory]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The statue of liberty holds aloft a product, which is changed each Jan. 1 by workers with cranes.
p 367-375
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
The next two speakers at the White Flag meeting demonstrate that it's got to be 'real' to get a response-- the first tries a well rehearsed joke, and the second an unintended one, and the former gets an icy response while the latter has them rolling with laughter. It has to be real and irony-free. Ironically you are encouraged to say stuff like 'one day at a time' and 'I'm an alcoholic' until you believe it. The next speaker commits one of the cardinal sins of AA when she says that she was a dope fiend *because* at 16 she had run away from home and become a stripper. She explicates the story in gory detail of how she was adopted by parents who had a biological daughter who was 'totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic.' The mother was 'crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug' [in Joelle's words] and forced the adopted daughter to drag *it* [as the speaker referred to her sister] along with her on dates. The father had begun coming into their room at night and molesting the catatonic girl, whom he would call 'Raquel' and equip with a rubber Raquel Welch mask. The adopted daughter would have to cover for him, and remove the mask afterwards for fear that if the mother ever found out it would mean that eventually the focus of the father's attentions would shift to her. What eventually led her to run away was, one night she had to turn the light on to get the Raquel wig untwisted and noticed that the catatonic sister had the same look on her face that she remembered from the picture in the hallway of 'some Catholic statue' with a woman 'whose stone robes were half hiked up.' That was 'what caused it' and why she's here recovering from 'One Day at a Time.' Gately's objection to the story is not that he's known plenty of people with worse childhood experiences, but rather that the *cause* of the disease is really just an excuse. At AA you don't ask why.
p 375
YDAU [2009] Apr 30-May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Marathe and Steeply are still in the desert at night,and it's getting cold. Steeply has divulged that he had been on marital leave after his divorce, but is now back in the field undercover as a journalist 'assigned to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles.'
p 375-376
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Himself emerges from the sauna drunk and depressed by the fact that even the avant-garde critics complain that his narrative films lacked plot. Mario and Joelle are probably the only ones who know that Found Drama and anti-confluentialism came out of the resulting conversation between Himself and Kyle. In a footnote [p 1026-1028] the concept of 'Found Drama' is explained by way of excerpts from Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Orin interjects his attempts to charm the interviewer with the details-- that 'Found Dramas' were never actually filmed, but consisted simply of choosing a subject at random from the phone book.
p 376-379
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
Boston's AA doesn't recoil from the idea of responsibility, just cause. The 'meeting's last and maybe best speaker' is a 'round pink girl with no eyelashes' who turned tricks and used freebase cocaine all the way through her pregnancy 'even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit.' Eventually she gives birth to a stillborn infant, and goes into to complete Denial. She carries the baby around with her rolled up in a blanket, trying to turn tricks and score drugs. Eventually she is turned into Social Services and put in a hospital for four months. When she is released and given SSI checks, she turns from crack to alcohol and ends up facing the two option choice on the window-ledge of a welfare-hotel, and here she is trying to live. Her speech invokes rapt attention all around. No cause or excuse, just what happened.
p 379
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]--?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle and Himself were the 'odd couple of libations' down in the weight room-- Himself with his Wild Turkey and Lyle with his diet Coke. Often Mario would struggle to stay awake and accompany them. Himself was a 'profound-personality-change drinker' and one night Mario awoke to hear him saying he would give his marriage a C-. Lyle would take things as they came, and would often get out William Blake and read it to Himself in the voices of cartoon characters.
notes
The Ennet House thread is now inextricably linked to the ETA thread and the Tucson thread by the appearance of Joelle at Ennet House. The reason behind Steeply's interviews with Orin are also made explicit here-- they have to do with Unspecified Services' interest in the film cartridge, of which Orin's father is the putative director.
p 321-342
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place ETA
narrated in third person [revealed to be Hal's transcription]
synopsis:
This section lays out the ground rules for a game played by younger kids at ETA called Eschaton. While he didn't invent it, Pemulis, when he was 12, had 'helped make it way more compelling.' The game requires 8-12 players and 400 old tennis balls, representing nuclear warheads. The players are divided into teams representing nations/alliances--AMNAT, SOVWAR, REDCHI, LIBSYR, or IRLYBSYR, and sometimes SOUTHAF and INDPAK. Distribution of the warheads/balls requires a knowledge of calculus, and a computer armed with number crunching software. Different T-shirts and wrist bands are distributed throughout each team's map to signify metropolitan areas and other strategic areas. The warheads can launched only with a racquet [requiring good lobbing skills] which is why the academy tacitly permits the game. This year's gamemaster is Otis P. Lord, whose responsibilities are to be statistician and also to come up with the 'Triggering Mechanism' that starts the game-- an impossibly convoluted set of circumstances which in the end requires AMNAT to initiate attacks against SOVWAR. One might expect that the game consists of 'warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place' but in reality an Eschaton game more resembles a restrained game of chess. The Nov 8 game proceeds with even more 'probity and cold deliberation' than is the norm. Since 11/8 is a mandatory R&R day, Hal watches the game with Troeltsch [who is calling the game as announcer] and Pemulis [who has ingested Tenuate] s Hal is suppressing the urge to get high for the second time today, due to his distaste for doing so in public, especially in front of the 'little buddies.' There is a mysterious mention of an 'idling Ford sedan... conspicuous for the excruciated full color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of it's right rear door.' About half the megatonnage has been expended and SOVWAR [Sleepy TP Peterson] petitions to have a meeting with AMNAT [LaMont Chu] to avoid an all out escalation, that would probably ensure that neither won the game. While this is happening REDCHI sends a warhead lob to INDPAK, and there is some disagreement as to whether it was a direct hit, which would be Lord's call, but his attention was elsewhere at the time. Lord appeals to the Eschaton guru Pemulis for an independent ruling, but Pemulis refuses. There is then an argument over whether as INDPAK's Penn suggests that the snow on the court would diffuse the effects of the warhead. Pemulis objects strenuously saying that it's 'snowing on the goddamn *map,* not the *territory*' Hal decides to smoke the pot after all. Ingersoll [IRLIBSYR] decides, in order to prevent the AMNAT/SOVWAR summit, and to everyone's surprise, to send a forehand straight into the back of Ann Kittenplan's head. He claims that he has just taken out both AMNAT and SOVWAR's heads of state in the blast kill radius. Lord, over Pemulis' strenuous objections dons the red beanie that means utter global crisis. Pemulis claims that it's a precondition of the game that you can only launch an attack on the territory and not on the players themselves, and that this is the only thing that keeps the game from devolving into chaos. And that's exactly what happens next. The chaos ends when Lord, in a mad dash to try to save the computer from crashing to the ground, stumbles and crashes head first into the monitor screen. Meanwhile 'the idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver's-side window.'
p 343-367
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
Ennet House members are required to attend the 'White Flag' AA meeting once a week in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home off Commonwealth Ave [a few blocks from ETA]. At these meetings the speakers are visitors from another Boston AA group, part of an exchange agreement called a 'Commitment.' John L. from Concord is this week's speaker, and his speech is intercut with an explanation [presumably from Gately's perspective] of what it's like to break down and enter AA. John L tells how he lost his job-- one day he showed up for work, and someone else was there doing his job,and his wife-- same story. Meanwhile the other narrative explains that all the speakers' narratives of decline and fall and surrender are alike. It appears that the Substance is the only consolation against the pain of the Losses [suffered because of the substance] and eventually you can't even get that relief anymore, but still you cannot quit. When you hit bottom you have two choices-- you can 'eliminate your own map for keeps' or you can try AA which seems at best like 'Unitarian happy horseshit' or at worst like 'cover for some glazed and canny cult-type thing.' But then comes the shocking discovery that this 'actually does seem to work.' No one knows how it works, you just have to 'Hang In' and keep repeating the cliches. The second speaker is an Irish immigrant who tells the story of his first solid bowel movement in adult life. Gately's gift as a staffer [besides his formidable size] is his ability to explain to newcomers his own initial skepticism, about how he raised his hand at a meeting early on and said that he hates AA, thinks it's 'horseshit' and 'drivel' and how he hates all the people who propagate it, which ended up making him sort of a hero, since as everyone told him, they had felt exactly the same way but hadn't the guts to say it out loud. However one of the 'Crocodiles' [as the old-timers are called] tells him he might be OK if he Keeps Coming, and starts to *listen* in stead of talk. Gately eventually started hanging out with them at their haunt,the 'Elit Diner' next to Steve's Donuts at Enfield Center, where they sit around and relate stories of all the guys who have Come In only to go back Out There and die or go back to 'not living.' Boston's AA is like a 'benign anarchy' --there are no rules only 'suggestions' and you have to *want* to follow them. But if you don't, no one will kick you out; they won't have to. Early in his AA tenure Gately had a dream where he was kneeling in a church basement with many others, when he notices some of the others are being sucked out through the glass wall silently. He then sees the 'authoritative figure' with a giant shepherd's crook who radiates 'good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience.' The 'slow silent stick with the hook' is what keeps them all kneeling in the basement. Gately didn't have to get assistance from the staffer on 'Dream Duty' to understand the meaning-- AA has 'the planet's most remorselessly hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms' and he was always on duty 'Out There.' Gately likes the new member Ken Erdedy, although he can't relate to the fact that marijuana could be responsible for landing someone in Ennet House. Erdedy along with the brand new girl Joelle, both object to the AA terms, especially 'miracle' and 'for the grace of God.' Gately explains to Erdedy and Joelle that the phrase 'good to hear you' is used instead of 'you spoke well' because it can't be anybody's place to judge, and that it means two things-- that what the speaker said was helpful, and that the listener was glad to be *able* to hear it. Gately has no handle yet on Joelle, who was admitted overnight without being on the waiting list, after a 'horrific O.D.-type situation.' To Gately's utter incomprehension, Joelle complains that 'But for the grace of God' is a subjunctive, and makes no sense introducing anything but a conditional clause. 'I'm here but for the grace of God' is senseless, regardless of whether she 'hears' it or not. Looking into her veil, Gately is baffled and for a moment seized with panic, that he will someday succumb, and get high again.
p 367
no date/place [backstory]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The statue of liberty holds aloft a product, which is changed each Jan. 1 by workers with cranes.
p 367-375
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
The next two speakers at the White Flag meeting demonstrate that it's got to be 'real' to get a response-- the first tries a well rehearsed joke, and the second an unintended one, and the former gets an icy response while the latter has them rolling with laughter. It has to be real and irony-free. Ironically you are encouraged to say stuff like 'one day at a time' and 'I'm an alcoholic' until you believe it. The next speaker commits one of the cardinal sins of AA when she says that she was a dope fiend *because* at 16 she had run away from home and become a stripper. She explicates the story in gory detail of how she was adopted by parents who had a biological daughter who was 'totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic.' The mother was 'crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug' [in Joelle's words] and forced the adopted daughter to drag *it* [as the speaker referred to her sister] along with her on dates. The father had begun coming into their room at night and molesting the catatonic girl, whom he would call 'Raquel' and equip with a rubber Raquel Welch mask. The adopted daughter would have to cover for him, and remove the mask afterwards for fear that if the mother ever found out it would mean that eventually the focus of the father's attentions would shift to her. What eventually led her to run away was, one night she had to turn the light on to get the Raquel wig untwisted and noticed that the catatonic sister had the same look on her face that she remembered from the picture in the hallway of 'some Catholic statue' with a woman 'whose stone robes were half hiked up.' That was 'what caused it' and why she's here recovering from 'One Day at a Time.' Gately's objection to the story is not that he's known plenty of people with worse childhood experiences, but rather that the *cause* of the disease is really just an excuse. At AA you don't ask why.
p 375
YDAU [2009] Apr 30-May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Marathe and Steeply are still in the desert at night,and it's getting cold. Steeply has divulged that he had been on marital leave after his divorce, but is now back in the field undercover as a journalist 'assigned to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles.'
p 375-376
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Himself emerges from the sauna drunk and depressed by the fact that even the avant-garde critics complain that his narrative films lacked plot. Mario and Joelle are probably the only ones who know that Found Drama and anti-confluentialism came out of the resulting conversation between Himself and Kyle. In a footnote [p 1026-1028] the concept of 'Found Drama' is explained by way of excerpts from Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Orin interjects his attempts to charm the interviewer with the details-- that 'Found Dramas' were never actually filmed, but consisted simply of choosing a subject at random from the phone book.
p 376-379
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]
synopsis:
Boston's AA doesn't recoil from the idea of responsibility, just cause. The 'meeting's last and maybe best speaker' is a 'round pink girl with no eyelashes' who turned tricks and used freebase cocaine all the way through her pregnancy 'even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit.' Eventually she gives birth to a stillborn infant, and goes into to complete Denial. She carries the baby around with her rolled up in a blanket, trying to turn tricks and score drugs. Eventually she is turned into Social Services and put in a hospital for four months. When she is released and given SSI checks, she turns from crack to alcohol and ends up facing the two option choice on the window-ledge of a welfare-hotel, and here she is trying to live. Her speech invokes rapt attention all around. No cause or excuse, just what happened.
p 379
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]--?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle and Himself were the 'odd couple of libations' down in the weight room-- Himself with his Wild Turkey and Lyle with his diet Coke. Often Mario would struggle to stay awake and accompany them. Himself was a 'profound-personality-change drinker' and one night Mario awoke to hear him saying he would give his marriage a C-. Lyle would take things as they came, and would often get out William Blake and read it to Himself in the voices of cartoon characters.
notes
The Ennet House thread is now inextricably linked to the ETA thread and the Tucson thread by the appearance of Joelle at Ennet House. The reason behind Steeply's interviews with Orin are also made explicit here-- they have to do with Unspecified Services' interest in the film cartridge, of which Orin's father is the putative director.
p 380-442
this section in 10 parts
p 380-386
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's first 'halfway-coherent' film cartridge is a filmed puppet show explicating the formation of ONAN and the rise of President Gentle to power. It is shown every year at the Interdependence Day dinner, at which students and faculty are encouraged to wear hats and/or face-masks in honor of the president. Also the ETA dietician, a former dessert chef, gets to go nuts and the students are allowed to indulge. Mario's film, which is a remake of his father's 4-hour epic, is strangely more popular with the adults and young adults than the kids. The film opens on an image of Johnny Gentle the one time lounge singer turned B-movie actor, who is Howard-Hughes paranoid in his fear of 'free-floating contamination' [hence the surgical masks.] Gentle eventually becomes standard bearer for a fringe political party called Clean US Party [CUSP] whose motto is ''Let's shoot our wastes into space.' He becomes president on the platform of cleaning the country up very literally-- he delivers his inaugural speech in a microfiltration mask. He promises to find someone to blame. He appoints the president of Mexico and prime minister of Canada to his cabinet. All but the Canadian students are charged up on sugar and having a grand time watching Mario's cartridge. A recreated meeting between Gentle and Canada's P.M. ends in a Motown version of 'It's a small world after all' with 'continent' squeezed in for 'world'
p 386-394
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle is in the weight room on 11/8 recalling a boy named Marlon from a few years back, who sweated so profusely that he was constantly wet, and hence a favorite of Lyle's; 'he told this boy everything he had to tell.' Those who wonder what Lyle does alone in the weight room every night obviously don't know that he's rarely alone. The boys often lurk around the weight room door after taking a sauna, to exchange their sweat for some advice from the 'guru' Lyle. He coaches LaMont Chu on his crippling obsession with fame and specifically getting his picture in the tennis magazines. Lyle tries to clue him in to the fact that 'fame is not the exit from any cage.' Kent Blott age 10, comes to Lyle worried about what kind of porn he'll watch when he begins to masturbate. Anton Doucette expresses debilitating anxiety about the mole beneath his nose. Meanwhile Mario's film shows a mixture of real and fake news headlines-- these go from bad to worse as NATO is abolished ONAN formed, Burger King Pilsbury granted the rights to the first year of subsidized time, doctors remove a railroad spike from Canadian PM's eye, barges loaded with waste collide near Gloucester causing toxic spill, and possible 'reconfigurative options.'
p 394-395
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle tells Ortho [the Darkness] Stice not to underestimate objects. Stice is worried that his somnambulism may hurt his chances for the Show-- he has been waking up with his bed moved to different parts of the room. Lyle's response is to tell a story of a man who would hustle bets by way of his ability to levitate the chair he was standing on.
p 395-398
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal has a nicotine addiction which he satisfies by chewing tobacco. He also has a sugar problem [related to his pot problem] but ordinarily can't handle the emotional states that it produces in him on court. As he watches Mario's cartridge with a mouthful of baklava, he muses on how Mario adopted his father's penchant for puppets/theater. He thinks back to Himself's 'The Medusa v The Odalisque' which is a plotless battle between the Medusa who's so hideous that she turns to stone those who gaze upon her, and the Quebecois Odalisque who's so inhumanly gorgeous to the same end. For obvious reasons the audience never gets to see the faces of the characters, and thus the film was ill-received. But perhaps the most hated film of Himself's oeuvre was 'The Joke' which played only in Cambridge and Berkeley and which intellectuals would pay to see even in spite of a sign warning them not to pay money to see this film. The film consisted of nothing more than a projection from a camera trained on the audience, and ended as soon as the last person had left the theater. This was an obvious precursor for the 'Found Dramas' that followed.
p 398-410
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
More headlines from Mario's film describe the toxic dumpsites in New England. This segues into a recreation of the 'Concavity Cabinet' meeting wherein Rodney Tine, Chief of Unspecified Services explains to the cabinet [including the leaders of Canada and Mexico] Gentle's idea to 'give away' the befouled territory. Various members of the cabinet raise questions and objections; the Mexican president asks how Gentle expects to convince Canada's PM to 'accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples.' Tine gives the answer: 'statesmanship.gamesmanship...brinksmanship.' More headlines explain that Canada refused the 'offer' and Gentle handcuffed himself to the 'Black Box of US nuclear codes' and threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify his neighbors unless they concede. This is Mario's nod to the legend of Eric Clipperton, tennis player from the last BS years, who played with a 'Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm' pointed at his temple and threatened to commit suicide if he ever lost. Hence no one is willing to beat him and risk having the suicide on their conscience. Mario is one of the only people that ever actually befriended him, which occurred during filming of Himself's documentary. Mario also has some of the only footage of Clipperton.
p 410-418
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is feeling the effects of 4 pot-smoking excursions and 4 chocolate cannolis and is finding Mario's film depressing, in part because it reminds him of Himself. The film is showing the early stages of the Reconfiguration, the ATHSCME fans, the EWD displacement installations, and Tine's disastrous love interest with the 'Quebecois fatale known publicly only as Luria P____'. The concept of Subsidized time was supposedly sketched on the back of a placemat by Tine. This part Hal knows well on account of the paper he wrote in 7th grade, on the fate of broadcast television and the American ad industry in the period concurrent with Mario's film. The Big Four networks' arch foe was the American Council of Disseminators of Cable [ACDC] which was challenging the viewer's 'Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained.' Viney and Veals, a Boston ad agency delivered an unintentional coup de grace to the Networks with a campaign that began with ads for Nunhagen aspirin that featured paintings depicting cranio-facial pain. Viewers found the ads too excruciating to watch, and so even though sales for the aspirin went through the roof, the ratings actually declined. Ditto with it's subsequent ads for LipoVac, a chain of walk-in liposuction clinics, and finally the ads for NoCoat tongue scrapers. The result was that 3 of the 4 Networks went under, and ABC began showing nothing but 'Happy Days' marathons. The ironic consequence of this was that the ad agencies themselves also went down. Then what happened was Noreen Lace-Forche, a video rental mogulette, convinced the remains of the combined Big 4 to consolidate, formed InterLace TelEntertainment, and hired Veals for her campaign, which was basically that the 'cable kabal's' promise of 'empowerment' was nothing more than a choice of one of the 504 choices they'd already made for you. What if the view could '100% choose what was on at any given time?' Everything in the vaults of the big 4 would be made available on 'pal-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes Interlace was marketing as "cartridges."' Viewable on computer or TV, and eventually via InterLaces optical pulses on 'Teleputers.' But the point of Hal's paper is that there could be no ads included on InterLace cartridges, and the advertising agency was doomed. Things were so bad that Veals took a job managing PR for an unlikely fringe candidate and former crooner.
p 418-430
YDAU [2009] Apr 30/May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply and Marathe are still out on the shelf in the desert, hours have passed and neither has slept. Steeply refuses to sit down, for fear his concealed weapon will be exposed beneath his skirt. They are both reluctant to broach the subject of how they will get down. Marathe recognizes that Steeply has a special gift for enduring the humiliating field-personae he's been required to assume. Steeply confesses that his organization cannot comprehend the AFR in the same way as other terrorist cells, because its actions seem random, without any clear objective. Marathe asks what that might be for Americans, and Steeply answers 'standard old American dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.' Marathe retorts with 'high quality entertainment...maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure.' Steeply says that what 'gives us the fantods about the AFR' is that they apparently derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Marathe poses the hypothetical situation of a single serving can of soup that they both want, and asks how they decide who should eat it. Steeply tries out all manner of answers which Marathe rejects-- bidding on the soup, bonking each other on the head. Marathe daydreams of his time in Boston during the summer, and of his two brothers who met their deaths head on with a train. The ponderous rectangles of light are the 'Barges of Land' gathering trash for eventual displacement launch northward. Marathe loathes the way Steeply anticipates his responses. Marathe asks why and how although two USA citizens desire the soup now, they will delay the gratification. Steeply calls it 'enlightened self-interest' and says that it can't be hammered into you, it has to be chosen. As Steeply digs for a cigarette, Marathe recalls that when his wife was born without a skull, it had been suggested that the parents' smoking had been the cause. He asks which type more resembles Americans- the one who bonks the other on the head and eats the soup, or the mature who one sees down the road. He asks how the AFR could hurt all of the USA by 'making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment.' He asks why make it samizdat if Americans can really make enlightened choices. Steeply says 'get real' explaining that this 'insidious enslaving process' can't be compared to cans of soup. Marathe concedes that this is true after the first viewing, but points out that the first viewing is still a choice.
p 430-434
2001[last pre-Subsidized year]-Year of the Whopper [2002]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
After each of his 'victories' Eric Clipperton would accept his trophies and disappear to wherever he lived and trained. He was regarded by the USTA as having no official ranking. When USTA became ONANTA however, a new systems analyst, knowing nothing of the illegitimacy of Clipperton's victories, and subsequently ranks him as #1. Bets are taken by Pemulis as to whether he'll just retire now. But then one day he shows up at ETA, with no racquet and not even his Glock 17's custom case, and asks for entry and counsel. James Incandenza is sent for, and they agree to an interview as long as they can film it [to protect themselves under ONANTA regulations]. So as Mario films, He pulls out the magazine announcing his #1 ranking and the concealed Glock 17 and puts the gun to his temple and fires. Himself brings Mario to the funeral in Indiana, where Clipperton was living with his parents, who had no idea of his tennis career. Mario insists on being the one to clean the room. Afterwards it is locked up and designated as the Clipperton Suite, which Schtitt invites junior players to go visit when they get too whiny.
p 434-436
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Five days a week, whether he's getting off all-night staff duty or not, Gately catches a 4:30am train to his janitorial job at Shattuck Center for Homeless Males in Jamaica Plain. from 5-8am he hoses excrement off the floor of the shower, etc. His boss is Stavros Lobokulas, who bills the state for an 8 hour job and pays Gately for 3. Gately often runs into guys he knew from his days of B&E. Stavros's dream is to save up enough to open a women's shoe store.
p 436-442
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Next to Clipperton the most ghastly buckling-under-the-pressure-of-competive-tennis story is that of a kid from Fresno who drank a glass of Quik laced with cyanide and dropped dead. His whole family then follows suit, attempting to give him [and then one another] mouth to mouth-- they had all recently completed a CPR course. For this reason all tennis academies are required to have PhD-level counselor. The ETA counselor is Dr. Dolores Rusk, who is regarded by the students as 'slightly worse than useless.' She simply repeats the last dependent clause of what she's told back to the student as a question. Around the time of the Clipperton/Gentle parallel, many of the kids are losing interest in Mario's film, as they begin to crash from the sugar. There's another scene of a meeting between Gentle and his secretaries, at which Gentle just back from a football game is going on about the punter who must be Orin [which the narration points out is not chronologically feasible]. They are discussing how to pay for the Reconfiguration. The advertising man, Veals and Tine's mistress Luria P__ are in attendance. Tine says that cutting programs or raising taxes will make the public 'whinge' and introduces the placemats on which the idea of Subsidized Time has been sketched. Gentle tells them the name of the football game from which he has just come: the 'Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.'
notes
This section is filled with parodies of various themes in the book. There's the Gentle/Clipperton theme. The TV ads that are so compellingly unwatchable makes a parallel to the Entertainment, and Madame Psychosis also comes to mind. Madame P comes to mind in the synopsis of the 'The Medusa v The Odalisque' as well.
p 380-386
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's first 'halfway-coherent' film cartridge is a filmed puppet show explicating the formation of ONAN and the rise of President Gentle to power. It is shown every year at the Interdependence Day dinner, at which students and faculty are encouraged to wear hats and/or face-masks in honor of the president. Also the ETA dietician, a former dessert chef, gets to go nuts and the students are allowed to indulge. Mario's film, which is a remake of his father's 4-hour epic, is strangely more popular with the adults and young adults than the kids. The film opens on an image of Johnny Gentle the one time lounge singer turned B-movie actor, who is Howard-Hughes paranoid in his fear of 'free-floating contamination' [hence the surgical masks.] Gentle eventually becomes standard bearer for a fringe political party called Clean US Party [CUSP] whose motto is ''Let's shoot our wastes into space.' He becomes president on the platform of cleaning the country up very literally-- he delivers his inaugural speech in a microfiltration mask. He promises to find someone to blame. He appoints the president of Mexico and prime minister of Canada to his cabinet. All but the Canadian students are charged up on sugar and having a grand time watching Mario's cartridge. A recreated meeting between Gentle and Canada's P.M. ends in a Motown version of 'It's a small world after all' with 'continent' squeezed in for 'world'
p 386-394
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle is in the weight room on 11/8 recalling a boy named Marlon from a few years back, who sweated so profusely that he was constantly wet, and hence a favorite of Lyle's; 'he told this boy everything he had to tell.' Those who wonder what Lyle does alone in the weight room every night obviously don't know that he's rarely alone. The boys often lurk around the weight room door after taking a sauna, to exchange their sweat for some advice from the 'guru' Lyle. He coaches LaMont Chu on his crippling obsession with fame and specifically getting his picture in the tennis magazines. Lyle tries to clue him in to the fact that 'fame is not the exit from any cage.' Kent Blott age 10, comes to Lyle worried about what kind of porn he'll watch when he begins to masturbate. Anton Doucette expresses debilitating anxiety about the mole beneath his nose. Meanwhile Mario's film shows a mixture of real and fake news headlines-- these go from bad to worse as NATO is abolished ONAN formed, Burger King Pilsbury granted the rights to the first year of subsidized time, doctors remove a railroad spike from Canadian PM's eye, barges loaded with waste collide near Gloucester causing toxic spill, and possible 'reconfigurative options.'
p 394-395
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle tells Ortho [the Darkness] Stice not to underestimate objects. Stice is worried that his somnambulism may hurt his chances for the Show-- he has been waking up with his bed moved to different parts of the room. Lyle's response is to tell a story of a man who would hustle bets by way of his ability to levitate the chair he was standing on.
p 395-398
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal has a nicotine addiction which he satisfies by chewing tobacco. He also has a sugar problem [related to his pot problem] but ordinarily can't handle the emotional states that it produces in him on court. As he watches Mario's cartridge with a mouthful of baklava, he muses on how Mario adopted his father's penchant for puppets/theater. He thinks back to Himself's 'The Medusa v The Odalisque' which is a plotless battle between the Medusa who's so hideous that she turns to stone those who gaze upon her, and the Quebecois Odalisque who's so inhumanly gorgeous to the same end. For obvious reasons the audience never gets to see the faces of the characters, and thus the film was ill-received. But perhaps the most hated film of Himself's oeuvre was 'The Joke' which played only in Cambridge and Berkeley and which intellectuals would pay to see even in spite of a sign warning them not to pay money to see this film. The film consisted of nothing more than a projection from a camera trained on the audience, and ended as soon as the last person had left the theater. This was an obvious precursor for the 'Found Dramas' that followed.
p 398-410
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
More headlines from Mario's film describe the toxic dumpsites in New England. This segues into a recreation of the 'Concavity Cabinet' meeting wherein Rodney Tine, Chief of Unspecified Services explains to the cabinet [including the leaders of Canada and Mexico] Gentle's idea to 'give away' the befouled territory. Various members of the cabinet raise questions and objections; the Mexican president asks how Gentle expects to convince Canada's PM to 'accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples.' Tine gives the answer: 'statesmanship.gamesmanship...brinksmanship.' More headlines explain that Canada refused the 'offer' and Gentle handcuffed himself to the 'Black Box of US nuclear codes' and threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify his neighbors unless they concede. This is Mario's nod to the legend of Eric Clipperton, tennis player from the last BS years, who played with a 'Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm' pointed at his temple and threatened to commit suicide if he ever lost. Hence no one is willing to beat him and risk having the suicide on their conscience. Mario is one of the only people that ever actually befriended him, which occurred during filming of Himself's documentary. Mario also has some of the only footage of Clipperton.
p 410-418
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is feeling the effects of 4 pot-smoking excursions and 4 chocolate cannolis and is finding Mario's film depressing, in part because it reminds him of Himself. The film is showing the early stages of the Reconfiguration, the ATHSCME fans, the EWD displacement installations, and Tine's disastrous love interest with the 'Quebecois fatale known publicly only as Luria P____'. The concept of Subsidized time was supposedly sketched on the back of a placemat by Tine. This part Hal knows well on account of the paper he wrote in 7th grade, on the fate of broadcast television and the American ad industry in the period concurrent with Mario's film. The Big Four networks' arch foe was the American Council of Disseminators of Cable [ACDC] which was challenging the viewer's 'Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained.' Viney and Veals, a Boston ad agency delivered an unintentional coup de grace to the Networks with a campaign that began with ads for Nunhagen aspirin that featured paintings depicting cranio-facial pain. Viewers found the ads too excruciating to watch, and so even though sales for the aspirin went through the roof, the ratings actually declined. Ditto with it's subsequent ads for LipoVac, a chain of walk-in liposuction clinics, and finally the ads for NoCoat tongue scrapers. The result was that 3 of the 4 Networks went under, and ABC began showing nothing but 'Happy Days' marathons. The ironic consequence of this was that the ad agencies themselves also went down. Then what happened was Noreen Lace-Forche, a video rental mogulette, convinced the remains of the combined Big 4 to consolidate, formed InterLace TelEntertainment, and hired Veals for her campaign, which was basically that the 'cable kabal's' promise of 'empowerment' was nothing more than a choice of one of the 504 choices they'd already made for you. What if the view could '100% choose what was on at any given time?' Everything in the vaults of the big 4 would be made available on 'pal-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes Interlace was marketing as "cartridges."' Viewable on computer or TV, and eventually via InterLaces optical pulses on 'Teleputers.' But the point of Hal's paper is that there could be no ads included on InterLace cartridges, and the advertising agency was doomed. Things were so bad that Veals took a job managing PR for an unlikely fringe candidate and former crooner.
p 418-430
YDAU [2009] Apr 30/May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply and Marathe are still out on the shelf in the desert, hours have passed and neither has slept. Steeply refuses to sit down, for fear his concealed weapon will be exposed beneath his skirt. They are both reluctant to broach the subject of how they will get down. Marathe recognizes that Steeply has a special gift for enduring the humiliating field-personae he's been required to assume. Steeply confesses that his organization cannot comprehend the AFR in the same way as other terrorist cells, because its actions seem random, without any clear objective. Marathe asks what that might be for Americans, and Steeply answers 'standard old American dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.' Marathe retorts with 'high quality entertainment...maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure.' Steeply says that what 'gives us the fantods about the AFR' is that they apparently derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Marathe poses the hypothetical situation of a single serving can of soup that they both want, and asks how they decide who should eat it. Steeply tries out all manner of answers which Marathe rejects-- bidding on the soup, bonking each other on the head. Marathe daydreams of his time in Boston during the summer, and of his two brothers who met their deaths head on with a train. The ponderous rectangles of light are the 'Barges of Land' gathering trash for eventual displacement launch northward. Marathe loathes the way Steeply anticipates his responses. Marathe asks why and how although two USA citizens desire the soup now, they will delay the gratification. Steeply calls it 'enlightened self-interest' and says that it can't be hammered into you, it has to be chosen. As Steeply digs for a cigarette, Marathe recalls that when his wife was born without a skull, it had been suggested that the parents' smoking had been the cause. He asks which type more resembles Americans- the one who bonks the other on the head and eats the soup, or the mature who one sees down the road. He asks how the AFR could hurt all of the USA by 'making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment.' He asks why make it samizdat if Americans can really make enlightened choices. Steeply says 'get real' explaining that this 'insidious enslaving process' can't be compared to cans of soup. Marathe concedes that this is true after the first viewing, but points out that the first viewing is still a choice.
p 430-434
2001[last pre-Subsidized year]-Year of the Whopper [2002]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
After each of his 'victories' Eric Clipperton would accept his trophies and disappear to wherever he lived and trained. He was regarded by the USTA as having no official ranking. When USTA became ONANTA however, a new systems analyst, knowing nothing of the illegitimacy of Clipperton's victories, and subsequently ranks him as #1. Bets are taken by Pemulis as to whether he'll just retire now. But then one day he shows up at ETA, with no racquet and not even his Glock 17's custom case, and asks for entry and counsel. James Incandenza is sent for, and they agree to an interview as long as they can film it [to protect themselves under ONANTA regulations]. So as Mario films, He pulls out the magazine announcing his #1 ranking and the concealed Glock 17 and puts the gun to his temple and fires. Himself brings Mario to the funeral in Indiana, where Clipperton was living with his parents, who had no idea of his tennis career. Mario insists on being the one to clean the room. Afterwards it is locked up and designated as the Clipperton Suite, which Schtitt invites junior players to go visit when they get too whiny.
p 434-436
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Five days a week, whether he's getting off all-night staff duty or not, Gately catches a 4:30am train to his janitorial job at Shattuck Center for Homeless Males in Jamaica Plain. from 5-8am he hoses excrement off the floor of the shower, etc. His boss is Stavros Lobokulas, who bills the state for an 8 hour job and pays Gately for 3. Gately often runs into guys he knew from his days of B&E. Stavros's dream is to save up enough to open a women's shoe store.
p 436-442
YDAU [2009] Nov. 8
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Next to Clipperton the most ghastly buckling-under-the-pressure-of-competive-tennis story is that of a kid from Fresno who drank a glass of Quik laced with cyanide and dropped dead. His whole family then follows suit, attempting to give him [and then one another] mouth to mouth-- they had all recently completed a CPR course. For this reason all tennis academies are required to have PhD-level counselor. The ETA counselor is Dr. Dolores Rusk, who is regarded by the students as 'slightly worse than useless.' She simply repeats the last dependent clause of what she's told back to the student as a question. Around the time of the Clipperton/Gentle parallel, many of the kids are losing interest in Mario's film, as they begin to crash from the sugar. There's another scene of a meeting between Gentle and his secretaries, at which Gentle just back from a football game is going on about the punter who must be Orin [which the narration points out is not chronologically feasible]. They are discussing how to pay for the Reconfiguration. The advertising man, Veals and Tine's mistress Luria P__ are in attendance. Tine says that cutting programs or raising taxes will make the public 'whinge' and introduces the placemats on which the idea of Subsidized Time has been sketched. Gentle tells them the name of the football game from which he has just come: the 'Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.'
notes
This section is filled with parodies of various themes in the book. There's the Gentle/Clipperton theme. The TV ads that are so compellingly unwatchable makes a parallel to the Entertainment, and Madame Psychosis also comes to mind. Madame P comes to mind in the synopsis of the 'The Medusa v The Odalisque' as well.
p 442-489
this section in 6 parts
p 442-449
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
On a 'Commitment' to the 'Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group' in Braintree, Gately reveals that he still has no solid understanding of the 'Higher Power' to which he is supposed to turn over his diseased will. He notes that those with a religious background have it easier, because even if they reject the notion of god that they've been taught, at least they have that notion to start with, whereas Gately has to start from scratch. He admits that he goes through the motions, but feels *nothing*. And then it happens again, the audience erupts in applause. The crowd is 'over 50% bikers and biker-chicks' and one of the bikers 'Bob Death' congratulates Gately,and asks if he's heard the one about the fish-- in which a wise old fish sees three young fish and asks them how the water is, to which they respond 'what the fuck is water?' On the ride home Gately is wracked with pain-- they always neglect to mention in AA that the way you get better is by way of pain. It turn out that the more vapid the AA cliche the more ghastly the thing it represents really is. After about 8 months sober, Gately began to recover memories of his childhood. His real father is an Estonian, who fled the scene early on. His mother was an alcoholic with a live-in lover a former Naval MP who would beat her,but do so only in her mid-section to keep the bruises out of sight. Gately would pretend to watch TV until his mother passed out, and then he would drink nearly all of the remaining vodka in her bottle, and then return the bottle to beside his mother, who would never know the difference in the morning. When she was sober she'd call him Bimmy or Bim, not knowing that his friends had invented the moniker , which is short for 'big Indestructible Moron.' In June, Gately had 'Got In Touch' with the memory of finding his mother covered in blood, after a cirrhotic hemorrhage. It had been ten years since he even thought of her in 'the long-term place' and he has never been to visit. His dreams the night of the Braintree meeting, Gately dreams he under a deep sea whose water is 'silent and dim and the same temperature that he is.'
p 449-450
YDAU [2009] very late October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is having a recurring dream that his teeth are crumbling and rotting away. As he's pricing dentures, he wakes to find Mario's bed made up, because he has been spending nights at HmH, in front of the radio in an uncharacteristic state of agitation over the unannounced sabbatical of Madame Psychosis from her nightly radio program.
p 450-461
YDAU [2009] Nov 9
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
ETA is 16 males under capacity and females over capacity, meaning that they have to house some of them in the male dorms, which creates some problems, hormonal and technical. This also creates in terms of scheduling drills before class, problems which get Charles Tavis out of bed early in the morning. This particular morning Mario, 'the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered' is asleep right next to the sound system. Dawn drills are under way for the top players, and it's very cold. Schtitt overseas the drills from which JJ Penn is 'ominously missing.' Players practice backhands, forehands, 'tap & whack,' wind sprints, etc. Next are the star drills which require having a bucket nearby for 'distress,' and then the side to sides which are particularly hard on Hal's ankle. Everyone accepts clean towels from 'a halfway-house part-time black girl.' Schtitt admonishes the players for sluggish drilling, and singles out LaMont Chu, who has been heard complaining about the cold, telling him it will always be 'something that is too' -- too cold, too hot, too bright etc. Schtitt's ends his monologue by testing Hal to reiterate his point that the players have to be here in mind as well as body, Hal answers' The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player.'
p 461-469
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Part of Gately's job at Ennet House is to cook dinner on weekdays, which means that he gets to borrow Pat Montesian's 1964 Ford Aventura, which is a mint condition antique sports car with a driver's seat that Gately can barely squeeze into. He doesn't care; he loves that car. Gately lost his license permanently in YWQMD [2006] when he was arrested for DUI while driving on a suspended license. He also has these on his record-- bad-check forgery, malicious destruction of property, 2 D&Ds, 'a bullshit Public Urination,' breaking and entering, possession with intent. Then there's also 'a certain darker issue' of the upscale Brookline home that he broke into, whose owner had been eulogized in all the papers. Gately had a court stenographer who had been a former client check into the issue for him and learned that, over the objections of the ADA, the Murder-2 investigation had been taken over by the 'Non-Specific Services Bureau' and now focussed on 'certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies' in Quebec. Most of Gately's pending cases had been 'Closed Without Finding' contingent on his treatment and sobriety, all except for the driving DUI with a suspended license which carries a mandatory 90-day sentence. Gately did 17 months in Billerca at age 24 for assaulting two bouncers. He had beaten senseless the first and only guys who had tried to mess with him. He's more worried now about the availability of drugs and the lack of access to AA in jail. He had told Pat Montesian up front at his interview that he was basically coming to Ennet House to stay out of jail, and had no hope of getting clean. He had rubbed Pat's dog's scabby stomach, as she told him that his honesty, hopelessness and desperation were key to his recovery. Pat is in her late 30s and is literally half pretty having suffered a stroke which debilitated half of her face and body. Her first husband had divorced her because of her alcoholism, and after the stroke she Surrendered and came to Ennet House in a wheelchair and purportedly tried to eat the rocks when told to do so. Her right arm had 'atrophied into a kind of semi-claw' and she walks with 'dignified but godawful lurch.' She treated as a favorite, and went with him on most of his court-dates, driving him in the Aventura at excessive speeds. About 4 months into his residency the desire to ingest drugs magically disappeared. He had simply done what they said to do, gotten downb on his knees every morning and night, even though he didn't believe in any of it. It was like the 'infamous Boston AA cake analogy' that Gene M had explained: just imagine that you're following the instructions on the side of the cake box-- you don't have to believe a cake will result, or understand how, you just have to follow the directions, and the cake will get made. So he did, and it did work. He still can't figure out how. One of the Crocodiles, Ferocious Francis G explained that 'anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass.' Months later, Gately no longer cares that he doesn't understands. On his one year anniversary Francis G presented him with a cake and he cried, although he later claimed otherwise. As a staff chef, Gately leaves something to be desired; he prepares overcooked spaghetti, boiled hot dogs, 'dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture.' But the house members don't dare complain, at least not directly.
p 470-475
YDAU [2009] May 1, pre-dawn
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply asks Marathe if he remembers a Canadian experimental procedure, where electrodes were used to stimulate the brain in various places with varying results. Marathe relates this to his father's pacemaker. Steeply continues describing how the researchers by trial and error located the 'p-terminals' which when stimulated would produces intense pleasure. When they rigged lab rats with a lever that caused the electrode to stimulate the p-terminal, the rat would eventually stimulate itself to death. the eventually tried it on other animals with the same results, and they wished to find human subjects, but couldn't legally use prisoners. However word of the experiments had been leaked and soon after they had a line of volunteers at the clinic, who 'by free choice' wanted to have the electrodes implanted. Steeply invites Marathe to 'see the analogy' implicit to the Entertainment, and points out that these were Canadians. Of course, the CIA and the Canadian C7 immediately shut it down, and destroyed the lab.
p 475-489
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [or later?]
place Ennet House and later Antitoi Entertainent [sic]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pat M asks Gately to go the Purity Supreme market to buy some eggs because the two new residents Amy J and Joelle van D cannot eat the boiled hot dogs, he was about to prepare. Gately views this as catering to the 'addict's claim of special uniqueness,' but then again he does love driving Pat's Aventura. Whenever he takes the car out to do errands, he makes up for time spent going out of way, by driving like a maniac. He takes the car down Commonwealth Ave through Brighton, Allston and past the Unexamined Life where he no longer goes. As he 'blasts though BU country' he sees the college girls and thinks about sex, which he's never had sober. He gets away with smoking menthols in the car by keeping the windows down for cross-ventilation. He gets on the Storrow 500 and heads toward Cambridge to go a health food store, the Bread & Circus in Inman Square, which he can use as an excuse for the delay. As he speeds through Inman Square the Aventura kicks up a 'backwash' of debris. One such piece of debris lands with a clunk on the door to Antitoi Entertainent. In mid paragraph the narrative shifts entirely from Gately's drive to the action inside Antitoi Entertainent. Lucien Antitoi comes to the door in his ammo belt Colt 44 and flannel shirt and is annoyed to find no one there. He lives in the back of the store with his brother Bertraund, where they sleep on cots,smoke pot and constitute a 'not very terrifying insurgent cell' who had been under DuPlessis, but then spurned by the FLQ after his death. Lucien cannot speak French, and this means that Bertraund runs the show, which consists of harebrained schemes like draping the Canadian flag over the civil war statue on Interdependence Day, and fashioning doormats bearing President Gentle's image, and recently selling harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on local youth. Bertraund had recently bartered with an old hippie for something that sounds much like DMZ, for among other things a garbage bag full of unlabeled read-only cartridges. The door squeaks loudly as Lucien closes it, and continues to squeak after he's bolted it. He has a broom with the end of the handle sharpened to a point, which doubles as a weapon. It's Lucien's job to watch all of the obscure unlabeled video cartridges that his brother acquires, and although they're in no discernible order, he knows what's on them. Bertraund's latest acquisition is a couple of tapes he picked up from a commercial display, and contained only the slogan in tiny raised letters--'il ne faut plus qu'on pursuive le bonheur' [happiness need no longer be pursued] and a stamped smiley face. Much to Bertraund's chagrin the cartridges were apparently blank. In a footnote, it's pointed out that this doesn't mean they are blank, since copy-capable cartridges require a 585 rpm machine to run,and the Antitoi's is a standard 450-drive. As Lucien sweeps he notices first one then another figure in a wheelchair outside the door, and he begins to hear squeaks. He realizes that this means the 'worst possible scenario' -- the AFR. As he pulls his Colt from his pants, the gun catches on his pants and along with the weight of his massive belly causes the pants to rip, and fall down around his ankles. He hobbles to the back room to warn his brother, but instead finds him with a railroad spike through his eye. The AFR members knock him to the floor, take his gun, and hit over the head with it as he listens in incomprehension to the their questions. The leader asks him to direct them to the 'Copy-capable' entertainment cartridge. Lucien understands none of this. His head is pulled back by the hair, and the sharpened broomstick is shoved down his throat skewering him. He has visions of childhood and his mother as he dies.
notes
That CT might have fathered his half-sister's child, Mario could possibly explain the unique deformities. It seems like DFW purposely pointed out [p 312-317] that CT was staying with the Moms and Himself on an extended stay at the time Mario was born, It seems odd that Hal's nightmare scene is from very late October, and Madame P is already off the air, since her suicide attempt was not until Nov 7. This section made me rethink my take on the two suicide-attempt scenes [p 219-223 and p 226-240] which I now think take place the same day, Nov 7, and are alternate takes on her overdose. This would mean that the murder of the Antitoi brothers probably takes place on Nov 8, since that has been established as Joelle's first night at Ennet House. The narrative shift in the last section seems unique thus far in the book, and this makes me wonder whether the point is to set it off as key. Another explanation might be that this occurs pretty close to the book's midpoint.
p 442-449
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
On a 'Commitment' to the 'Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group' in Braintree, Gately reveals that he still has no solid understanding of the 'Higher Power' to which he is supposed to turn over his diseased will. He notes that those with a religious background have it easier, because even if they reject the notion of god that they've been taught, at least they have that notion to start with, whereas Gately has to start from scratch. He admits that he goes through the motions, but feels *nothing*. And then it happens again, the audience erupts in applause. The crowd is 'over 50% bikers and biker-chicks' and one of the bikers 'Bob Death' congratulates Gately,and asks if he's heard the one about the fish-- in which a wise old fish sees three young fish and asks them how the water is, to which they respond 'what the fuck is water?' On the ride home Gately is wracked with pain-- they always neglect to mention in AA that the way you get better is by way of pain. It turn out that the more vapid the AA cliche the more ghastly the thing it represents really is. After about 8 months sober, Gately began to recover memories of his childhood. His real father is an Estonian, who fled the scene early on. His mother was an alcoholic with a live-in lover a former Naval MP who would beat her,but do so only in her mid-section to keep the bruises out of sight. Gately would pretend to watch TV until his mother passed out, and then he would drink nearly all of the remaining vodka in her bottle, and then return the bottle to beside his mother, who would never know the difference in the morning. When she was sober she'd call him Bimmy or Bim, not knowing that his friends had invented the moniker , which is short for 'big Indestructible Moron.' In June, Gately had 'Got In Touch' with the memory of finding his mother covered in blood, after a cirrhotic hemorrhage. It had been ten years since he even thought of her in 'the long-term place' and he has never been to visit. His dreams the night of the Braintree meeting, Gately dreams he under a deep sea whose water is 'silent and dim and the same temperature that he is.'
p 449-450
YDAU [2009] very late October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is having a recurring dream that his teeth are crumbling and rotting away. As he's pricing dentures, he wakes to find Mario's bed made up, because he has been spending nights at HmH, in front of the radio in an uncharacteristic state of agitation over the unannounced sabbatical of Madame Psychosis from her nightly radio program.
p 450-461
YDAU [2009] Nov 9
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
ETA is 16 males under capacity and females over capacity, meaning that they have to house some of them in the male dorms, which creates some problems, hormonal and technical. This also creates in terms of scheduling drills before class, problems which get Charles Tavis out of bed early in the morning. This particular morning Mario, 'the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered' is asleep right next to the sound system. Dawn drills are under way for the top players, and it's very cold. Schtitt overseas the drills from which JJ Penn is 'ominously missing.' Players practice backhands, forehands, 'tap & whack,' wind sprints, etc. Next are the star drills which require having a bucket nearby for 'distress,' and then the side to sides which are particularly hard on Hal's ankle. Everyone accepts clean towels from 'a halfway-house part-time black girl.' Schtitt admonishes the players for sluggish drilling, and singles out LaMont Chu, who has been heard complaining about the cold, telling him it will always be 'something that is too' -- too cold, too hot, too bright etc. Schtitt's ends his monologue by testing Hal to reiterate his point that the players have to be here in mind as well as body, Hal answers' The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player.'
p 461-469
YDAU [2009] ca July
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Part of Gately's job at Ennet House is to cook dinner on weekdays, which means that he gets to borrow Pat Montesian's 1964 Ford Aventura, which is a mint condition antique sports car with a driver's seat that Gately can barely squeeze into. He doesn't care; he loves that car. Gately lost his license permanently in YWQMD [2006] when he was arrested for DUI while driving on a suspended license. He also has these on his record-- bad-check forgery, malicious destruction of property, 2 D&Ds, 'a bullshit Public Urination,' breaking and entering, possession with intent. Then there's also 'a certain darker issue' of the upscale Brookline home that he broke into, whose owner had been eulogized in all the papers. Gately had a court stenographer who had been a former client check into the issue for him and learned that, over the objections of the ADA, the Murder-2 investigation had been taken over by the 'Non-Specific Services Bureau' and now focussed on 'certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies' in Quebec. Most of Gately's pending cases had been 'Closed Without Finding' contingent on his treatment and sobriety, all except for the driving DUI with a suspended license which carries a mandatory 90-day sentence. Gately did 17 months in Billerca at age 24 for assaulting two bouncers. He had beaten senseless the first and only guys who had tried to mess with him. He's more worried now about the availability of drugs and the lack of access to AA in jail. He had told Pat Montesian up front at his interview that he was basically coming to Ennet House to stay out of jail, and had no hope of getting clean. He had rubbed Pat's dog's scabby stomach, as she told him that his honesty, hopelessness and desperation were key to his recovery. Pat is in her late 30s and is literally half pretty having suffered a stroke which debilitated half of her face and body. Her first husband had divorced her because of her alcoholism, and after the stroke she Surrendered and came to Ennet House in a wheelchair and purportedly tried to eat the rocks when told to do so. Her right arm had 'atrophied into a kind of semi-claw' and she walks with 'dignified but godawful lurch.' She treated as a favorite, and went with him on most of his court-dates, driving him in the Aventura at excessive speeds. About 4 months into his residency the desire to ingest drugs magically disappeared. He had simply done what they said to do, gotten downb on his knees every morning and night, even though he didn't believe in any of it. It was like the 'infamous Boston AA cake analogy' that Gene M had explained: just imagine that you're following the instructions on the side of the cake box-- you don't have to believe a cake will result, or understand how, you just have to follow the directions, and the cake will get made. So he did, and it did work. He still can't figure out how. One of the Crocodiles, Ferocious Francis G explained that 'anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass.' Months later, Gately no longer cares that he doesn't understands. On his one year anniversary Francis G presented him with a cake and he cried, although he later claimed otherwise. As a staff chef, Gately leaves something to be desired; he prepares overcooked spaghetti, boiled hot dogs, 'dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture.' But the house members don't dare complain, at least not directly.
p 470-475
YDAU [2009] May 1, pre-dawn
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply asks Marathe if he remembers a Canadian experimental procedure, where electrodes were used to stimulate the brain in various places with varying results. Marathe relates this to his father's pacemaker. Steeply continues describing how the researchers by trial and error located the 'p-terminals' which when stimulated would produces intense pleasure. When they rigged lab rats with a lever that caused the electrode to stimulate the p-terminal, the rat would eventually stimulate itself to death. the eventually tried it on other animals with the same results, and they wished to find human subjects, but couldn't legally use prisoners. However word of the experiments had been leaked and soon after they had a line of volunteers at the clinic, who 'by free choice' wanted to have the electrodes implanted. Steeply invites Marathe to 'see the analogy' implicit to the Entertainment, and points out that these were Canadians. Of course, the CIA and the Canadian C7 immediately shut it down, and destroyed the lab.
p 475-489
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [or later?]
place Ennet House and later Antitoi Entertainent [sic]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pat M asks Gately to go the Purity Supreme market to buy some eggs because the two new residents Amy J and Joelle van D cannot eat the boiled hot dogs, he was about to prepare. Gately views this as catering to the 'addict's claim of special uniqueness,' but then again he does love driving Pat's Aventura. Whenever he takes the car out to do errands, he makes up for time spent going out of way, by driving like a maniac. He takes the car down Commonwealth Ave through Brighton, Allston and past the Unexamined Life where he no longer goes. As he 'blasts though BU country' he sees the college girls and thinks about sex, which he's never had sober. He gets away with smoking menthols in the car by keeping the windows down for cross-ventilation. He gets on the Storrow 500 and heads toward Cambridge to go a health food store, the Bread & Circus in Inman Square, which he can use as an excuse for the delay. As he speeds through Inman Square the Aventura kicks up a 'backwash' of debris. One such piece of debris lands with a clunk on the door to Antitoi Entertainent. In mid paragraph the narrative shifts entirely from Gately's drive to the action inside Antitoi Entertainent. Lucien Antitoi comes to the door in his ammo belt Colt 44 and flannel shirt and is annoyed to find no one there. He lives in the back of the store with his brother Bertraund, where they sleep on cots,smoke pot and constitute a 'not very terrifying insurgent cell' who had been under DuPlessis, but then spurned by the FLQ after his death. Lucien cannot speak French, and this means that Bertraund runs the show, which consists of harebrained schemes like draping the Canadian flag over the civil war statue on Interdependence Day, and fashioning doormats bearing President Gentle's image, and recently selling harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on local youth. Bertraund had recently bartered with an old hippie for something that sounds much like DMZ, for among other things a garbage bag full of unlabeled read-only cartridges. The door squeaks loudly as Lucien closes it, and continues to squeak after he's bolted it. He has a broom with the end of the handle sharpened to a point, which doubles as a weapon. It's Lucien's job to watch all of the obscure unlabeled video cartridges that his brother acquires, and although they're in no discernible order, he knows what's on them. Bertraund's latest acquisition is a couple of tapes he picked up from a commercial display, and contained only the slogan in tiny raised letters--'il ne faut plus qu'on pursuive le bonheur' [happiness need no longer be pursued] and a stamped smiley face. Much to Bertraund's chagrin the cartridges were apparently blank. In a footnote, it's pointed out that this doesn't mean they are blank, since copy-capable cartridges require a 585 rpm machine to run,and the Antitoi's is a standard 450-drive. As Lucien sweeps he notices first one then another figure in a wheelchair outside the door, and he begins to hear squeaks. He realizes that this means the 'worst possible scenario' -- the AFR. As he pulls his Colt from his pants, the gun catches on his pants and along with the weight of his massive belly causes the pants to rip, and fall down around his ankles. He hobbles to the back room to warn his brother, but instead finds him with a railroad spike through his eye. The AFR members knock him to the floor, take his gun, and hit over the head with it as he listens in incomprehension to the their questions. The leader asks him to direct them to the 'Copy-capable' entertainment cartridge. Lucien understands none of this. His head is pulled back by the hair, and the sharpened broomstick is shoved down his throat skewering him. He has visions of childhood and his mother as he dies.
notes
That CT might have fathered his half-sister's child, Mario could possibly explain the unique deformities. It seems like DFW purposely pointed out [p 312-317] that CT was staying with the Moms and Himself on an extended stay at the time Mario was born, It seems odd that Hal's nightmare scene is from very late October, and Madame P is already off the air, since her suicide attempt was not until Nov 7. This section made me rethink my take on the two suicide-attempt scenes [p 219-223 and p 226-240] which I now think take place the same day, Nov 7, and are alternate takes on her overdose. This would mean that the murder of the Antitoi brothers probably takes place on Nov 8, since that has been established as Joelle's first night at Ennet House. The narrative shift in the last section seems unique thus far in the book, and this makes me wonder whether the point is to set it off as key. Another explanation might be that this occurs pretty close to the book's midpoint.
p 489-538
this section in 7 parts
p 489-491
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply asks Marathe if he's ever been tempted to view the Entertainment. Marathe muses on the fact that his father's death was caused by a videophonic pulse [from a call that Marathe had answered] which had stopped his father's pacemaker. Steeply reveals that the US has a team working on it, searching for possible non-lethal viewing possibilities. He says that one theory is that it's some kind of advanced holography. Marathe retorts that his people find theories of content irrelevant.
p 491-503
BS 1963 Winter
place Sepulveda, CA
narrated in first person by James Incandenza
synopsis:
James relates a story from his youth [revealed in a footnote to be a part of a memoir explaining how he became interested in annulation]. His father has just come home from shooting a TV commercial and is still dressed in all white with wig and makeup. After making himself a 'tomato juice beverage' he begins inspecting his bed to determine where the squeak is happening. He tells Jim he is fed up with the 'miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt like she needed to hang onto' and what they need to do is take the mattress off and expose the frame. Jim suggests that it may be the mattress, but his father insists that the frame is old. On TV is father plays the 'Man from Glad' who's a faux-superhero who shows up and saves the day by pointing out the proper storage bag for the situation. Much struggling and cussing ensues as Jim helps his father remove the mattress and then the box spring and leaning them up in the hallway. Exposing the bed frame reveals a great deal of dust, and his father complains, asking when the last time his mother had cleaned in there. Jim points out that his bed squeaks too, but that it doesn't bother him. His father says that he's well aware of this, and can hear every squeak. His father asks his mother to go get the vacuum, as he balances on the bed frame testing for the squeak. He is seized by a coughing fit and is then 'taken ill' which is not uncommon when he's 'relaxing' after work. He pitches forward and passes out face down in the dust breaking the bed frame in the process. Jim's mother arrives with the vacuum and he squeezes past the mattress in the hallway, and runs to his room, jumping onto his own bed trying to make it squeak. In the course of doing this he knocks over a lamp, which in turn knocks the brass knob off of his closet door. The bolt that holds the knob in place fell to the floor and begins to turn circles within circle's reminding him of "L'Hopital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem' which seems to him what it would be like for 'someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor.' and this was how he first became interested 'the possibilities of annulation.'
p 503-507
YDAU [2009] Nov 9
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
EH staffer Johnette Foltz accompanies Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert to an NA meeting for beginners where the focus is marijuana. Everyone shares the ravages of pot-- 'slowly but thoroughly was the consensus' and then the horrors of withdrawal. Erededy is surprised that no one comes out and uses clinical terms for depression. After the meeting everyone says an 'Our Father' and then begins hugging each other. Erdedy recoils to the back of the room to avoid being hugged, but is approached anyway by Roy Tony, a 'tall heavy African-American fellow with a gold incisor' who opens his arms for a hug. Erdedy says that he doesn't like to hug, which causes Roy Tony to burst into a tirade. 'You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks' etc. He points out that they had surrendered their wills in the group,and says that Erdedy better hug him or he'll rip off his head. Erdedy gives him a vigorous hug.
p 507-508
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply says that they've lost a couple of people during the testing of the Entertainment. An intern got a clearance card and began to view it, and his supervisor tried to pull him out, and now he's on a feeding tube. Steeply again asks if Marathe ever considers what it'd be like. Marathe says he's tempted in a different way-- by the efficacy of the Entertainment. Steeply says he's as much terrified as he is intrigued. Marathe says he never feels this temptation, but respects its power, thus does not 'fool crazily about.'
p 508-527
YDAU [2009] Nov 10
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is in the waiting room outside the Headmaster's office with Pemulis, Axford and Ann Kittenplan. The majority of the objects in this room are blue. The receptionist is known as Lateral Alice Moore, because she had been a traffic reporter and survived a helicopter crash, which left her with a neurological condition that restricted her movement to lateral. The four have them have presumably been summoned here in conjunction with the Eschaton fiasco. There are two offices Mrs. Incandenza's and Charles Tavis' and hers has no door. She is in her office with all of the younger girls, performing a 'diddle check' which is essentially a thorough questioning to make sure that none of them are being abused, which became mandatory after an incident with Coach Bill ['Touchy'] Phiely in California. Ordinarily Dr. Rusk does the diddle check, so Hal surmises that she must be in the office with Tavis assisting with what's going to go down. Pemulis is worried that he's going to get the lion's share of the blame, and perhaps be denied the trip to the WhataBurger. Pemulis absolutely detests Rusk, for reasons Hal has never been clear on. Fortunately for Pemulis, Hal never gave him up for wiring Rusk's doorknob and electrocuting a cleaning lady. Pemulis sidles over to Lateral Alice Moore's desk and is trying to find out whether his name is in the stack of WhataBurger invitations. Hal feels at his swollen gum where his tooth had been removed. Avril is questioning the uncomprehending girls about being touched inappropriately. Kittenplan proffers that the other 3 are 'in for some serious Pukers' referring to the Tap & Whack drills. Pemulis tries to rebut saying that Eschaton was firmly entrenched before any of them came along. Hal wonders why it's taken 48 hours for the summons. Hal is often surrounded by his family but spends little time thinking of them as such, except for Mario. Tavis, like Himself, was an indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. He had become a civil engineer and had built stadia, until an embarrassing incident where the stadium he built in Toronto turned out to afford it's spectators a view of people having sex in the hotel adjacent. When a bored cameraman began broadcasting the images on the instant replay board, most of the heat fell upon Tavis. Hal thinks his uncle is very shy and tries to hide it by being open and expansive to the point of being unsettling. As Headmaster he is both ineffectual and fearsome. The only other time Hal had been summoned to the Headmaster's office this year, was in August when he had been asked to take temporary charge of a new 9 year old student, who had been evacuated too late from Ticonderoga NNY, leaving him legally blind, but still a solid player in spite of the oversized head, and the need to drag around an oxygen tank. Hal was waiting in the same place then for Tavis, who was finishing an entrance interview with 'tiny little Tina Echt' who had been as much as thrown out of the car instead of dropped off. Tavis is physically small in the way of 'something that's farther from you than it wants to be plus it's receding.' Hal feels an 'involuntary rush of affection' for his uncle with his comb-over hair, his unsymmetrical mustache and his eyes that are set at different angles. The narrative flashes back to Nov 10, briefly, and then back to the interview with Tina. Tavis tells her that they will take her apart as a little girl and put her back together as a tennis player, that they will 'take apart your skull and very gently reconstruct a skull for you.' As Hal listens Ortho Stice comes and goes, and then the Moms enters, establishing herself in "the exact center" of the room as always. She asks about his ankle, which he says is tender. She lights a cigarette and holds it with smoking arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm, as always. Tavis is apologizing for making Tina cry. The Moms notes that Hal must be hungry and produces an apple, which she insists that she doesn't want and he should take. Orin and Hal call this the 'politeness roulette' wherein you feel bad for telling her any problem, because of the consequences for her. They discuss Tina Echt, and Hal laments how ten years at ETA will leave her burned out like coal at the bottom of a grill or ready for the Show. The Moms asks what the term for coal reduced to residue, and Hal quotes the OED derivation of 'clinkers' but reminds her that a grill wouldn't have clinkers, because charcoal is refined to burn to ash. She offers to have him for dinner, and then to give him the key to the kitchen, both of which he declines saying that he and Stice and perhaps Pemulis are going to 'blast down the hill and grab something.' The narrative shifts back to Nov 10, and Hal at the dentist just before being summoned, having his tooth pulled. The quartet wait on Tavis, and things are tense. Tavis when he loses his composure is like a cornered rat; when he suddenly gets very silent it's a danger sign. Because then he seems to grow, to rush at you. Lateral Alice Moore gets buzzed to bring them in, and Axford 'needs three tries' to open the door while ann Kittenplan is regally calm. Inside the office is Clenette, the custodial temp and her cart has a crazy wheel. Dr. Rusk is also inside with Otis P. Lord, with the computer monitor still over his head, with glass shards keeping him from moving his head. The room's final occupant is revealed to be an ONANTA urine expert, presumably there for a surprise test.
p 528-530
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply insists that it's not just a USA thing, citing 'multicultural Oriental myths' of a woman covered with fine blond hair with whom men would be drawn
to have sex and then be paralyzed or killed outright. As dawn approaches, Marathe thinks of boys with legs and bicycles. Both Steeply's and Marathe's superiors know of the meetings and look forward to them. This is their sixth or seventh meeting. According to Steeply, the BSS doesn't know that Fortier knows about Steeply knowing that Fortier knows Marathe is here. Fortier doesn't know however that Marathe now puts his wife before his cause.If he did know this, Marathe would surely have a railroad spike through his eye by now. Steeply continues, citing the myth of Odalisk, who is so beautiful that she turns those who gaze upon her to an opal, like the Greek 'Medusa in reverse.' Marathe explains that the Greeks did not fear beauty, they feared ugliness. Steeply smoked a cigarette in the same fashion as Avril, cradling his smoking arm's elbow with the other arm. Marathe invites Steeply to sit down for a moment, gesturing at his uncomfortable shoes, and then announces that he must soon leave. Steeply says the possibility of things crawling up the skirt makes him sensitive about 'plopping down.'
p 531-538
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 4:50am
Ennet House
no narration
synopsis:
This section is a dialog between Gately and Joelle in the front office of Ennet House. Gately is explaining an incident in bar where one of his friends makes the moves on another guy's girl and then humiliates the guy in front of her. The humiliated guy comes back with a gun and shoots Gately's friend in the head. Gately and his friends try to keep the victim on his feet, until the ambulance came, but to no avail. Joelle interjects a story of seeing someone cut off his hand with a chainsaw, and watching her Daddy use his belt to save him. Gately asks Joelle about the veil. She tells him about the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed [UHID]. He asks why she's in it, though. She answers by describing the ceremony where the members first don the veil. Gately expresses his incomprehension and inability to see the UHID concept through the lens of AA, viz why would someone want the veil when they've finally found a support group wherein they can 'step out of the cage and quit hiding.' Joelle explains that the urge to hide is accompanied by shame about that urge. People stare but try to conceal the stare because they're ashamed to stare. So without the veil, you hide your need to hide by appearing as if you don't care how you appear to others. Gately notes that her voice changes when on this topic and asks her to use few words. The first step of UHID is acceptance of the powerlessness over the need to hide-- donning the veil. When Gately grasps what she's said, she notes that he didn't need fewer words after all, and that although he worries that he's 'not bright,' he is 'not not bright.' She uses this to point up a difference between AA and UHID which would say that it's fine to feel shame of being not bright, but if you begin to feel ashamed of that shame it becomes an insidious cycle. Gately says this makes his head hurt. He reveals that he got kicked off his football team for flunking English. She reacts with interest asking him what position he played, and telling of her baton twirling. He asks again what she's hiding under the veil, and again she ducks the question. He says the Staff part of him wants to say, if you don't want to answer just say so. She answers that he's more bugged by the possibility that she's treating him as unbright, than about her inability to refuse to answer his question. She says that she's already been upfront about her stuff, but it's his shame about his perceived unbrightness that's getting 'buried under this dead horse' of her deformity. He understands nothing and asks if her skin is deformed, even though everywhere else it looks--. She says he was about to say perfect. She says finally that she's perfect, ''Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities.' He takes this as sarcasm. She says 'I am so beautiful I am deformed.' He calls for six extra-strong aspirin. She asks again what position he played.
notes
The question of whether Joelle is actually deformed under the veil seems to be answered once and for all here, by her. Or is it? The idea of a beauty so sublime that it harms its beholder is clearly one of the primary themes that unifies the converging story lines. Another theme is simply the head which is hit upon many times in this section, so to speak. From Mario on down, there are a myriad of characters with large, unusual and often deformed heads, and heads are almost always the point of impact of violence, self inflicted or otherwise. Heads are where the game of tennis purportedly takes place, and hence are the object of much of the ETA-training regimen. Tavis' head is clearly reminiscent of Mario's, suggesting again the incest possibility. Then there's Himself who put his own head in a microwave oven. Also of note is the near comical [in spite of what they often portend] recurrence of squeaks in a good majority of scenes.
p 489-491
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply asks Marathe if he's ever been tempted to view the Entertainment. Marathe muses on the fact that his father's death was caused by a videophonic pulse [from a call that Marathe had answered] which had stopped his father's pacemaker. Steeply reveals that the US has a team working on it, searching for possible non-lethal viewing possibilities. He says that one theory is that it's some kind of advanced holography. Marathe retorts that his people find theories of content irrelevant.
p 491-503
BS 1963 Winter
place Sepulveda, CA
narrated in first person by James Incandenza
synopsis:
James relates a story from his youth [revealed in a footnote to be a part of a memoir explaining how he became interested in annulation]. His father has just come home from shooting a TV commercial and is still dressed in all white with wig and makeup. After making himself a 'tomato juice beverage' he begins inspecting his bed to determine where the squeak is happening. He tells Jim he is fed up with the 'miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt like she needed to hang onto' and what they need to do is take the mattress off and expose the frame. Jim suggests that it may be the mattress, but his father insists that the frame is old. On TV is father plays the 'Man from Glad' who's a faux-superhero who shows up and saves the day by pointing out the proper storage bag for the situation. Much struggling and cussing ensues as Jim helps his father remove the mattress and then the box spring and leaning them up in the hallway. Exposing the bed frame reveals a great deal of dust, and his father complains, asking when the last time his mother had cleaned in there. Jim points out that his bed squeaks too, but that it doesn't bother him. His father says that he's well aware of this, and can hear every squeak. His father asks his mother to go get the vacuum, as he balances on the bed frame testing for the squeak. He is seized by a coughing fit and is then 'taken ill' which is not uncommon when he's 'relaxing' after work. He pitches forward and passes out face down in the dust breaking the bed frame in the process. Jim's mother arrives with the vacuum and he squeezes past the mattress in the hallway, and runs to his room, jumping onto his own bed trying to make it squeak. In the course of doing this he knocks over a lamp, which in turn knocks the brass knob off of his closet door. The bolt that holds the knob in place fell to the floor and begins to turn circles within circle's reminding him of "L'Hopital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem' which seems to him what it would be like for 'someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor.' and this was how he first became interested 'the possibilities of annulation.'
p 503-507
YDAU [2009] Nov 9
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
EH staffer Johnette Foltz accompanies Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert to an NA meeting for beginners where the focus is marijuana. Everyone shares the ravages of pot-- 'slowly but thoroughly was the consensus' and then the horrors of withdrawal. Erededy is surprised that no one comes out and uses clinical terms for depression. After the meeting everyone says an 'Our Father' and then begins hugging each other. Erdedy recoils to the back of the room to avoid being hugged, but is approached anyway by Roy Tony, a 'tall heavy African-American fellow with a gold incisor' who opens his arms for a hug. Erdedy says that he doesn't like to hug, which causes Roy Tony to burst into a tirade. 'You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks' etc. He points out that they had surrendered their wills in the group,and says that Erdedy better hug him or he'll rip off his head. Erdedy gives him a vigorous hug.
p 507-508
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply says that they've lost a couple of people during the testing of the Entertainment. An intern got a clearance card and began to view it, and his supervisor tried to pull him out, and now he's on a feeding tube. Steeply again asks if Marathe ever considers what it'd be like. Marathe says he's tempted in a different way-- by the efficacy of the Entertainment. Steeply says he's as much terrified as he is intrigued. Marathe says he never feels this temptation, but respects its power, thus does not 'fool crazily about.'
p 508-527
YDAU [2009] Nov 10
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is in the waiting room outside the Headmaster's office with Pemulis, Axford and Ann Kittenplan. The majority of the objects in this room are blue. The receptionist is known as Lateral Alice Moore, because she had been a traffic reporter and survived a helicopter crash, which left her with a neurological condition that restricted her movement to lateral. The four have them have presumably been summoned here in conjunction with the Eschaton fiasco. There are two offices Mrs. Incandenza's and Charles Tavis' and hers has no door. She is in her office with all of the younger girls, performing a 'diddle check' which is essentially a thorough questioning to make sure that none of them are being abused, which became mandatory after an incident with Coach Bill ['Touchy'] Phiely in California. Ordinarily Dr. Rusk does the diddle check, so Hal surmises that she must be in the office with Tavis assisting with what's going to go down. Pemulis is worried that he's going to get the lion's share of the blame, and perhaps be denied the trip to the WhataBurger. Pemulis absolutely detests Rusk, for reasons Hal has never been clear on. Fortunately for Pemulis, Hal never gave him up for wiring Rusk's doorknob and electrocuting a cleaning lady. Pemulis sidles over to Lateral Alice Moore's desk and is trying to find out whether his name is in the stack of WhataBurger invitations. Hal feels at his swollen gum where his tooth had been removed. Avril is questioning the uncomprehending girls about being touched inappropriately. Kittenplan proffers that the other 3 are 'in for some serious Pukers' referring to the Tap & Whack drills. Pemulis tries to rebut saying that Eschaton was firmly entrenched before any of them came along. Hal wonders why it's taken 48 hours for the summons. Hal is often surrounded by his family but spends little time thinking of them as such, except for Mario. Tavis, like Himself, was an indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. He had become a civil engineer and had built stadia, until an embarrassing incident where the stadium he built in Toronto turned out to afford it's spectators a view of people having sex in the hotel adjacent. When a bored cameraman began broadcasting the images on the instant replay board, most of the heat fell upon Tavis. Hal thinks his uncle is very shy and tries to hide it by being open and expansive to the point of being unsettling. As Headmaster he is both ineffectual and fearsome. The only other time Hal had been summoned to the Headmaster's office this year, was in August when he had been asked to take temporary charge of a new 9 year old student, who had been evacuated too late from Ticonderoga NNY, leaving him legally blind, but still a solid player in spite of the oversized head, and the need to drag around an oxygen tank. Hal was waiting in the same place then for Tavis, who was finishing an entrance interview with 'tiny little Tina Echt' who had been as much as thrown out of the car instead of dropped off. Tavis is physically small in the way of 'something that's farther from you than it wants to be plus it's receding.' Hal feels an 'involuntary rush of affection' for his uncle with his comb-over hair, his unsymmetrical mustache and his eyes that are set at different angles. The narrative flashes back to Nov 10, briefly, and then back to the interview with Tina. Tavis tells her that they will take her apart as a little girl and put her back together as a tennis player, that they will 'take apart your skull and very gently reconstruct a skull for you.' As Hal listens Ortho Stice comes and goes, and then the Moms enters, establishing herself in "the exact center" of the room as always. She asks about his ankle, which he says is tender. She lights a cigarette and holds it with smoking arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm, as always. Tavis is apologizing for making Tina cry. The Moms notes that Hal must be hungry and produces an apple, which she insists that she doesn't want and he should take. Orin and Hal call this the 'politeness roulette' wherein you feel bad for telling her any problem, because of the consequences for her. They discuss Tina Echt, and Hal laments how ten years at ETA will leave her burned out like coal at the bottom of a grill or ready for the Show. The Moms asks what the term for coal reduced to residue, and Hal quotes the OED derivation of 'clinkers' but reminds her that a grill wouldn't have clinkers, because charcoal is refined to burn to ash. She offers to have him for dinner, and then to give him the key to the kitchen, both of which he declines saying that he and Stice and perhaps Pemulis are going to 'blast down the hill and grab something.' The narrative shifts back to Nov 10, and Hal at the dentist just before being summoned, having his tooth pulled. The quartet wait on Tavis, and things are tense. Tavis when he loses his composure is like a cornered rat; when he suddenly gets very silent it's a danger sign. Because then he seems to grow, to rush at you. Lateral Alice Moore gets buzzed to bring them in, and Axford 'needs three tries' to open the door while ann Kittenplan is regally calm. Inside the office is Clenette, the custodial temp and her cart has a crazy wheel. Dr. Rusk is also inside with Otis P. Lord, with the computer monitor still over his head, with glass shards keeping him from moving his head. The room's final occupant is revealed to be an ONANTA urine expert, presumably there for a surprise test.
p 528-530
YDAU [2009] May 1
place near Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Steeply insists that it's not just a USA thing, citing 'multicultural Oriental myths' of a woman covered with fine blond hair with whom men would be drawn
to have sex and then be paralyzed or killed outright. As dawn approaches, Marathe thinks of boys with legs and bicycles. Both Steeply's and Marathe's superiors know of the meetings and look forward to them. This is their sixth or seventh meeting. According to Steeply, the BSS doesn't know that Fortier knows about Steeply knowing that Fortier knows Marathe is here. Fortier doesn't know however that Marathe now puts his wife before his cause.If he did know this, Marathe would surely have a railroad spike through his eye by now. Steeply continues, citing the myth of Odalisk, who is so beautiful that she turns those who gaze upon her to an opal, like the Greek 'Medusa in reverse.' Marathe explains that the Greeks did not fear beauty, they feared ugliness. Steeply smoked a cigarette in the same fashion as Avril, cradling his smoking arm's elbow with the other arm. Marathe invites Steeply to sit down for a moment, gesturing at his uncomfortable shoes, and then announces that he must soon leave. Steeply says the possibility of things crawling up the skirt makes him sensitive about 'plopping down.'
p 531-538
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 4:50am
Ennet House
no narration
synopsis:
This section is a dialog between Gately and Joelle in the front office of Ennet House. Gately is explaining an incident in bar where one of his friends makes the moves on another guy's girl and then humiliates the guy in front of her. The humiliated guy comes back with a gun and shoots Gately's friend in the head. Gately and his friends try to keep the victim on his feet, until the ambulance came, but to no avail. Joelle interjects a story of seeing someone cut off his hand with a chainsaw, and watching her Daddy use his belt to save him. Gately asks Joelle about the veil. She tells him about the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed [UHID]. He asks why she's in it, though. She answers by describing the ceremony where the members first don the veil. Gately expresses his incomprehension and inability to see the UHID concept through the lens of AA, viz why would someone want the veil when they've finally found a support group wherein they can 'step out of the cage and quit hiding.' Joelle explains that the urge to hide is accompanied by shame about that urge. People stare but try to conceal the stare because they're ashamed to stare. So without the veil, you hide your need to hide by appearing as if you don't care how you appear to others. Gately notes that her voice changes when on this topic and asks her to use few words. The first step of UHID is acceptance of the powerlessness over the need to hide-- donning the veil. When Gately grasps what she's said, she notes that he didn't need fewer words after all, and that although he worries that he's 'not bright,' he is 'not not bright.' She uses this to point up a difference between AA and UHID which would say that it's fine to feel shame of being not bright, but if you begin to feel ashamed of that shame it becomes an insidious cycle. Gately says this makes his head hurt. He reveals that he got kicked off his football team for flunking English. She reacts with interest asking him what position he played, and telling of her baton twirling. He asks again what she's hiding under the veil, and again she ducks the question. He says the Staff part of him wants to say, if you don't want to answer just say so. She answers that he's more bugged by the possibility that she's treating him as unbright, than about her inability to refuse to answer his question. She says that she's already been upfront about her stuff, but it's his shame about his perceived unbrightness that's getting 'buried under this dead horse' of her deformity. He understands nothing and asks if her skin is deformed, even though everywhere else it looks--. She says he was about to say perfect. She says finally that she's perfect, ''Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities.' He takes this as sarcasm. She says 'I am so beautiful I am deformed.' He calls for six extra-strong aspirin. She asks again what position he played.
notes
The question of whether Joelle is actually deformed under the veil seems to be answered once and for all here, by her. Or is it? The idea of a beauty so sublime that it harms its beholder is clearly one of the primary themes that unifies the converging story lines. Another theme is simply the head which is hit upon many times in this section, so to speak. From Mario on down, there are a myriad of characters with large, unusual and often deformed heads, and heads are almost always the point of impact of violence, self inflicted or otherwise. Heads are where the game of tennis purportedly takes place, and hence are the object of much of the ETA-training regimen. Tavis' head is clearly reminiscent of Mario's, suggesting again the incest possibility. Then there's Himself who put his own head in a microwave oven. Also of note is the near comical [in spite of what they often portend] recurrence of squeaks in a good majority of scenes.
p 538-619
this section in 16 parts
p 538-547
YDAU [2009] presumably November
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Randy Lenz has found his own way to deal with the Rage and Powerlessness issues recovering alcoholics face. While he has a car, a heavily modified Duster, he always rides to meetings with someone else, and sits in the northernmost seat in the car. But after the meetings he always walks back to Ennet House, and soon begins returning right at 11:29, a minute before curfew. This raises red flags, but whatever urine spot-checks haven't come back messed up by the lab, were clean, so he's left alone. It all started with a rat: one night on the way home he comes across two rats eating garbage in an alley, and picks up a chunk of concrete and drops it on one of the rats, squishing it. He discovers what he likes to say at the moment of issue resolution- 'there.' From rats he moves on to cats, using tuna to lure them into a hefty bag where they will squirm for air until they've suffocated. There. Eventually he moves to 'Hefty Steel-Sak' reinforced bags to ensure that the cats cannot claw their way out. Lenz develops a preference for the interval 10:16-10:26, and he therefore likes to keep the Brighton Best Savings Bank giant clock within view. This reminds him of a story related by Doony Glynn at a meeting, that once under the influence of 'Madame' he had viewed the entire sky as a viewer screen with the time and temperature displayed at all times. Glynn went crazy, but Lenz likes the idea. Lenz has used cocaine a few times since coming to Ennet House. He stores it in his copy of 'Principles of Psychology and the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion' which has hole cut in the middle 300 pages. He considers it enough of a miracle that under such duress, hiding from threats from both sides of the law, that he's only broken down a few times. He considers that sobriety. He is careful not to do it when he's out alone, and he knows how to beat the urine test, by drinking lemon juice and putting a dash of powdered bleach on his hand.He soon feels the need to move on from swinging the cats against a pole to setting them on fire with kerosene. That soon leads him to dogs, which he lures with meat and then slits their throats with his Browning X444 knife. He has a close call when he sees a street drunk urinating in an alley and imagines him on fire with his throat slit, but that's as far as it goes. When Bruce Green starts walking home from meetings with Lenz, it presents Lenz with a dilemma. On the one hand, Green is a decent listener, throwing in enough 'no shit's' and 'fucking-A's' to make Lenz feel validated. On the other hand, Lenz is deprived of his much needed 2216-2226h interval. Plus he feels like it would be no big deal to Green anyway and that just increases his tension over the matter. He does manage to exterminate a small bird in the garbage disposal, but still is left feeling unresolved.
p 548
YDAU [2009] November
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
None of the rooms at Ennet House have locks, except for Pat M's office, the House manager's office and the two live-in staff bedrooms downstairs.
p 548-549
YDAU [2009] early November
place metro Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The only blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine is that he carries a ruler with him so that he can measure his penis every morning. He is in Boston because of national security implications of the Entertainment. More casualties have been reported, including a film professor and his companion in Berkeley. Tine has toured a ward in Boston, where the victims of the Entertainment have been reduced to vegetative existence. The Berkeley cartridge was stolen from SFPD, by someone who left behind red flannel fibers. A retarded inmate with a headset recorder reported that the opening scene is of a veiled woman going through a revolving door and catching sight of someone, which makes her veil billow. After that the inmate was incapacitated. Attempts to trace the dissemination of the samizdat point to somewhere along the Canadian border, with hubs in Boston, New Bedford and somewhere in the desert Southwest. The possibility of Canadian involvement is the reason Tine is in Boston.
p 550-553
YDAU [2009] November 9, late PM [2100h]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis passes by Dr. Rusk's office and overhears Ortho Stice discussing his 'counterphobia' of linoleum. Stice is objecting to her Oedipal-GI Joe suggestions, assuring her that he doesn't play with dolls, nor want to have sex with them. Pemulis had tried to dress as insolently as possible, but the result was simply that he looked poorly dressed. As he passes through the ETA lobby, all is dark and quiet. There is 'an odd vehicular shape near the north wall's trophy case' but he doesn't look into it. He enters the Headmaster's office, and there are cracks of light underTavis's and Mrs. Inc's lack of a door, but Lateral Alice Moore has gone home. He snoops through her desk, hearing Tavis on his stair-master. He hears something coming from Avril's office and enters. He finds John Wayne in his jockstrap and a football helmet and shoulder-pads, and Hal's mom in a cheerleader's outfit nearly doing the splits on the shag carpet, and blowing a silent whistle. When he says 'hoping for a second of your time' Wayne stops, gets dressed and leaves. Mrs. Incandenza remains in the splits on the shag, and Pemulis makes a point of keeping his eyes on her face.
p 553-559
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz in his topcoat, dark slacks and loafers, and Green in his cheap leather jacket are out on one of their walks and by 2200h the meatloaf is burning a hole in Lenz's pocket, but he can't bring himself to ask Green to find another route back to Ennet House. Earlier today Lenz had sprayed hairspray in the face of one of the house cats, but it wasn't satisfying, and then he had diarrhea. All of which necessitated the need to get high, which he convinces himself he is doing in the interests of sobriety and growth. He miscalculates the effect of the cocaine, however; instead of giving him the nerve to ask Green to leave him alone with his meatloaf, it compels him to tell Green more or less every experience he's ever had. He explains how his clock phobia relates to his stepfather who made him wind and polish his stopwatch and keep it accurate to the second. He relates how obese his mother had been, and other less credible tales about his thumb having been cut off and growing back, about his knowledge of secret marshall arts moves, about a hydrocephalic woman with a necklace of dead gulls at a Halloween party at the home of an orthodontist where there had also been an infant Concavity-victim that became the subject of mescal-related rituals. He tells of a 'recurving' dream about wearing a safari hat seated under a ceiling fan. Green doesn't dream or at least cannot remember his dreams. Green keeps Lenz abreast of the time. Lenz says that AA/NA works alright but that it's a cult. He claims to remember things that happened to him in vitro.
p 560
YDAU [2009] possibly November 10
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is lying on his bunk at lunchtime. Troeltsch pokes his head in but gets no answer as to what Hal is doing. Pemulis comes by '41 breaths later' and asks if Hal has eaten, he gestures that he has and says that 'the beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the baobab tree.' Then 'over 200 breaths later' John Wayne puts his head in the door and neither says anything, and then Wayne leaves.
p 560-562
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz is showing off his ravaged septum and rattling off conspiratorial tidbits to Green. He seems to know something about the Entertainment, which he describes as holographic pornography, and in the same breath he mentions a Canadian cult whose members jump in front of trains. He tells of his obese stepfather, and of the disadvantages of being a coke dealer, etc. Green's done some coke, but doesn't appear to follow Lenz's coke-addled rant. He veers from how male actors are usually 'closet pooftas' to how the feral animal population in the Great Concavity descended from housepets, and on to how a cult of Rastafarians worship 'The Infant' which was a fetus reanimated by some toxic mixture. Green says that if AA is a brainwashing cult, then he reckons he's due for a washing, which Lenz recognizes as something Gately repeats daily.
p 560-562
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 up to 11:29pm
place Ennet House
no narration
synopsis:
This section in the form of extracts from Gately's interface with various residents. In the first Gately asks why all the interest in football, and refuses to flex his muscle. She asks if his father is still alive and reveals that hers is, but that her mother is 'worm-farming.' Joelle comments on how she was drawn to one of the speakers at a meeting, because he had kind of a 'broken authority' to him. She comments on how like a lot of Bostoners, he wrecks a perfectly acceptable outfit by omitting the socks. Gately says maybe she shouldn't be the one to comment on wardrobe. The next excerpt is between Foss and Gately. Foss is trying to report on Nell G. and Geoff D. without feeling like a rat. He says that they're telling newbies to 'think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift' and that's this is wreaking havoc, especially on Tingley, the new kid. The next two regard the plumbing. In the last extract Yolanda is reporting that Lenz [not named] has connived her into incorporating oral sex into the morning ritual of getting down on knees and thanking the Higher Power.
p 565-567
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin is in a hotel room with a putatively Swiss hand model, whom he met at the airport after driving Helen Steeply [and having struck out with her]. She had asked him to sign a football for her son. At the hotel she has photos of her family all laid out. His pursuit is not of love, but of conquest. He needs to feel 'he has' the Subject,and she can do nothing but yearn for him, to feel 'a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O, O. That he is the One.' This why there must be many Subjects, if the One had a One, then they'd merge into We. Orin had felt that once, but would never again recover. And there's also contempt, he hates all of them a little, but this he disguises, pretending to be tender and feeling. This section also contains a lengthy footnote [p 1038-1044] which is another excerpt of Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Steeply's questions aren't given, but apparently she's asked him if Himself and/or the Moms is insane. His answer is a qualified yes w/r/t Himself; he says that you'd have to be insane to kill yourself in that way, but that mostly he just drank himself blind everyday, and he made films in his spare time, about which people are still writing doctoral theses. With the Moms, it's a different story-- he admits that she can function and more, and relates how she belongs to the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts whose obsession it is to correct public misuse of grammar, eg '10 items or less.' She never leaves the ETA grounds now, but her OCD is not the debilitating kind. She has her compulsions compulsively arranged to maintain time for her kids. He says that she has 'Hal's skull lashed tight to hers' but without him being aware of it. She worships Mario, having made him a 'secular martyr to the mess she's made of her adult life.' He says that they both have to get away from ETA before they realize that the Moms is bats. He reveals that Himself is buried in the Moms's family plot in Quebec. He then tells a story to relate just how bats the Moms is. This is the same story from p 10-11. The Moms is in her Weston yard roto-tilling the garden [she makes Orin put the gas in it because she thinks that petroleum products cause cancer] wearing plastic bags over her espadrilles and a filtration mask. Hal comes up to her with a big old piece of mold and announces that he has eaten some of it. He interrupts the story to mention that for more info on the Moms and Himself, Helen should contact Marlon Bain, who practically lived with them at the time. He's also OCD and possibly bats. Back to the story-- The Moms becomes hysterical and just runs around the yard yelling 'Help! my son ate this!' Meanwhile Mario imitates Himself who watches the situation from the porch making a frame with his hands as if he were filming. The neighbor finally intervenes and hooks up the hose, presumably to wash out Hal's mouth.
p 567-574
YDAU [2009] possibly November
place ETA
no narration
synopsis:
This section is just dialog without narration. Schacht runs into Arslanian outside the weight room Arslanian is blindfolded, as Coach Thorp's experiment in anticipation of the soon to arrive blind player, Dymphna. He explains how he went through a training match wearing the blindfold, to attempt to train his ear. He had some trouble, often facing the wrong direction, etc. He then runs into Pemulis, who at first pretends to also be blindfolded. Pemulis says that Doucette in in with Kyle receiving advice about his depression over his mole, and trying to get tutored so that he can get through Watson's Energy Survey class. Arslanian asks to be shown to the restroom, but Pemulis goes right on talking about how Mario is in there with them trying to explain annulation to Doucette, using the somersault with one hand nailed to the floor analogy. Arslanian confesses that he's one of the few Pakistani's who doesn't excel in science and he himself has a hard time with annulation. Pemulis says picture a triangle, and explains how the cycle works-- the fusion facility in what used to be Vermont in the Concavity pumps its waste to Methuen Fan-Complex just south of the Concavity, where it's processed into U-239 waste and then trucked or catapulted to Maine where it's allowed to decay and then added to UF4 waste also pumped from Vermont, and turned into the radioactive raw materials which are sent back to Vermont and the process begins again. Arslanian's head is spinning, and says he's confused that fusion creates no waste. Pemulis says that this is where Himself came into the picture, inventing holographic conversions that allowed the team to study annulation safely in highly poisonous environments. Pemulis says that the whole idea for using waste as raw material for annulation came from medicine-- the giving cancerous cells cancer to treat them. All you need is a huge amount of toxic, waste which is why the annulation site was placed in the Great Concavity. It turns out also that the process sucks all the poisonous stuff out of the environment, and leaves it hyper-fertile, which is why it's necessary to catapult the toxins from other places into the region to keep the fertile zone from overrunning the entire area. So the area goes from wasteland to overgrown several times a month and it's as if it's a sped up evolutionary model-- this 'accelerated phenomena' is 'actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time.' Pemulis says that this is the part that Doucette is having trouble with. Arslanian pleads again to be shown to the bathroom. Pemulis realizes [or perhaps reveals] that Arslanian is Muslim and his urine is thus clean and valuable, and convinces him to part ways with it.
p 574-575
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Now that Ms. Steeply has gone, Orin has noticed that the legless wheelchair guys are back, as if they were afraid of her. He also notes that the legless man at the hotel room door had had the same Swiss accent as the putatively Swiss hand model.
p 575-589
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz is pretending to Green that his sniffing comes from allergies, forgetting his experience with cocaine. He tells Green that the 'new Joel girl's' veil conceals a single eye in the center of her forehead. Lenz rattles on-- about how his mother was so obese that when she came to Parent's Day at Lenz's school she was unable to sit at his desk like all the other parents,and when she attempted to, she crushed the desk. Lenz describes how she died: on a bus trip she had been in the bathroom when the ride became very turbulent due to some construction and she was flung about in the bathroom, ending up with her rear-end stuck protruding from the bathroom window, where she remained for the rest of the voyage. She then sued the bus company and the transportation agency and won an enormous settlement, after which she lost all will to do anything but eat and watch InterLace cartridges, and eventually ruptured and died. Lenz tells Green that his mother's will left him in the cold, giving all her money to ex-husbands . Amidst the faint sound of Polynesian music, Lenz urinates behind a dumpster, while Green parses his repressed memories of his own parents who had died when he was small. His father was an aerobics instructor until one of his legs suddenly grew longer than the other, and he was forced to take a job in a novelties store. His mother dies by opening a Christmas present which is a can she thinks holds her favorite macadamia nuts, but actually contains a cloth snake that springs out of the can and gives her a heart attack. Bruce never spoke a word until his final year of grade school. His father went nuts and was executed after sending Blammo-cigars to and killing a bunch of Shriners and Rotarians. Due to the macadamia nuts, Green has an aversion to all things remotely Polynesian, and perhaps the presence of the faint music explains why he wanders off in the direction of the Unexamined Life, without realizing that he and Lenz have become separated. Green after detox has about one thought every 60 seconds. He wanders through a neighborhood toward the Hawaiian music with horrified fascination. He spots Lenz some distance ahead of him and hangs back without calling out to him. At 412 W. Brainerd he finds the source of the music someone has placed speakers in the window of a house adorned with a Canadian flag. He sees Lenz approaching the dog that's chained in the yard of the same house, where the party is in full tilt. Green has a flashback to a Hawaiian party that he and Mildred [at 7 months pregnant] had crashed, and at which he had gotten so drunk that he shit his pants and had to take the subway home wearing a grass skirt after ditching his pants. He sees Lenz offering the dog some of Don G's meatloaf. The music is disturbing Green to no end, causing him to have way more than one thought per minute. Green watches Lenz lures the dog with the meatloaf and then slits his throat, the sounds of which cause one of the party-goers to the window. Lenz finishes the dog off and then goes tearing off down the street, as the party-goers come out and alternately shriek in horror and give chase. Green stands there finger almost frozen in his ear, noticing a couple of guys in wheelchairs.
p 589-593
YDAU [2009] November
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's birthday will be the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 25. As Madame P's hiatus enters its third week Mario cannot sleep. He has a burned pelvis, which his insensitivity to pain kept him from noticing. He hears the shrieks of the Moms's night terrors. Mario is worried because he can no longer tell whether Hal is sad. Mario has been taking insomniacal strolls on the grounds of the Enfield Marine PHH, across the street from Ennet House, where the headmistress has a disability and the people all cry in front of each other. He hears the sound of a taped broadcast of Madame P's show from her first year when she still had an accent coming from a window covered with a billowing flag. Mario had fallen in love with Madame P because she spoke of heartbreak, people dying, and stuff that was real. 'It's increasingly hard to find valid art about stuff that's real in this way.' Mario is confused by the fact that people roll their eyes every time something serious is mentioned. He was the only one who laughed at Pemulis's joke about the dial-a-prayer service for atheists where the phone just rings and rings. Neither Hal or Lyle can explain to him why everyone else looked down uncomfortably. Mario watches as people from Ennet House return just before curfew. One of them helps him down from his police lock, and he ambles up the hill, noticing Don G's square head through the window.
p 593-596
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Gately's duties as live-in staffer are described-- head-counts, log-entries, unlocking the meds-locker for certain residents, and making out chore lists for Pat M. He has to check on Kate, who's too sick to leave her room. He has to give Doony Glynn his Slimfast shake. He has to figure out who made Rice Krispie treats and didn't clean the mess. He has to call Pat M to relay Kate's comment about hurting herself. He has to have each resident in the office for at least a few minutes. He has to meet with the newest resident, Ruth van Cleve, and go over the house rules. He often has to kick people off the one payphone in the house, and he's gotten quite apt at letting the abuse roll off of him. He does struggle daily with the urge to clobber Wade McDade, who is pushing up the end of his nose to flatten it like a pig's, and asking everyone whether they know anyone with such a nose. He is expected to keep an ear open to the house gossip to root out potential conflicts. The only thing residents are expected to report others for is using Substances, and all the rest Gately's got to ferret out.
p 596-601
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
Orin feels a postcoital loss of hope, plus a contempt that he hides well. He can give pleasure but can't receive it. But it does give him pleasure to feign intimacy and caring afterwards. The putatively Swiss hand-model says that no one must know, and Orin assures her. When a knock comes at the door, the hand-model hides beneath the blankets as Orin wraps a towel around himself and goes to answer. He thinks of Swiss cuckolds, near-Eastern medical attaches, journalists, but the man at the door is in a wheelchair and claims to be conducting a survey, which Orin cheerfully accepts. The man asks him some basic questions and then asks him to please list what 'lifestyle elements he misses. Orin takes it as a shy ruse to get his autograph. He lists some childhood memories and then says he misses TV. When asked for the 'reason' he says he misses the commercials being louder than the program, the order-before-midnight sales pitches, sneering at something he loves. He says he misses stuff he could watch and know what people were going to say. Summer reruns. The man in the wheelchair reminds him that he can watch cartridges again and again, if he chooses. Orin says it's not the same; with TV you were subjected to the repetition, the familiarity was inflicted. The man in the wheelchair asks him to list things he does not miss. Orin asks how much time he has. The wheelchaired man glances briefly past him at the lump under the covers, and says he can return at a later time, since Orin is 'engaged.' Orin says that's a matter of opinion.
p 601-619
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
From 2300-2330h Gately is conducting the nightly head count as the curfew approaches. Lenz slips through the door just as Gately's getting the keys ready to lock it. Green is 6 minutes late and Gately decides to let him in but gives him the obligatory chewing out, plus a week's house restriction. Green is so unresponsive that Gately decides he has to perform a spot-urine. He has to rush the urine down to his personal fridge where it's to be kept until the morning when the lab is open. He makes it back in time for the final head count at 2345h, when he notices that Amy J is still not back, and he has to make the call to discharge her. After that he has time for only 20 situps before he has to deal with the nightly car moving, which is necessary because each night at midnight, the legal side of the street switches, and all the residents who have cars must move them, or face citation and/or towing. Plus if some of the car owners have fallen asleep Gately feels he has to go up and find them. This happens to be the case with Lenz tonight, and Gately has to hold all the residents up at the door while he goes in search of Lenz. He finds him doing handstand pushups in his jockstrap and without a doubt high on cocaine. Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, but there's the car issue to be dealt with asap. So he lets everyone out and keeps a close eye on Lenz to make sure he doesn't bolt. However when he notices Doony Glynn's VW, he realizes he has to leave the residents unattended and go back inside and round up a resident to move it, because Glynn is legitimately incapacitated. He recruits Green but then has to go up and get the keys from Glynn, who is too delirious to answer coherently. After a minute, Green comes into the room and tells Gately to come down immediately. When he does he finds that two guys almost his size are chasing Lenz around a Montego car, while a third holds the rest of the residents at bay with a gun. Lenz is talking nonstop, denying doing whatever they think he did. Gately notes that the smaller guy is holding the gun like he knows how to shoot, and that the gun is a serious weapon. Gately feels a weird calm. He realizes the three are Canadian, and has a flashback to the Canadian he killed by gagging. The lady who yells 'help' is at her window yelling and Joelle is leaning out of a window yelling for someone to call Pat. The cops who are usually punctual with their tow trucks and parking tickets are nowhere to be found. One of the big guys advises Gately to mind his own business, but Gately says that he cannot. Lenz hides behind Gately, and Gately notices blood on his hands. One of the Canadians pulls out a knife, and Gately's 'subdural hardware' clicks into fight mode. He explains that he's responsible for these people and suggests that they talk it out instead of fighting. The guys explain that Lenz killed someone named Pepe or Bebe. When Lenz taunts them they charge and a fight ensues. The description goes into something like slow motion as Gately breaks the arm of one guy and sends the other flying onto the hood of the car with a kick to the chin. As he is kneeing the man with the broken arm in the groin, he is shot in the shoulder by the third man. Green grabs the man in a half nelson and Nell Gunther kicks him in the face, causing his head to snap back and break Green's nose. Gately grabs the guy on the hood of the car with his good hand and smashes his head repeatedly into the windshield. Erdedy standing with his hands up notes the appearance of possible extracurricular concern in Joelle's repeated calls to Gately, which use his first name. Lenz has come out of the shadows and is hitting the now unconscious shooter, exclaiming 'there.' Gately finishes off the guy with the broken arm and staggers to the street to lie down. Joelle jumps down from the window and runs to him. He thinks about his numb shoulder and worries about vomiting in front of Joelle, who takes off her robe [revealing a kimono-ish thing] and tries to use it to stop the bleeding. Lenz says 'what can I say?' and Gately answers that Lenz owes him urine. Gately says to call Pat but not to call an ambulance. He asks Lenz and Green to get him inside, since he can't be taken to the ER with a gunshot wound. One or two of the Canadians are apparently dead. Joelle takes charge ordering Lenz and the others to get him inside. Just then a security guard tells them to 'hold it right thaah.' Luckily it's the drunkard security, and Joelle orders Erdedy to deal with him. Gately suddenly recognizes her voice as Madame P. Her hand caresses him and he vomits on her as they heave him up bring him inside.
notes
We finally learn that the opening segment of the Entertainment consists of Joelle and her billowing veil. Perhaps this means that her face is revealed. We also get more of Joelle's actual character in this section. The section p 550-553 perhaps holds an important key to Orin's dysfunction. It seems clear that he's using his sexual conquests as a way to get back at his mother, and that it was surely he who saw Tavis and the Moms in the act. Meanwhile the Moms is acting out a fantasy of being her son's girlfriend!?
p 538-547
YDAU [2009] presumably November
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Randy Lenz has found his own way to deal with the Rage and Powerlessness issues recovering alcoholics face. While he has a car, a heavily modified Duster, he always rides to meetings with someone else, and sits in the northernmost seat in the car. But after the meetings he always walks back to Ennet House, and soon begins returning right at 11:29, a minute before curfew. This raises red flags, but whatever urine spot-checks haven't come back messed up by the lab, were clean, so he's left alone. It all started with a rat: one night on the way home he comes across two rats eating garbage in an alley, and picks up a chunk of concrete and drops it on one of the rats, squishing it. He discovers what he likes to say at the moment of issue resolution- 'there.' From rats he moves on to cats, using tuna to lure them into a hefty bag where they will squirm for air until they've suffocated. There. Eventually he moves to 'Hefty Steel-Sak' reinforced bags to ensure that the cats cannot claw their way out. Lenz develops a preference for the interval 10:16-10:26, and he therefore likes to keep the Brighton Best Savings Bank giant clock within view. This reminds him of a story related by Doony Glynn at a meeting, that once under the influence of 'Madame' he had viewed the entire sky as a viewer screen with the time and temperature displayed at all times. Glynn went crazy, but Lenz likes the idea. Lenz has used cocaine a few times since coming to Ennet House. He stores it in his copy of 'Principles of Psychology and the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion' which has hole cut in the middle 300 pages. He considers it enough of a miracle that under such duress, hiding from threats from both sides of the law, that he's only broken down a few times. He considers that sobriety. He is careful not to do it when he's out alone, and he knows how to beat the urine test, by drinking lemon juice and putting a dash of powdered bleach on his hand.He soon feels the need to move on from swinging the cats against a pole to setting them on fire with kerosene. That soon leads him to dogs, which he lures with meat and then slits their throats with his Browning X444 knife. He has a close call when he sees a street drunk urinating in an alley and imagines him on fire with his throat slit, but that's as far as it goes. When Bruce Green starts walking home from meetings with Lenz, it presents Lenz with a dilemma. On the one hand, Green is a decent listener, throwing in enough 'no shit's' and 'fucking-A's' to make Lenz feel validated. On the other hand, Lenz is deprived of his much needed 2216-2226h interval. Plus he feels like it would be no big deal to Green anyway and that just increases his tension over the matter. He does manage to exterminate a small bird in the garbage disposal, but still is left feeling unresolved.
p 548
YDAU [2009] November
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
None of the rooms at Ennet House have locks, except for Pat M's office, the House manager's office and the two live-in staff bedrooms downstairs.
p 548-549
YDAU [2009] early November
place metro Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The only blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine is that he carries a ruler with him so that he can measure his penis every morning. He is in Boston because of national security implications of the Entertainment. More casualties have been reported, including a film professor and his companion in Berkeley. Tine has toured a ward in Boston, where the victims of the Entertainment have been reduced to vegetative existence. The Berkeley cartridge was stolen from SFPD, by someone who left behind red flannel fibers. A retarded inmate with a headset recorder reported that the opening scene is of a veiled woman going through a revolving door and catching sight of someone, which makes her veil billow. After that the inmate was incapacitated. Attempts to trace the dissemination of the samizdat point to somewhere along the Canadian border, with hubs in Boston, New Bedford and somewhere in the desert Southwest. The possibility of Canadian involvement is the reason Tine is in Boston.
p 550-553
YDAU [2009] November 9, late PM [2100h]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis passes by Dr. Rusk's office and overhears Ortho Stice discussing his 'counterphobia' of linoleum. Stice is objecting to her Oedipal-GI Joe suggestions, assuring her that he doesn't play with dolls, nor want to have sex with them. Pemulis had tried to dress as insolently as possible, but the result was simply that he looked poorly dressed. As he passes through the ETA lobby, all is dark and quiet. There is 'an odd vehicular shape near the north wall's trophy case' but he doesn't look into it. He enters the Headmaster's office, and there are cracks of light underTavis's and Mrs. Inc's lack of a door, but Lateral Alice Moore has gone home. He snoops through her desk, hearing Tavis on his stair-master. He hears something coming from Avril's office and enters. He finds John Wayne in his jockstrap and a football helmet and shoulder-pads, and Hal's mom in a cheerleader's outfit nearly doing the splits on the shag carpet, and blowing a silent whistle. When he says 'hoping for a second of your time' Wayne stops, gets dressed and leaves. Mrs. Incandenza remains in the splits on the shag, and Pemulis makes a point of keeping his eyes on her face.
p 553-559
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz in his topcoat, dark slacks and loafers, and Green in his cheap leather jacket are out on one of their walks and by 2200h the meatloaf is burning a hole in Lenz's pocket, but he can't bring himself to ask Green to find another route back to Ennet House. Earlier today Lenz had sprayed hairspray in the face of one of the house cats, but it wasn't satisfying, and then he had diarrhea. All of which necessitated the need to get high, which he convinces himself he is doing in the interests of sobriety and growth. He miscalculates the effect of the cocaine, however; instead of giving him the nerve to ask Green to leave him alone with his meatloaf, it compels him to tell Green more or less every experience he's ever had. He explains how his clock phobia relates to his stepfather who made him wind and polish his stopwatch and keep it accurate to the second. He relates how obese his mother had been, and other less credible tales about his thumb having been cut off and growing back, about his knowledge of secret marshall arts moves, about a hydrocephalic woman with a necklace of dead gulls at a Halloween party at the home of an orthodontist where there had also been an infant Concavity-victim that became the subject of mescal-related rituals. He tells of a 'recurving' dream about wearing a safari hat seated under a ceiling fan. Green doesn't dream or at least cannot remember his dreams. Green keeps Lenz abreast of the time. Lenz says that AA/NA works alright but that it's a cult. He claims to remember things that happened to him in vitro.
p 560
YDAU [2009] possibly November 10
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is lying on his bunk at lunchtime. Troeltsch pokes his head in but gets no answer as to what Hal is doing. Pemulis comes by '41 breaths later' and asks if Hal has eaten, he gestures that he has and says that 'the beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the baobab tree.' Then 'over 200 breaths later' John Wayne puts his head in the door and neither says anything, and then Wayne leaves.
p 560-562
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz is showing off his ravaged septum and rattling off conspiratorial tidbits to Green. He seems to know something about the Entertainment, which he describes as holographic pornography, and in the same breath he mentions a Canadian cult whose members jump in front of trains. He tells of his obese stepfather, and of the disadvantages of being a coke dealer, etc. Green's done some coke, but doesn't appear to follow Lenz's coke-addled rant. He veers from how male actors are usually 'closet pooftas' to how the feral animal population in the Great Concavity descended from housepets, and on to how a cult of Rastafarians worship 'The Infant' which was a fetus reanimated by some toxic mixture. Green says that if AA is a brainwashing cult, then he reckons he's due for a washing, which Lenz recognizes as something Gately repeats daily.
p 560-562
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 up to 11:29pm
place Ennet House
no narration
synopsis:
This section in the form of extracts from Gately's interface with various residents. In the first Gately asks why all the interest in football, and refuses to flex his muscle. She asks if his father is still alive and reveals that hers is, but that her mother is 'worm-farming.' Joelle comments on how she was drawn to one of the speakers at a meeting, because he had kind of a 'broken authority' to him. She comments on how like a lot of Bostoners, he wrecks a perfectly acceptable outfit by omitting the socks. Gately says maybe she shouldn't be the one to comment on wardrobe. The next excerpt is between Foss and Gately. Foss is trying to report on Nell G. and Geoff D. without feeling like a rat. He says that they're telling newbies to 'think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift' and that's this is wreaking havoc, especially on Tingley, the new kid. The next two regard the plumbing. In the last extract Yolanda is reporting that Lenz [not named] has connived her into incorporating oral sex into the morning ritual of getting down on knees and thanking the Higher Power.
p 565-567
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Orin is in a hotel room with a putatively Swiss hand model, whom he met at the airport after driving Helen Steeply [and having struck out with her]. She had asked him to sign a football for her son. At the hotel she has photos of her family all laid out. His pursuit is not of love, but of conquest. He needs to feel 'he has' the Subject,and she can do nothing but yearn for him, to feel 'a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O, O. That he is the One.' This why there must be many Subjects, if the One had a One, then they'd merge into We. Orin had felt that once, but would never again recover. And there's also contempt, he hates all of them a little, but this he disguises, pretending to be tender and feeling. This section also contains a lengthy footnote [p 1038-1044] which is another excerpt of Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Steeply's questions aren't given, but apparently she's asked him if Himself and/or the Moms is insane. His answer is a qualified yes w/r/t Himself; he says that you'd have to be insane to kill yourself in that way, but that mostly he just drank himself blind everyday, and he made films in his spare time, about which people are still writing doctoral theses. With the Moms, it's a different story-- he admits that she can function and more, and relates how she belongs to the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts whose obsession it is to correct public misuse of grammar, eg '10 items or less.' She never leaves the ETA grounds now, but her OCD is not the debilitating kind. She has her compulsions compulsively arranged to maintain time for her kids. He says that she has 'Hal's skull lashed tight to hers' but without him being aware of it. She worships Mario, having made him a 'secular martyr to the mess she's made of her adult life.' He says that they both have to get away from ETA before they realize that the Moms is bats. He reveals that Himself is buried in the Moms's family plot in Quebec. He then tells a story to relate just how bats the Moms is. This is the same story from p 10-11. The Moms is in her Weston yard roto-tilling the garden [she makes Orin put the gas in it because she thinks that petroleum products cause cancer] wearing plastic bags over her espadrilles and a filtration mask. Hal comes up to her with a big old piece of mold and announces that he has eaten some of it. He interrupts the story to mention that for more info on the Moms and Himself, Helen should contact Marlon Bain, who practically lived with them at the time. He's also OCD and possibly bats. Back to the story-- The Moms becomes hysterical and just runs around the yard yelling 'Help! my son ate this!' Meanwhile Mario imitates Himself who watches the situation from the porch making a frame with his hands as if he were filming. The neighbor finally intervenes and hooks up the hose, presumably to wash out Hal's mouth.
p 567-574
YDAU [2009] possibly November
place ETA
no narration
synopsis:
This section is just dialog without narration. Schacht runs into Arslanian outside the weight room Arslanian is blindfolded, as Coach Thorp's experiment in anticipation of the soon to arrive blind player, Dymphna. He explains how he went through a training match wearing the blindfold, to attempt to train his ear. He had some trouble, often facing the wrong direction, etc. He then runs into Pemulis, who at first pretends to also be blindfolded. Pemulis says that Doucette in in with Kyle receiving advice about his depression over his mole, and trying to get tutored so that he can get through Watson's Energy Survey class. Arslanian asks to be shown to the restroom, but Pemulis goes right on talking about how Mario is in there with them trying to explain annulation to Doucette, using the somersault with one hand nailed to the floor analogy. Arslanian confesses that he's one of the few Pakistani's who doesn't excel in science and he himself has a hard time with annulation. Pemulis says picture a triangle, and explains how the cycle works-- the fusion facility in what used to be Vermont in the Concavity pumps its waste to Methuen Fan-Complex just south of the Concavity, where it's processed into U-239 waste and then trucked or catapulted to Maine where it's allowed to decay and then added to UF4 waste also pumped from Vermont, and turned into the radioactive raw materials which are sent back to Vermont and the process begins again. Arslanian's head is spinning, and says he's confused that fusion creates no waste. Pemulis says that this is where Himself came into the picture, inventing holographic conversions that allowed the team to study annulation safely in highly poisonous environments. Pemulis says that the whole idea for using waste as raw material for annulation came from medicine-- the giving cancerous cells cancer to treat them. All you need is a huge amount of toxic, waste which is why the annulation site was placed in the Great Concavity. It turns out also that the process sucks all the poisonous stuff out of the environment, and leaves it hyper-fertile, which is why it's necessary to catapult the toxins from other places into the region to keep the fertile zone from overrunning the entire area. So the area goes from wasteland to overgrown several times a month and it's as if it's a sped up evolutionary model-- this 'accelerated phenomena' is 'actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time.' Pemulis says that this is the part that Doucette is having trouble with. Arslanian pleads again to be shown to the bathroom. Pemulis realizes [or perhaps reveals] that Arslanian is Muslim and his urine is thus clean and valuable, and convinces him to part ways with it.
p 574-575
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Now that Ms. Steeply has gone, Orin has noticed that the legless wheelchair guys are back, as if they were afraid of her. He also notes that the legless man at the hotel room door had had the same Swiss accent as the putatively Swiss hand model.
p 575-589
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz is pretending to Green that his sniffing comes from allergies, forgetting his experience with cocaine. He tells Green that the 'new Joel girl's' veil conceals a single eye in the center of her forehead. Lenz rattles on-- about how his mother was so obese that when she came to Parent's Day at Lenz's school she was unable to sit at his desk like all the other parents,and when she attempted to, she crushed the desk. Lenz describes how she died: on a bus trip she had been in the bathroom when the ride became very turbulent due to some construction and she was flung about in the bathroom, ending up with her rear-end stuck protruding from the bathroom window, where she remained for the rest of the voyage. She then sued the bus company and the transportation agency and won an enormous settlement, after which she lost all will to do anything but eat and watch InterLace cartridges, and eventually ruptured and died. Lenz tells Green that his mother's will left him in the cold, giving all her money to ex-husbands . Amidst the faint sound of Polynesian music, Lenz urinates behind a dumpster, while Green parses his repressed memories of his own parents who had died when he was small. His father was an aerobics instructor until one of his legs suddenly grew longer than the other, and he was forced to take a job in a novelties store. His mother dies by opening a Christmas present which is a can she thinks holds her favorite macadamia nuts, but actually contains a cloth snake that springs out of the can and gives her a heart attack. Bruce never spoke a word until his final year of grade school. His father went nuts and was executed after sending Blammo-cigars to and killing a bunch of Shriners and Rotarians. Due to the macadamia nuts, Green has an aversion to all things remotely Polynesian, and perhaps the presence of the faint music explains why he wanders off in the direction of the Unexamined Life, without realizing that he and Lenz have become separated. Green after detox has about one thought every 60 seconds. He wanders through a neighborhood toward the Hawaiian music with horrified fascination. He spots Lenz some distance ahead of him and hangs back without calling out to him. At 412 W. Brainerd he finds the source of the music someone has placed speakers in the window of a house adorned with a Canadian flag. He sees Lenz approaching the dog that's chained in the yard of the same house, where the party is in full tilt. Green has a flashback to a Hawaiian party that he and Mildred [at 7 months pregnant] had crashed, and at which he had gotten so drunk that he shit his pants and had to take the subway home wearing a grass skirt after ditching his pants. He sees Lenz offering the dog some of Don G's meatloaf. The music is disturbing Green to no end, causing him to have way more than one thought per minute. Green watches Lenz lures the dog with the meatloaf and then slits his throat, the sounds of which cause one of the party-goers to the window. Lenz finishes the dog off and then goes tearing off down the street, as the party-goers come out and alternately shriek in horror and give chase. Green stands there finger almost frozen in his ear, noticing a couple of guys in wheelchairs.
p 589-593
YDAU [2009] November
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mario's birthday will be the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 25. As Madame P's hiatus enters its third week Mario cannot sleep. He has a burned pelvis, which his insensitivity to pain kept him from noticing. He hears the shrieks of the Moms's night terrors. Mario is worried because he can no longer tell whether Hal is sad. Mario has been taking insomniacal strolls on the grounds of the Enfield Marine PHH, across the street from Ennet House, where the headmistress has a disability and the people all cry in front of each other. He hears the sound of a taped broadcast of Madame P's show from her first year when she still had an accent coming from a window covered with a billowing flag. Mario had fallen in love with Madame P because she spoke of heartbreak, people dying, and stuff that was real. 'It's increasingly hard to find valid art about stuff that's real in this way.' Mario is confused by the fact that people roll their eyes every time something serious is mentioned. He was the only one who laughed at Pemulis's joke about the dial-a-prayer service for atheists where the phone just rings and rings. Neither Hal or Lyle can explain to him why everyone else looked down uncomfortably. Mario watches as people from Ennet House return just before curfew. One of them helps him down from his police lock, and he ambles up the hill, noticing Don G's square head through the window.
p 593-596
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Gately's duties as live-in staffer are described-- head-counts, log-entries, unlocking the meds-locker for certain residents, and making out chore lists for Pat M. He has to check on Kate, who's too sick to leave her room. He has to give Doony Glynn his Slimfast shake. He has to figure out who made Rice Krispie treats and didn't clean the mess. He has to call Pat M to relay Kate's comment about hurting herself. He has to have each resident in the office for at least a few minutes. He has to meet with the newest resident, Ruth van Cleve, and go over the house rules. He often has to kick people off the one payphone in the house, and he's gotten quite apt at letting the abuse roll off of him. He does struggle daily with the urge to clobber Wade McDade, who is pushing up the end of his nose to flatten it like a pig's, and asking everyone whether they know anyone with such a nose. He is expected to keep an ear open to the house gossip to root out potential conflicts. The only thing residents are expected to report others for is using Substances, and all the rest Gately's got to ferret out.
p 596-601
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person
Orin feels a postcoital loss of hope, plus a contempt that he hides well. He can give pleasure but can't receive it. But it does give him pleasure to feign intimacy and caring afterwards. The putatively Swiss hand-model says that no one must know, and Orin assures her. When a knock comes at the door, the hand-model hides beneath the blankets as Orin wraps a towel around himself and goes to answer. He thinks of Swiss cuckolds, near-Eastern medical attaches, journalists, but the man at the door is in a wheelchair and claims to be conducting a survey, which Orin cheerfully accepts. The man asks him some basic questions and then asks him to please list what 'lifestyle elements he misses. Orin takes it as a shy ruse to get his autograph. He lists some childhood memories and then says he misses TV. When asked for the 'reason' he says he misses the commercials being louder than the program, the order-before-midnight sales pitches, sneering at something he loves. He says he misses stuff he could watch and know what people were going to say. Summer reruns. The man in the wheelchair reminds him that he can watch cartridges again and again, if he chooses. Orin says it's not the same; with TV you were subjected to the repetition, the familiarity was inflicted. The man in the wheelchair asks him to list things he does not miss. Orin asks how much time he has. The wheelchaired man glances briefly past him at the lump under the covers, and says he can return at a later time, since Orin is 'engaged.' Orin says that's a matter of opinion.
p 601-619
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
From 2300-2330h Gately is conducting the nightly head count as the curfew approaches. Lenz slips through the door just as Gately's getting the keys ready to lock it. Green is 6 minutes late and Gately decides to let him in but gives him the obligatory chewing out, plus a week's house restriction. Green is so unresponsive that Gately decides he has to perform a spot-urine. He has to rush the urine down to his personal fridge where it's to be kept until the morning when the lab is open. He makes it back in time for the final head count at 2345h, when he notices that Amy J is still not back, and he has to make the call to discharge her. After that he has time for only 20 situps before he has to deal with the nightly car moving, which is necessary because each night at midnight, the legal side of the street switches, and all the residents who have cars must move them, or face citation and/or towing. Plus if some of the car owners have fallen asleep Gately feels he has to go up and find them. This happens to be the case with Lenz tonight, and Gately has to hold all the residents up at the door while he goes in search of Lenz. He finds him doing handstand pushups in his jockstrap and without a doubt high on cocaine. Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, but there's the car issue to be dealt with asap. So he lets everyone out and keeps a close eye on Lenz to make sure he doesn't bolt. However when he notices Doony Glynn's VW, he realizes he has to leave the residents unattended and go back inside and round up a resident to move it, because Glynn is legitimately incapacitated. He recruits Green but then has to go up and get the keys from Glynn, who is too delirious to answer coherently. After a minute, Green comes into the room and tells Gately to come down immediately. When he does he finds that two guys almost his size are chasing Lenz around a Montego car, while a third holds the rest of the residents at bay with a gun. Lenz is talking nonstop, denying doing whatever they think he did. Gately notes that the smaller guy is holding the gun like he knows how to shoot, and that the gun is a serious weapon. Gately feels a weird calm. He realizes the three are Canadian, and has a flashback to the Canadian he killed by gagging. The lady who yells 'help' is at her window yelling and Joelle is leaning out of a window yelling for someone to call Pat. The cops who are usually punctual with their tow trucks and parking tickets are nowhere to be found. One of the big guys advises Gately to mind his own business, but Gately says that he cannot. Lenz hides behind Gately, and Gately notices blood on his hands. One of the Canadians pulls out a knife, and Gately's 'subdural hardware' clicks into fight mode. He explains that he's responsible for these people and suggests that they talk it out instead of fighting. The guys explain that Lenz killed someone named Pepe or Bebe. When Lenz taunts them they charge and a fight ensues. The description goes into something like slow motion as Gately breaks the arm of one guy and sends the other flying onto the hood of the car with a kick to the chin. As he is kneeing the man with the broken arm in the groin, he is shot in the shoulder by the third man. Green grabs the man in a half nelson and Nell Gunther kicks him in the face, causing his head to snap back and break Green's nose. Gately grabs the guy on the hood of the car with his good hand and smashes his head repeatedly into the windshield. Erdedy standing with his hands up notes the appearance of possible extracurricular concern in Joelle's repeated calls to Gately, which use his first name. Lenz has come out of the shadows and is hitting the now unconscious shooter, exclaiming 'there.' Gately finishes off the guy with the broken arm and staggers to the street to lie down. Joelle jumps down from the window and runs to him. He thinks about his numb shoulder and worries about vomiting in front of Joelle, who takes off her robe [revealing a kimono-ish thing] and tries to use it to stop the bleeding. Lenz says 'what can I say?' and Gately answers that Lenz owes him urine. Gately says to call Pat but not to call an ambulance. He asks Lenz and Green to get him inside, since he can't be taken to the ER with a gunshot wound. One or two of the Canadians are apparently dead. Joelle takes charge ordering Lenz and the others to get him inside. Just then a security guard tells them to 'hold it right thaah.' Luckily it's the drunkard security, and Joelle orders Erdedy to deal with him. Gately suddenly recognizes her voice as Madame P. Her hand caresses him and he vomits on her as they heave him up bring him inside.
notes
We finally learn that the opening segment of the Entertainment consists of Joelle and her billowing veil. Perhaps this means that her face is revealed. We also get more of Joelle's actual character in this section. The section p 550-553 perhaps holds an important key to Orin's dysfunction. It seems clear that he's using his sexual conquests as a way to get back at his mother, and that it was surely he who saw Tavis and the Moms in the act. Meanwhile the Moms is acting out a fantasy of being her son's girlfriend!?
p 620-808
this section in 45 parts
[since the last two sections are so long, my notes will be interspersed throughout the synopses, instead of at the end]
p 620-626
YDAU [2009] mid November
place Boston Public Gardens
narrated in third person [WYYY engineer]
synopsis:
It's YDAU and it's the near future when things are really high tech and ultra-convenient. Almost no one really needs to leave home to work, and 94% of all entertainment is absorbed at home. Hence the newly formed passion for 'spect-ops' -- witnessing things happening. One such spect-op is the yearly draining of the duck pond in the Public Gardens. This happens each year on an unannounced weekday in mid-November. Himself would often bring Hal and Mario to see it. Rodney Tine is standing at an 8th floor window in the State House annex as the pond is drained below. He is joined by Hugh Steeply and Rodney Tine Jr. along with a stenographer, the Deputy Mayor, and the Director of Substance Abuse Services. Meanwhile below the engineer from WYYY is sunning his poor skin on a silver NASA souvenir blanket. He is the only one of the people on the ponds grassy decline who appears not to be homeless. The others have shopping carts and trash bags full of recyclables and are in various states of filth and intoxication. Up on the street an unmarked van with tinted windows and handicapped license plates is idling. The engineer hasn't had the opportunity to sun since Madame P's hiatus began. First he had to engineer the replacement Miss Diagnosis' show, but her tenure was brief. After that he has had to play Madame P's background music while no one speaks into the microphone. Half her show was silence anyway, but that silence was different: 'silence of presence v silence of absence.' Another Dodge van has appeared. The engineer happens to know about the ambulance and the ICU and the five day rehab from Molly Notkin who came to retrieve some old tapes for the Madame's personal listening use. He also knows that she is undergoing 'Treatment' at 'half a house' in an unpleasant metro area. This is all the engineer knows but he will soon wish he knew much more. A wheelchair ramp descends from one of the vans and a legless wheelchaired man comes shooting down the ramp and down the hill, snatching up the engineer and carrying down the hill to the awaiting second van, which is idling and has its wheelchair ramp extended.
p 627-638
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 6:10pm
place ETA
narrated in third person [Hal]
synopsis:
The ETA students are assembled in the dining hall for dinner at 20 different tables. The prorectors are at their own table joined tonight by the Moment soft-profiler. Stice had earlier that day come very close to beating Hal in an off-record challenge match. No one besides John Wayne has been able to beat Hal in recent memory, and word has gotten around. Everyone except Axford [who says that to him food tastes the way vomit smells] is fervently eating. Stice clears his throat to continue his story about his parents who met in C&W bar in Kansas when they discovered that they were equally unbeatable at the game in which a burning cigarette is propped between participants' forearms and the first one to pull his arm away is the loser. It was love at first sight. Their relationship was tumultuous, consisting of either ardent passion or fighting. Axford has lost his match with Shaw today. Even though Hal hasn't touched his 6 cranberry juices, he's still swallowing a lot. There's rumors circulating as to whether Hal's near loss and Axford's loss have something to do with a rumored showdown with the ONANTA urologist in Tavis' office. Pemulis who is also rumored to have been there ignores Hal's swallowing and Axfor'd stony expression. Troeltsch is complaining that the kitchen is substituting the milk with powdered milk. Pemulis argues that Tavis can't even regrout the showers without calling a community meeting and Troeltsch is suggesting that under cover of night they are filling the milk dispenser bags with powdered milk?! In addition to milk there's cranberry juice and high lecithin chocolate skim which every student tries exactly once. Avril has corrected the sign above the milk which foremerly read 'milk is filling, drink what you take' but now has a semicolon in place of the comma. Pemulis calls Troeltsch's theory paranoia, but Troeltsch suggests that there are other signs-- the lung has not yet been inflated, the bagels are day-old, Stice's bed is moving around [re: which Stice wants to know how he knows anything about that]. But it's true [the narrator insists] there's the tripod of the Mario/Millicent encounter, mysteriously falling acoustic ceiling-tiles, a lawn mower in the kitchen, the ball machine in the females' sauna, squeegees hung in a cross on the dining hall's north wall. The creepiest thing about it is that if these are regular pranks, they're not funny. They give everyone the fantods. The two black girls who do kitchen and custodial work are making their way down the steep hill to Ennet House. Hal had noted that Clenette had left Tavis' office with a guilty look and her backpack stuffed with items rescued from the trash, a practice which ETA tacitly permits. As the discussion turns to why girls who hit one-handed backhands have different sized breasts, Hal recalls how Orin would try to meet and have sex with girls while on dates with another girl. 'This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured.' [p 634]. He kept journals of his conquests which he left out available for all to read. Struck, Pemulis, Schacht, Freer and maybe Coyle have all had intercourse. For Hal, lifetime virginity is a conscious goal; he feels like Orin has enough sex for the 3 brothers. Hals' mouth is overflowing with saliva. He knows that he should have lost to Stice today, and only won because Stice didn't believe he could beat Hal. But this is a whole new Hal, who doesn't get high and will hand his own chemical-free urine over to authorities in 29 days. Pemulis and Ashford are the only others that know this. Stice, meanwhile is staring at his salad, not because of his post-match high, but because of his secret suspicion about the table at which he sits. When Ingersoll returns on crutches Hal goes over to speak with him. Troeltsch follows him to avoid any further mention of the opposite sex. It's almost conditioned into the players to leave certain things behind in order to excel. Hence in spite of the raging hormones ETA is basically unsexual. Stice looks up from his salad momentarily, where he believes a cherry tomato is suspended in defiance of gravity. Stice's body resembles a poorly spliced photo-- perfect athletic from the neck down with the 'ravaged face of Winston Churchill' attached. He stares at his tomato with a 'coercive reverence' not unlike that he'd experienced in his match today, when balls he'd hit seemed to do things beyond his control. He wonders if Hal had noticed. Hal had seemed on the verge of falling apart out there. Stice convinces himself not to wonder about the ONANTA urologist. Even those who know Hal gets high would never think his troubles were related to the urine thing, since he'd be the last of the crew to get the boot, and Pemulis seems blithe as ever. Hal and Mario know that the milk at ETA is powdered, poured by the graveyard kitchen crew into the regular milk bags. Struck is eating Hal's uneaten dinner while Hal is talking to Ingersoll. Stice had a traumatic experience at 14, where he set the weight too high on the weight machine, and is excused from weights until his issues are resolved.
notes:
One has to wonder what Clenette is taking from the ETA dumpster back to Ennet House. It is beginning to seem like the weird pranks are some kind of encoded message, and that they have a supernatural component.
p 638-648
YDAU [2009] May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
It's early morning in the desert as Steeply tells Marathe the story of his own father who around midlife got consumed with a sort of entertainment. It started out as simply a show that he liked-- M*A*S*H. His father was a heating oil distributor for Cheery Oil in Troy, NY. Initially his Mummykins thought it was cute, but as time passed the father became more obsessed, seeking out even the reruns. He eventually started bring a small TV to work, and then he dropped out of his bowling league, the Knights of Columbus. He would get anxious and ugly if he had to miss an episode and the Mummykins was forced to invent excuses for them to miss engagements. The father began keeping a notebook in which he recorded tiny details which he kept secret. He started quoting the program regularly and even referring to the kitchen as the Mess Tent. He taped episodes and stayed up most of the night watching them and taking his notes. He started to write letters to the characters Frank Burns, addressed to him in Korea. The letters were hostile, putting forth an Armageddon-themed conspiracy theory that he had somehow gleaned from the show. soon he began missing work and Mr. Cheery was in a quandary because the father was a long-time employee and bowling partner. He would come to the house, watch an episode with the father and then take Mummykins out in the garage and plead with her to get the father some help. The Mummykins would feigned ignorance. By this time Steeply had gone to college. The father apparently found messages encoded about the end of the familiar type of time and the advent of a whole new type of time. Among the things he found significant was the fact that the Korean War lasted only 2 years but that the show was by then into its seventh year. As characters retired from the show, the father invented theories as to what *really* happened to them. He let it be known that he was working on a secret book about his ideas. In 1983 there came a letter from the Network attorneys saying that the father's letters could constitute grounds for legal action, and around the same time, the final episode ran. The Mummykins now freely discussed the fact that he refused to leave his den. He eventually died in his easy chair watchng an episode in which Alan Alda, [Hawkeye] can't stop sleepwalking and fears he's going out of his mind-- his therapist tells him that if he were crazy he'd sleep like a baby. After his death Steeply and his sister spent some time trying to decode the notebooks full of military/medical-coded rants. Marathe responds 'his unbalance of temptation cost him his life... because of consuming obsession.' Steeply answers that it was actually heart trouble. Steeply says that when he sees Flatto's lab, he gets tempted. He pictures Hank Hoyne in his father's easy chair. Marathe announces that his time is 'sharply finite to remain' and asks that Steeply leave first. Steeply says that 'empty of intent' doesn't really capture the look in the eyes, that it's more like stuck in the middle between two things,--pulled apart in different directions, as if there were something he had misplaced or lost.
notes:
This section has yet another parody of the Infinite Jest theme. It seems important that instead of being empty of intent, or simply hollow, the eyes of the viewer/victim are pulled apart and lost.
p 648-651
YDAU [2009] Nov 13 2:45am
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Eugenio M is filling in for Johnette on Dream Duty as Kate Gompert [in an awkward yoga position] and Geoffrey Day have a conversation on the couch. Erdedy is smoking and Green is asleep. The whole house is still reeling from the episode in the streetlet. Kate says 'like you really care' and then Day tells a story of practicing his violin on a summer day with the fan on, and how certain notes from his violin combined with the fan to set up a resonance in his head. This produced a 'large dark billowing shape' from a corner in his mind, which made him drop his violin and run from the room. Kate asks if it was triangular, but he answers that it was shapeless. He returned to the room and played the violin notes again and again the shape rose in his mind; it was 'total psychic horror.' Out of the blue Erdedy says 'his head was shaped like a mushroom.' After that the shape began arising at will in Day's mind. Kate again calls it triangular. Day says the last time it billowed up was his sophomore year in college and he thought he'd have to throw himself out the window. Kate comes half way out of her yoga position now and suggests that he maybe despised himself for awakening it by going back the second time to play the violin notes. Day says that another boy he hardly knew heard him whimpering and came and sat with him until it went away. Green cries out in his sleep asking Mr. Ho not to light it. Day says it's never come back, but he's never forgotten. He understands what people mean by hell. 'They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.' Kate suggests 'or the corner it came up out of' and Day answers that he understands why people killed themselves. Kate answers 'Time in the shadow of the wing too big to see, rising.'
notes:
The formless billowing shape is notable in its resemblance to Joelle's veil. What is the significance of Erdedy's interjection?
p 651-662
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mary Esther Thode has been dispatched on her Vespa to tell Hal and Stice that they were to play an exhibition match. Perhaps this had something to do with Helen Steeply's presence. Hal noted that she held a certain 'thuggish allure' but nothing on the order of Orin's description. DeLint sat next to her until Thierry Poutrincourt stole his seat. This is Steeply's first junior tennis match. She writes in her notebook while deLint fills in his performance charts. Hal's imaginative 'anti-book' forehand shot gets the 5th game back to deuce and the gathering crowd applauds. DeLint's chart would later have this as one of Hal's few imaginative shots. Helen Steeply allegedly only came to see Hal about Orin, but Tavis for reasons unknown will not let her near Hal, even chaperoned. Stice is hitting his second serve as hard as he can. [p 654-655] There is an uncharacteristic pan backwards in the text allowing the reader to survey what's happening at several different places at this time--at Ennet House, Gately is sleeping; in the Armenian Foundation library, Poor Tony Krause is hunched forward enduring the passage of time; Pemulis and Struck are in the Pharmacy School library; Steeply's green sedan with a Nunhagen ad on the side is parked in the ETA guest spot; Tavis is in his office reaching under the sofa for the bathroom scale he keeps there; Avril's whereabouts are unknown; Orin is again embracing the 'Swiss' hand model at yet another hotel in Phoenix. DeLint tells Steeply that Stice is wise to crank up his second serve, even though he has been double faulting a lot, since that's really his only chance of beating Hal. Stice's next serve is blindingly fast and close enough that Hal has to call it, and he calls it fair, meaning that Stice wins the set. DeLint tells Steeply that this means that the next debatable call goes to Hal, and notes the fairness that ETA inculcates in the players. Steeply watches as Hal begins to serve, and thinks of him as a violinist, noting that he looks nothing like Orin, and she figures that no 'one game figured much in the Entertainment.' Steeply watches as Hal wins a characteristically strategic point, in which he sets up his opponents failure several hits later. Steeply asks when she might get to talk with Hal, and DeLint says that although it's not his decision, his guess is that she doesn't get to, but that Tavis is the one to ask. She says she was up there with him for 2 hours and couldn't get an answer out of him. She explains that it's for background for her piece on Orin. DeLint explains that they come to ETA to 'be the ones who look and see, and forget getting looked at.' Steeply answers that they'll be entertainers if they make the Show, so why not train them to get used to being seen. DeLint answers that it has to be all about the game, and never about being seen, otherwise when you feel your flower fade, you're likely to be suicidal. Hal mishits a serve allowing Stice to go up 6-5. Steeply asks what if it *was* up to DeLint and he answers that she'd be outside the gate, and he asks why Orin, anyway, why not John Wayne? Steeply muses 'carved out of what, though, this place?'
notes:
The strange pan backwards is undoubtedly a signal of some kind. Most probably it signals a turning point--that the threads are all coming together from here on out. Steeply asking what ETA is carved out of, while alluding to the players being carved from stone, seems to also dovetail with the whole political angle of the book. The construction of ETA has required flattening a mountain, much as annulation/ energy production has required the decimation of the lands within the Great Concavity.
p 663-665
YDAU [2009] November
no place/narration
synopsis:
This section is in the form of 3 letters [and a fourth in the footnote p 1047-1052] exchanged between Helen Steeply and Marlon Bain, the childhood friend of Orin's. She asks him whether he's willing to answer some questions about Orin, and he agrees. In the footnotes, his answers to most of the [unstated] questions are given. [1] He explains that he and Orin were best of friends starting at age 10, when they were the two best players on metro Boston. When Bain's parents were killed in a radio-traffic helicopter accident, he became a hanger-on at the Incandenza house and later at ETA where he was one of the first matriculants. They were best of friends until Bain started to beat Orin at tennis, which Orin took hard. They experimented with drugs, but Orin stopped because having reached puberty, he found that he needed all his faculties and guile. Bain stopped because of a couple of negative psychedelic experiences left him with disabilities which led to his departure from ETA at 17, and which make normal life a challenge to this day. Orin left tennis too, but he says that no one could have predicted Orin's defection to football, which he criticizes at length as 'homophobically repressed nacy-ism.' [3c] he says that he can't help much with Dr. Incandenza's suicide, except that he was imbibing much alcohol and working on a new genre of film-cartridges that Orin said was making him insane. [3e] The only thing he knows about Orin and Joelle's separation is that James began using her in his films and Orin says they became close, although he distrusts Orin as a source. He also knows from Orin and one of his early Subjects, that just before Himself's death, a 'word' appeared in the fogged window of Mrs. Inc's Volvo that 'cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions.' [5] He says that he wasn't warning that Orin was a pathological liar so much as sincere with a motive. He gives the example of Orin's classic pick-up line, 'tell me what sort of man you prefer and I'll affect the demeanor of that man' which he describes as a pose of poselessness. He says that Orin came to see the truth as constructed rather than reported. He says Orin studied for 18 years 'at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker' and feels that the way to escape her influence is through renunciation and hatred. As an example of Orin's lack of a gift for lying he tells a story of how Mrs Inc. charged he and Orin with watching Hal and Mario, and instead they got high and forgot all about the boys. When Mrs. Inc. confronted Orin saying she couldn't get through on the phone, he invents the lame lie that he made several calls. She then said that the phone wasn't busy, just unanswered and Orin replied simply 'I have no response to that.' Another example is when Orin took the Moms' Volvo for a drive without realizing she had tethered her beloved dog to the back, and when he confronted her with the 'nubbin' that remained and explained it had been run over repeatedly by a hit-and-run driver. [7] He answers by rhetorically asking if she would call it abuse if a parent were so depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into a psychotic depression. Would she call it abuse if the handyman father was so good at fixing things that he never engaged his son's help beyond asking him to hand tools, or fetch lemonade, so that the son never actually learns how to fix anything. He asks why it is that parents who are bent on producing children who feel self worth end up producing children who feel they are hideous and undeserving of the love their parents give them. Is it abuse if a mother produces a child who instead of feeling he is deserving of his mother's magnificent treatment, just thinks he lucked out and got a magnificent mother. He reveals that he's not speaking of his own mother, but of Mrs. Incandenza. He says although she's so 'multi-leveled and indictment-proof' that it's hard to criticize her and feel ok about it, that something just wasn't right. For instance after Orin had killed her dog and offered a lame excuse, she basically acted as if it never happened and even went out of her way to shield Orin from any implications of the experience, and her 'love-and-support-bombardment increased.' He asks if her actions were actually meant to safeguard Orin's self-esteem or her own. He says that when Orin used to do his impression of the Moms, he would put on an enormous warm smile and then move slowly closer until he was smothering you with it. Bain says she reminds him of a philanthropist who views recipients of his charity as a way of demonstrating his own virtue. He says he thinks she was abused as a child, although he has nothing to back this up.
notes:
In classic a DFW maneuver, this section about Orin [as pathological liar who strikes the pose of poselessness] is told by a dubious source. What is the word that cast the 'conjugal pall' and what is the relation between that and the word 'knife' that Hal remembers seeing on a fogged mirror in a bathroom [p 15-17].
p 666-673
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 3:25pm
place tunnels beneath ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
During Hal and Stice's match, most of the sub-14 males involved in the Eschaton escapade are in the tunnels below ETA doing a kind of work detail, as a punitive measure. They are clearing trash from the path that the workers will need to use as they haul out the Lung. The younger kids actually enjoy rooting through the tunnels, and it's considered one of the attractions of ETA over other schools. The tunnels are near the old optics and editing facilities and also the prorectors quarters, so the tunnels are often used to dispose of detritus, for example as a prorector moves out to begin a tour. LaMont Chu has a clipboard and is supposed to note the location of any objects too large to be picked up by the boys. With the exception of Kent Blott, all the boys in the tunnels belong to the Tunnel Club, whose main activity seems to be reading Robert's Rules [for Eschaton] and whose main raison d'etre has to do with exclusion, primarily of girls and but also younger boys. Blott has been included mainly because he claimed to have seen something that maybe was a rat, but looked more like a 'Concavitated feral hamster.' Plus they can make Blott drag the filled Glad bags back to the entrance. They've filled enough bags to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump room, which they note has a 'strange stale sweet burny smell.' Most of Chu's list of bulky objects is comprised of 'fridgelettes' abandoned by prorectors and trunks seemingly filled with magazines and pennies. Chu asks Blott to see whether he can lift a doorless old microwave oven. Feral hamsters are pretty high on the bogey list in these parts, along with skull-deprived wraiths and mile-high toddlers. Feral hamsters are rarely seen south of the Lucite walls that delimit the Great Concavity. Peterson and Gopnik complain the mostly unmarked cartridges found spilling out of a box are tearing the Glad bags. A confirmed feral hamster sighting could maybe distract the Headmaster's office from its punishment of Pemulis, Incandenza and Ashford, and also might go a ways toward explaining the recent rash of appearances of large incongruous objects throughout the ETA grounds. Even just a rat could supply the club with a raison d'etre at ths point. Instead they come upon an abandoned and unfortunately unemptied refrigerator, whose contents are emitting smells mistaken at a difference for farts. When they get close they find that it's an oversized fridge which they believe belonged to Pearson, who apparently left mayonnaise in the fridge, which is crawling with maggots. They hightail it out of there.
notes:
There are allusions to Himself throughout this section. Could that doorless microwave be the one used in his suicide. Note that they collect a garbage bag full of cartridges.
p 673-682
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
As the third set begins in Hal and Stice's match, deLint's place next to Helen Steeply is taken by the Quebecois prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, a tall, long-faced former Satellite pro. Steeply asks aboutr Troeltsch, who is on the top bleacher calling the match into his empty fist. Poutrincourt says she has been told to be unfriendly, but she thinks she will not comply. She says her family is also large, and she know it's difficult. Steeply had decided when going undercover to let all size comments pass as if undetected, and simply says it seemed like deLint certainly held himself aloof. Poutrincourt says that deLint does whatever it takes to please his superiors. Her right forearm is almost twice the size of her left and her blue warmup clashes with her [and Helen's] hat. She has blue circles under her eyes. She says that Helen is here to make publicity for Hal, to make him 'etoile' [star]. Hal meanwhile comes back on the court, acting as if he is unwatched. Helen explains that her profile is on Orin. When deLint returns, Steeply invites Poutrincourt to speak French. Poutrincourt gives a blase shrug and accepts, after which their conversation is in French, but translated to English for the reader. [It's revealed in the footnotes that Poutrincourt is using Quebecois idioms that she couldn't expect Steeply to know with his/her Parisian French. And also that Poutrincourt is on to the fact that Steeply is not a woman.] Poutrincourt says that adolescent tennis stars are common because, unlike other sports, tennis requires nothing that anyone cannot have by adolescence, but that adolescents have and advantage because they don't feel the anxiety and pressure that makes professional tennis so difficult for adults. And this is why young tennis stars burn out so quickly, when suddenly the object shifts from the game to winning. Meanwhile the game goes on, and Troeltsch announces the play-by-play-- 'rare tactical lapse for Incandenza...the Halster's been having some trouble controlling his volleys...' etc. DeLint tells him to keep it down. Poutrincourt says in English that Hal has the greater tennis brain, and deLint says he has a complete game, as Hal aces Stice to win a game. DeLint expounds saying that Pemulis has many strengths but not a complete game. He says that Possalthwaite has a better future because he's built a complete game around his lob. Poutrincourt disagrees in French. Hal is a sphinx as the wind blows a near-perfect shot out of bounds. Poutrincourt says that the ETA philosophy is more Canadian than American, that you must not just strive to be the best, but to transcend that goal, when you attain it. Steeply notices the younger boys emerging from the tunnels with their trash bags. Poutrincourt continues, saying that otherwise once they become 'etoiles' they must transcend that, or they are doomed. She mentions Eric Clipperton. DeLint says John Wayne is even better than Hal; he has a gestalt game. Steeply tries to steer the conversation towards Himself, asking if his was also a philosophy of doom. Poutrincourt says when the founder died, Schtitt was like two selves, one not there. DeLint says Wayne's only limitation is his lack of flexibility, which he overcomes by sheer strength. This works on the juniors, but in the Show, it will not be so easy. He says the main reason Wayne is better is the head. Hal remembers points after they pass, and tracks trends throughout the match, and Wayne does not. He says Hal has an 'emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting' which he says is more commonly as female thing.
notes:
Hal is breaking down, presumably because of withdrawal, but it's perhaps worth noting that physically his game seems unaffected. His breakdown seems to come in the emotional realm, which DeLint describes as Hal's big liability.
p 682-686
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge [Man o' War Grille on Prospect]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Matty Pemulis is sitting in the Man o' War Grille on Prospect eating soup on his 23rd birthday. He's a prostitute. A bag lady lifts her skirt and defecates on the sidewalk just outside the window. Matty is a big, rangy kid now balding, with what seems like a permanent smile of his face. Matty watches as people pass, and avoid the shit on the sidewalk. He recognizes Poor Tony Krause, who looks 'godawful' and doesn't seem to even notice the shit on the sidewalk. Matty's 'Da' had come over on a boat from Ireland in 1989 and worked at the Southie docks, and he had begun giving him 'a fook in t' boom' when Matty was 10, and his brother Micky was 5. Micky would seem to sleep through it all. His father would come in drunk get on the bed with Matty, shake him awake and caress him tenderly. As soon as Matty would shrink away, his father would drill him, asking if he thinks all his Da has on his mind is a fook. it was only later that he realized that it didn't matter whether he feigned sleep, or employed any other strategy, his Da would have fooked him anyway. It was also later that he realized he was 'lucky' that his father had used vaseline. His father died a gruesome death of acute pancreatitis and cirrhosis, choking on aspirated blood. Matty still toasts his father with his first shot, whenever he indulges.
p 686-689
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
After dinner Hal drops by Schtitt's office to find out why he had to play Stice publicly so close to the WhataBurger and to glean some input as to what had gone wrong. Instead he finds deLint and is subject to his analysis of the match. DeLint has a big chart with Stice and Wayne at the top and Hal's name omitted. DeLint says that Hal 'never quite occurred out there' which Hal finds chilling. He then skips the mandatory study period and sits alone in Viewing Room 6 watching cartridges of Himself's films. Anyone looking on would've said Hal was depressed. He watches American Century As Seen Through A Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed which he finds maddening because it's all monologue by an actor who's ubiquitous in Himself's work, but whose name he can't recall. He watches some others, taking out Medusa v. Odalisque halfway, when the audience starts being turned to stone. He declines to watch the cartridges with Himself being interviewed. He watches Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat twice in a row. The bureaucrat is an exemplary employee, but for his problem getting up on time. He is threatened with 'termination' [which is likened to ontological erasure] if he is late again. He sets every alarm clock he has, but that night the power goes out and his alarms don't go off. He drives to the train station parks illegally and dives into the train, crashing into a kid with a bow-tie and thick glasses. Hal whacks himself in the forehead trying to remember the kid's name. The bureaucrat in inclined toward the still open train doors, which seem to pull him back, but he keeps his eyes focussed on the kid and packages that have been knocked from the kid's hands. This is described as one of Himself's few 'internal-conflict moments.' The bureaucrat helps the kid reassemble his packages, and straightens his tie. As he leaves the kid turns to him and asks if he is Jesus, to which he answers 'don't I wish.' He steps back onto the platform and the kid waves goodbye as the train pulls away. This is Mario's favorite of Himself's films. Hal secretly likes it too, and likes to imagine himself as the bureaucrat on the drive home, on the way to 'ontological erasure.' Hal is planning to punish himself with a few more cartridges including Blood Sister: One Tough Nun which little does he know, germinated from Himself's brief tenure in Boston AA, in the mid 90s. Without Bob Hope, Hal spits way more than usual, and he feels 'zero in the way of kinesthetic sense'-- he couldn't feel the ball on his stick out there this afternoon.
notes:
The fact that Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat is Mario's favorite Himself film should definitely be noted. Perhaps just that this seems like Himself at his most unguarded and un-ironic. It's clear that Hal's photographic memory is failing him. It's ironic that Himself tried so hard to reach Hal and thought he had failed, and now here's Hal pouring over Himself's oeuvre.
p 689-691
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after his seizure, feeling 'right as rain.' The fact that he was destitute and without a valid Health Card, helped him convince the paramedics to let him go instead of admitting him to the hospital. Lucky for him the hospital is just blocks away from Antitoi Entertainment, which is maybe the one place he can get some 'pharmocological credit.' He ambles down the street past pedestrians veering clear of him, on account of the smell. Poor Tony had come into the Antitoi brothers favor, was by with a crew of 12 others, donning identical red leather coats and wigs and lingered in the lobby of a hotel where a Qubecer insurgent threw toxic waste in the face of the Canadian ONAN trade minister. When the perpetrator emerged all the identically dressed transvestites created confusion that allowed him to escape. As he passes the Man o' War Grille, Tony is debating whether to snatch the purses of the two girls walking ahead of him. How different to come to Antitoi with cash on hand. Too bad he never saw his old crewmate Matty, a sure source of compassion, looking up from his soup.
p 692 [This section begins the page without a line break, but is clearly a different setting]
YDAU [2009] Nov 13-14
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Geoffrey Day has noted how most of the male members of Ennet House have names for their penises, and thinks it's possibly a class thing since neither Ewell, Erdedy no he has named his. Lenz called his the Frightful Hog and brandished it often. Lenz described the Hog as an example of the Polish curse-- undistinguished in length but sobering in circumference. Lenz's dismissal had resulted in Ewell being transferred into his place in Day's room, and while Ewell is one of the few residents with whom an actual conversation is possible, Day finds himself missing Lenz after a couple of nights.
p 692-698
YDAU [2009] November
place Ennet House [+ ETA]
narrated in third person [nearly in authorial first person]
synopsis:
The section begins 'And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:' There is more than one kind of depression. One is a low grade depression usually called anhedonia. It's a 'spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important.' As Kate sees it, the world becomes a map of the world. Younger ETA students often think this is why Himself committed suicide, because anhedonia is often associated with middle-age crises in people who have achieved more than all they had hoped for. This in reality has more to do with the students than Himself. The author steps forward to say, 'it's more invigorating to want than to have. though this is maybe just the inverse of the same delusion.' While Hal has no idea why his father killed himself, he doubts it has anything to do with anhedonia. Hal himself hasn't had a single 'intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion' since he was little. One of his big troubles with the Moms is that she thinks she knows him inside and out, when in fact what she hears is her own self echoing around inside him. He feels the one thing he feels to the limit: he is lonely. It is notable that millennial arts treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip, possibly as the vestiges of Romantic glorification of 'Wetzschmerz' world weariness. For young people to be cool is the same as to be Unalone. From a young age through the arts we are shown masks of ennui and irony, at an age where 'the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears.' And then it becomes permanent-- the weary cynicism saves us from sentiment and naivete. This is something sophisticated viewers appreciate about Incandenza's The American Century As Seen Through A Brick- it's unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last sin of millennial America, and the myth that naivete and cynicism are mutually exclusive. 'Hal who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human' since being human is to be 'in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map.' Hal despises this thing he longs for, this 'hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.' A central image of The American Century As Seen Through A Brick is that of a piano string vibrating beautifully and a thumb reaching in and damping it. Later in the film the thumb is removed and the string begins to vibrate, but it grows louder and dysphoric, and soon the viewer longs for the 'natal thumb' to damp it again. Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. It isn't the 'true predator, the Great White Shark of Pain, what Kate Gompert knows simply as 'It.' 'It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.' It is not a feature of, but rather the essence of existence. It is a nausea of the soul. Kate describes it as indescribable except perhaps as a double bind where any of the alternatives of human agency are not just unpleasant but horrible. It is also lonely, since part of a clinically depressed person is incapable of empathy, or perceiving anything as independent of the universal pain. The term 'psychotic depression makes Kate feel especially lonely, especially being on a ward of such people, none of whom is really psychotic, it's just that their torture is undetectable by an outside party. The psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of hopelessness. It's more like someone who jumps from a burning building-- the terror of falling from a great height is still the same, but begins to appear to be the lesser of two terrors as the flames encroach. 'But and so' the idea of a 'suicide contract' in a halfway house, however well intentioned, only adds to the loneliness, since it is valid only up to the point when the psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary exert themselves. One psychotically depressed person that Kate came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital was a civil engineer in his 50s whose hobby was model trains. 20 years ago he slipped and hit his head and awoke in the hospital depressed beyond endurance. He had never attempted suicide, though he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was endlessly loyal and went to daily mass to pray for him. He still went to work, taking breaks only when his condition became unbearable and he would require hospitalization. They had tried every drug and even ECT on him to no avail. Kate knew he was possessed of a courage that was off all the charts. He was finally transferred to Long Island to undergo a radical new type of surgery where the entire limbic system is removed, thus removing all sentiment and feeling. His dream was to achieve anhedonia, a complete psychic numbing. For the past 2 years, Mr & Mrs Ernest Feaster had sent Kate Xmas cards with little watercolor locomotives, but Kate never knew whether or not he ever had the surgery.
notes:
This is the among the saddest and heaviest sections in the book. DFW's authorial emerges from the fiction here [which is chilling in retrospect] to connect the dots between the characters and the major themes of depression, irony and the 'hideous internal self' that Hal longs for. The piano note of the film sounds very much like the violin notes that Geoffrey Day described to Kate [p 648-651]. What could be sadder than the fact that Hal hasn't had a single 'intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion' since he was little?! Perhaps only that Hal isn't old enough to know that this is not the worst kind of depression.
p 698-700
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ruth van Cleve on her first outing from ETA and Kate Gompert are walking along Prospect in Cambridge a little after 10pm. Kate is finding Ruth excruciating to be around since she talks nonstop. Ruth is from Braintree on South Shore, is underweight and wears brass colored lipstick and spike heels. Kate hasn't slept in 4 nights. The narrative that begins to emerge is that Ruth has been remanded to Ennet House after her baby was found in an alley. The baby is now in a hospital in an incubator, while the baby's father is in jail awaiting sentencing for 'operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.' As the pair walks along, Latino males check Ruth out; even though she's underweight, she exudes sexuality. Unlike AA meetings, NA meetings are few and far between, and they have come all this way on the train and then walking and now have only 75 minutes to get back to Ennet House. Kate notes that Ruth's chatter is 'listener-interest-independent' as was Lenz's who has been 'invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere.' Kate is simply focussing on putting one foot in front of the other, and doesn't notice Poor Tony trailing behind them eyeing their purses, which little does he know contain little more than train-fare.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Troetsch is sick in his room, with the vaporizer going. His hair is slicked back to resemble a toupee and he's announcing along with a wrestling match on his TP.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is on tiptoes in the Subdorm B hallway using his racquet's handle to move one of the panels of the drop-ceiling.
notes:
Presumably this is where he keeps his stash, and is hiding the DMZ there.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle is in the darkened weight room, legs crossed eyes rolled up white and lips silently moving.
notes:
Is Lyle channeling something otherworldly?
p 701
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place near ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Schtitt and Mario are racing down Commonwealth Ave in Schtitt's BMW, on their way to get ice cream.
p 701
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Avril has obtained the phone number and email address of a journalistic business in Tucson and is dialing the number.
p 701-711
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 [and later, Nov 14]
place ETA [and later Ennet House and environs]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is watching the opening scene of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun and just as the title flashes over a freeze-frame of the titular nun in mid-karate-kick, Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin come uninvited to join Hal in the viewing room. Bridget asks what's up his butt, and he he says he came in to be alone. She comments that it might have something to do with the fact that he nearly lost today, and he invites her to go to Rite Aid and buy an emetic. Bernadette Longley comes in with Jennie Bash who informs Hal that there's a huge lady with a notebook looking for him, and asks if he doesn't have a paper due tomorrow for Poutrincourt's class. To no one's surprise, Hal has already finished it. Bernadette says that she heard his best friend [Pemulis] did something really funny today. Hal notes that the girls have all slipped out of their sneakers, as they always seem to do. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun is one of Himself's few commercial successes, but Hal considers its metacinematic parody aloof and overly clever. Hal tries to imagine Himself editing the film, and can't summon any idea of what he was thinking. Arslanian, Blott and Possalthwaite come in and soon everyone except Hal is riveted. The film shows a biker chick who is beaten up, robbed and molested and then 'saved' by a nun, who had herself suffered through the same experience [and so on]. Eventually this nun feels the call to rescue her own troubled adolescent, and eventually finds a burn-scarred coke addict. There's a 'brutally drawn-out Getting-to-know-and-trust-you montage' as the girl becomes indoctrinated in the ways of a tough nun. Bridget Boone notes that the conversion is nothing more than the 'exchange of one will obliterating "habit" for another' while Hal, in the midst of THC withdrawal, is thinking about another Himself cartridge, Low Temperature Civics which is considered a lampoon of the corporate-politics genre, but Hal knows was actually real-- made during the 80s when Himself was 'existentially unmoored' in the midst of a career change, drinking Wild Turkey and watching Dynasty rapaciously , in a Canadian spa where he supposedly met Lyle. What no one in the viewing room knows is that Bridget's analysis is very close to the way newcomers often see AA, as the trading of one crutch for another. Some newcomers, the 'gun to their head' ones, have already been so broken by their addiction that they don't care about this, substitution, they'd 'give their left nut' to trade their addiction for some platitudes, and they're the ones who 'stick and hang.' The narrative uncharacteristically shifts mid-section to Joelle/Ennet House, 11/14. It remains to be seen whether Joelle [whose first JOI film was Low Temperature Civics] will be one of those who stick and hang, but she is IDing with Commitment speakers who have. She is at an NA splinter, Cocaine Anonymous meeting, that she chose partially so she could visit Don Gately in the trauma ward of the hospital, a couple floors above where the meeting takes place. She's late and sits in the back row, 'denial aisle' as the speaker begins. Joelle sees past his 'colored idioms' because she 'can identify.' He says he had a wife and child and another on the way, back in Mattapan's Perry Hill Projects, and he used cocaine only in really severe binges. At the end of his rope, he was emptying their bank account, and his wife had to take a part-time job. Before his final binge, his wife was to meet him at the bus stop to 'help' him deposit his paycheck, but he never made it to the bus. When he returns to the apartment the next day, there's another eviction notice on the door, and a peanut butter jar that had been scraped clean. At that sight , he contemplated jumping out the window, but instead walked straight into Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain, where he wept when the first night's dinner was peanut butter sandwiches. Joelle decides right there that she's going straight, even if Gately takes Demerol, goes to jail, or rejects her if she can't show him the face.
notes:
It's perhaps worth noting that Blood Sister: One Tough Nun with its obvious parallels to Joelle [the burn-scarred coke addict] came before her first appearance in Low Temperature Civics.
p 711-714
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Once the girl that Blood Sister had tried to save is found dead from an overdose, things take a 'splattery' turn. BS suspects foul play and reverts to her street ways, over the objection of the Vice-Mother Superior [her own savior]. She goes on a killing rampage and finally finds out that the girl had been killed by the Mother Superior [who had save the vice-MS]. In the final act, it turns out that the vice-MS had not been saved after all, and had turned to not only using but to dealing in large quantities, from the Outreach confessionals, where it turns out, she had been the girl's dealer. The MS killed her to keep her from revealing the whole seamy truth to the BS, and to save the vice-MS from exposure and excommunication. All this gets explicated during a fight scene where the two older nuns kick BS's ass. The vice MS has a spiritual epiphany just as the the MS is about to demap BS with a tomahawk, and cold-cocks the MS with a 'Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn't even be named.' The vice MS stares down BS imploring her to complete the 'circle of recidivist retribution' but instead the BS drops the tomahawk, and walks out under the carved sign with the Latin inscription for 'we are what we revile' and she is shown getting on her Harley and riding away, whether to lapse to old ways or not is unknown. Everyone stretches and changes position in the viewing room, and Hal suddenly remembers the name--Smothergill. The boys tell Hal that they've come to discuss something disturbing that they found on their disciplinary detail. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, and looks for the 'Low Temperature Civics' cartridge.
notes:
Were the the boys simply going to tell Hal about the disgusting refrigerator, or was there something else?
p 714-716
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The apparition [Poor Tony] recedes pursued by a shrieking Ruth van Cleve as Kate holds her hurt head. Her eye was swelling shut and her vision becoming violet, as a voice claims to have witnessed the whole thing. The witness is a bearded man in an army coat who smells bad. She tries not to think that concussion is another word for a bruised brain. Ruth had been rattling off her baby's father's aliases when the apparition had grabbed their purses. Ruth's strap had given way, but Kate's macrame strap held, and she was pulled down the street until hitting a light post.
p 716-719
YDAU [2009] Nov 14 22:12
place Little Lisbon, Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Randy Lenz has ingested enough cocaine to go well beyond the 'euphoric crest' into the 'interstellar cold.' He is following two Chinese women with enormous shopping bags. At first he thought that the women were following him, having been privy to the fact that the most 'fearsome surveillance' was often carried out by unlikely people walking in front of you carrying mirrors. He had, however, successfully shaken them twice, and now he was pretty sure about who was tailing whom. He had decided that getting thrown out of Ennet House was perhaps not a curse; he had given the 'Straight On Narrow' a try and now he could hide out here in the open, the last place 'They' would look for him. He's dressed in clothes stolen from sidewalk displays-- bright yellow snow pants, a sombrero and a new mustache snatched off of a mannequin. He has eschewed eating and sleeping, to maintain an eye out for surveillance. He has familiarized himself with the now dwindling population of feral dogs and cats. His stash of cocaine inside his hollowed-out copy of the 'Gifford Lectures' was dwindling faster than he'd allow himself to think about. His feet are numb, following the Chinese women, past a grey-faced woman squatting behind a dumpster, and a guy in a 'rat-colored suit' shooting suction cup arrows from a toy bow, with whom he nearly collides. Lenz 'knows' that 'Orientoid types' carry all their earthly possessions around with them, and he intended to pull the 'snatch-and-sprint' on these. He began to feel his feet, and his nose dried up a bit from the adrenaline. These women far from surveilling him, had no idea what was about to take place.
p 719
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Antitoi Entertainment
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The AFR has two choices, both of which they're prepared to pursue. The less desirable route was to surveil the surviving relatives of the Entertainment's 'auteur' which would hopefully lead them to the auteur's own copy of the cartridge. The more desirable route would be to locate a copy of the cartridge on their own, which is why they are still here in the Antitoi Brothers' shop searching.
p 719-721
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony, wearing high heels, is being chased by Ruth van Cleve [whom Tony refers to as 'the Creature'], also in heels. He turns her strategy of yelling to onlookers to 'stop the bitch,' etc against her by yelling for help himself. His strategy is to make to the Antitoi Brothers' back door and take refuge inside. Running is difficult for Poor Tony who hasn't eaten for days, he gains a few steps on her when he cuts into the alley, but she stays on his tail.
p 721-723
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The AFR traced the cartridge to Antitoi Brothers, by way of interviewing the burgular whom they abducted pawning duPlessis' cafe au lait machine. It then took them several days to find it. Fortier, the USA-cell leader had brought in a viewer and volunteer viewers began going through the cartridges. They came across the blank 'street-display' cartridges made by the rival FLQ. They had no interest in these, nor was any rivalry initiated. They simply wanted to find the Entertainment, and find out whether the duPlessis copy was read-only. Fortier was required to be absent for a period in the middle of the search, so that he could assist in the Southwest ops. Marathe had informed him that Orin was likely to have or know of a copy, and he was under constant surveillance by the American agent with prostheses [Steeply].
notes:
It's implied here that the cartridge came to Antitoi Brothers by way of Gately's burglary [and accidental murder] of DuPlessis.
p 723
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Fortier owned prosthetic legs, which were capable of responding to nerve impulses in his stumps. But he rarely wore them in the USA, and never for public transportation. He preferred the condescension, and the institutional sensitivity to his rights, which 'honed the edge of his senses of purpose.'
p 723-724
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Beginning a few days before Gately was injured, Joelle had begun to obsess over her teeth, and the effects of base-cocaine on them. As she sleeps across from Kate Gompert's empty bunk, she dreams of Gately as a dentist, deftly ministering to her teeth. He is completely intent on her teeth and makes no small talk. In the small mirror attached to his forehead, she can see her own face ravaged by years of cocaine abuse. She can see her teeth rows of canines stained with dried blood extending way back inside her mouth as it down a pitch-black pipe. The image blots out the dentist's good face. As he probes her, he assures her that these can be saved.
p 724-728
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By the time Fortier returns to the shop, they have located the cartridge which was labelled with a smily face as were the blank FLQ cartridges. They had suffered only two lost to viewing the Entertainment, the volunteer Desjardins, whose turn it was, and Joubet who had wheeled into the storage closet, to check on him. They left them in there watching the the cartridge repeatedly. Marathe delivered the bad news to Fortier that the cartridge was read-only. Fortier found this nevertheless encouraging-- they knew that the cartridge existed and could bring about their plans for 'extending the ONAN's self-destructing logic to its final conclusion.' All they had to do now was locate the auteur's master copy. Fortier orders the suspension of surveillance on the FLQ house on Brainerd, and all available AFR personnel to be brought to the shop. Their work will now focus on the auteur's colleagues and family. An employee at ETA has been recruited along with the instructor and student already in their ranks. In the desert Luria P__ was winning [Orin's] confidences with alacrity. They had determined that the 'probable performer' had worked at the MIT radio station. They had made inquiries into the Quebecois tennis team that was about to play against ETA. They had acquired and interrogated the engineer from the radio station, and were thus sending Marathe, Ossowiecke and Fortier himself [those with good English skills] to infiltrate rehab facilities in the area, in search of the probable performer. They had used the engineer as a test subject for the samizdat's 'motivational range.' After allowing him to watch it twice, they handed him an orthopedic saw and informed him that before each subsequent viewing he would be required to cut off one of his fingers. AFR members are scouting the area for suitable additional subjects, and Fortier is traveling by bus [alone with a driver] after having tried to gain entrance to Phoenix House, where he determined there was no person with a veil. As he travels through Cambridge, he daydreams of President Gentle signing the declaration of war.
notes:
This section explains fairly explicitly how many of the plot lines intertwine. Presumably John Wayne and Thierry Poutrincourt are the student and instructor at ETA who are in the AFR ranks, but who is the employee?
p 728-729
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz has made off with the Chinese women's bags, and is running down a back alley looking for a place to check out his score. He hears the not so distant crashing sound of the dumpster that Poor Tony used to trip up Ruth van Cleve. He comes upon 4 boys, all under 12, smoking crack, and making fun of Lenz. He's looking for somewhere to separate out the valuables in the bags. He comes across a sexless figure lying against a dumpster, its hand moving furiously in its groin, softly chanting 'pretty, pretty, pretty.' He thinks what bunch of losers.
p 729-735
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section begins with a dialog between two former cult members, one of whose cults burned money and rode around in a Rolls Royce that he never started but had the cult members push. Marathe is overhearing this conversation in Ennet House, which the last 'demi-maison' on his schedule for the day. He awaits an interview to fill a vacancy at the house. Several others also await interviews, and several residents approach him, advising him to pet the dog, which he assumes is an idiomatic expression that he's unfamiliar with. He repeats his recited lines 'good night, I am addicted and deformed...' No one seems to take notice of his veil. A girl with a glass eye is having a conversation with Day, about whether cars are portable from various perspectives. It's easy for Marathe to ignore the fact that one addict is staring at him. He is prepared to die for his cause, hence he can choose among emotions. His veil allows to stare back, and he notes that the man's pallor reminds him of the insects he had found beneath a log as a 4-limbed child, before 'Le Culte du Prochain Train' [here there's a lengthy footnote #304, which was referred to on p 108, and was summarized previously]. The addicted man picks up his ashtray and comes closer to Marathe, and asks if he's real. He says that he can tell Marathe is real, but to be careful because the others are not real; they are metal with a thin covering of skin. Marathe answers that he is Swiss. The man smells of 3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid, and Marathe times his inhales to coincide with the man's. The man says that if you get close you can hear them whir. He gets very close to Marathe and Marathe finally inhales. The man announces that he cannot hear a whir, which confirms his belief that Marathe is real. Marathe says that Swiss people are a quiet and reserved people. The man says that the real people are all in one room and everything is projected for them to see. The office door opens and an attractive blonde woman with a limp is escorted by the authority figure who calls for the 'physically challenged foreign person with the unpronounceable name. The man repeats his plea for Marathe to get up close, and tells him to pet the dogs as he enters the office.
p 736-747
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle used to like to get high and clean. Now she's enjoying it without being high. After her dentist nightmare, she was awakened by Nell's scream from downstairs and she began cleaning the room, while Charlotte Treat sleeps with her face-mask and earplugs in place. Joelle hates earplugs because they make your pulse audible. The cleaning thing had started with Orin; when they had relationships troubles, would clean. The place they lived had been provided nearly gratis by Himself. Both of Orin's nicknames for his father, Himself and the Mad Stork, gave Joelle the creeps. Orin had introduced Joelle to Himself's films, The Work, which was very obscure until the time when Joelle became his subject. By then she was closer to Himself than Orin had ever been, resulting in a lot of cleaning of the brownstone. She hadn't thought about the Incandenzas for years before she met Gately. They were the second saddest family she'd ever seen. Orin felt that his father disliked him to the extent that he was even aware of him. He felt his issues with his father were exceptional, but Joelle considered them banal. Joelle had similar issues with her mother, who didn't seem to like her much, once Joelle's father made it clear he'd rather take Pokie to the movies alone. Orin felt his mother was the family's pulse and center, offering enough maternal concern to almost make up for the absent father. Orin's mother sometimes referred to Himself's blank expression as Le Masque. Orin's parents were both extremely tall, and Orin had found it odd that none of the sons were tall. One of the brothers was a hopeless retard and about the size of a fire hydrant. Joelle had at first thought that The Moms' maternal love had damaged Orin by contrasting with Himself's self-absorption, and making him too dependent on her. Especially when the younger special-needs brother came along. Orin said that he'd grown up dividing the world into those that are trustworthy and those that are closed and hidden, and then started to feel like one of the hidden types as a tennis player. Joelle had thought it was all so easy to figure out-- the adoration Orin had received as a punter vs. the staid tennis applause. She had loved him and felt for him, the poor little rich prodigy. But this was before she came to know Himself and The Work. She had learned never to trust a man on the subject of his parents. Orin had said Joelle was third in line for most 'neatnikest' person after the Moms and an OCD player he'd known. It hadn't occurred to her at the time that his attraction to her might have had anything pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that he was drawn to her only for what she looked like, her father having drilled into her head that 'the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies.' Orin was nothing like her own personal Daddy, who all but followed her around the house, and when he left the room it seemed like a relief. Orin's absence seem to empty the place out, and she felt not lonely, but alone and early on she 'was erecting fortifications.' Orin had introduced her to Himself because he thought because of her looks, Himself would want to use her in his films. She objected on several grounds-- because she wanted to be a filmmaker and disdained acting, and also because it was patently obvious that Orin was simply using her as a way to try to get to his father, Plus she felt uneasy about any connection with the man who'd hurt Orin so. She might have known from The Work, which she thought was amateurish, or at least the work of a brilliant technician with no ability at communication, or dramatic 'towardness.' His work seemed cold and ironic, and contemptuous of the audience. But there had been flashes of something else, even before he'd made the leap to anticonfluential but ironic melodrama after he'd met her. The flashes were fleeting and she'd noticed them only when alone watching with the lights up bright. She discovered things when studying 'The Medusa v. the Odalisque' for a storyboarding class, that there three split-second glimpses of facial pain, as if 'what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive.' She questioned how it could be accidental, when not a single frame in the film seem unplanned. She even became convinced that he had upped the film speed to keep anyone from being able to study them as she was attempting. Before Orin [in a footnote it's revealed that there is some disagreement about who approached whom], she had only been approached by one other boy, a Kentucky lineman who had only been able to get up enough nerve to talk to her by getting drunk, and who vomited while approaching her. She realized that day that it wasn't simply her father somehow discouraging would-be suitors. It had made her feel 'queer and lonely' until Orin, who made it clear that he had 'balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.' Joelle's mind changed about the 4 minute shot of Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Theresa' in the otherwise narrative film about an alcoholic sandwich bag salesman. She began to see that the absence of the otherwise pervasive face of the salesman, reflected an escaping of ones own POV, a transcendence of self, which is just what the statue itself does. She found this to be almost a 'moral thesis' in an otherwise campy film. There was a message that the 'self forgetting of alcohol' is inferior to art/religion. Eventually the alcoholic salesman's head swells until its dimensions exceed the frame. She began to to see an inkling in The Work that the 'punter's hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.' Orin set up a meeting at Legal Seafood, and Jim didn't have too much trouble resisting using her. He later told her that she seemed too conventionally pretty for his work at the time which was about breaking those conventions. Orin was so tense in the presence of Himself that he talked the whole time. Jim later told her that he wasn't able to speak to either of his undamaged sons without their mother's mediation. Orin wouldn't shut up and Hal was completely shut down. Jim referred to the Work's films as 'entertainments' sometimes ironically. On the way home in the cab that Jim had hailed for them, Orin lamented that he could not speak with Himself without his mother's mediation. He said that he had no idea whether Himself was proud, threatened or judgmental about the punting. At her first meeting with the whole family at turkey-lessThanksgiving at the Headmaster's House, Avril had indeed done everything she could to mediate-- trying to put everyone at ease, and to make Joelle feel welcome. She was the tallest woman Joelle had met. It took Joelle years to pin down the reason the Moms gave her the howling fantods. At the dinner Avril drank champagne without ever seeming to lower the level of her glass, Jim drank freely from a tumbler. Hal had two buddies for dinner. Avril directed alternating comments at each of her sons in a cycle of inclusion. Joelle was convinced that Avril wished her harm. Joelle had decided that Jim looked like an 'ecologically poisoned crane' she later told him. At some point Hal announced that the candela was the basic unit luminous intensity and then defined it, to no one in particular. Joelle intrigued Jim with a discussion of Bazin, a film theorist Himself detested. Avril asked Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did his 'billions and billions' Carl Sagan impersonation. Hal and Avril discussed whether circa could describe an interval or just a single year. Joelle had to resist the urge to slap Hal, whom she found annoying. The subjects of tennis, punting and baton twirling never came up. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Avril encouraged Joelle to call home to her family in rural Kentucky, and encouraged Jim to include her in one of his films. Mario reminded Joelle of one of the creatures from a Spielberg movie. She noticed that everyone at the table seemed to be constantly smiling. Her own face muscles ached. Orin had been up half the night vomiting with anxiety. At some point Himself got up to refreshen his drink and never returned. Before desert the Moms asked everyone to hold hands, and made a point of including Joelle. After the dinner Joelle felt she detect nothing fake in the Moms' good will, and yet she was certain that the woman could have cut out and eaten her pancreas. On the way home Orin commented on how you could count on the Moms to facilitate Himself using Joelle in a film. That night [the last BS Thanksgiving--2001] was the first time Joelle has used cocaine to intentionally keep from sleeping. She cleaned behind the refrigerator as Orin cried out in his sleep from a nightmare she felt should have been hers.
notes:
Here's the brief history of Joelle and the Incandenzas told in a cocaine-fueled free-association style. Presumably Joelle considers her own family to be the one family that's sadder than the Incandenzas.
p 747-751
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
Marathe rarely misjudged people, but the one he had thought an addict turned out to be the person of authority. She is speaking into the phone to someone named Mars, when he enters. The dogs are lying on the floor, one them licking his genitals. He gives her the rehearsed lines about being a Swiss addict who is deformed, and produces some forged documents of his legal status, which list him as Henri. Marathe memorizes every detail of the room. He tells her he was at Chit Chat Farms Rehab in Wernersberg, PA. As she fumbled in a cabinet he noticed some TP cartridges. She says that when she arrived at Ennet House she too was disabled, and unable to get on her knees. He replies that he will attempt to pray at a moments notice. He notices what he thinks are two unmarked cartridges among the others. She mentions UHID and says that they have a member in residency right now, and perhaps she'll help him to adjust. Marathe then began recording every moment since entering the house, and debating whether he would report first to Fortier or to Steeply. He debates whether to ask to meet the veiled person right away. She asks if his deformity is related to his drug use, and he gives his rehearsed answers of how he lost his legs injecting drugs, when he fell on his face and his legs remained tangled in the chair and became gangrenous, while his nose and mouth were squished. He debates whether to mention the unmarked cartridges to Steeply and the veiled girl to Fortier. But Steeply would want confirmation that the cartridges were not simply more of the FLQ fakes. He decides that killing the authority figure would be futile at this point. She tells him that his honesty is encouraging, and asks him how far he's willing to go.
notes:
Marathe is now set up to nab Joelle, and possibly find the cartridge, but he waffles on whether to report to Fortier or to betray his organization and report to Steeply.
p 751-752
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
The Thanksgiving dinner had made Joelle think that the whole family was 'lousy with secrets.' Orin had said they were all 'exactly as crazy as they seem' which struck Joelle as a pretense. But she knows that 'we're all a lot more intuitive about our lovers' families than our own.' As she cleans, she worries that Kate Gompert, who makes her nervous in general, will walk in at any moment.
p 752-755
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
Marathe finds the situation tricky when he is offered the sofa-bed in the rear office to sleep on this very evening. He debates whether to accept and observe the veiled girl first-hand. Or he could wheel out of their asap and alert the AFR that the cartridge might very well be here, and they could return later for the cartridges and the girl. Or he could call Steeply, and give him the information-- throw in once and for all, and finally get medical care for his wife. Or he could kill the authority figure right now. He feels saddened by the thought and wonders if he's slipping, recalling secretly vomiting in the alley outside Antitoi Brothers, after impaling the brother with the broomstick. He fantasizes about the outcome were he to find the cartridge and hand it over to Steeply, being protected in the US, where his first-hand knowledge of insurgency would be rewarded handsomely. Johnette enters the office, and the authority figure asks her to preview some donated cartridges from ETA [which Marathe mistakes for etier], because the natives are restless for some new entertainment.
notes:
The cartridges presumably came from beneath ETA by way of the cleaning crew and then Clenette.
p 755-769
YDAU [2009] Nov 11, 2100h
place ETA
narrated in third person [Mario]
synopsis:
Mario is wandering around with his Bolex camera strapped to his head getting footage for his documentary. He wanders from the Center court where a lingering match is being played into Scthitt's room, which is built around his massive stereo system on which he listens to Wagner while asleep, pipe dangling from his mouth. Then into the dormitory halls he goes where Felicity Zweig admonishes him for filming her wrapped in a bath towel. He runs into LaMont Chu, whom he interviews on film. Chu says that he was filling in Lyle on the Eschaton debacle and asks Mario whether he has heard any news from Hal about whom will be punished. Mario proves difficult to get a straight answer from, being more interested in the filmic aspect of the situation. He then goes downstairs [with difficulty] and into the Moms' office. She is on the phone, but greets him enthusiastically, both arms in the air forming a V. She asks whether she's a subject or if he's just passing through to say hello. She tells him she remembers Himself making the Bolex camera helmet, and she says it's the last thing he really enjoyed himself. He notes that the cowlick in her pure white hair is the only sign of her exhaustion. He tells her what he's just filmed, and she calls it 'peripatetic footage' refusing to talk down to Mario. She explains she's here working because she'll be very busy tomorrow. She puts out her Benson & Hedges, because she feels like her smoking makes Mario worry about her. She invites him to dinner, and says that Tavis is still in a conference. When he asks if it concerns the Eschaton incident, she says that he's been in there with the reporter and Thierry since afternoon. She says he can answer the reporter's questions about Orin, if he'd like. She asks if he knows where Hal is, and he answers that he hasn't seen him since the afternoon when he said he had a 'tooth thing' and had asked about the burn on Mario's pelvis. He says that his pelvis is fine and that Hal wishes that Mario would come back and sleep there. Mario asks if CT was mad. She skirts the question saying that she'll wait for Hal to come to her about Eschaton, teeth and urine. He says he has something to ask her, and she says she's 'there for him anytime day or night.' He asks how you can tell if someone is sad. She corrects him, 'whether someone is sad,' and says that he isn't exactly insensitive. He says he wants to confirm his suspicion that someone is sad. Mario notices that along with foot prints, the shag carpet has what look like knuckle prints. Avril goes through all the usual outward expressions of sadness, but Mario isn't satisfied. She asks if he might be talking about Hal. Today's lunch had been the same as yesterday's because the cook Mrs. Clark had taken the day off after discovering two brooms arranged in an X on the wall. Avril suggests that Mario may be picking up on a dissociation, that the person might not be himself. The person maybe deeply afraid of his own emotions, and have a fragile sense of self. She says that Delores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, 'as if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.' She says this interpretation is 'existential' which means 'vague and slightly flaky.' She tells of her grandfather who invested a windfall from one year's large potato harvest in Delaware Punch instead of Coca Cola, two blight years later, after Delaware Punch had folded he was forced to sell his farm. Her father who could only tell the story when he was drunk, had said that his father could only feel emotion when about 4 times a year when he was drunk, and when he would throw his son through the living room window. Her own father never threw anyone through any windows, he simply drank until he fell out of his chair. If he had not died when Avril was a girl, she most likely would have been deprived her university education, since he believed education was a waste for girls. She had been emptying her ashtray into the wastebasket in which were several long crinkly strips of red paper. Mario likes to look at his very beautiful mother and notes the facial similarities that both Hal and Orin share with her. Avril continues her answer saying that some people are afraid to experience genuine emotions, and are frozen inside. She says Delores calls it suppression and believes it derives from childhood trauma, but Avril suspects otherwise. She says that she'll write these terms down for him, but he points out that she's forgetting that she needs to speak more simply to him. She says these people might seem blank, distant or 'spacey.' An old pair of football pants and a helmet on top of the cabinet are her one memento to Orin, who refuses talk to them. She drinks her coffee from a mug that's inscribed 'To a woman outstanding in her field' and never gets lipstick on the rim. She has a blue ONANTA blazer neatly hung on the coatrack. Mario was incontinent until his early teens, but Himself and Hal had to change him because Avril was unable to deal with diapers. Mario asks what if someone is even more himself after something sad, instead of being blank. She asks how someone can be too much himself, and asks if he's thinking of Uncle Charles, or even of himself.
notes:
It's notable that the Moms describes having a fragile sense of self in terms of not being able to truly feel for fear of obliteration. This dovetails with one of the central metaphors in the book: 'eliminating one's map' as a metaphor for death and with the political significance of the metaphor-- the map of the Great Concavity was eliminated as a result of the production of inexpensive energy by Annulation. The ONANTA blazer hanging in the Moms's office suggests that urologist that mysteriously gave Hal and Pemulis a deferral on their drug test was in fact a fake, hired by the Moms to get Hal off the hook.
p 769-774
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Mario and Hal]
synopsis:
Hal is asking Mario if he was asleep, and tells of his dream wherein he's losing his teeth. His teeth are splintering and fragmenting when he eats or speaks. Mario says that people have been asking about Hal and about the urine doctor. Hal says his dream then changed to him sitting naked in a flame retardant chair where the mail carrier keeps coming in with bills for someone else's teeth. Mario says that he promised to tell LaMont Chu whatever he found out from Hal. Hal asks Mario if he remembers the Moms' dog S. Johnson, and says that he's been thinking about Orin lying about the dog's death. Mario remembers the Moms posing as a blind person in order to be able to bring the dog into a library. He remembers when she refused to put him in a cage to bring on the airplane, and instead left him tied to the Volvo with the phone near him, so she could call him, claiming that he recognized the sound of her ring. He reminds Hal of how Orin once answered the phone with a bark and then hung up, and made them promise not to tell. Hal says he's been remembering that Orin lied with a pathological intensity when they were young. Hal says that when the urologist had them fill the urine cups right there in front of him, that he didn't actually take it; they were allowed to hang onto it. He says that Pemulis got the guy to agree to give them 30 days. Mario says that he loves Hal, and that Hal's an excellent brother in every way. Hal says it's like talking to the Moms with Mario, except that he can tell Mario means it. Hal says he wonders how someone as optimistic as Mario can tell if he's being lied to, or whether it even occurs to him. Hal talks about different ways people lie-- one type becomes intense and tries to dominate the person they're lying to, another becomes fluttery and insubstantial, and others bury the lie in a lot of digressions and asides. Mario says that Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he thought he wasn't. Hal says some are kamikaze liars that tell you a big lie, and then retract it and then offer the lie they wanted you to buy. He says that Pemulis was always the type that over-elaborates the lie, until now; he's become the terse liar, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on. He says that Pemulis could have sold the urologist land. Mario says that Psychosis used to read a brochure on the air that said 'the importance of a mask is to increase your circulation.' Hal says that at 17 he no longer thinks of monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants, but rather as people who can lie and there's simply no way to tell. Mario asks how you know they're monsters, then. Hal answers that that's the monster right there.
notes:
Here's Mario as the maddeningly un-ironic side of DFW dialoguing with the fearful and increasingly jaded Hal. Perhaps Mario recognizes some truth in Orin's defection, that Orin had intended to conceal in lies, namely that her unending love is anything but real.
p 774-782
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ryle's Inman Square Jazz Club, Cambridge
no narration [dialog between Marathe and Kate Gompert]
synopsis:
Kate and Marathe are sitting in a bar, and Kate can't believe that she's drinking, since she's never had more than a beer, and had come to Ennet House for drugs. She asks him what it's like to be in 'that thing' [the wheelchair] and he answers it's best to prefer it. She says that Marathe has saved her from a 'reptilian character' who had offered to buy her a drink. She says that before she was mugged she was soberly deciding how to kill herself so it seems a bit silly to worry about drinking. Marathe says that she has a resemblance to his dying wife. He says that he spends his day searching for someone whom his friends will kill, and he has come here to telephone to betray them, and is feeling like it's time for many drinks. Since they are both drunk, he says he'll tell her a story. He tells of how his legs were lost to a train, and that she'd have no idea of the pain. She says it's he that has no idea. Kate simultaneously tells him the story of how his father abandoned his family by moving to Portland with his therapist. Marathe says that his 'Swiss' nation was in a dark period of oppression from neighboring countries, and many of his friends fought the injustice, but he thought it was all pointless. She says he was depressed. He continues that he would drink and roll around alone thinking of death. She says she identifies, and then realizes the AA-speak. He says he was 'chained in a cage of the self' and she draws the comparison to her 'billlowing shaped black sailing wing.' He tells how one day he had drunkenly rolled himself to the crest of a hill, and below had seen a small hunched woman in a metal hat with a truck headed straight toward her. Without thinking he had released his brake and went careening down the hill and swept her out of the way. Kate says he pulled himself out of clinical depression by saving someone's life. He says she is not seeing that the woman saved his life, because he was allowed to choose something as more important than thinking about his life. Kate projects that he saw her without her metal hat and fell madly in love. He reveals that she had no skull, and no ability to form words. He says that the unclamping of the brakes was the love. As for the woman, he carries her to the hospital, where he learns of all her other problems. Kate is waiting impatiently for the falling-in-love part of the story, but realizing this won't be coming up. He says that after this he could join the fight for his despoiled nation because he saw the point, not in winning, but in merely choosing to fight. Kate is disappointed; she asks if he's saying 'this' is love. She says he's not half the guy she had thought. He says his choice was love- he had needed the woman to choose over his own cage. She scoffs saying he is chained to her. He says their wedding night was the happiest day for him since the train. he reveals that now she is in a coma, and it for her that he betrays his friends. Kate has turned against him at this point, and she answers that he is 'disturbed' and that he's mistaking low self-esteem and settling for less as love, assuming that he's not lying to get her 'in the hay.' He still tries to make her see it his way, that the choice he made chains him, but the other chains were of not choosing. She suggests that he has a twin that has come in and taken over the conversation. He says she's just drunk. He says that the love that people in this country seek is the idea of pleasure and good feelings, that all choice leads there- the pleasure of not choosing. She insults him. He asks what if he could lead her a few blocks away and show her something which promised she would never again feel sorrow or the pain of the chains. She mistakes this for a come-on and says that she's a lousy lay. She's only been sexual twice and both times it was awful. He says she has misunderstood, and asks that if she is saying no because she doesn't believe his claim.
notes:
Kate and Marathe talk past each other as they each tell the story of their own 'cages' all the while thinking that they see the signs of the other's weakness-- Kate sees Marathe as an addict, and Marathe sees Kate as simply seeking the pleasure of not choosing.
p 782-785
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Mario and Hal]
synopsis:
Mario says that he's sorry Hal seems sad. Hal confesses that he secretly smokes Bob Hope in the tunnels. He says that he's not the one CT and Moms want gone anyway. That he was just there to make it look objective for them to test Pemulis's urine. Pemulis said he had vague memories of poppy seed bagel, and being exposed downwind from substances, and convinced the guy that to give them 30 days. Hal says that the ingenious part of the lie was that the 30 days was actually to protect Hal. Pemulis says Hal needs no more than 30 days of cranberry juice, and vinegar in water. Hal says that CT would have no choice but to boot him after having gotten ONANTA involved. He thinks of the stain on ETA, on Himself, and he shudders at how it would 'kill the Moms' not so much the drug use but the secrecy. He contemplates 30 days of total withdrawal-- the WhataBurger and then SATs in December. Mario says everyone knows he'll get a perfect score. Hal says that of course Mario must be hurt that Hal hadn't told him. Mario says he's not hurt, and that Hal always tells him the truth when it's right to tell. Hal says it's normal to get hurt and mad at people. He says that after only 40 hours, he can't sleep without horror-show dreams. He says Pemulis is fully alert and functional [exemplified by a lengthy footnote, discussed below], and is going to the library reading up on whether the DMZ he got for the WhataBurger will be detectable. Hal says it's different with him, that he has a hole, which after a month will be a 'way more than Hal-sized hole.' He worries that it'll come out, clean urine or no, and the Moms will be devastated. He asks Mario what he should do. Mario says he thinks Hal just did it.
notes:
Ironically Hal thinks that Pemulis is the one who saved him from getting kicked out of ETA and destroying his mother, while all the while she has set the whole thing up so that Hal will get straight, and she can probably kick Pemulis out. Another example of what Mario recognized [p 769-774] as the truth about the Moms concealed by a lie.
p 1063-1066
YDAU [2009] Nov 12
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Pemulis and Hal]
synopsis:
Pemulis is coaching Hal on trigonometry and calculus for the SAT, and Hal tells him about a DMZ-dream which featured the convict who had lost his mind after being injected with DMZ and started singing Ethel Merman songs [p 211-219]. Hal was the convict and he wasn't actually singing, he was crying out for help and everyone treated him like he was singing Ethel Merman songs. Pemulis says that Struck tracked down an article that says that DMZ won't show up in the urine test. He says that the stuff's original purpose was to induce 'transcendent experiences' in chronic alcoholics at Verdun Hospital in Montreal in the 60s. Hal notes that everything is relating to Quebec nowadays and Pemulis teases him for being paranoid. Pemulis says he thinks a DMZ interlude before Tucson is just what Hal needs to keep from going back to smoking Bob Hope daily after the test. He says he doesn't want to see Hal wind up with 'fat titties slumped in a chair' watching the TP. Hal says what if he just totally quit Bob Hope altogether. Pemulis says he's naive, and that a little DMZ would make it easier. Hal says but what if he truly needs it, and Pemulis asks if Hal knows what happens if you need it and you give it up-- you die inside. He says if you need the Bob, you can only quit the Bob and move onward to something else. Hal is reminded of a filmstrip. Pemulis says Hal probably could quit it, for a while, but he'd wind up dead inside, or outside. Hal assumes he's referring to Himself, and points out that the bottle of Wild Turkey was right there beside the microwave. Pemulis says he's not talking about Himself, but about guys he's known, some did a Clipperton and some joined NA and got clean, and got up every day and went to work like machines. But Hal is too 'buy the God-squad shit.' Pemulis says he's Hal's friend, and if he doesn't want to do the DMZ, fine. He says to take some time and figure out what part of himself has come to 'need' it. Hal asks if he means the part that's incomplete-- the addict. Pemulis says that's just a word.
notes:
Pemulis's dream sounds an awful lot like one of Himself's films, or like Hal's own actual situation. Was Himself's tragic end a result of the alcoholism? Is Hal's trouble the result of his need for Bob Hope? Hardly.
p 785-787
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Johnette F.]
synopsis:
Johnette F. has taken over Gately's Dream Duty shift, and at 8:30am someone knocks on the House's front door. She assumes it's the police inquiring further about the Lenz episode. She answers the door to an 'upscale kid' [who must be Hal] asking to speak privately to someone in authority. She notes his weirdly tanned skin and immaculate clothes, and she can tell he's not here to visit any of the residents. His talking had a salivating quality that she recognized as substance withdrawal. He asks long-windedly if he can have or borrow a list of NA meetings, because he was considering 'in a largely speculative way' maybe dropping in on one, but wasn't sure 'whom else to call.' She notes that he's the kind of kid that knows how to use 'whom' but can't look up NA in the phone book. Much later, 'in subsequent events' light' she would clearly recall him saying 'whom' with the saliva almost running over his lip.
notes:
Another of DFW's well-concealed hints about how the story lines will converge is dropped here: 'in subsequent events' light' clearly points out that Hal will be involved in something that Johnette, as Ennet House manager will know about.
p 787--this section is entirely a footnote -- p 1066-1072
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis comes into the locker room at 1420h to dress for the PM match against Ken Freer, who is standing in front of the mirror, ministering to his skin. Todd Possalthwaite is nearly nude and weeping. Pemulis, who is Todd's Big Buddy, gives a fake punch and asks what's wrong. Todd says 'nothing is true' and Pemulis answers directing his question at Freer, 'what metaphysical angst at thirteen?' Pemulis is waiting for the upswing in mood that should accompany the Tenuate he's taken [which, a footnote explains, is out of your system within 36 hours]. Freer answers 'just a disappointed dinkle' and explains that Postal Weight's dad had promised something for accomplishing something and then reneged. Pemulis asks if this is about the Eschaton thing, because he can explain to Todd's dad that they're not blaming anyone under 17. Pemulis has calculated that a win against Freer today could mean a seat on the plane to WhataBurger, and this is why he's taken the Tenuate even though he and Hal narrowly escaped the urinalysis on account of Pemulis telling Hal's mother that he'd tell Hal about the incident with John Wayne. Todd repeats that nothing is true, and Pemulis says that some things are 'rock-solid, high-grade true.' Freer tells Pemulis to let him cry, and says that at 13 he has yet to experience anything like real disappointment. Pemulis chooses from among his T-shirts, and puts it on head first instead of arms first like all the upscale kids. And unlike John Wayne, who had been in Pemulis's room right after lunch, purportedly to retrieve Troeltsch's Seldane, Pemulis puts his socks on first then his shoes. Neither had mentioned the incident in Avril's office. Pemulis tries to get Todd to buckle up and assures him of his gifts as an Eschaton player. He says that his kertwang is emotion-based and not fact-based. A bunch of 16 year olds come in towel snapping. Freer warns Todd of what's coming next, and Pemulis says that if Todd didn't have such a way with 'launch vector' that he might not be ready to hear this. Pemulis says 'you can trust math.' As he expounds on the certitude of all things math-related, a student comes in to announce that John Wayne expounding his innermost thoughts-- Troeltsch has him 'on the air and Wayne's lost his mind.'
notes:
Pemulis reveals yet another view of why he and Hal were allowed to escape the urinalysis. Unfortunately, unlike the truths of his math, this truth is thoroughly suspect. It's key to note that John Wayne was in Pemulis's room just before having 'lost his mind.'
p 787-795
YDAU [2009] probably early November
place Boston
narrated in third person [Molly Notkin]
synopsis:
Molly Notkin has told Rodney Tine everything she knows about Madame Psychosis in a 'technical interview' under the duress of a high-watt lamp. She tells the operatives that her understanding is that the lethal cartridge is 'Infinite Jest V' or 'Infinite Jest VI' and consists of Madame P as Death, sitting pregnant and naked with her deformed face distorted or blanked out by computer. She is explaining to the camera that Death is always female and always maternal, ie the mother in your next life. She says that it was definitely a trick of the lens that made Madame P appear pregnant, because Molly had seen her naked [though never unveiled] and she definitely had never been pregnant. Molly says that Madame P's mother killed herself on Thanksgiving, four months before the Auteur had done the same. She says that the camera had been below the reclining maternal figure while she explained that the reason mothers were so consumingly loving is that they are trying to make amends for a murder that neither of you quite remember. Molly explains that Madame P had not been sexually involved with the Auteur, because his belief in a finite number of erections in the world rendered him impotent. She had, however been involved with the Auteur's son, whom Molly considers a rotter. Molly says that Madame P had not been present at the Auteur's suicide, funeral, nor at the reading of his will, and that Madame P had never mentioned the fate of the cartridge, and had only described it from the perspective of a performer. She says that Madame P had never seen the cartridge, but did not believe it could be lethally entertaining, and felt that the Auteur had probably recognized it as a the thinly veiled cries of a man at the end of his tether, and destroyed it as he had the other attempts at the same film. She says that the Auteur's funeral had taken place in L'Islet province in Quebec, where the widow is from, and that he had not been cremated. She says that it's unlikely that the widow was involved with anti-American cells. Madame P had told her that the woman was basically Death incarnate, and that it was ironic that the Auteur repeatedly tried to cast Madame P in that role, when he had the real thing right there. Molly says that the Auteur had given up alcohol on Madame P's request, and had been sober for the 3 1/2 months prior to his death, apparently in part because he was so moved by her consent to appear before the camera even after her deforming accident, and her subsequent abandonment by the Auteur's son. Molly says that Madame P's substance-abuse problem was the result of her guilt over having coerced the Auteur into giving up his substance abuse. Molly says that her guilt had nothing to do with Infinite Jest V or VI, but rather with her feeling that she made him give up the one thing that was holding him together. Molly says that she thinks the bottle of Wild Turkey may have been placed at the scene of the suicide after the fact by the widow, who was probably enraged that he was willing to give up drinking for Madame P. Molly says that 'by all reports' Madame P had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving day that her mother committed suicide. She says that the Auteur's death probably had nothing to do with his work, or with supposedly having created a lethally entertaining cartridge, but rather with the fact his wife was having sex with 'just about everything with a Y-chromosome' including possibly her own son Orin. She says that the myth of the cartridge is the classic illustration of the 'antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism' and that she'd be happy to lend the interrogators a book on the subject. When pressed to give more concise answers, Molly explains that Madame P's deforming trauma had been something right out of one of the Auteur's 'proto-incestuous disaster films.' Madame P's father, the low-pH chemist had a creepy attachment to his daughter gotten even creepier when she reached puberty, and when she brought her first boyfriend home for Thanksgiving, 'the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan.' When Madame P finally snapped and questioned why her father insisted on cutting up the turkey on her plate, he snapped in turn confessing that he was in love with her, and that he had never touched or ogled her out of deference to the purity of his love. But when she had reached puberty, the pressure had become so great that he was forced to regress her to childhood, in his mind. And now that she's brought a mature male into the house, and he has been forced to watch them in bed together through the peephole that he tried with all his will to resist drilling-- at this point the mother had blown her fuse. She announced that she and the chemist had not had sex since the daughter reached puberty, and she confessed that her own father had molested her repeatedly. The mother said that perhaps she is at fault for having married the same kind of monster who spurns his wife for his own daughter. The mother then races down to the father's acid lab in order to douse herself, and the others follow behind. Molly reveals that Madame P's real name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and her father's name was either Earl or Al. Molly says that the son had claimed that his guilt for having let the accident occur had made the relationship untenable, but that she thinks it's pretty clear why he gave her the boot a few months later. The mother had instead of dousing herself, hurled the acid at the father who ducked, as had Orin, which left Madame P to get a face full of acid. When no charges were pressed, she had been freed from custody and came home to commit suicide by putting her arms one at a time into the garbage disposal.
notes:
Here the mystery of whether Madame P is actually deformed or just fatally beautiful beneath the veil is finally revealed. Or is it? Much of what Molly Notkin says turns out to be suspect, most notably her description of Infinite Jest, which bears little similarity to Joelle's own description later in the book. Also she attributes Joelle's drug use to her guilt over the Auteur's suicide when we know from p 736-747, that her habit formed earlier, as a result of her deteriorating relationship with Orin. She does offer a more plausible reason [the Moms's infidelity] for Himself's suicide than Pemulis, but it's pretty clear that while plausible, this explanation is pretty far from true. So much of what she offers up, whether intentionally or not, is fairly suspect.
p 795--this section is entirely a footnote -- p 1073-1076
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis is in the Dean of Academic Affairs office with deLint as well as Nwagi and Watson. DeLint says that Tavis, Avril and Rusk are with John Wayne now, and apparently he's going to be OK. Pemulis feigns relief. DeLint asks him to recount what transpired. Pemulis had figured that none of the administrators had heard the thing, and had not even figured it out himself until he was en route to find his pilfered Tenuates in the Seldane bottle that Wayne had borrowed from Troeltsch. Pemulis explains that he was suiting up when Stice and Zoltan came in ranting about Wayne's 'candid sharing' on the student radio broadcast. DeLint asks if he's saying that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into this, but Pemulis had already heard that Wayne had come rattling in and grabbed the mic. Pemulis recognized the irony in the situation-- it was actually not his doing, and Troeltsch, if anyone, was to blame. He could not, however, figure out a way to get this across without implicating himself for possession, which given the incident with the urologist, would be suicide. DeLint asks about his first knowledge of 'untowardness' with Wayne, and Pemulis says he heard what Keith says sounded like an imitation of Tavis. Wayne had done a dead-on version of Tavis coming on to a cheerleader and telling her he had a fear of rejection, so instead of rejecting him would she please invent a plausible excuse. DeLint prompts him about what followed, which was Troeltsch prodding Wayne to make 'public castigations' of his peers and instructors. In Wayne's scenario Tavis succeeds in seducing the cheerleader, and that even though it's clear that his honesty had been simply a ruse, she lets him have his way with her to get him to shut up. And what's most chilling about this is that Pemulis knows through Hal that this is one of Orin's top 'Strategies' for seducing married women. Pemulis interrupts the cataloging of Wayne's castigations to ask if the emerging point is that all of this will affect his chances for the WhataBurger trip. At this point Watson brings out Pemulis's yachting cap, his pharmaceutical scale, and virtually every bottle from his bedside table, indicating that Troeltsch had cut some kind of deal to save his own ass. Pemulis requests to see Avril. DeLint says that while she's busy attending to one of the academy's finest students who has been unwittingly dosed with an illegal substance, she sends her very best regards. Pemulis that before this all gets nailed down, he really needs to see her. DeLint says he's given to understand that Pemulis can either finish out the term for credit, or try to find another academy to accept him without a positive reference, and that he's free to shout whatever it was he was threatening to shout from the highest hill he can find. And that they've had the doorknobs rubberized. Pemulis asks if this affects his chances for the WhataBurger.
notes:
It's not clear whether Tavis actually uses Orin's strategy for seduction, or if Wayne simply got it from his own escapades with the Moms. It's interesting that the whole episode of Pemulis being dismissed happens completely in the footnotes.
p 795-808
YDAU [2009] Nov 17 [presumably]
place Natick [outer metro Boston]
narrated in third person [Hal]
synopsis:
Hal chooses the most remote Tuesday meeting from the book given to him by the 'incisorless nostril-pierced girl' at Ennet House, which is Natick on Route 27. He rushes through his PM match and skips dinner so he can make the meeting. He's not sure why, since abstaining is not so much his problem, as the horrible way he feels, since he's 'Abandoned All Hope.' Excessive saliva, nightmares, and as if his own head were trying to torture him. He takes the tow truck and chokes down two bran muffins, regrettably without anything liquid. He considers the etymology of the word anonymous. The withdrawal hasn't affected his ability to call up a mental xerox of anything he's read. He finds Quabbin Recovery Systems [QRS] in a building set back from the highway. A good 2/3 of the parking spaces are reserved for staff. He enters the reflector-shade glass door, which is unlocked. There is no map or directory, so he wanders the menacingly silent halls in search of 32A. He wished he was somewhere else and felt some other way. He empties the glass holding his spit into the dirt in the pot of a rubber tree. He's brought along $50 US and $100 ONAN, since he has no idea how much these things might cost. He finds the room, with it's door closed like the rest, but he detects muffled voices, and assumes since he's 10 minutes early, that it may be some sort of orientation for newcomers, and he enters. He finds the meeting already under way, and laments that it's not nearly big enough for anonymity or casual spectation. In the room are 9-10 bearded men sitting Indian style in their chairs, each clutching an identical teddy bear. One of the men is crying, and the man who appears to be the leader asks the others to hold their bears tight and let their 'Inner Infant' listen to Kevin's Inner Infant express his grief and loss. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs and assumes he'll be able to approach the leader at a break and buy some texts to study later. Even though it sounds suspiciously close to Dr. Rusk's dreaded Inner Child, Hal assumes that Inner Infant is some NA sobriquet, and wills himself to stay objective. The leader says the energy he's feeling from the others is unconditional love and acceptance of Kevin's Inner Infant, and then invites the others to chime in with their feelings. They do, at which point Hal begins to lose control of his objectivity. His mood worsens as the leader starts some really bad ambient music. Kevin is prompted to explain that his Inner Infant is crying in its crib, waiting for Mommy and Daddy to come nurture him. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside is his belly gurgling from the bran muffins. Kevin says through the string of mucus hanging from his nose that his Inner Infant wants to be loved and held. He says that by the time he was 8 they were dead, killed by a traffic helicopter on Jamaica Way. Hal suddenly realizes that Kevin is the older brother of Marlon Bain, who had been Orin's tennis partner. He realizes that no way has Kevin Bain ever ingested a substance in his life, and that this is a men's issues meeting. He notices that the booklet he'd got from Ennet House is dated January YDPAH, making it 2 years old. The leader of the group has Kevin repeating 'please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me' and Hal recalls his own toddlerhood during which he was held and loved extensively, and it didn't exactly make him whole or substance-free. There's a man eating yogurt behind Hal, and it turns out that this is the person whom Kevin 'needs something from.' Hal tries to become invisible as Kevin is prompted to direct his request to be loved and held directly to this man. Hal scrolls through an alphabetical list of all the places he'd rather be than where he is now. Despite repeated pleas and projectile-weeping, the man behind Hal does not come and hold and love Kevin. He is then encouraged to let his Inner Infant walk out and let it walk over to the man and actively ask for what it wants. Hal's most vivid memory of the meeting was Kevin on all fours crawling toward him, clutching a teddy bear.
notes:
Hal's revelation here is implicit, or at least seems unknown to him-- that the horror of his existence [or his addiction] can't be traced easily to some simple root cause and then expunged. It's ironic that he was looking for this answer at an NA meeting, and it was presented to him vicariously at the Inner Infant meeting.
[since the last two sections are so long, my notes will be interspersed throughout the synopses, instead of at the end]
p 620-626
YDAU [2009] mid November
place Boston Public Gardens
narrated in third person [WYYY engineer]
synopsis:
It's YDAU and it's the near future when things are really high tech and ultra-convenient. Almost no one really needs to leave home to work, and 94% of all entertainment is absorbed at home. Hence the newly formed passion for 'spect-ops' -- witnessing things happening. One such spect-op is the yearly draining of the duck pond in the Public Gardens. This happens each year on an unannounced weekday in mid-November. Himself would often bring Hal and Mario to see it. Rodney Tine is standing at an 8th floor window in the State House annex as the pond is drained below. He is joined by Hugh Steeply and Rodney Tine Jr. along with a stenographer, the Deputy Mayor, and the Director of Substance Abuse Services. Meanwhile below the engineer from WYYY is sunning his poor skin on a silver NASA souvenir blanket. He is the only one of the people on the ponds grassy decline who appears not to be homeless. The others have shopping carts and trash bags full of recyclables and are in various states of filth and intoxication. Up on the street an unmarked van with tinted windows and handicapped license plates is idling. The engineer hasn't had the opportunity to sun since Madame P's hiatus began. First he had to engineer the replacement Miss Diagnosis' show, but her tenure was brief. After that he has had to play Madame P's background music while no one speaks into the microphone. Half her show was silence anyway, but that silence was different: 'silence of presence v silence of absence.' Another Dodge van has appeared. The engineer happens to know about the ambulance and the ICU and the five day rehab from Molly Notkin who came to retrieve some old tapes for the Madame's personal listening use. He also knows that she is undergoing 'Treatment' at 'half a house' in an unpleasant metro area. This is all the engineer knows but he will soon wish he knew much more. A wheelchair ramp descends from one of the vans and a legless wheelchaired man comes shooting down the ramp and down the hill, snatching up the engineer and carrying down the hill to the awaiting second van, which is idling and has its wheelchair ramp extended.
p 627-638
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 6:10pm
place ETA
narrated in third person [Hal]
synopsis:
The ETA students are assembled in the dining hall for dinner at 20 different tables. The prorectors are at their own table joined tonight by the Moment soft-profiler. Stice had earlier that day come very close to beating Hal in an off-record challenge match. No one besides John Wayne has been able to beat Hal in recent memory, and word has gotten around. Everyone except Axford [who says that to him food tastes the way vomit smells] is fervently eating. Stice clears his throat to continue his story about his parents who met in C&W bar in Kansas when they discovered that they were equally unbeatable at the game in which a burning cigarette is propped between participants' forearms and the first one to pull his arm away is the loser. It was love at first sight. Their relationship was tumultuous, consisting of either ardent passion or fighting. Axford has lost his match with Shaw today. Even though Hal hasn't touched his 6 cranberry juices, he's still swallowing a lot. There's rumors circulating as to whether Hal's near loss and Axford's loss have something to do with a rumored showdown with the ONANTA urologist in Tavis' office. Pemulis who is also rumored to have been there ignores Hal's swallowing and Axfor'd stony expression. Troeltsch is complaining that the kitchen is substituting the milk with powdered milk. Pemulis argues that Tavis can't even regrout the showers without calling a community meeting and Troeltsch is suggesting that under cover of night they are filling the milk dispenser bags with powdered milk?! In addition to milk there's cranberry juice and high lecithin chocolate skim which every student tries exactly once. Avril has corrected the sign above the milk which foremerly read 'milk is filling, drink what you take' but now has a semicolon in place of the comma. Pemulis calls Troeltsch's theory paranoia, but Troeltsch suggests that there are other signs-- the lung has not yet been inflated, the bagels are day-old, Stice's bed is moving around [re: which Stice wants to know how he knows anything about that]. But it's true [the narrator insists] there's the tripod of the Mario/Millicent encounter, mysteriously falling acoustic ceiling-tiles, a lawn mower in the kitchen, the ball machine in the females' sauna, squeegees hung in a cross on the dining hall's north wall. The creepiest thing about it is that if these are regular pranks, they're not funny. They give everyone the fantods. The two black girls who do kitchen and custodial work are making their way down the steep hill to Ennet House. Hal had noted that Clenette had left Tavis' office with a guilty look and her backpack stuffed with items rescued from the trash, a practice which ETA tacitly permits. As the discussion turns to why girls who hit one-handed backhands have different sized breasts, Hal recalls how Orin would try to meet and have sex with girls while on dates with another girl. 'This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured.' [p 634]. He kept journals of his conquests which he left out available for all to read. Struck, Pemulis, Schacht, Freer and maybe Coyle have all had intercourse. For Hal, lifetime virginity is a conscious goal; he feels like Orin has enough sex for the 3 brothers. Hals' mouth is overflowing with saliva. He knows that he should have lost to Stice today, and only won because Stice didn't believe he could beat Hal. But this is a whole new Hal, who doesn't get high and will hand his own chemical-free urine over to authorities in 29 days. Pemulis and Ashford are the only others that know this. Stice, meanwhile is staring at his salad, not because of his post-match high, but because of his secret suspicion about the table at which he sits. When Ingersoll returns on crutches Hal goes over to speak with him. Troeltsch follows him to avoid any further mention of the opposite sex. It's almost conditioned into the players to leave certain things behind in order to excel. Hence in spite of the raging hormones ETA is basically unsexual. Stice looks up from his salad momentarily, where he believes a cherry tomato is suspended in defiance of gravity. Stice's body resembles a poorly spliced photo-- perfect athletic from the neck down with the 'ravaged face of Winston Churchill' attached. He stares at his tomato with a 'coercive reverence' not unlike that he'd experienced in his match today, when balls he'd hit seemed to do things beyond his control. He wonders if Hal had noticed. Hal had seemed on the verge of falling apart out there. Stice convinces himself not to wonder about the ONANTA urologist. Even those who know Hal gets high would never think his troubles were related to the urine thing, since he'd be the last of the crew to get the boot, and Pemulis seems blithe as ever. Hal and Mario know that the milk at ETA is powdered, poured by the graveyard kitchen crew into the regular milk bags. Struck is eating Hal's uneaten dinner while Hal is talking to Ingersoll. Stice had a traumatic experience at 14, where he set the weight too high on the weight machine, and is excused from weights until his issues are resolved.
notes:
One has to wonder what Clenette is taking from the ETA dumpster back to Ennet House. It is beginning to seem like the weird pranks are some kind of encoded message, and that they have a supernatural component.
p 638-648
YDAU [2009] May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
It's early morning in the desert as Steeply tells Marathe the story of his own father who around midlife got consumed with a sort of entertainment. It started out as simply a show that he liked-- M*A*S*H. His father was a heating oil distributor for Cheery Oil in Troy, NY. Initially his Mummykins thought it was cute, but as time passed the father became more obsessed, seeking out even the reruns. He eventually started bring a small TV to work, and then he dropped out of his bowling league, the Knights of Columbus. He would get anxious and ugly if he had to miss an episode and the Mummykins was forced to invent excuses for them to miss engagements. The father began keeping a notebook in which he recorded tiny details which he kept secret. He started quoting the program regularly and even referring to the kitchen as the Mess Tent. He taped episodes and stayed up most of the night watching them and taking his notes. He started to write letters to the characters Frank Burns, addressed to him in Korea. The letters were hostile, putting forth an Armageddon-themed conspiracy theory that he had somehow gleaned from the show. soon he began missing work and Mr. Cheery was in a quandary because the father was a long-time employee and bowling partner. He would come to the house, watch an episode with the father and then take Mummykins out in the garage and plead with her to get the father some help. The Mummykins would feigned ignorance. By this time Steeply had gone to college. The father apparently found messages encoded about the end of the familiar type of time and the advent of a whole new type of time. Among the things he found significant was the fact that the Korean War lasted only 2 years but that the show was by then into its seventh year. As characters retired from the show, the father invented theories as to what *really* happened to them. He let it be known that he was working on a secret book about his ideas. In 1983 there came a letter from the Network attorneys saying that the father's letters could constitute grounds for legal action, and around the same time, the final episode ran. The Mummykins now freely discussed the fact that he refused to leave his den. He eventually died in his easy chair watchng an episode in which Alan Alda, [Hawkeye] can't stop sleepwalking and fears he's going out of his mind-- his therapist tells him that if he were crazy he'd sleep like a baby. After his death Steeply and his sister spent some time trying to decode the notebooks full of military/medical-coded rants. Marathe responds 'his unbalance of temptation cost him his life... because of consuming obsession.' Steeply answers that it was actually heart trouble. Steeply says that when he sees Flatto's lab, he gets tempted. He pictures Hank Hoyne in his father's easy chair. Marathe announces that his time is 'sharply finite to remain' and asks that Steeply leave first. Steeply says that 'empty of intent' doesn't really capture the look in the eyes, that it's more like stuck in the middle between two things,--pulled apart in different directions, as if there were something he had misplaced or lost.
notes:
This section has yet another parody of the Infinite Jest theme. It seems important that instead of being empty of intent, or simply hollow, the eyes of the viewer/victim are pulled apart and lost.
p 648-651
YDAU [2009] Nov 13 2:45am
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Eugenio M is filling in for Johnette on Dream Duty as Kate Gompert [in an awkward yoga position] and Geoffrey Day have a conversation on the couch. Erdedy is smoking and Green is asleep. The whole house is still reeling from the episode in the streetlet. Kate says 'like you really care' and then Day tells a story of practicing his violin on a summer day with the fan on, and how certain notes from his violin combined with the fan to set up a resonance in his head. This produced a 'large dark billowing shape' from a corner in his mind, which made him drop his violin and run from the room. Kate asks if it was triangular, but he answers that it was shapeless. He returned to the room and played the violin notes again and again the shape rose in his mind; it was 'total psychic horror.' Out of the blue Erdedy says 'his head was shaped like a mushroom.' After that the shape began arising at will in Day's mind. Kate again calls it triangular. Day says the last time it billowed up was his sophomore year in college and he thought he'd have to throw himself out the window. Kate comes half way out of her yoga position now and suggests that he maybe despised himself for awakening it by going back the second time to play the violin notes. Day says that another boy he hardly knew heard him whimpering and came and sat with him until it went away. Green cries out in his sleep asking Mr. Ho not to light it. Day says it's never come back, but he's never forgotten. He understands what people mean by hell. 'They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.' Kate suggests 'or the corner it came up out of' and Day answers that he understands why people killed themselves. Kate answers 'Time in the shadow of the wing too big to see, rising.'
notes:
The formless billowing shape is notable in its resemblance to Joelle's veil. What is the significance of Erdedy's interjection?
p 651-662
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Mary Esther Thode has been dispatched on her Vespa to tell Hal and Stice that they were to play an exhibition match. Perhaps this had something to do with Helen Steeply's presence. Hal noted that she held a certain 'thuggish allure' but nothing on the order of Orin's description. DeLint sat next to her until Thierry Poutrincourt stole his seat. This is Steeply's first junior tennis match. She writes in her notebook while deLint fills in his performance charts. Hal's imaginative 'anti-book' forehand shot gets the 5th game back to deuce and the gathering crowd applauds. DeLint's chart would later have this as one of Hal's few imaginative shots. Helen Steeply allegedly only came to see Hal about Orin, but Tavis for reasons unknown will not let her near Hal, even chaperoned. Stice is hitting his second serve as hard as he can. [p 654-655] There is an uncharacteristic pan backwards in the text allowing the reader to survey what's happening at several different places at this time--at Ennet House, Gately is sleeping; in the Armenian Foundation library, Poor Tony Krause is hunched forward enduring the passage of time; Pemulis and Struck are in the Pharmacy School library; Steeply's green sedan with a Nunhagen ad on the side is parked in the ETA guest spot; Tavis is in his office reaching under the sofa for the bathroom scale he keeps there; Avril's whereabouts are unknown; Orin is again embracing the 'Swiss' hand model at yet another hotel in Phoenix. DeLint tells Steeply that Stice is wise to crank up his second serve, even though he has been double faulting a lot, since that's really his only chance of beating Hal. Stice's next serve is blindingly fast and close enough that Hal has to call it, and he calls it fair, meaning that Stice wins the set. DeLint tells Steeply that this means that the next debatable call goes to Hal, and notes the fairness that ETA inculcates in the players. Steeply watches as Hal begins to serve, and thinks of him as a violinist, noting that he looks nothing like Orin, and she figures that no 'one game figured much in the Entertainment.' Steeply watches as Hal wins a characteristically strategic point, in which he sets up his opponents failure several hits later. Steeply asks when she might get to talk with Hal, and DeLint says that although it's not his decision, his guess is that she doesn't get to, but that Tavis is the one to ask. She says she was up there with him for 2 hours and couldn't get an answer out of him. She explains that it's for background for her piece on Orin. DeLint explains that they come to ETA to 'be the ones who look and see, and forget getting looked at.' Steeply answers that they'll be entertainers if they make the Show, so why not train them to get used to being seen. DeLint answers that it has to be all about the game, and never about being seen, otherwise when you feel your flower fade, you're likely to be suicidal. Hal mishits a serve allowing Stice to go up 6-5. Steeply asks what if it *was* up to DeLint and he answers that she'd be outside the gate, and he asks why Orin, anyway, why not John Wayne? Steeply muses 'carved out of what, though, this place?'
notes:
The strange pan backwards is undoubtedly a signal of some kind. Most probably it signals a turning point--that the threads are all coming together from here on out. Steeply asking what ETA is carved out of, while alluding to the players being carved from stone, seems to also dovetail with the whole political angle of the book. The construction of ETA has required flattening a mountain, much as annulation/ energy production has required the decimation of the lands within the Great Concavity.
p 663-665
YDAU [2009] November
no place/narration
synopsis:
This section is in the form of 3 letters [and a fourth in the footnote p 1047-1052] exchanged between Helen Steeply and Marlon Bain, the childhood friend of Orin's. She asks him whether he's willing to answer some questions about Orin, and he agrees. In the footnotes, his answers to most of the [unstated] questions are given. [1] He explains that he and Orin were best of friends starting at age 10, when they were the two best players on metro Boston. When Bain's parents were killed in a radio-traffic helicopter accident, he became a hanger-on at the Incandenza house and later at ETA where he was one of the first matriculants. They were best of friends until Bain started to beat Orin at tennis, which Orin took hard. They experimented with drugs, but Orin stopped because having reached puberty, he found that he needed all his faculties and guile. Bain stopped because of a couple of negative psychedelic experiences left him with disabilities which led to his departure from ETA at 17, and which make normal life a challenge to this day. Orin left tennis too, but he says that no one could have predicted Orin's defection to football, which he criticizes at length as 'homophobically repressed nacy-ism.' [3c] he says that he can't help much with Dr. Incandenza's suicide, except that he was imbibing much alcohol and working on a new genre of film-cartridges that Orin said was making him insane. [3e] The only thing he knows about Orin and Joelle's separation is that James began using her in his films and Orin says they became close, although he distrusts Orin as a source. He also knows from Orin and one of his early Subjects, that just before Himself's death, a 'word' appeared in the fogged window of Mrs. Inc's Volvo that 'cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions.' [5] He says that he wasn't warning that Orin was a pathological liar so much as sincere with a motive. He gives the example of Orin's classic pick-up line, 'tell me what sort of man you prefer and I'll affect the demeanor of that man' which he describes as a pose of poselessness. He says that Orin came to see the truth as constructed rather than reported. He says Orin studied for 18 years 'at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker' and feels that the way to escape her influence is through renunciation and hatred. As an example of Orin's lack of a gift for lying he tells a story of how Mrs Inc. charged he and Orin with watching Hal and Mario, and instead they got high and forgot all about the boys. When Mrs. Inc. confronted Orin saying she couldn't get through on the phone, he invents the lame lie that he made several calls. She then said that the phone wasn't busy, just unanswered and Orin replied simply 'I have no response to that.' Another example is when Orin took the Moms' Volvo for a drive without realizing she had tethered her beloved dog to the back, and when he confronted her with the 'nubbin' that remained and explained it had been run over repeatedly by a hit-and-run driver. [7] He answers by rhetorically asking if she would call it abuse if a parent were so depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into a psychotic depression. Would she call it abuse if the handyman father was so good at fixing things that he never engaged his son's help beyond asking him to hand tools, or fetch lemonade, so that the son never actually learns how to fix anything. He asks why it is that parents who are bent on producing children who feel self worth end up producing children who feel they are hideous and undeserving of the love their parents give them. Is it abuse if a mother produces a child who instead of feeling he is deserving of his mother's magnificent treatment, just thinks he lucked out and got a magnificent mother. He reveals that he's not speaking of his own mother, but of Mrs. Incandenza. He says although she's so 'multi-leveled and indictment-proof' that it's hard to criticize her and feel ok about it, that something just wasn't right. For instance after Orin had killed her dog and offered a lame excuse, she basically acted as if it never happened and even went out of her way to shield Orin from any implications of the experience, and her 'love-and-support-bombardment increased.' He asks if her actions were actually meant to safeguard Orin's self-esteem or her own. He says that when Orin used to do his impression of the Moms, he would put on an enormous warm smile and then move slowly closer until he was smothering you with it. Bain says she reminds him of a philanthropist who views recipients of his charity as a way of demonstrating his own virtue. He says he thinks she was abused as a child, although he has nothing to back this up.
notes:
In classic a DFW maneuver, this section about Orin [as pathological liar who strikes the pose of poselessness] is told by a dubious source. What is the word that cast the 'conjugal pall' and what is the relation between that and the word 'knife' that Hal remembers seeing on a fogged mirror in a bathroom [p 15-17].
p 666-673
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 3:25pm
place tunnels beneath ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
During Hal and Stice's match, most of the sub-14 males involved in the Eschaton escapade are in the tunnels below ETA doing a kind of work detail, as a punitive measure. They are clearing trash from the path that the workers will need to use as they haul out the Lung. The younger kids actually enjoy rooting through the tunnels, and it's considered one of the attractions of ETA over other schools. The tunnels are near the old optics and editing facilities and also the prorectors quarters, so the tunnels are often used to dispose of detritus, for example as a prorector moves out to begin a tour. LaMont Chu has a clipboard and is supposed to note the location of any objects too large to be picked up by the boys. With the exception of Kent Blott, all the boys in the tunnels belong to the Tunnel Club, whose main activity seems to be reading Robert's Rules [for Eschaton] and whose main raison d'etre has to do with exclusion, primarily of girls and but also younger boys. Blott has been included mainly because he claimed to have seen something that maybe was a rat, but looked more like a 'Concavitated feral hamster.' Plus they can make Blott drag the filled Glad bags back to the entrance. They've filled enough bags to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump room, which they note has a 'strange stale sweet burny smell.' Most of Chu's list of bulky objects is comprised of 'fridgelettes' abandoned by prorectors and trunks seemingly filled with magazines and pennies. Chu asks Blott to see whether he can lift a doorless old microwave oven. Feral hamsters are pretty high on the bogey list in these parts, along with skull-deprived wraiths and mile-high toddlers. Feral hamsters are rarely seen south of the Lucite walls that delimit the Great Concavity. Peterson and Gopnik complain the mostly unmarked cartridges found spilling out of a box are tearing the Glad bags. A confirmed feral hamster sighting could maybe distract the Headmaster's office from its punishment of Pemulis, Incandenza and Ashford, and also might go a ways toward explaining the recent rash of appearances of large incongruous objects throughout the ETA grounds. Even just a rat could supply the club with a raison d'etre at ths point. Instead they come upon an abandoned and unfortunately unemptied refrigerator, whose contents are emitting smells mistaken at a difference for farts. When they get close they find that it's an oversized fridge which they believe belonged to Pearson, who apparently left mayonnaise in the fridge, which is crawling with maggots. They hightail it out of there.
notes:
There are allusions to Himself throughout this section. Could that doorless microwave be the one used in his suicide. Note that they collect a garbage bag full of cartridges.
p 673-682
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
As the third set begins in Hal and Stice's match, deLint's place next to Helen Steeply is taken by the Quebecois prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, a tall, long-faced former Satellite pro. Steeply asks aboutr Troeltsch, who is on the top bleacher calling the match into his empty fist. Poutrincourt says she has been told to be unfriendly, but she thinks she will not comply. She says her family is also large, and she know it's difficult. Steeply had decided when going undercover to let all size comments pass as if undetected, and simply says it seemed like deLint certainly held himself aloof. Poutrincourt says that deLint does whatever it takes to please his superiors. Her right forearm is almost twice the size of her left and her blue warmup clashes with her [and Helen's] hat. She has blue circles under her eyes. She says that Helen is here to make publicity for Hal, to make him 'etoile' [star]. Hal meanwhile comes back on the court, acting as if he is unwatched. Helen explains that her profile is on Orin. When deLint returns, Steeply invites Poutrincourt to speak French. Poutrincourt gives a blase shrug and accepts, after which their conversation is in French, but translated to English for the reader. [It's revealed in the footnotes that Poutrincourt is using Quebecois idioms that she couldn't expect Steeply to know with his/her Parisian French. And also that Poutrincourt is on to the fact that Steeply is not a woman.] Poutrincourt says that adolescent tennis stars are common because, unlike other sports, tennis requires nothing that anyone cannot have by adolescence, but that adolescents have and advantage because they don't feel the anxiety and pressure that makes professional tennis so difficult for adults. And this is why young tennis stars burn out so quickly, when suddenly the object shifts from the game to winning. Meanwhile the game goes on, and Troeltsch announces the play-by-play-- 'rare tactical lapse for Incandenza...the Halster's been having some trouble controlling his volleys...' etc. DeLint tells him to keep it down. Poutrincourt says in English that Hal has the greater tennis brain, and deLint says he has a complete game, as Hal aces Stice to win a game. DeLint expounds saying that Pemulis has many strengths but not a complete game. He says that Possalthwaite has a better future because he's built a complete game around his lob. Poutrincourt disagrees in French. Hal is a sphinx as the wind blows a near-perfect shot out of bounds. Poutrincourt says that the ETA philosophy is more Canadian than American, that you must not just strive to be the best, but to transcend that goal, when you attain it. Steeply notices the younger boys emerging from the tunnels with their trash bags. Poutrincourt continues, saying that otherwise once they become 'etoiles' they must transcend that, or they are doomed. She mentions Eric Clipperton. DeLint says John Wayne is even better than Hal; he has a gestalt game. Steeply tries to steer the conversation towards Himself, asking if his was also a philosophy of doom. Poutrincourt says when the founder died, Schtitt was like two selves, one not there. DeLint says Wayne's only limitation is his lack of flexibility, which he overcomes by sheer strength. This works on the juniors, but in the Show, it will not be so easy. He says the main reason Wayne is better is the head. Hal remembers points after they pass, and tracks trends throughout the match, and Wayne does not. He says Hal has an 'emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting' which he says is more commonly as female thing.
notes:
Hal is breaking down, presumably because of withdrawal, but it's perhaps worth noting that physically his game seems unaffected. His breakdown seems to come in the emotional realm, which DeLint describes as Hal's big liability.
p 682-686
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge [Man o' War Grille on Prospect]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Matty Pemulis is sitting in the Man o' War Grille on Prospect eating soup on his 23rd birthday. He's a prostitute. A bag lady lifts her skirt and defecates on the sidewalk just outside the window. Matty is a big, rangy kid now balding, with what seems like a permanent smile of his face. Matty watches as people pass, and avoid the shit on the sidewalk. He recognizes Poor Tony Krause, who looks 'godawful' and doesn't seem to even notice the shit on the sidewalk. Matty's 'Da' had come over on a boat from Ireland in 1989 and worked at the Southie docks, and he had begun giving him 'a fook in t' boom' when Matty was 10, and his brother Micky was 5. Micky would seem to sleep through it all. His father would come in drunk get on the bed with Matty, shake him awake and caress him tenderly. As soon as Matty would shrink away, his father would drill him, asking if he thinks all his Da has on his mind is a fook. it was only later that he realized that it didn't matter whether he feigned sleep, or employed any other strategy, his Da would have fooked him anyway. It was also later that he realized he was 'lucky' that his father had used vaseline. His father died a gruesome death of acute pancreatitis and cirrhosis, choking on aspirated blood. Matty still toasts his father with his first shot, whenever he indulges.
p 686-689
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
After dinner Hal drops by Schtitt's office to find out why he had to play Stice publicly so close to the WhataBurger and to glean some input as to what had gone wrong. Instead he finds deLint and is subject to his analysis of the match. DeLint has a big chart with Stice and Wayne at the top and Hal's name omitted. DeLint says that Hal 'never quite occurred out there' which Hal finds chilling. He then skips the mandatory study period and sits alone in Viewing Room 6 watching cartridges of Himself's films. Anyone looking on would've said Hal was depressed. He watches American Century As Seen Through A Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed which he finds maddening because it's all monologue by an actor who's ubiquitous in Himself's work, but whose name he can't recall. He watches some others, taking out Medusa v. Odalisque halfway, when the audience starts being turned to stone. He declines to watch the cartridges with Himself being interviewed. He watches Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat twice in a row. The bureaucrat is an exemplary employee, but for his problem getting up on time. He is threatened with 'termination' [which is likened to ontological erasure] if he is late again. He sets every alarm clock he has, but that night the power goes out and his alarms don't go off. He drives to the train station parks illegally and dives into the train, crashing into a kid with a bow-tie and thick glasses. Hal whacks himself in the forehead trying to remember the kid's name. The bureaucrat in inclined toward the still open train doors, which seem to pull him back, but he keeps his eyes focussed on the kid and packages that have been knocked from the kid's hands. This is described as one of Himself's few 'internal-conflict moments.' The bureaucrat helps the kid reassemble his packages, and straightens his tie. As he leaves the kid turns to him and asks if he is Jesus, to which he answers 'don't I wish.' He steps back onto the platform and the kid waves goodbye as the train pulls away. This is Mario's favorite of Himself's films. Hal secretly likes it too, and likes to imagine himself as the bureaucrat on the drive home, on the way to 'ontological erasure.' Hal is planning to punish himself with a few more cartridges including Blood Sister: One Tough Nun which little does he know, germinated from Himself's brief tenure in Boston AA, in the mid 90s. Without Bob Hope, Hal spits way more than usual, and he feels 'zero in the way of kinesthetic sense'-- he couldn't feel the ball on his stick out there this afternoon.
notes:
The fact that Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat is Mario's favorite Himself film should definitely be noted. Perhaps just that this seems like Himself at his most unguarded and un-ironic. It's clear that Hal's photographic memory is failing him. It's ironic that Himself tried so hard to reach Hal and thought he had failed, and now here's Hal pouring over Himself's oeuvre.
p 689-691
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after his seizure, feeling 'right as rain.' The fact that he was destitute and without a valid Health Card, helped him convince the paramedics to let him go instead of admitting him to the hospital. Lucky for him the hospital is just blocks away from Antitoi Entertainment, which is maybe the one place he can get some 'pharmocological credit.' He ambles down the street past pedestrians veering clear of him, on account of the smell. Poor Tony had come into the Antitoi brothers favor, was by with a crew of 12 others, donning identical red leather coats and wigs and lingered in the lobby of a hotel where a Qubecer insurgent threw toxic waste in the face of the Canadian ONAN trade minister. When the perpetrator emerged all the identically dressed transvestites created confusion that allowed him to escape. As he passes the Man o' War Grille, Tony is debating whether to snatch the purses of the two girls walking ahead of him. How different to come to Antitoi with cash on hand. Too bad he never saw his old crewmate Matty, a sure source of compassion, looking up from his soup.
p 692 [This section begins the page without a line break, but is clearly a different setting]
YDAU [2009] Nov 13-14
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Geoffrey Day has noted how most of the male members of Ennet House have names for their penises, and thinks it's possibly a class thing since neither Ewell, Erdedy no he has named his. Lenz called his the Frightful Hog and brandished it often. Lenz described the Hog as an example of the Polish curse-- undistinguished in length but sobering in circumference. Lenz's dismissal had resulted in Ewell being transferred into his place in Day's room, and while Ewell is one of the few residents with whom an actual conversation is possible, Day finds himself missing Lenz after a couple of nights.
p 692-698
YDAU [2009] November
place Ennet House [+ ETA]
narrated in third person [nearly in authorial first person]
synopsis:
The section begins 'And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:' There is more than one kind of depression. One is a low grade depression usually called anhedonia. It's a 'spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important.' As Kate sees it, the world becomes a map of the world. Younger ETA students often think this is why Himself committed suicide, because anhedonia is often associated with middle-age crises in people who have achieved more than all they had hoped for. This in reality has more to do with the students than Himself. The author steps forward to say, 'it's more invigorating to want than to have. though this is maybe just the inverse of the same delusion.' While Hal has no idea why his father killed himself, he doubts it has anything to do with anhedonia. Hal himself hasn't had a single 'intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion' since he was little. One of his big troubles with the Moms is that she thinks she knows him inside and out, when in fact what she hears is her own self echoing around inside him. He feels the one thing he feels to the limit: he is lonely. It is notable that millennial arts treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip, possibly as the vestiges of Romantic glorification of 'Wetzschmerz' world weariness. For young people to be cool is the same as to be Unalone. From a young age through the arts we are shown masks of ennui and irony, at an age where 'the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears.' And then it becomes permanent-- the weary cynicism saves us from sentiment and naivete. This is something sophisticated viewers appreciate about Incandenza's The American Century As Seen Through A Brick- it's unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last sin of millennial America, and the myth that naivete and cynicism are mutually exclusive. 'Hal who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human' since being human is to be 'in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map.' Hal despises this thing he longs for, this 'hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.' A central image of The American Century As Seen Through A Brick is that of a piano string vibrating beautifully and a thumb reaching in and damping it. Later in the film the thumb is removed and the string begins to vibrate, but it grows louder and dysphoric, and soon the viewer longs for the 'natal thumb' to damp it again. Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. It isn't the 'true predator, the Great White Shark of Pain, what Kate Gompert knows simply as 'It.' 'It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.' It is not a feature of, but rather the essence of existence. It is a nausea of the soul. Kate describes it as indescribable except perhaps as a double bind where any of the alternatives of human agency are not just unpleasant but horrible. It is also lonely, since part of a clinically depressed person is incapable of empathy, or perceiving anything as independent of the universal pain. The term 'psychotic depression makes Kate feel especially lonely, especially being on a ward of such people, none of whom is really psychotic, it's just that their torture is undetectable by an outside party. The psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of hopelessness. It's more like someone who jumps from a burning building-- the terror of falling from a great height is still the same, but begins to appear to be the lesser of two terrors as the flames encroach. 'But and so' the idea of a 'suicide contract' in a halfway house, however well intentioned, only adds to the loneliness, since it is valid only up to the point when the psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary exert themselves. One psychotically depressed person that Kate came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital was a civil engineer in his 50s whose hobby was model trains. 20 years ago he slipped and hit his head and awoke in the hospital depressed beyond endurance. He had never attempted suicide, though he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was endlessly loyal and went to daily mass to pray for him. He still went to work, taking breaks only when his condition became unbearable and he would require hospitalization. They had tried every drug and even ECT on him to no avail. Kate knew he was possessed of a courage that was off all the charts. He was finally transferred to Long Island to undergo a radical new type of surgery where the entire limbic system is removed, thus removing all sentiment and feeling. His dream was to achieve anhedonia, a complete psychic numbing. For the past 2 years, Mr & Mrs Ernest Feaster had sent Kate Xmas cards with little watercolor locomotives, but Kate never knew whether or not he ever had the surgery.
notes:
This is the among the saddest and heaviest sections in the book. DFW's authorial emerges from the fiction here [which is chilling in retrospect] to connect the dots between the characters and the major themes of depression, irony and the 'hideous internal self' that Hal longs for. The piano note of the film sounds very much like the violin notes that Geoffrey Day described to Kate [p 648-651]. What could be sadder than the fact that Hal hasn't had a single 'intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion' since he was little?! Perhaps only that Hal isn't old enough to know that this is not the worst kind of depression.
p 698-700
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ruth van Cleve on her first outing from ETA and Kate Gompert are walking along Prospect in Cambridge a little after 10pm. Kate is finding Ruth excruciating to be around since she talks nonstop. Ruth is from Braintree on South Shore, is underweight and wears brass colored lipstick and spike heels. Kate hasn't slept in 4 nights. The narrative that begins to emerge is that Ruth has been remanded to Ennet House after her baby was found in an alley. The baby is now in a hospital in an incubator, while the baby's father is in jail awaiting sentencing for 'operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.' As the pair walks along, Latino males check Ruth out; even though she's underweight, she exudes sexuality. Unlike AA meetings, NA meetings are few and far between, and they have come all this way on the train and then walking and now have only 75 minutes to get back to Ennet House. Kate notes that Ruth's chatter is 'listener-interest-independent' as was Lenz's who has been 'invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere.' Kate is simply focussing on putting one foot in front of the other, and doesn't notice Poor Tony trailing behind them eyeing their purses, which little does he know contain little more than train-fare.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Troetsch is sick in his room, with the vaporizer going. His hair is slicked back to resemble a toupee and he's announcing along with a wrestling match on his TP.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is on tiptoes in the Subdorm B hallway using his racquet's handle to move one of the panels of the drop-ceiling.
notes:
Presumably this is where he keeps his stash, and is hiding the DMZ there.
p 700
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lyle is in the darkened weight room, legs crossed eyes rolled up white and lips silently moving.
notes:
Is Lyle channeling something otherworldly?
p 701
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place near ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Schtitt and Mario are racing down Commonwealth Ave in Schtitt's BMW, on their way to get ice cream.
p 701
YDAU [2009] Nov 11?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Avril has obtained the phone number and email address of a journalistic business in Tucson and is dialing the number.
p 701-711
YDAU [2009] Nov 11 [and later, Nov 14]
place ETA [and later Ennet House and environs]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is watching the opening scene of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun and just as the title flashes over a freeze-frame of the titular nun in mid-karate-kick, Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin come uninvited to join Hal in the viewing room. Bridget asks what's up his butt, and he he says he came in to be alone. She comments that it might have something to do with the fact that he nearly lost today, and he invites her to go to Rite Aid and buy an emetic. Bernadette Longley comes in with Jennie Bash who informs Hal that there's a huge lady with a notebook looking for him, and asks if he doesn't have a paper due tomorrow for Poutrincourt's class. To no one's surprise, Hal has already finished it. Bernadette says that she heard his best friend [Pemulis] did something really funny today. Hal notes that the girls have all slipped out of their sneakers, as they always seem to do. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun is one of Himself's few commercial successes, but Hal considers its metacinematic parody aloof and overly clever. Hal tries to imagine Himself editing the film, and can't summon any idea of what he was thinking. Arslanian, Blott and Possalthwaite come in and soon everyone except Hal is riveted. The film shows a biker chick who is beaten up, robbed and molested and then 'saved' by a nun, who had herself suffered through the same experience [and so on]. Eventually this nun feels the call to rescue her own troubled adolescent, and eventually finds a burn-scarred coke addict. There's a 'brutally drawn-out Getting-to-know-and-trust-you montage' as the girl becomes indoctrinated in the ways of a tough nun. Bridget Boone notes that the conversion is nothing more than the 'exchange of one will obliterating "habit" for another' while Hal, in the midst of THC withdrawal, is thinking about another Himself cartridge, Low Temperature Civics which is considered a lampoon of the corporate-politics genre, but Hal knows was actually real-- made during the 80s when Himself was 'existentially unmoored' in the midst of a career change, drinking Wild Turkey and watching Dynasty rapaciously , in a Canadian spa where he supposedly met Lyle. What no one in the viewing room knows is that Bridget's analysis is very close to the way newcomers often see AA, as the trading of one crutch for another. Some newcomers, the 'gun to their head' ones, have already been so broken by their addiction that they don't care about this, substitution, they'd 'give their left nut' to trade their addiction for some platitudes, and they're the ones who 'stick and hang.' The narrative uncharacteristically shifts mid-section to Joelle/Ennet House, 11/14. It remains to be seen whether Joelle [whose first JOI film was Low Temperature Civics] will be one of those who stick and hang, but she is IDing with Commitment speakers who have. She is at an NA splinter, Cocaine Anonymous meeting, that she chose partially so she could visit Don Gately in the trauma ward of the hospital, a couple floors above where the meeting takes place. She's late and sits in the back row, 'denial aisle' as the speaker begins. Joelle sees past his 'colored idioms' because she 'can identify.' He says he had a wife and child and another on the way, back in Mattapan's Perry Hill Projects, and he used cocaine only in really severe binges. At the end of his rope, he was emptying their bank account, and his wife had to take a part-time job. Before his final binge, his wife was to meet him at the bus stop to 'help' him deposit his paycheck, but he never made it to the bus. When he returns to the apartment the next day, there's another eviction notice on the door, and a peanut butter jar that had been scraped clean. At that sight , he contemplated jumping out the window, but instead walked straight into Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain, where he wept when the first night's dinner was peanut butter sandwiches. Joelle decides right there that she's going straight, even if Gately takes Demerol, goes to jail, or rejects her if she can't show him the face.
notes:
It's perhaps worth noting that Blood Sister: One Tough Nun with its obvious parallels to Joelle [the burn-scarred coke addict] came before her first appearance in Low Temperature Civics.
p 711-714
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Once the girl that Blood Sister had tried to save is found dead from an overdose, things take a 'splattery' turn. BS suspects foul play and reverts to her street ways, over the objection of the Vice-Mother Superior [her own savior]. She goes on a killing rampage and finally finds out that the girl had been killed by the Mother Superior [who had save the vice-MS]. In the final act, it turns out that the vice-MS had not been saved after all, and had turned to not only using but to dealing in large quantities, from the Outreach confessionals, where it turns out, she had been the girl's dealer. The MS killed her to keep her from revealing the whole seamy truth to the BS, and to save the vice-MS from exposure and excommunication. All this gets explicated during a fight scene where the two older nuns kick BS's ass. The vice MS has a spiritual epiphany just as the the MS is about to demap BS with a tomahawk, and cold-cocks the MS with a 'Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn't even be named.' The vice MS stares down BS imploring her to complete the 'circle of recidivist retribution' but instead the BS drops the tomahawk, and walks out under the carved sign with the Latin inscription for 'we are what we revile' and she is shown getting on her Harley and riding away, whether to lapse to old ways or not is unknown. Everyone stretches and changes position in the viewing room, and Hal suddenly remembers the name--Smothergill. The boys tell Hal that they've come to discuss something disturbing that they found on their disciplinary detail. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, and looks for the 'Low Temperature Civics' cartridge.
notes:
Were the the boys simply going to tell Hal about the disgusting refrigerator, or was there something else?
p 714-716
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The apparition [Poor Tony] recedes pursued by a shrieking Ruth van Cleve as Kate holds her hurt head. Her eye was swelling shut and her vision becoming violet, as a voice claims to have witnessed the whole thing. The witness is a bearded man in an army coat who smells bad. She tries not to think that concussion is another word for a bruised brain. Ruth had been rattling off her baby's father's aliases when the apparition had grabbed their purses. Ruth's strap had given way, but Kate's macrame strap held, and she was pulled down the street until hitting a light post.
p 716-719
YDAU [2009] Nov 14 22:12
place Little Lisbon, Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Randy Lenz has ingested enough cocaine to go well beyond the 'euphoric crest' into the 'interstellar cold.' He is following two Chinese women with enormous shopping bags. At first he thought that the women were following him, having been privy to the fact that the most 'fearsome surveillance' was often carried out by unlikely people walking in front of you carrying mirrors. He had, however, successfully shaken them twice, and now he was pretty sure about who was tailing whom. He had decided that getting thrown out of Ennet House was perhaps not a curse; he had given the 'Straight On Narrow' a try and now he could hide out here in the open, the last place 'They' would look for him. He's dressed in clothes stolen from sidewalk displays-- bright yellow snow pants, a sombrero and a new mustache snatched off of a mannequin. He has eschewed eating and sleeping, to maintain an eye out for surveillance. He has familiarized himself with the now dwindling population of feral dogs and cats. His stash of cocaine inside his hollowed-out copy of the 'Gifford Lectures' was dwindling faster than he'd allow himself to think about. His feet are numb, following the Chinese women, past a grey-faced woman squatting behind a dumpster, and a guy in a 'rat-colored suit' shooting suction cup arrows from a toy bow, with whom he nearly collides. Lenz 'knows' that 'Orientoid types' carry all their earthly possessions around with them, and he intended to pull the 'snatch-and-sprint' on these. He began to feel his feet, and his nose dried up a bit from the adrenaline. These women far from surveilling him, had no idea what was about to take place.
p 719
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Antitoi Entertainment
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The AFR has two choices, both of which they're prepared to pursue. The less desirable route was to surveil the surviving relatives of the Entertainment's 'auteur' which would hopefully lead them to the auteur's own copy of the cartridge. The more desirable route would be to locate a copy of the cartridge on their own, which is why they are still here in the Antitoi Brothers' shop searching.
p 719-721
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Poor Tony, wearing high heels, is being chased by Ruth van Cleve [whom Tony refers to as 'the Creature'], also in heels. He turns her strategy of yelling to onlookers to 'stop the bitch,' etc against her by yelling for help himself. His strategy is to make to the Antitoi Brothers' back door and take refuge inside. Running is difficult for Poor Tony who hasn't eaten for days, he gains a few steps on her when he cuts into the alley, but she stays on his tail.
p 721-723
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The AFR traced the cartridge to Antitoi Brothers, by way of interviewing the burgular whom they abducted pawning duPlessis' cafe au lait machine. It then took them several days to find it. Fortier, the USA-cell leader had brought in a viewer and volunteer viewers began going through the cartridges. They came across the blank 'street-display' cartridges made by the rival FLQ. They had no interest in these, nor was any rivalry initiated. They simply wanted to find the Entertainment, and find out whether the duPlessis copy was read-only. Fortier was required to be absent for a period in the middle of the search, so that he could assist in the Southwest ops. Marathe had informed him that Orin was likely to have or know of a copy, and he was under constant surveillance by the American agent with prostheses [Steeply].
notes:
It's implied here that the cartridge came to Antitoi Brothers by way of Gately's burglary [and accidental murder] of DuPlessis.
p 723
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Fortier owned prosthetic legs, which were capable of responding to nerve impulses in his stumps. But he rarely wore them in the USA, and never for public transportation. He preferred the condescension, and the institutional sensitivity to his rights, which 'honed the edge of his senses of purpose.'
p 723-724
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Beginning a few days before Gately was injured, Joelle had begun to obsess over her teeth, and the effects of base-cocaine on them. As she sleeps across from Kate Gompert's empty bunk, she dreams of Gately as a dentist, deftly ministering to her teeth. He is completely intent on her teeth and makes no small talk. In the small mirror attached to his forehead, she can see her own face ravaged by years of cocaine abuse. She can see her teeth rows of canines stained with dried blood extending way back inside her mouth as it down a pitch-black pipe. The image blots out the dentist's good face. As he probes her, he assures her that these can be saved.
p 724-728
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By the time Fortier returns to the shop, they have located the cartridge which was labelled with a smily face as were the blank FLQ cartridges. They had suffered only two lost to viewing the Entertainment, the volunteer Desjardins, whose turn it was, and Joubet who had wheeled into the storage closet, to check on him. They left them in there watching the the cartridge repeatedly. Marathe delivered the bad news to Fortier that the cartridge was read-only. Fortier found this nevertheless encouraging-- they knew that the cartridge existed and could bring about their plans for 'extending the ONAN's self-destructing logic to its final conclusion.' All they had to do now was locate the auteur's master copy. Fortier orders the suspension of surveillance on the FLQ house on Brainerd, and all available AFR personnel to be brought to the shop. Their work will now focus on the auteur's colleagues and family. An employee at ETA has been recruited along with the instructor and student already in their ranks. In the desert Luria P__ was winning [Orin's] confidences with alacrity. They had determined that the 'probable performer' had worked at the MIT radio station. They had made inquiries into the Quebecois tennis team that was about to play against ETA. They had acquired and interrogated the engineer from the radio station, and were thus sending Marathe, Ossowiecke and Fortier himself [those with good English skills] to infiltrate rehab facilities in the area, in search of the probable performer. They had used the engineer as a test subject for the samizdat's 'motivational range.' After allowing him to watch it twice, they handed him an orthopedic saw and informed him that before each subsequent viewing he would be required to cut off one of his fingers. AFR members are scouting the area for suitable additional subjects, and Fortier is traveling by bus [alone with a driver] after having tried to gain entrance to Phoenix House, where he determined there was no person with a veil. As he travels through Cambridge, he daydreams of President Gentle signing the declaration of war.
notes:
This section explains fairly explicitly how many of the plot lines intertwine. Presumably John Wayne and Thierry Poutrincourt are the student and instructor at ETA who are in the AFR ranks, but who is the employee?
p 728-729
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Cambridge
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Lenz has made off with the Chinese women's bags, and is running down a back alley looking for a place to check out his score. He hears the not so distant crashing sound of the dumpster that Poor Tony used to trip up Ruth van Cleve. He comes upon 4 boys, all under 12, smoking crack, and making fun of Lenz. He's looking for somewhere to separate out the valuables in the bags. He comes across a sexless figure lying against a dumpster, its hand moving furiously in its groin, softly chanting 'pretty, pretty, pretty.' He thinks what bunch of losers.
p 729-735
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section begins with a dialog between two former cult members, one of whose cults burned money and rode around in a Rolls Royce that he never started but had the cult members push. Marathe is overhearing this conversation in Ennet House, which the last 'demi-maison' on his schedule for the day. He awaits an interview to fill a vacancy at the house. Several others also await interviews, and several residents approach him, advising him to pet the dog, which he assumes is an idiomatic expression that he's unfamiliar with. He repeats his recited lines 'good night, I am addicted and deformed...' No one seems to take notice of his veil. A girl with a glass eye is having a conversation with Day, about whether cars are portable from various perspectives. It's easy for Marathe to ignore the fact that one addict is staring at him. He is prepared to die for his cause, hence he can choose among emotions. His veil allows to stare back, and he notes that the man's pallor reminds him of the insects he had found beneath a log as a 4-limbed child, before 'Le Culte du Prochain Train' [here there's a lengthy footnote #304, which was referred to on p 108, and was summarized previously]. The addicted man picks up his ashtray and comes closer to Marathe, and asks if he's real. He says that he can tell Marathe is real, but to be careful because the others are not real; they are metal with a thin covering of skin. Marathe answers that he is Swiss. The man smells of 3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid, and Marathe times his inhales to coincide with the man's. The man says that if you get close you can hear them whir. He gets very close to Marathe and Marathe finally inhales. The man announces that he cannot hear a whir, which confirms his belief that Marathe is real. Marathe says that Swiss people are a quiet and reserved people. The man says that the real people are all in one room and everything is projected for them to see. The office door opens and an attractive blonde woman with a limp is escorted by the authority figure who calls for the 'physically challenged foreign person with the unpronounceable name. The man repeats his plea for Marathe to get up close, and tells him to pet the dogs as he enters the office.
p 736-747
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle used to like to get high and clean. Now she's enjoying it without being high. After her dentist nightmare, she was awakened by Nell's scream from downstairs and she began cleaning the room, while Charlotte Treat sleeps with her face-mask and earplugs in place. Joelle hates earplugs because they make your pulse audible. The cleaning thing had started with Orin; when they had relationships troubles, would clean. The place they lived had been provided nearly gratis by Himself. Both of Orin's nicknames for his father, Himself and the Mad Stork, gave Joelle the creeps. Orin had introduced Joelle to Himself's films, The Work, which was very obscure until the time when Joelle became his subject. By then she was closer to Himself than Orin had ever been, resulting in a lot of cleaning of the brownstone. She hadn't thought about the Incandenzas for years before she met Gately. They were the second saddest family she'd ever seen. Orin felt that his father disliked him to the extent that he was even aware of him. He felt his issues with his father were exceptional, but Joelle considered them banal. Joelle had similar issues with her mother, who didn't seem to like her much, once Joelle's father made it clear he'd rather take Pokie to the movies alone. Orin felt his mother was the family's pulse and center, offering enough maternal concern to almost make up for the absent father. Orin's mother sometimes referred to Himself's blank expression as Le Masque. Orin's parents were both extremely tall, and Orin had found it odd that none of the sons were tall. One of the brothers was a hopeless retard and about the size of a fire hydrant. Joelle had at first thought that The Moms' maternal love had damaged Orin by contrasting with Himself's self-absorption, and making him too dependent on her. Especially when the younger special-needs brother came along. Orin said that he'd grown up dividing the world into those that are trustworthy and those that are closed and hidden, and then started to feel like one of the hidden types as a tennis player. Joelle had thought it was all so easy to figure out-- the adoration Orin had received as a punter vs. the staid tennis applause. She had loved him and felt for him, the poor little rich prodigy. But this was before she came to know Himself and The Work. She had learned never to trust a man on the subject of his parents. Orin had said Joelle was third in line for most 'neatnikest' person after the Moms and an OCD player he'd known. It hadn't occurred to her at the time that his attraction to her might have had anything pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that he was drawn to her only for what she looked like, her father having drilled into her head that 'the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies.' Orin was nothing like her own personal Daddy, who all but followed her around the house, and when he left the room it seemed like a relief. Orin's absence seem to empty the place out, and she felt not lonely, but alone and early on she 'was erecting fortifications.' Orin had introduced her to Himself because he thought because of her looks, Himself would want to use her in his films. She objected on several grounds-- because she wanted to be a filmmaker and disdained acting, and also because it was patently obvious that Orin was simply using her as a way to try to get to his father, Plus she felt uneasy about any connection with the man who'd hurt Orin so. She might have known from The Work, which she thought was amateurish, or at least the work of a brilliant technician with no ability at communication, or dramatic 'towardness.' His work seemed cold and ironic, and contemptuous of the audience. But there had been flashes of something else, even before he'd made the leap to anticonfluential but ironic melodrama after he'd met her. The flashes were fleeting and she'd noticed them only when alone watching with the lights up bright. She discovered things when studying 'The Medusa v. the Odalisque' for a storyboarding class, that there three split-second glimpses of facial pain, as if 'what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive.' She questioned how it could be accidental, when not a single frame in the film seem unplanned. She even became convinced that he had upped the film speed to keep anyone from being able to study them as she was attempting. Before Orin [in a footnote it's revealed that there is some disagreement about who approached whom], she had only been approached by one other boy, a Kentucky lineman who had only been able to get up enough nerve to talk to her by getting drunk, and who vomited while approaching her. She realized that day that it wasn't simply her father somehow discouraging would-be suitors. It had made her feel 'queer and lonely' until Orin, who made it clear that he had 'balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.' Joelle's mind changed about the 4 minute shot of Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Theresa' in the otherwise narrative film about an alcoholic sandwich bag salesman. She began to see that the absence of the otherwise pervasive face of the salesman, reflected an escaping of ones own POV, a transcendence of self, which is just what the statue itself does. She found this to be almost a 'moral thesis' in an otherwise campy film. There was a message that the 'self forgetting of alcohol' is inferior to art/religion. Eventually the alcoholic salesman's head swells until its dimensions exceed the frame. She began to to see an inkling in The Work that the 'punter's hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.' Orin set up a meeting at Legal Seafood, and Jim didn't have too much trouble resisting using her. He later told her that she seemed too conventionally pretty for his work at the time which was about breaking those conventions. Orin was so tense in the presence of Himself that he talked the whole time. Jim later told her that he wasn't able to speak to either of his undamaged sons without their mother's mediation. Orin wouldn't shut up and Hal was completely shut down. Jim referred to the Work's films as 'entertainments' sometimes ironically. On the way home in the cab that Jim had hailed for them, Orin lamented that he could not speak with Himself without his mother's mediation. He said that he had no idea whether Himself was proud, threatened or judgmental about the punting. At her first meeting with the whole family at turkey-lessThanksgiving at the Headmaster's House, Avril had indeed done everything she could to mediate-- trying to put everyone at ease, and to make Joelle feel welcome. She was the tallest woman Joelle had met. It took Joelle years to pin down the reason the Moms gave her the howling fantods. At the dinner Avril drank champagne without ever seeming to lower the level of her glass, Jim drank freely from a tumbler. Hal had two buddies for dinner. Avril directed alternating comments at each of her sons in a cycle of inclusion. Joelle was convinced that Avril wished her harm. Joelle had decided that Jim looked like an 'ecologically poisoned crane' she later told him. At some point Hal announced that the candela was the basic unit luminous intensity and then defined it, to no one in particular. Joelle intrigued Jim with a discussion of Bazin, a film theorist Himself detested. Avril asked Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did his 'billions and billions' Carl Sagan impersonation. Hal and Avril discussed whether circa could describe an interval or just a single year. Joelle had to resist the urge to slap Hal, whom she found annoying. The subjects of tennis, punting and baton twirling never came up. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Avril encouraged Joelle to call home to her family in rural Kentucky, and encouraged Jim to include her in one of his films. Mario reminded Joelle of one of the creatures from a Spielberg movie. She noticed that everyone at the table seemed to be constantly smiling. Her own face muscles ached. Orin had been up half the night vomiting with anxiety. At some point Himself got up to refreshen his drink and never returned. Before desert the Moms asked everyone to hold hands, and made a point of including Joelle. After the dinner Joelle felt she detect nothing fake in the Moms' good will, and yet she was certain that the woman could have cut out and eaten her pancreas. On the way home Orin commented on how you could count on the Moms to facilitate Himself using Joelle in a film. That night [the last BS Thanksgiving--2001] was the first time Joelle has used cocaine to intentionally keep from sleeping. She cleaned behind the refrigerator as Orin cried out in his sleep from a nightmare she felt should have been hers.
notes:
Here's the brief history of Joelle and the Incandenzas told in a cocaine-fueled free-association style. Presumably Joelle considers her own family to be the one family that's sadder than the Incandenzas.
p 747-751
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
Marathe rarely misjudged people, but the one he had thought an addict turned out to be the person of authority. She is speaking into the phone to someone named Mars, when he enters. The dogs are lying on the floor, one them licking his genitals. He gives her the rehearsed lines about being a Swiss addict who is deformed, and produces some forged documents of his legal status, which list him as Henri. Marathe memorizes every detail of the room. He tells her he was at Chit Chat Farms Rehab in Wernersberg, PA. As she fumbled in a cabinet he noticed some TP cartridges. She says that when she arrived at Ennet House she too was disabled, and unable to get on her knees. He replies that he will attempt to pray at a moments notice. He notices what he thinks are two unmarked cartridges among the others. She mentions UHID and says that they have a member in residency right now, and perhaps she'll help him to adjust. Marathe then began recording every moment since entering the house, and debating whether he would report first to Fortier or to Steeply. He debates whether to ask to meet the veiled person right away. She asks if his deformity is related to his drug use, and he gives his rehearsed answers of how he lost his legs injecting drugs, when he fell on his face and his legs remained tangled in the chair and became gangrenous, while his nose and mouth were squished. He debates whether to mention the unmarked cartridges to Steeply and the veiled girl to Fortier. But Steeply would want confirmation that the cartridges were not simply more of the FLQ fakes. He decides that killing the authority figure would be futile at this point. She tells him that his honesty is encouraging, and asks him how far he's willing to go.
notes:
Marathe is now set up to nab Joelle, and possibly find the cartridge, but he waffles on whether to report to Fortier or to betray his organization and report to Steeply.
p 751-752
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
The Thanksgiving dinner had made Joelle think that the whole family was 'lousy with secrets.' Orin had said they were all 'exactly as crazy as they seem' which struck Joelle as a pretense. But she knows that 'we're all a lot more intuitive about our lovers' families than our own.' As she cleans, she worries that Kate Gompert, who makes her nervous in general, will walk in at any moment.
p 752-755
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
Marathe finds the situation tricky when he is offered the sofa-bed in the rear office to sleep on this very evening. He debates whether to accept and observe the veiled girl first-hand. Or he could wheel out of their asap and alert the AFR that the cartridge might very well be here, and they could return later for the cartridges and the girl. Or he could call Steeply, and give him the information-- throw in once and for all, and finally get medical care for his wife. Or he could kill the authority figure right now. He feels saddened by the thought and wonders if he's slipping, recalling secretly vomiting in the alley outside Antitoi Brothers, after impaling the brother with the broomstick. He fantasizes about the outcome were he to find the cartridge and hand it over to Steeply, being protected in the US, where his first-hand knowledge of insurgency would be rewarded handsomely. Johnette enters the office, and the authority figure asks her to preview some donated cartridges from ETA [which Marathe mistakes for etier], because the natives are restless for some new entertainment.
notes:
The cartridges presumably came from beneath ETA by way of the cleaning crew and then Clenette.
p 755-769
YDAU [2009] Nov 11, 2100h
place ETA
narrated in third person [Mario]
synopsis:
Mario is wandering around with his Bolex camera strapped to his head getting footage for his documentary. He wanders from the Center court where a lingering match is being played into Scthitt's room, which is built around his massive stereo system on which he listens to Wagner while asleep, pipe dangling from his mouth. Then into the dormitory halls he goes where Felicity Zweig admonishes him for filming her wrapped in a bath towel. He runs into LaMont Chu, whom he interviews on film. Chu says that he was filling in Lyle on the Eschaton debacle and asks Mario whether he has heard any news from Hal about whom will be punished. Mario proves difficult to get a straight answer from, being more interested in the filmic aspect of the situation. He then goes downstairs [with difficulty] and into the Moms' office. She is on the phone, but greets him enthusiastically, both arms in the air forming a V. She asks whether she's a subject or if he's just passing through to say hello. She tells him she remembers Himself making the Bolex camera helmet, and she says it's the last thing he really enjoyed himself. He notes that the cowlick in her pure white hair is the only sign of her exhaustion. He tells her what he's just filmed, and she calls it 'peripatetic footage' refusing to talk down to Mario. She explains she's here working because she'll be very busy tomorrow. She puts out her Benson & Hedges, because she feels like her smoking makes Mario worry about her. She invites him to dinner, and says that Tavis is still in a conference. When he asks if it concerns the Eschaton incident, she says that he's been in there with the reporter and Thierry since afternoon. She says he can answer the reporter's questions about Orin, if he'd like. She asks if he knows where Hal is, and he answers that he hasn't seen him since the afternoon when he said he had a 'tooth thing' and had asked about the burn on Mario's pelvis. He says that his pelvis is fine and that Hal wishes that Mario would come back and sleep there. Mario asks if CT was mad. She skirts the question saying that she'll wait for Hal to come to her about Eschaton, teeth and urine. He says he has something to ask her, and she says she's 'there for him anytime day or night.' He asks how you can tell if someone is sad. She corrects him, 'whether someone is sad,' and says that he isn't exactly insensitive. He says he wants to confirm his suspicion that someone is sad. Mario notices that along with foot prints, the shag carpet has what look like knuckle prints. Avril goes through all the usual outward expressions of sadness, but Mario isn't satisfied. She asks if he might be talking about Hal. Today's lunch had been the same as yesterday's because the cook Mrs. Clark had taken the day off after discovering two brooms arranged in an X on the wall. Avril suggests that Mario may be picking up on a dissociation, that the person might not be himself. The person maybe deeply afraid of his own emotions, and have a fragile sense of self. She says that Delores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, 'as if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.' She says this interpretation is 'existential' which means 'vague and slightly flaky.' She tells of her grandfather who invested a windfall from one year's large potato harvest in Delaware Punch instead of Coca Cola, two blight years later, after Delaware Punch had folded he was forced to sell his farm. Her father who could only tell the story when he was drunk, had said that his father could only feel emotion when about 4 times a year when he was drunk, and when he would throw his son through the living room window. Her own father never threw anyone through any windows, he simply drank until he fell out of his chair. If he had not died when Avril was a girl, she most likely would have been deprived her university education, since he believed education was a waste for girls. She had been emptying her ashtray into the wastebasket in which were several long crinkly strips of red paper. Mario likes to look at his very beautiful mother and notes the facial similarities that both Hal and Orin share with her. Avril continues her answer saying that some people are afraid to experience genuine emotions, and are frozen inside. She says Delores calls it suppression and believes it derives from childhood trauma, but Avril suspects otherwise. She says that she'll write these terms down for him, but he points out that she's forgetting that she needs to speak more simply to him. She says these people might seem blank, distant or 'spacey.' An old pair of football pants and a helmet on top of the cabinet are her one memento to Orin, who refuses talk to them. She drinks her coffee from a mug that's inscribed 'To a woman outstanding in her field' and never gets lipstick on the rim. She has a blue ONANTA blazer neatly hung on the coatrack. Mario was incontinent until his early teens, but Himself and Hal had to change him because Avril was unable to deal with diapers. Mario asks what if someone is even more himself after something sad, instead of being blank. She asks how someone can be too much himself, and asks if he's thinking of Uncle Charles, or even of himself.
notes:
It's notable that the Moms describes having a fragile sense of self in terms of not being able to truly feel for fear of obliteration. This dovetails with one of the central metaphors in the book: 'eliminating one's map' as a metaphor for death and with the political significance of the metaphor-- the map of the Great Concavity was eliminated as a result of the production of inexpensive energy by Annulation. The ONANTA blazer hanging in the Moms's office suggests that urologist that mysteriously gave Hal and Pemulis a deferral on their drug test was in fact a fake, hired by the Moms to get Hal off the hook.
p 769-774
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Mario and Hal]
synopsis:
Hal is asking Mario if he was asleep, and tells of his dream wherein he's losing his teeth. His teeth are splintering and fragmenting when he eats or speaks. Mario says that people have been asking about Hal and about the urine doctor. Hal says his dream then changed to him sitting naked in a flame retardant chair where the mail carrier keeps coming in with bills for someone else's teeth. Mario says that he promised to tell LaMont Chu whatever he found out from Hal. Hal asks Mario if he remembers the Moms' dog S. Johnson, and says that he's been thinking about Orin lying about the dog's death. Mario remembers the Moms posing as a blind person in order to be able to bring the dog into a library. He remembers when she refused to put him in a cage to bring on the airplane, and instead left him tied to the Volvo with the phone near him, so she could call him, claiming that he recognized the sound of her ring. He reminds Hal of how Orin once answered the phone with a bark and then hung up, and made them promise not to tell. Hal says he's been remembering that Orin lied with a pathological intensity when they were young. Hal says that when the urologist had them fill the urine cups right there in front of him, that he didn't actually take it; they were allowed to hang onto it. He says that Pemulis got the guy to agree to give them 30 days. Mario says that he loves Hal, and that Hal's an excellent brother in every way. Hal says it's like talking to the Moms with Mario, except that he can tell Mario means it. Hal says he wonders how someone as optimistic as Mario can tell if he's being lied to, or whether it even occurs to him. Hal talks about different ways people lie-- one type becomes intense and tries to dominate the person they're lying to, another becomes fluttery and insubstantial, and others bury the lie in a lot of digressions and asides. Mario says that Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he thought he wasn't. Hal says some are kamikaze liars that tell you a big lie, and then retract it and then offer the lie they wanted you to buy. He says that Pemulis was always the type that over-elaborates the lie, until now; he's become the terse liar, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on. He says that Pemulis could have sold the urologist land. Mario says that Psychosis used to read a brochure on the air that said 'the importance of a mask is to increase your circulation.' Hal says that at 17 he no longer thinks of monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants, but rather as people who can lie and there's simply no way to tell. Mario asks how you know they're monsters, then. Hal answers that that's the monster right there.
notes:
Here's Mario as the maddeningly un-ironic side of DFW dialoguing with the fearful and increasingly jaded Hal. Perhaps Mario recognizes some truth in Orin's defection, that Orin had intended to conceal in lies, namely that her unending love is anything but real.
p 774-782
YDAU [2009] Nov 14
place Ryle's Inman Square Jazz Club, Cambridge
no narration [dialog between Marathe and Kate Gompert]
synopsis:
Kate and Marathe are sitting in a bar, and Kate can't believe that she's drinking, since she's never had more than a beer, and had come to Ennet House for drugs. She asks him what it's like to be in 'that thing' [the wheelchair] and he answers it's best to prefer it. She says that Marathe has saved her from a 'reptilian character' who had offered to buy her a drink. She says that before she was mugged she was soberly deciding how to kill herself so it seems a bit silly to worry about drinking. Marathe says that she has a resemblance to his dying wife. He says that he spends his day searching for someone whom his friends will kill, and he has come here to telephone to betray them, and is feeling like it's time for many drinks. Since they are both drunk, he says he'll tell her a story. He tells of how his legs were lost to a train, and that she'd have no idea of the pain. She says it's he that has no idea. Kate simultaneously tells him the story of how his father abandoned his family by moving to Portland with his therapist. Marathe says that his 'Swiss' nation was in a dark period of oppression from neighboring countries, and many of his friends fought the injustice, but he thought it was all pointless. She says he was depressed. He continues that he would drink and roll around alone thinking of death. She says she identifies, and then realizes the AA-speak. He says he was 'chained in a cage of the self' and she draws the comparison to her 'billlowing shaped black sailing wing.' He tells how one day he had drunkenly rolled himself to the crest of a hill, and below had seen a small hunched woman in a metal hat with a truck headed straight toward her. Without thinking he had released his brake and went careening down the hill and swept her out of the way. Kate says he pulled himself out of clinical depression by saving someone's life. He says she is not seeing that the woman saved his life, because he was allowed to choose something as more important than thinking about his life. Kate projects that he saw her without her metal hat and fell madly in love. He reveals that she had no skull, and no ability to form words. He says that the unclamping of the brakes was the love. As for the woman, he carries her to the hospital, where he learns of all her other problems. Kate is waiting impatiently for the falling-in-love part of the story, but realizing this won't be coming up. He says that after this he could join the fight for his despoiled nation because he saw the point, not in winning, but in merely choosing to fight. Kate is disappointed; she asks if he's saying 'this' is love. She says he's not half the guy she had thought. He says his choice was love- he had needed the woman to choose over his own cage. She scoffs saying he is chained to her. He says their wedding night was the happiest day for him since the train. he reveals that now she is in a coma, and it for her that he betrays his friends. Kate has turned against him at this point, and she answers that he is 'disturbed' and that he's mistaking low self-esteem and settling for less as love, assuming that he's not lying to get her 'in the hay.' He still tries to make her see it his way, that the choice he made chains him, but the other chains were of not choosing. She suggests that he has a twin that has come in and taken over the conversation. He says she's just drunk. He says that the love that people in this country seek is the idea of pleasure and good feelings, that all choice leads there- the pleasure of not choosing. She insults him. He asks what if he could lead her a few blocks away and show her something which promised she would never again feel sorrow or the pain of the chains. She mistakes this for a come-on and says that she's a lousy lay. She's only been sexual twice and both times it was awful. He says she has misunderstood, and asks that if she is saying no because she doesn't believe his claim.
notes:
Kate and Marathe talk past each other as they each tell the story of their own 'cages' all the while thinking that they see the signs of the other's weakness-- Kate sees Marathe as an addict, and Marathe sees Kate as simply seeking the pleasure of not choosing.
p 782-785
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Mario and Hal]
synopsis:
Mario says that he's sorry Hal seems sad. Hal confesses that he secretly smokes Bob Hope in the tunnels. He says that he's not the one CT and Moms want gone anyway. That he was just there to make it look objective for them to test Pemulis's urine. Pemulis said he had vague memories of poppy seed bagel, and being exposed downwind from substances, and convinced the guy that to give them 30 days. Hal says that the ingenious part of the lie was that the 30 days was actually to protect Hal. Pemulis says Hal needs no more than 30 days of cranberry juice, and vinegar in water. Hal says that CT would have no choice but to boot him after having gotten ONANTA involved. He thinks of the stain on ETA, on Himself, and he shudders at how it would 'kill the Moms' not so much the drug use but the secrecy. He contemplates 30 days of total withdrawal-- the WhataBurger and then SATs in December. Mario says everyone knows he'll get a perfect score. Hal says that of course Mario must be hurt that Hal hadn't told him. Mario says he's not hurt, and that Hal always tells him the truth when it's right to tell. Hal says it's normal to get hurt and mad at people. He says that after only 40 hours, he can't sleep without horror-show dreams. He says Pemulis is fully alert and functional [exemplified by a lengthy footnote, discussed below], and is going to the library reading up on whether the DMZ he got for the WhataBurger will be detectable. Hal says it's different with him, that he has a hole, which after a month will be a 'way more than Hal-sized hole.' He worries that it'll come out, clean urine or no, and the Moms will be devastated. He asks Mario what he should do. Mario says he thinks Hal just did it.
notes:
Ironically Hal thinks that Pemulis is the one who saved him from getting kicked out of ETA and destroying his mother, while all the while she has set the whole thing up so that Hal will get straight, and she can probably kick Pemulis out. Another example of what Mario recognized [p 769-774] as the truth about the Moms concealed by a lie.
p 1063-1066
YDAU [2009] Nov 12
place ETA
no narration [dialog between Pemulis and Hal]
synopsis:
Pemulis is coaching Hal on trigonometry and calculus for the SAT, and Hal tells him about a DMZ-dream which featured the convict who had lost his mind after being injected with DMZ and started singing Ethel Merman songs [p 211-219]. Hal was the convict and he wasn't actually singing, he was crying out for help and everyone treated him like he was singing Ethel Merman songs. Pemulis says that Struck tracked down an article that says that DMZ won't show up in the urine test. He says that the stuff's original purpose was to induce 'transcendent experiences' in chronic alcoholics at Verdun Hospital in Montreal in the 60s. Hal notes that everything is relating to Quebec nowadays and Pemulis teases him for being paranoid. Pemulis says he thinks a DMZ interlude before Tucson is just what Hal needs to keep from going back to smoking Bob Hope daily after the test. He says he doesn't want to see Hal wind up with 'fat titties slumped in a chair' watching the TP. Hal says what if he just totally quit Bob Hope altogether. Pemulis says he's naive, and that a little DMZ would make it easier. Hal says but what if he truly needs it, and Pemulis asks if Hal knows what happens if you need it and you give it up-- you die inside. He says if you need the Bob, you can only quit the Bob and move onward to something else. Hal is reminded of a filmstrip. Pemulis says Hal probably could quit it, for a while, but he'd wind up dead inside, or outside. Hal assumes he's referring to Himself, and points out that the bottle of Wild Turkey was right there beside the microwave. Pemulis says he's not talking about Himself, but about guys he's known, some did a Clipperton and some joined NA and got clean, and got up every day and went to work like machines. But Hal is too 'buy the God-squad shit.' Pemulis says he's Hal's friend, and if he doesn't want to do the DMZ, fine. He says to take some time and figure out what part of himself has come to 'need' it. Hal asks if he means the part that's incomplete-- the addict. Pemulis says that's just a word.
notes:
Pemulis's dream sounds an awful lot like one of Himself's films, or like Hal's own actual situation. Was Himself's tragic end a result of the alcoholism? Is Hal's trouble the result of his need for Bob Hope? Hardly.
p 785-787
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Johnette F.]
synopsis:
Johnette F. has taken over Gately's Dream Duty shift, and at 8:30am someone knocks on the House's front door. She assumes it's the police inquiring further about the Lenz episode. She answers the door to an 'upscale kid' [who must be Hal] asking to speak privately to someone in authority. She notes his weirdly tanned skin and immaculate clothes, and she can tell he's not here to visit any of the residents. His talking had a salivating quality that she recognized as substance withdrawal. He asks long-windedly if he can have or borrow a list of NA meetings, because he was considering 'in a largely speculative way' maybe dropping in on one, but wasn't sure 'whom else to call.' She notes that he's the kind of kid that knows how to use 'whom' but can't look up NA in the phone book. Much later, 'in subsequent events' light' she would clearly recall him saying 'whom' with the saliva almost running over his lip.
notes:
Another of DFW's well-concealed hints about how the story lines will converge is dropped here: 'in subsequent events' light' clearly points out that Hal will be involved in something that Johnette, as Ennet House manager will know about.
p 787--this section is entirely a footnote -- p 1066-1072
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis comes into the locker room at 1420h to dress for the PM match against Ken Freer, who is standing in front of the mirror, ministering to his skin. Todd Possalthwaite is nearly nude and weeping. Pemulis, who is Todd's Big Buddy, gives a fake punch and asks what's wrong. Todd says 'nothing is true' and Pemulis answers directing his question at Freer, 'what metaphysical angst at thirteen?' Pemulis is waiting for the upswing in mood that should accompany the Tenuate he's taken [which, a footnote explains, is out of your system within 36 hours]. Freer answers 'just a disappointed dinkle' and explains that Postal Weight's dad had promised something for accomplishing something and then reneged. Pemulis asks if this is about the Eschaton thing, because he can explain to Todd's dad that they're not blaming anyone under 17. Pemulis has calculated that a win against Freer today could mean a seat on the plane to WhataBurger, and this is why he's taken the Tenuate even though he and Hal narrowly escaped the urinalysis on account of Pemulis telling Hal's mother that he'd tell Hal about the incident with John Wayne. Todd repeats that nothing is true, and Pemulis says that some things are 'rock-solid, high-grade true.' Freer tells Pemulis to let him cry, and says that at 13 he has yet to experience anything like real disappointment. Pemulis chooses from among his T-shirts, and puts it on head first instead of arms first like all the upscale kids. And unlike John Wayne, who had been in Pemulis's room right after lunch, purportedly to retrieve Troeltsch's Seldane, Pemulis puts his socks on first then his shoes. Neither had mentioned the incident in Avril's office. Pemulis tries to get Todd to buckle up and assures him of his gifts as an Eschaton player. He says that his kertwang is emotion-based and not fact-based. A bunch of 16 year olds come in towel snapping. Freer warns Todd of what's coming next, and Pemulis says that if Todd didn't have such a way with 'launch vector' that he might not be ready to hear this. Pemulis says 'you can trust math.' As he expounds on the certitude of all things math-related, a student comes in to announce that John Wayne expounding his innermost thoughts-- Troeltsch has him 'on the air and Wayne's lost his mind.'
notes:
Pemulis reveals yet another view of why he and Hal were allowed to escape the urinalysis. Unfortunately, unlike the truths of his math, this truth is thoroughly suspect. It's key to note that John Wayne was in Pemulis's room just before having 'lost his mind.'
p 787-795
YDAU [2009] probably early November
place Boston
narrated in third person [Molly Notkin]
synopsis:
Molly Notkin has told Rodney Tine everything she knows about Madame Psychosis in a 'technical interview' under the duress of a high-watt lamp. She tells the operatives that her understanding is that the lethal cartridge is 'Infinite Jest V' or 'Infinite Jest VI' and consists of Madame P as Death, sitting pregnant and naked with her deformed face distorted or blanked out by computer. She is explaining to the camera that Death is always female and always maternal, ie the mother in your next life. She says that it was definitely a trick of the lens that made Madame P appear pregnant, because Molly had seen her naked [though never unveiled] and she definitely had never been pregnant. Molly says that Madame P's mother killed herself on Thanksgiving, four months before the Auteur had done the same. She says that the camera had been below the reclining maternal figure while she explained that the reason mothers were so consumingly loving is that they are trying to make amends for a murder that neither of you quite remember. Molly explains that Madame P had not been sexually involved with the Auteur, because his belief in a finite number of erections in the world rendered him impotent. She had, however been involved with the Auteur's son, whom Molly considers a rotter. Molly says that Madame P had not been present at the Auteur's suicide, funeral, nor at the reading of his will, and that Madame P had never mentioned the fate of the cartridge, and had only described it from the perspective of a performer. She says that Madame P had never seen the cartridge, but did not believe it could be lethally entertaining, and felt that the Auteur had probably recognized it as a the thinly veiled cries of a man at the end of his tether, and destroyed it as he had the other attempts at the same film. She says that the Auteur's funeral had taken place in L'Islet province in Quebec, where the widow is from, and that he had not been cremated. She says that it's unlikely that the widow was involved with anti-American cells. Madame P had told her that the woman was basically Death incarnate, and that it was ironic that the Auteur repeatedly tried to cast Madame P in that role, when he had the real thing right there. Molly says that the Auteur had given up alcohol on Madame P's request, and had been sober for the 3 1/2 months prior to his death, apparently in part because he was so moved by her consent to appear before the camera even after her deforming accident, and her subsequent abandonment by the Auteur's son. Molly says that Madame P's substance-abuse problem was the result of her guilt over having coerced the Auteur into giving up his substance abuse. Molly says that her guilt had nothing to do with Infinite Jest V or VI, but rather with her feeling that she made him give up the one thing that was holding him together. Molly says that she thinks the bottle of Wild Turkey may have been placed at the scene of the suicide after the fact by the widow, who was probably enraged that he was willing to give up drinking for Madame P. Molly says that 'by all reports' Madame P had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving day that her mother committed suicide. She says that the Auteur's death probably had nothing to do with his work, or with supposedly having created a lethally entertaining cartridge, but rather with the fact his wife was having sex with 'just about everything with a Y-chromosome' including possibly her own son Orin. She says that the myth of the cartridge is the classic illustration of the 'antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism' and that she'd be happy to lend the interrogators a book on the subject. When pressed to give more concise answers, Molly explains that Madame P's deforming trauma had been something right out of one of the Auteur's 'proto-incestuous disaster films.' Madame P's father, the low-pH chemist had a creepy attachment to his daughter gotten even creepier when she reached puberty, and when she brought her first boyfriend home for Thanksgiving, 'the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan.' When Madame P finally snapped and questioned why her father insisted on cutting up the turkey on her plate, he snapped in turn confessing that he was in love with her, and that he had never touched or ogled her out of deference to the purity of his love. But when she had reached puberty, the pressure had become so great that he was forced to regress her to childhood, in his mind. And now that she's brought a mature male into the house, and he has been forced to watch them in bed together through the peephole that he tried with all his will to resist drilling-- at this point the mother had blown her fuse. She announced that she and the chemist had not had sex since the daughter reached puberty, and she confessed that her own father had molested her repeatedly. The mother said that perhaps she is at fault for having married the same kind of monster who spurns his wife for his own daughter. The mother then races down to the father's acid lab in order to douse herself, and the others follow behind. Molly reveals that Madame P's real name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and her father's name was either Earl or Al. Molly says that the son had claimed that his guilt for having let the accident occur had made the relationship untenable, but that she thinks it's pretty clear why he gave her the boot a few months later. The mother had instead of dousing herself, hurled the acid at the father who ducked, as had Orin, which left Madame P to get a face full of acid. When no charges were pressed, she had been freed from custody and came home to commit suicide by putting her arms one at a time into the garbage disposal.
notes:
Here the mystery of whether Madame P is actually deformed or just fatally beautiful beneath the veil is finally revealed. Or is it? Much of what Molly Notkin says turns out to be suspect, most notably her description of Infinite Jest, which bears little similarity to Joelle's own description later in the book. Also she attributes Joelle's drug use to her guilt over the Auteur's suicide when we know from p 736-747, that her habit formed earlier, as a result of her deteriorating relationship with Orin. She does offer a more plausible reason [the Moms's infidelity] for Himself's suicide than Pemulis, but it's pretty clear that while plausible, this explanation is pretty far from true. So much of what she offers up, whether intentionally or not, is fairly suspect.
p 795--this section is entirely a footnote -- p 1073-1076
YDAU [2009] Nov 17
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis is in the Dean of Academic Affairs office with deLint as well as Nwagi and Watson. DeLint says that Tavis, Avril and Rusk are with John Wayne now, and apparently he's going to be OK. Pemulis feigns relief. DeLint asks him to recount what transpired. Pemulis had figured that none of the administrators had heard the thing, and had not even figured it out himself until he was en route to find his pilfered Tenuates in the Seldane bottle that Wayne had borrowed from Troeltsch. Pemulis explains that he was suiting up when Stice and Zoltan came in ranting about Wayne's 'candid sharing' on the student radio broadcast. DeLint asks if he's saying that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into this, but Pemulis had already heard that Wayne had come rattling in and grabbed the mic. Pemulis recognized the irony in the situation-- it was actually not his doing, and Troeltsch, if anyone, was to blame. He could not, however, figure out a way to get this across without implicating himself for possession, which given the incident with the urologist, would be suicide. DeLint asks about his first knowledge of 'untowardness' with Wayne, and Pemulis says he heard what Keith says sounded like an imitation of Tavis. Wayne had done a dead-on version of Tavis coming on to a cheerleader and telling her he had a fear of rejection, so instead of rejecting him would she please invent a plausible excuse. DeLint prompts him about what followed, which was Troeltsch prodding Wayne to make 'public castigations' of his peers and instructors. In Wayne's scenario Tavis succeeds in seducing the cheerleader, and that even though it's clear that his honesty had been simply a ruse, she lets him have his way with her to get him to shut up. And what's most chilling about this is that Pemulis knows through Hal that this is one of Orin's top 'Strategies' for seducing married women. Pemulis interrupts the cataloging of Wayne's castigations to ask if the emerging point is that all of this will affect his chances for the WhataBurger trip. At this point Watson brings out Pemulis's yachting cap, his pharmaceutical scale, and virtually every bottle from his bedside table, indicating that Troeltsch had cut some kind of deal to save his own ass. Pemulis requests to see Avril. DeLint says that while she's busy attending to one of the academy's finest students who has been unwittingly dosed with an illegal substance, she sends her very best regards. Pemulis that before this all gets nailed down, he really needs to see her. DeLint says he's given to understand that Pemulis can either finish out the term for credit, or try to find another academy to accept him without a positive reference, and that he's free to shout whatever it was he was threatening to shout from the highest hill he can find. And that they've had the doorknobs rubberized. Pemulis asks if this affects his chances for the WhataBurger.
notes:
It's not clear whether Tavis actually uses Orin's strategy for seduction, or if Wayne simply got it from his own escapades with the Moms. It's interesting that the whole episode of Pemulis being dismissed happens completely in the footnotes.
p 795-808
YDAU [2009] Nov 17 [presumably]
place Natick [outer metro Boston]
narrated in third person [Hal]
synopsis:
Hal chooses the most remote Tuesday meeting from the book given to him by the 'incisorless nostril-pierced girl' at Ennet House, which is Natick on Route 27. He rushes through his PM match and skips dinner so he can make the meeting. He's not sure why, since abstaining is not so much his problem, as the horrible way he feels, since he's 'Abandoned All Hope.' Excessive saliva, nightmares, and as if his own head were trying to torture him. He takes the tow truck and chokes down two bran muffins, regrettably without anything liquid. He considers the etymology of the word anonymous. The withdrawal hasn't affected his ability to call up a mental xerox of anything he's read. He finds Quabbin Recovery Systems [QRS] in a building set back from the highway. A good 2/3 of the parking spaces are reserved for staff. He enters the reflector-shade glass door, which is unlocked. There is no map or directory, so he wanders the menacingly silent halls in search of 32A. He wished he was somewhere else and felt some other way. He empties the glass holding his spit into the dirt in the pot of a rubber tree. He's brought along $50 US and $100 ONAN, since he has no idea how much these things might cost. He finds the room, with it's door closed like the rest, but he detects muffled voices, and assumes since he's 10 minutes early, that it may be some sort of orientation for newcomers, and he enters. He finds the meeting already under way, and laments that it's not nearly big enough for anonymity or casual spectation. In the room are 9-10 bearded men sitting Indian style in their chairs, each clutching an identical teddy bear. One of the men is crying, and the man who appears to be the leader asks the others to hold their bears tight and let their 'Inner Infant' listen to Kevin's Inner Infant express his grief and loss. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs and assumes he'll be able to approach the leader at a break and buy some texts to study later. Even though it sounds suspiciously close to Dr. Rusk's dreaded Inner Child, Hal assumes that Inner Infant is some NA sobriquet, and wills himself to stay objective. The leader says the energy he's feeling from the others is unconditional love and acceptance of Kevin's Inner Infant, and then invites the others to chime in with their feelings. They do, at which point Hal begins to lose control of his objectivity. His mood worsens as the leader starts some really bad ambient music. Kevin is prompted to explain that his Inner Infant is crying in its crib, waiting for Mommy and Daddy to come nurture him. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside is his belly gurgling from the bran muffins. Kevin says through the string of mucus hanging from his nose that his Inner Infant wants to be loved and held. He says that by the time he was 8 they were dead, killed by a traffic helicopter on Jamaica Way. Hal suddenly realizes that Kevin is the older brother of Marlon Bain, who had been Orin's tennis partner. He realizes that no way has Kevin Bain ever ingested a substance in his life, and that this is a men's issues meeting. He notices that the booklet he'd got from Ennet House is dated January YDPAH, making it 2 years old. The leader of the group has Kevin repeating 'please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me' and Hal recalls his own toddlerhood during which he was held and loved extensively, and it didn't exactly make him whole or substance-free. There's a man eating yogurt behind Hal, and it turns out that this is the person whom Kevin 'needs something from.' Hal tries to become invisible as Kevin is prompted to direct his request to be loved and held directly to this man. Hal scrolls through an alphabetical list of all the places he'd rather be than where he is now. Despite repeated pleas and projectile-weeping, the man behind Hal does not come and hold and love Kevin. He is then encouraged to let his Inner Infant walk out and let it walk over to the man and actively ask for what it wants. Hal's most vivid memory of the meeting was Kevin on all fours crawling toward him, clutching a teddy bear.
notes:
Hal's revelation here is implicit, or at least seems unknown to him-- that the horror of his existence [or his addiction] can't be traced easily to some simple root cause and then expunged. It's ironic that he was looking for this answer at an NA meeting, and it was presented to him vicariously at the Inner Infant meeting.
p 809-981
this section in 25 parts
p 809-827
YDAU [2009] Nov 12
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately is lying in the trauma wing hallucinating that the ceiling is bulging and deflating, just as the polyurethane covering a hole in the ceiling above his bed had done when he was a child. As a child he had named the polyurethane hole Herman. He couldn't feel his upper right side, and he couldn't really move. His throat burned when he breathed. The blurred figure in the next bed sat upright very still, and 'seemed to have a box on its head.' He had been having a 'repetitious ethnocentric dream' where he's trying unsuccessfully to tie an 'Oriental' without a nose or mouth to a chair. He perceives going in and out of consciousness as light cycles, or as being held underwater and occasionally coming up for air. One time he comes up for air and finds that Tiny Ewell is seated beside him. Ewell had shaved his goatee. This was Gately's first full night in the trauma ward, and he feels as if he's been encased in hot cement. Ewell has been talking to Gately, presumably since before he had become aware. Ewell says that his wife had called the soul 'personality' and said that Tiny's was incorrigibly dark especially when drinking. Gately can't tell if Ewell thinks he's awake or not. Ewell tells the story of growing up in a tough Irish neighborhood, and how he although he failed to do even a single pull-up in the fitness exam, he still became the leader of the pack of blue collar kids and their club, the Money-Stealers' Club. He wins the kids over with his rhetoric and his big scheme to collect donations for a phony youth hockey club. Gately perceives Ewell and the other figures as receding and then looming in. Ewell says he was reveling in the discovery of fraud. He had persuaded the others to let him be the keeper of the can full of money, and he soon begins to dip into the funds, spending the money on candy, toys and magazines. To cover the fact that he had spent most of the money, he fabricated band statements. Eventually as Christmas nears, the boys decide that they want their share of the money. He puts them off until he can get the supposed money out of the bank, and then stays home sick from school. Gately cannot speak in response. Ewell finally decided to raid the 'IBEW Local 517 Petty Slush' in his father's closet to get the money to pay back the kids. The kids pummel him anyway, and going home and facing his own shame was worse. He had buried the whole thing until the other night after the fracas and Don's reluctant 'se offendendo' [which a footnote explains is either blundered Latin for self defense, or an oblique reference to Hamlet's graveyard scene, from which the title of this book also comes] Ewell had dreamed the whole episode again and awakened sans goatee. Gately starts to remember being offered Demerol, event though his chart had clearly been marked to indicate his history of narcotics dependency. The bullet had fragmented and passed through the tissue in his shoulder, and the surgeon had warned Gately that after the local anesthetic had worn off, the pain would be unlike any Gately had ever imagined, and also that he had developed toxemia because the bullet had possibly been treated with something unclean. Gately comes to again and it's nighttime and Ewell is still there intoning. Ewell asks how he'll be able to follow the 9th step and make amends to all those he defrauded, and to his mother, whom the revelations would kill. Ewell's wife shields his mother from anything unpleasant about Tiny, in fact she now thinks he's at a tax-law symposium. Ewell has the revelation that his whole descent into drinking may have been an attempt to bury his third-grade feelings of despicability. Gately's pain is intensifying, but he can neither move nor call out. The last thing he hears Tiny say is 'I'm scared' and he wishes that he could tell him that he can totally ID with him. Gately sleeps and dreams of a storm that rips the polyurethane vacuole over his bed off while a man with a shepherd's crook is beating up his mother. He broke out of his crib and ran down the beach trying to escape the tornado on his tail. He swims into the ocean and when he surfaces for air, he sees the tornado just outside the house and his mother standing on the porch with a bloody Ginsu knife. The tornado swallows his mother in its maw and when he awakes he really has to piss, and Tiny Ewell is gone. Later someone who is either Joelle or a nurse in a veil is running a cold washcloth over his forehead. After she's gone, he finally gives up and urinates and finds that he is catheterized, which term he'd always mistaken for castrated. At some point Pat M comes in tells him everything will be alright and that she's so sorry he had to deal with a situation like that all by himself. Her hair is a less radiant red than Joelle's. Gately is surprised the cops haven't come. He never shared certain things about his past with Pat M, namely the remorseless ADA or the suffocated Nuck. Pat tells him that he's showing tremendous resolution by not taking the narcotic painkillers, and that it wouldn't necessarily be a relapse, if he knew in heart that it wasn't. The whole interface was possibly unreal, because he couldn't think of a reason why she would have burst into tears. He's more sure that he dreamed seeing Mrs. Lopate in her wheelchair in the room, although his realization in the dream that she had been the same woman he'd often seen at night touching a tree in #5's lawn, when he was first on staff. He awoke again to find Joelle in a chair beside his bed. At some point senior Ennet House counselor Calvin Thrust straddles the chair beside the bed and goes on a longwinded rant, which explains more or less what happened in the aftermath of the incident. He says that they managed to drag Gately inside before the police came. Gately recalls having seen Thrust in a porn cartridge, having sex with a one-armed lady on a trapeze. Thrust explains that Lenz had complained that he would get blamed for the incident, and Bruce Green had rammed him against the cabinets, but then refused to rat him out. Thrust says that he could tell Lenz was coked up, and offered him the choice of resigning from Ennet House, or submitting to a spot-urine. Meanwhile Gately had been bleeding on the couch in Pat's office, while the veiled girl had unwittingly revealed parts beneath her robe while trying to stanch the blood. He says that he hadn't taken him straight to the hospital because it was known that Gately was on probation, and it wasn't clear exactly who had done what to whom in the melee. When Pat arrived they heaved him into Thrust's Corvette and Pat had driven her Aventura ahead of them to the hospital with Joelle riding shotgun. Thrust says not to worry, that the blood in his car was the least of the problems, which worries Gately in ways he cannot express. What Gately really wants to know is were any of the Nucks killed, and has there been an ADA looking into Gately's involvement. He also would like to whether any of the Ennet House residents might make a respectable enough witness, and also 'what the fuck Thrust was thinking of' when he let Lenz go. Thrust says it's lucky that Gately is so huge, so that even though he lost so much blood, he's still alive. He said that both Joelle and Pat had been pretty upset that he had let Lenz go before his involvement could be established. He says he had basically let him go to keep himself from eliminating Lenz's map right then and there. Lenz had tried to get his Duster started, but had apparently left without it because the new resident, Amy J had seen it being towed in the early morning. He says that the House Manager had kept the cops at bay, convincing them that they had no right to enter without a court order. Thrust says that the gun they'd shot Gately with had been serious ordnance, and asks if they've informed him how much of his shoulder and arm he'd be able to keep. Gately pictures himself as a pirate with a hook for a hand, and then with a prosthetic voice box. Thrust said that Hester Thrale had disappeared during the 'freakas' and Gately remembered seeing her running off. Thrust says that the porch is cluttered with all the bags of former residents' stuff that'd been set out. Gately tries to calculate the date based on this. Thrust says that Emil Linty got house restriction after being caught removing an undergarment from Hester's stuff. Thrust says that Ruth van Cleve and Kate Gompert had their purses snatched on the way to NA, and only Ruth had returned. Pat had a warrant issued for Kate on account of her suicidal impulses. Thrust gives an update of house-related news including mention of a new resident Dave K, who had come in after a drunken incident at Interdependence Day office party, where he attempted a limbo-dance challenge and injured his spine, and now scuttles around the house like a crab. He says the biggest issue at the House meeting was that Clenette had brought a bunch of cartridges back from the tennis academy, and Pat won't let them be disseminated until they're screened. He says Green hasn't said a thing about the 'embryoglio' but apparently shouts in his sleep about nuts and cigars. He says that something seems to have snapped in Tiny Ewell, who shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, and was heard weeping in the bathroom. Gately imagines Joelle in her room dressed as Madame Psychosis, eating a peach. He suddenly has anxiety over who's fixing dinner at the house. Gately finds Thrust insufferable but admits that he is keeping Gately's mind off the pain. Gately's heart skips and sinks as Thrust tells him that all of the residents whose legal status permits them to file depositions have backed Gately up 110% to the cops and the weird federal guys with crewcuts, who were probably called in on account of the Nucks. Several of the witnesses indicated that the Nucks appeared to be under the influence of some Substance. The biggest problem is that the weapon cannot be located. Green was the last one to see it when he dropped it on the lawn after taking it away from 'the Nuck the nigger girls stomped.' Gately's heart is somewhere near his knees at the mention of the feds, and he's dying to find out whether he actually killed anyone. Thrust says that finding the weapon is going to be in the best interests of Yolanda Willis too, since her spiked shoe was left in the eye socket of the guy that she'd killed. The sun was starting to go down, and night is when the ceiling breathes.
notes:
The figure with the box on its head must be Otis P. Lord, who was taken to the hospital to have the monitor removed from his head. This will allow us to date some of what happens, in spite of the fact that Gately cannot figure out the date himself. It has become unclear at times whether Gately is dreaming or not. The vacuole on the ceiling seems similar to Kate's billowing sail [p 648-651] as well as Joelle's veil.
p 827-845
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 12-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately awakes again to find Geoffrey Day sitting where Thrust had been. It's night. Day informs him that Johnette is no Gately in the kitchen. It might be a different night, the ceiling no longer bulges. His side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It's now a deep tight pain with a flavor of emotional loss. Day is telling Gately about his developmentally-challenged brother who had a phobia of leaves, and whom Day would torment by threatening him with leaves. Gately has become much more popular since he's become paralyzed and mute. He sees a 'tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision's periphery' but Gately may be sleeping. Gately's recurring dream ever since getting clean has been a 'tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman' looking down at him. Nothing happens she's just looking down at him, which means that either he's lying down or he has become smaller than the tiny woman. There is also a menacing dog standing just past the woman. When he awakes Day is gone and his bed has been moved over so it's right next to the adjacent patient, as if they are a 'sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds.' He strains to yell which wakes him up [implying perhaps that he wasn't actually awake] and his bed has returned to its original place. Sometime later in the night, but before midnight parking switch, he dreams of the ghostish figure who finally stays in one place long enough for Gately to see him. The figure is a very tall man with glasses and a sunken chest wearing very high-water chinos Gately flashes back to youthful beating of kids with floods. He experiences, in the dream, a remorseful flash that this tall figure might represent one of those kids. But the figure shrugged and said that no it was just a plain old 'garden variety wraith.' Gately considers the fact that in the dream he knows he's dreaming and is considering the 'up front dream quality' of the dream, and it all gets mulitlevelled and confusing. The wraith discourages him from getting hung of on the 'dream-v-real' stuff and take note of the important thing, which is that the wraith can hear him, even though Gately cannot speak. The wraith says it's difficult for him to stay in one position long enough for Gately to be able to see him, and he's not sure how long he can keep it up. Gately tries to pretend to go to sleep to see if the wraith will go away, and then he does actually sleep because the tiny Oriental woman returns. When he awakes from the dream's dream, the wraith is still there, now standing on the bed's railing, towering over him. Gately can see the wraith's nostril hair and brown socks, and notes that these are not the sort of details he associates with dreaming. The wraith was nodding in empathy with Gately's thoughts of his 'suffocated speechlessness' and explaining that wraiths never spoke out loud, which is why their words always seemed like thoughts in your head. The wraith said that very few wraiths have anything important enough to interface about to overcome their impatience and stand still long enough for a person to see them clearly, preferring to whiz around at the speed of quanta. He says that wraiths 'exist' in a completely different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. Gately is thinking 'for fuck's sake what was this,' first Day and Ewell, and now even in his dreams, everyone suddenly wants to talk to him about their problems, now that he's mute. The wraith disappears and reappears several times, bringing each time another object- first a picture of Johnny Gentle, then a Coke can with Oriental writing in place of the logo. 'The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream's worst moment.' The wraith then starts to defy nature appearing upside down and doing pirouettes on Gately's chest. Gately realizes he doesn't know the term 'PIROUETTE' which appears to him in all caps. He starts to feel something like 'lexical rape' as terms obscure to him appear in his head [see complete list below] the words suggest links to Hamlet, to annulation, to optics, to black widows, left-handedness, and levirate marriage [where the widow must marry one of her husband's brothers] all relating the wraith incontrovertibly to James O. Incandenza. Gately wants to scream, and the next time the wraith appears, it is sitting above him on the heart monitor in Lyle's cross-legged position, and the Oriental coke can is sitting on Gately's forehead smelling like low tide. An orderly shines a flashlight into the room and the wraith disappears. It occurs to Gately that the wraith may be Gately's 'Higher Power' but the wraith reappears to say 'don't we both wish.' Gately ponders the burglary-related implications of having the wraiths abilities, and wonders if wraith means 'ghost, as in dead.' The wraith tells Gately that he can Identify with his 'feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation' and asks if Gately remembers TV sitcoms. Gately laughs inside because everyone knows that drug addicts and TV go hand in hand. He waxes poetic about his favorites, most notably 'Cheers' which he loved because took place in Boston and because everyone always had a beer in hand. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the 'huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom.' The wraith asks if Gately remembers the 'figurant' actors, those that served as 'human scenery' and were never heard. The wraith says that he spent the bulk of his animate life that way, especially to those closest to him. The wraith says you can't understand the pathos of figurants, until you realized how 'trapped and encaged' they are in their peripheral status. It's not as if one could just suddenly stand up and start yelling in a scene in 'Cheers.' Gately speculates briefly about lower-rung actor suicide rates. The wraith explains that he himself dabbled in making filmed entertainments, and that he went out of his way to make sure that unless the film was silent, you could hear the voice of each and every actor, no matter how peripheral. His critics often perceived this as a self-conscious heavy-art directorial pose instead of as radical realism. Gately is remembering how he would pretend that Nom was his father, who would be sarcastic and witty to Gately's mother instead of beating her. Gately is trying to focus on the ring of cold the foreign Coke can has left on his forehead, instead of either the pain or the memory of his mother trying to escape to the lockable bathroom without detection by her inebriated paramour. The wraith tells Gately that he's had to sit still for the equivalent of 3 weeks, so that Gately could see him. This reminds Gately that no one has mentioned how long he's been in here. Gately wonders why his sponsor Francis G has not yet come to visit. The wraith disappears briefly and returns to say he's paid a call to Francis G who seems to be on his way. The wraith says that when he was alive in the world he had seen his own son becoming something like a figurant. He said that witnessing this had marred the end of his animate life, and admits the foolishness of ever having blamed it on the boy's mother. Gately muses that 'resentment is the #1 offender' is one of the AA cliches he's starting to believe, not that he wouldn't mind a few minutes alone with Lenz. The wraith says to imagine spending your own youth trying to be heard or noticed by your own father only to have your own son become mute. The son who had done everything with an unslumped grace the father never could, had begun to disappear, and no one else in the family noticed. The family believed that the wraith was confusing the boy with his own boyhood self, or with his father's father who was notoriously wooden and had purportedly driven his father to drink. The wraith says that near the end, he feared his son was experimenting with substances. His family just thought the wraith had 'gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to get sober, again.' Gately asks if he tried to 'Surrender and Come In.' The wraith says he spent the whole last 90 days of his life sober trying to create a 'medium via which he and his muted son simply converse,' to make something so compelling that it would reverse thrust on his 'fall into the womb of solipsism,' to bring out of himself, a way to say 'I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard.' Gately recognizes this as self-pity, and doubts that the wraith could stay sober with such a poor-me attitude. The wraith says that he had, and he had found the AA cliches too vapid, not to mention their disdain for abstraction. The wraith says he bets Gately is dying to know if he ever came up with the thoroughly engaging entertainment. Gately thinks how he's spent his own sobriety fending off memories of the ex-MP, his mother's paramour, to which the wraith replies that any conversation is better than none at all. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure as much pain as he does to hear Gately's brain-voice. Instead of asking him if he's representing the Higher Power Gately pretends to think he's wondering why the wraith is spending so much wrath-time here with Gately instead of just trying to interface with the son. He thinks maybe that would make the son kind of bats, though. He tries to keep from thinking of demerol. He thinks of the ex-MP, who had never laid a hand on Gately, but who scared him. He remembers the ex-MP teaching him the basics of weightlifting, and not being terribly happy when Gately became capable of lifting more. The ex-MP kept cafeful records in a little book of his weightlifting, and of his Heinekin consumption. When Gately remembers this stuff, he wonders why he never once thought to ask his mother why she loved him, in spite of the beatings. They never spoke his name when he was out of the house. He tries not to think about why he didn't just pull the ex-MP off of her. The ex-MP never hid the beatings from young Gately, and after a while he'd just turn the TV up or go off and lift weights. Without anyone's help, he soon figured out the difference between the beatings and the similar sounding activity in the bed. Gately remembers the ex-MP's way of dealing with house flies; instead of killing them he'd whack them hard enough to disable them, because he theorized that their screams of pain would scare off the other flies. Gately's memories fade into a dream where he's dressed Lenz's topcoat leaning over the Nuck whose head he just bashed in. When he wakes, he thinks he sees Francis G, who says at least Gately's still alive, and asks if he's sober still. Gately blinks and Francis is gone. There are 3 other White Flaggers in the room, and their talking about the tall well-dressed Civil-Service-looking guy in the hallway, with brown shoes and a hat, who appears to be in it for the long haul with his take-out food from many countries. Gately recognizes this as possibly a certain ADA, and grunts. The White Flaggers joke about CPR, which is their term for Al-Anon, the Church of Perpetual Revenge. Gately wishes he could laugh and get them to go away.
terms on p 832, with brief definitions
-acciacatura- a dissonant grace note used to embellish a note of a melody
-alembic- an alchemical still, or metaphorically something that refines or transforms through distillation
-lactrodectus mactans- black widow spider
-neutral density point- the point on which a photographer focuses to get the proper exposure
-proprioception--literally one's own perception, or the sense of relative position of neighboring parts of the body
-testudo- type of tortoise, or a military formation where soldiers aggregate together for protection
-annulate- the way energy is produced in IJ, invented in part by James O. Incandenza
-bricolage- something constructed out of whatever happens to be available, eg found art
-gerrymander- manipulation of boundaries to favor a certain group
-scopophilia- literally the love of looking, or 'male gaze' ie, objectification of women in films
-Laertes- the character who kills Hamlet
-extruding-thrusting or forcing out, or shaping by forcing through a die
-strigil- curved instrument used to scrape sweat off the skin
-lexical-relating to words or to the lexicon of words
-lordosis-curvature of the spine
-impost- a tax, or the handicap weight carried by a racehorse
-sinistral- left-handed
-meniscus-a lens that is concave on one side and convex on the other
-chronaxy-the minimum time required to excite a nerve using an electrical current of twice the threshold voltage
-Poor Yorick- the character whose skull is dug up in Hamlet, in the scene from which the title 'Infinite Jest' comes
-Luculus-Roman general famous for giving lavish banquets
-Cerise Montclair- deep red Montclair [the car James O. Incandenza's father had]
-De Sica neo-real crane dolly- a crane dolly named for Italian neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica
-Circumambientfounddramaleviratemarriage
-circumambient- surrounding,
-found drama- JOI's unfilmable films,
-levirate marriage- widow is required to marry the husband's brother after the husband's death
notes:
This is among the most densely packed sections of the book. Himself explains that he made Infinite Jest to get through to Hal, and to apologize. Nearly all of the book's symbols make an appearance here, with the chilling image of the 'figurant' actors being central. In typical DFW style, the revelations raise more questions than they answer. Why is the Asian script on the Coke can the most disturbing thing about an otherwise pretty disturbing dream? Are we to assume that Lyle is also a wraith, or perhaps just that Himself's wraith visits Lyle and helps him give the students advice. Who is the tiny acne scarred Asian woman? It must have been the wraith that moved Gately's bed right next to Otis P. Lord's bed, thus suggesting that Himself's wraith has been responsible for the bed moving and other inexplicable occurrences at ETA. The last 90 days of his life presumably refers to the making of Infinite Jest, and we thus have an explanation for why he made it, and possibly what it is about, at least from his perspective. This suggests that Molly Notkin's synopsis of the film [p 787-795] is spurious.
p 845-846
YDAU [2009] Nov 19
place Antitoi Brothers
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
After Marathe, Ossowiecke and Balbalis failed to turn up the veiled performer, Fortier and Marathe turned to the final and most drastic means of trying to locate the cartridge, to acquire members of the Auteur's immediate family, which Marathe would be in charge of. Broullime was carrying out further tests on 'viewer willingness' on his newly acquired test subjects. One test subject is an irritating, eccentrically dressed homeless man with a white wig [Lenz] who was cutting off not his own fingers but the fingers of the other test subject, a weakened addict dressed as a gauche woman, and found carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature [Poor Tony]. This of course marred the statistics of the experiment, and Bruillime considers a 'lethal technical interview.' Fortier is going to Phoenix to assist Luria P__ in a more important technical interview, and leaving Marathe in charge of the 'preliminary acquisition.' A direct attack on the tennis academy was out of the question , on account of the tall steep hill. Instead he put Balbais in charge of acquiring the Quebecois team that was en route to play against ETA, while he remained at Antitoi's, occasionally going to nearby Ryle's for 'jazz nights.' Balbais would use the mirror across the highway trick to force the bus of the Quebecois players off the road, and then several AFR members would take the place of the young players. Marathe apparently had some plausible explanation prepared to deal with the issue of the wheelchairs and the beards of the putative youngsters.
notes:
This short section explains what happens at the book's end, namely that Hal and Orin will be acquired, and 'interviewed' to determine the location of the master cartridge. It also confirms that Marathe has sold out and failed to mention the fact that he did locate Joelle, and possibly another copy of the cartridge at Ennet House. It's not clear, though, why Marathe would still go ahead with the acquisition of the family members. Perhaps he handed Joelle over to Steeply in order to get a deal for his wife, while still maintaining his cover with AFR by going ahead with the operation.
p 846-851
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 13-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately dreams that he is with Joelle in motel with Joelle in the South. Joelle raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his forehead. She is promising him a night of near terminal pleasure, as she disrobes revealing a incredible 'inhuman' body. Then she removes the veil revealing the face of Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls. Gately is jolted awake briefly. He then remembers Mrs. Waite, who was his neighbor when he lived with his mother and the MP. There was something about Mrs. Waite, but no one said what it was. Her house and yard are in disarray, and she kept jars of brown-green viscous vegetoid stuff in her garage. She never left her house. Some of the littler kids said she was a witch. Mrs. Gately forbade Don to fuck with her. Although she was in no position to enforce such a rule, Don followed it. He didn't buy the witch stories, but was afraid of her. Eventually however, he developed a relationship of sorts with her. He went over once or twice under forgotten circumstances and interfaced with her in her kitchen. She never tried to feed him viscous stuff from a jar. She eventually hung herself. She was found by a meter-reader a few weeks after Gately's birthday. Realizing that Gately's mother was too pathetic to do much of anything for Don, she made him a cake and brought it to the birthday party that some other kids allowed Don to share with them, since he had no party of his own. He knew that she had given up cigarettes to save up money to make him the cake. The party's Mom accepted the cake without inviting Mrs. Waite to come in, but she forbade the kids to eat it or even blow out the candles, and put it directly into the trash. There's no way Mrs. Waite could have seen the mom throw the cake away, and Gately wasn't so into self-torture to think her suicide was related to the cake being thrown out. He didn't mourn her or even think about her for many years, which is what makes his next dream even more disturbing. The dream takes place in Mrs. Waite's kitchen with Joelle plays the part of Mrs. Waite, sitting on a pink plastic ring, again naked and unveiled, with the same unbelievable body, but this time instead of Winston Churchill there is the face of an angel. It's not a sex dream though, Mrs. Waite/Joelle is the figure of death. Death explains to Gately that death happens over and over, you have many lives and at the end of each one a woman kills you to release you into the next life, in which she will be your mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remembers. As Gately begins to understand, he becomes sad. He's seeing Joelle/Death through a milky filter, reminiscent of the way a baby sees a parent. He begins cry and asks Joelle/Death to set him free. She shakes her unfocussed head and says: Wait.
notes:
Gately's dream/vision seems to be similar to Molly Notkin's description of Infinite Jest [p 787-795] Perhaps the wraith has put the vision in his head. The head of Winston Churchill atop the perfect body is reminiscent of the description of Ortho Stice [727-638]
p 851-854
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
The header reading 'Gaudeamus Igitur' [Let us therefore rejoice] is a college drinking song. Hal awakes from a dream where he's in a zoo, that has no animals or cages. It's 5am and Mario is asleep. He puts in a plug of Kodiak tobacco and notes that he feels bad, 'a sort of nausea of the head.' He's felt on the verge of crying for a week. He gets up to stand on one foot, which is therapeutic for his ankle. It has begun snowing and the snow on the ground is purple from the light. The Boards and AP exams are 3 weeks from tomorrow. This is the first day without dawn drills since Interdependence Day [Nov 8] and he has missed a chance to sleep until breakfast. He had awakened early the day before as well, after seeing in his sleep Kevin Bain crawling toward him. The wind outside rattled the subdorm doors in their frames. The Lung hadn't been inflated and Hal is hopeful that this might be cancellation weather for the exhibition meet. He can't ever remember hoping to not play before, and he can't remember feeling strongly one way or another for a long time. The message machine is blinking twice, meaning 2 messages. Hal notes the relationship between this flashing and that of the light in the smoke detector. Pemulis has coached him through enough math for him to determine that the formula for this relationship would be that of an ellipse. Since the Wayne incident the lessons have stopped and Pemulis has been very scarce. Every year between I Day and the WhataBurger the academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for purposes of fundraising, and each year Tavis has a team from another country flown in to compete against ETA. The teams chosen are always subpar, making the ETA kids look good. This year's opponents would be Quebecois, but Hal has his doubts about planes landing in this weather. It has occurred to Hal that without a few one-hitters to look forward to, he was waking up feeling like there was nothing to look forward to. The implied question was whether Bob Hope had become not just the high point of the day, but its actual meaning, which he finds pretty appalling. Hal is in charge of the messages on the machine, and this week their outgoing message goes 'this is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza...'
notes:
Hal's answering machine message seems an apt metaphor, if an unconscious one. Pemulis has been scarce but apparently Hal doesn't know he's been kicked out. Who has left the messages on Hal's machine?
p 854-864
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
When Gately wakes from the Joelle/Death dream, the actual Joelle is leaning over him wetting his forehead with a cloth. She's wearing a clean veil, and her hair seems darker red to Gately. He had never been into Madame Psychosis, but had known many who were, mostly 'Organics men' [heroin/opium users] and he feels an odd vividness that he is being swabbed by a celebrity. He has no idea how heroic and/or romantic he appears to her, and she has no idea that newly sober people are prone to see people with more sober time as heroic and/or romantic. Joelle says she can't stay long this time and as she moves away he notices that her sweatpants have the word BUM down one leg, and he thinks these were once Erdedy's sweatpants. The bed next to him is now empty. She tells Gately how she'd gone to St. Columbkill's Meeting and there'd been a guy from her home state of Kentucky named Wayne who had awakened in a disconnected sewage drain pipe after a ten year blackout. Wayne had a deep furrow across his face where his alcoholic father in the grip of post-binge Horrors had hit him with a hatchet. The gash had just about healed when his father dropped dead. He dragged his father under the farmhouse and began charging kids $5 to see a bona fide dead man. He took the money and headed out to 'lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.' Next thing he remembers is waking up in the drain pipe near Boston, with some 'right nasty' medical issues but the timer bell cuts him off, and he points at Joelle to speak next. Gately has to remind himself that Joelle is only 3 weeks clean. She has a big flat notebook in her lap, and when she looks down, the veil hangs loose like a white screen with nothing behind it. She raises her head and her veiled features return. She announces that she has to leave, but that she can come back later and bring him whatever he wants. He hikes an eyebrow. She says that now that his fever is down, they'll hopefully remove his feeding tube. Gately realizes that this is why he cannot speak, and Thanks God. Joelle compulsively flexes and twiddles her thumb and says that unlike her radio show, at Meetings, she doesn't know what she'll say until it comes out. She speaks about Recovery issues in an intellectualish way. She says that Pat keeps telling her to build a wall around each day, and not to look over or back or to add up the days. She says that she realizes this is why she could never quit. If she went straight, she always counted the days, and when she looked ahead it seemed like too staggering a number. She likens it to Evel Knievel jumping over cars on his motorcycle. Gately recalls his own detox in jail in Revere, when he had to build a wall around each second to endure it, but once the heaves and chills vanished so did this sense of the endless Now. His shoulder hurt now but nothing like the hurt of 'the Bird.' The White Flaggers call the Now 'The Present' -- the true gift of AA. Joelle says that when Wayne pointed to her to go up there, she realized that she really could do it, if she chose to do it as one endless day. He tries to give her a look that will validate her breakthrough. Gately has his own breakthrough and realizes that he can endure this pain and fear of the ADA the same he way. He decides that if he gets through this, he'll take the Evel Knievel picture from his wall and give it to Joelle. Joelle opens the big book in her lap to a picture of her own personal Daddy. There's a dog in the photo, and Joelle explains that none of her Daddy's dogs had names, and this one was later called the one that got hit by the UPS truck. She explains that her father was a low-pH chemist, and that her mother had inherited a farm, so her father moved them out there and 'jick-jacked' with farming. The nurse comes to change the catheter-receptacle and Joelle doesn't seem to notice, as she flips through the album showing him pictures of all the farm animals, who do have names. Gately realizes he could reach his left hand up and brush the veil aside as she shows him a picture of Uncle Lum, her father's partner who inhaled fumes and began acting strangely. He does move his hand enough to touch her wrist, and get her attention, and then mimics writing. Ordinarily when an attractive female so much as looks at Gately, he plays out a whole fantasy sequence in his mind which either ends with happily married sunset years, or a bitter divorce. With Joelle, though it ends with either bouncing veiled babies, or a a honeymoon eve deveiling, which reveals Winston Churchill. But still, he can't help envisioning 'the old X' with Joelle veiled and yelling 'And Lo!' Having Joelle sharing her personal photos with him, jumps his mind right over the moments wall. He envisions her smitten with him, volunteering to help in his escape from the hospital and from the Feds or whoever that is in the hallway. This fantasy fills him with shame, because even contemplating a romantic thing with a newcomer is known as 13th stepping and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders, and considered tantamount to rape. He realizes that it's no accident that his most vivid fantasy is the flight-from-the-law one, where the newcomer helps clean up his mess. His eyes roll back in his head in disgust.
notes
Since the bed next to Gately is now empty, this must be Nov 20 or later, since Otis P. Lord is brought back to ETA on Nov 20. This is also confirmed on p 96-964, when Joelle leaves the hospital the snowstorm of Nov 20 has already happened. Is there an intended allusion to John Wayne with Wayne from Kentucky? Why would Joelle have on Erdedy's sweatpants? The billowing of Joelle's veil, with nothing behind it,when she looks down [and away from Gately] is reminiscent of the vacuole in the ceiling [p 809-827], and of the black sail [p 648-651].
p 864-876
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal can hear the sounds of early morning weeping from behind dorm doors as he goes down the hall to brush his teeth. Snow had piled up in the sill of a window left open, and Hal puts his head out to have a look, but visibility is too low to see the ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air. The Headmaster's House was little more than a lump, but Hal can picture CT fretting over the snow, and possible consequences on the exhibition tournament. Hal pulls his head back when it becomes numb and realizes that he hasn't had to go to the bathroom in a serious way for 3 days. The digital display on the intercom reads '11-18 EST0456' [although this seems to be the same day as p 851-854, which was given as 11/20]. He finds Ortho Stice making an odd chanting sound with his forehead up against the glass of his window. When Hal enters, Stice asks without turning his head if Hal had been crying. Hal says no, and then contemplates that for the past 10 days, he had felt worst in the morning. Stice mentions playing the 'furriners' today, and Hal says if we do it's not going to be out there on the courts. Hal says they'll shuttle the kids around to various indoor courts, if the Quebecois kids managed to fly in before the airport closed. Hal says he figures they're stuck up at Dorval, and CT is probably on the case now. He expects Stice to do his CT impersonation, but Stice remains face to the window. After a silence, Stice tells Hal a joke about 3 statisticians duck hunting-- the first misses low, the second misses high, at which point the third jumps up whooping 'we got him!' Out the window Hal can see a figure sitting in the bleachers, getting buried with snow. It had never snowed like this in November, and the whole scene out the window has a pathos to it. Hal asks why Stice has his forehead up against the window this way, and isn't it getting cold. Stice says the forehead lost all feeling a couple of hours ago, and reveals that his forehead is actually stuck to the window. He had been unable to sleep, and feeling hot and sweaty, brought a chair to sit by the window where it was cool. He rested his head against the window, and before he knew it he was stuck. He had tried to unstick the head a couple hours later, but the sound it began to make discouraged him. He then just waited for someone to come along, praying it wouldn't be Pemulis, who surely would have thought of something cruel to do to him. Or Troeltsch who to Hal's surprise is sleeping in Axhandle's single room. Hal decides to try and pull him free. Stice asks if Hal believes in 'little kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit' and Hal says he won't feel a thing. Hal says he used to believe in vampires, and that Himself used to claim to see his father's ghost, but they had written that off, because he also used to claim that Hal wasn't speaking even though he was. And Mario says that he's seen paranormal figures, and Mario never lies. So Hal says he's withholding judgement. Stice says if Hal pulls him free, he'll show him some paranormal stuff that'll shake his tree good. Hal counts to 3, but then pulls on 2, and there is a horrible sound as his forehead distended, pulling his ordinarily jowly flesh tight, giving Hal a view of what Stice would look like with a radical facelift. It all happened in less than a second, Stice screamed out for him to let go, and Hal does so, deciding that they're going to have to thaw it off. Troeltsch emerges from Axford's room and begins mock-announcing into his fist about reports of screaming. They discuss possibilities for thawing the head. It was as if there were a tacit agreement not to mention Troeltsch's being in Axford's room or to ask where Axford was. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance of impropriety. Hal leaves Stice alone with Troeltsch and goes in search of Kenkle and Brandt, the janitors. Brandt is is the submoronic sidekick to Kenkel who had risen from the rough Roxbury Crossing neighborhood to earn a doctorate in low-temperature Physics, had taken a job with the Office of Naval Research, and then had been court-martialed, for an offense that changes each time he's asked about. He's an incredible spitter, and their janitorial technique consists of Kenkel spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt is about to clean. Himself had met them on the T which they rode recreationally, and they had steered him toward the proper train, and all but carried him to his door, where they were invited in at 2am and have been employed at ETA ever since. As Hal approaches, they are in the midst of a one-sided conversation about 'Canine-Style interface favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings.' Brandt introduces himself to Hal, presumably for the umpteenth time, and Kenkle greets him as 'Good prince Hal.' Hal explains the Stice situation and Kenkle says they are in route, but asks why the hilarity. Hal tries to make a serious face, but Kenkle stills sees it as mirthful. Hal tries to examine his face in the reflection of a window, but it has gotten too light and he looks 'tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.'
notes:
Who is the figure in the bleachers covered in snow? Why does Hal's faith appear as mirthful to Kenkle while to Hal it seems ghostly? It's interesting that Himself was visited by his father's ghost. Can Hal not see his own father's ghost, or has Himself just decided it's no use visiting Hal. What is Himself's ghost trying to accomplish by visiting Stice, and by moving all of the objects around?
p 876-883
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place 8th floor, State House Annex, Boston
no narration, partial transcript of a meeting.
synopsis:
This section transcribes the meeting between Rodney Tine, his son Rodney Jr.. Maureen Hooley from the children's division of Interlace, Carl Yee from Glad Corporation and Tom Veals from Viney & Veals Advertising. Tine has been delayed because of the weather to this meeting which has been called to get an OK before disseminating a 30-second advertising spot aimed at 6-10 year old demographic, to be shown during the 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show.' They discuss the costs, which Yee thinks are a bit high. Tine Jr. reminds him that the following year is Glad's year, and asks if he wants everyone 'staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge' the whole year. Tine Sr. tells him shut up and stop tapping the ruler on the table. Veals, who has a cold, announces that they had to can 'Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie' icon because it had tested as uncool. He says that the present version is rough because there have been some bugs with 'Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass.' Ms. Hooley explains that the mule icon provokes empathy, doesn't come off as an authority figure, plus everything besides the cockroach and the ass is basically copyrighted. Yee says surely he doesn't present himself as an ass. Hooley explains that he's never just Phil, he's Fully Functional Phil, in contrast with the adult figure who reclines passively before the Canadian cartridge. tine says he's foreseeing trouble selling the president on a prancing ass. Hooley explains that Phil's message is that not every cartridge is safe, that there are wicked cartridges with a smily face on the case. At 14 seconds there's a traumatic graphic where the animated cartridge has yellow fangs and is driving away with a kidnapped kid splayed against the car's rear window. 'Stuff of fucking nightmares' Veals says. At this point Yee has an epileptic seizure. Hooley says he'll be fine, just be sure not to mention it happened. Tine Sr finally takes the ruler, actually a weatherman's pointer away from Tine Jr. Hooley says that at this point Phil says that they don't even know what the cartridge to watch out for is even about, just that it looks like something you'd really want to watch, and that it's Canadian, which is why the kidnapper wears a plaid cap. At 19 seconds Phil dances a 'Native-American-cum-Breakdance-type' dance and says be sure to check with Mommy and Daddy before watching any cartridges. Yee is back up, and mentions floppy-ear and buck-teeth product tie-ins. Tine Jr asks if Yee's OK, which sends him into another seizure. Hooley continues, saying that at 25.35 seconds Phil emphatically warns that if Mommy or Daddy is observed in front of the viewer for a long time, that 'No-ho-ho-ho way' should you join them and watch whatever they're watching. Tine Sr says they're ready to view. Hooley says that Veals has already storyboarded an adolescent version of Phil for music videos and soft-core, with a more ironic angle. His trademark expression is 'It's your ass, ace.'
p 883-896
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
In the wake of Joelle's visit, and the ensuing fantasies Gately has yet to really get around to the implications of the wraith, that there may swarms of them flitting around his room. Gately couldn't get through 'Ethan From' in high school and he has no clue where ghostwords like 'sinistral' and 'ommatophoric' [having stalks with eyes at the end] are coming from. Not to mention ghostwords, which he thinks is at least a real word [although it is not]. The nurse gives him a stenographic notebook and a pen, saying that the visitor said that he requested it. He sees that Ferocious Francis has taken up the bedside chair, with his oxygen tank in tow. He coughs as a way of saying hello, and says 'still sucking air I see.' Gately tries to write 'yo' but it comes out illegible. Francis says he's heard that Gately was giving God a little help, protecting his fellowman from his consequences. Francis says he heard Gately had taken on six armed Hawaiians, broken one's nose, shoving bits of it into his brain. Gately tries to ask in writing whether any were dead and who the guy in the hall might be. A doctor comes in, it's one that Gately dislikes, an Indian or Pakistani doctor who had tried to hook Gately up to Demerol drip 4-8 days ago. The doctor looks at Gately's chart and says 'grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation' and asks if the pain is much worse today. He says that the pain is estimated to be comparable to ectopic labor. He asks if Gately is ready to succumb and accept the proper pain medication. He lists a host of 'very safe' alternatives. Gately wishes that Francis would step in help out here. But Francis sits silently and the doctor doesn't appear to notice him. The doctor says that he is Moslem and he too abstains from drugs by religious law, but that under these circumstances, he would accept relief from pain, since no god would will needless suffering on his children. Gately has written 'AA' on the paper, and shooting Francis a 'please-jump-in-here' look. Francis is blowing his nose, and Gately is remembering the taste in the mouth when Demerol is injected. The doctor looks uncomprehending at what Gately has scribbled, and Gately thinks that this must be the disease, the Spider talking. The doctor offers him Talwin, which was Gately's #2 after Demerol. Gately starts to feel that if the doctor offers him Demerol again that he will succumb. Then he thinks that this is the Disease telling him that he won't be able to handle a dosage of medically required Demerol. Instead of stepping in Francis says he's going to leave and let Gately handle this. The doctor pleads with 'Mr. Gately Senior' to help convince Gately of the extreme discomfort to come. Francis dismisses this saying 'Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do.' Gately takes his still good left hand and reaches over and grabs the doctor's balls and squeezes. The doctor screams out 'like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet' and the sound of the scream wakes Gately and causes so much pain that he hits nearly the same operatic note. When he wakes the morning light is 'Dilaudid-colored' and the visitor's chair is back by the wall. The stenographer's notebook was either part of the dream, or has been knocked off the bed. But the railing is folded down, so the part where Joelle had sat there showing him pictures was probably real. He really does have a tube in his throat. For the first time in the trauma wing, he realizes the need to shit, and suspects that the arrangements for that will not be pleasant. The dream could have been either a fever dream, or the Disease. In AA they teach you to accept that thoughts of the Substance pop into your head, and you should let them come and go; just don't entertain them. Gately had always found Demerol with a Talwin kicker to be a 'symmetrical buzz.' He tries to think about anything else to get his mind away from it-- bumper stickers, lobsters in traps with their eyestalks poking through, Joelle, the nurse who sold him bottles Demerol and then let him X her, etc. A large black nurse enters and calls him baby. He tries to convey the need to defecate. Gately was introduced to Demerol at age 23, when the intra-ocular itching forced him to switch from Percocet. The Demerol tabs were called Pebbles [50 mg] and Bam Bam [100 mg] and they were very small, and at first he'd been suspicious they'd have no effect. But once he ran out of everything else and tried them, he never went back. Gately remembers crewing for many of the Percocet/Demerol era with Fackelman and Kite [who had a background in computer hacking], whose scam was to manufacture fake background checks, and then rent a furnished luxury apartment, sell all the furnishings and live there getting high off the proceeds until they received notice for overdue rent. Gately remembers Fackelman bringing girls home to the apartment and pretending that they'd been robbed of all their furnishings. Fackelman and Kite thought that it was odd that Gately was a narcotics man, because he was such a good and stand-up guy, but while on the substance he became taciturn and what Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep called 'Other-Directed.' McDade and Diehl come into Gately's room after visiting Doony Glynn in the gastroenterology ward. They announce that they may not be able to legally depose for Gately after all, due to legal issues. They also inform him that it's looking like the gun with which Gately was shot may be in Lenz's possession, to which he reacts by making a 'whole new kind of noise.' They tell him that Lenz had possibly been spotted, totally relapsed, drunk, wearing a tux and a sombrero with balls. They say that Unit #3 is going to be rented out as a place that treats agoraphobia, and they are arranging to print invitations to a big welcome party. Gately realizes that it must have been them that put the 'help wanted' sign outside the window of the woman who cries for help. Diehl produces an unsigned 'get well' card, which Gately is sure is shoplifted. This brings on a wave of self-pity and resentment, about the fact that these losers won't stand up for him, about having to say no to the grinning doctor, about not getting his notebook, about having to shit. He starts to think that maybe the God of AA is really a cruel one who gets you straight only so you can feel the severity of the punishment more keenly. There are purple cords standing up on Gately's neck, and the visitors are backing away as the nurse comes in with a kidney shaped bedpan and cleaning fluid. The visitors duck out, and Gately's heart sinks with a thud when he sees the attractive nurse, whose job it is to clean up his shit and wipe his ass.
notes:
The doctor is reminiscent of the near Eastern medical attache and seems to possibly have been planted in Gately's dream, along with the fancy vocabulary, by the wraith.
p 896-902
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal is going back up to check on Stice and Mario, check his reflection for signs of unintentional hilarity, and listen to the death aria from 'Tosca.' As he's walking down the hall he's hit with 'some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match.' He's never felt this way off-court before. It was as Lyle had taught them, not totally unpleasant. His advice had been to focus on the your heightened perception on the fear itself. '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 almost edible, there for the ingesting.' Sleepy Perterson passes in his robe. 'But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with overcognitive, bad-trip-like element... something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world...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 the Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect.' Hal starts to imagine all the times he's ever done and ever will do certain things all added up-- the volume of food he'll ever eat added up, a huge room bulging with all the excrement he'll produce. He braces himself and hunches waiting for the worst of it to pass. He lies down in Viewing Room 5, with his toothbrush in the NASA glass balanced on his chest, fighting the feeling that either he'd never been there before, or he'd spent a whole lifetime there. Peterson puts his head in to ask if this qualifies as a blizzard, and after a long silence goes away. Hal lies there letting the saliva drip post-nasally and reviews his family history. His mothers mother was Quebecois and her father was an Anglo-Canadian binge-drinker. Himself's middle name was Orin, the name of his own grandfather. He considers the design and lighting of the viewing room, and the arrangement of Himself's films on the shelf. The Moms's full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza and she's 197 cm tall [13.4 more than Hal, but only up to Himself's ear]. She had an aversion to overhead lighting. Petropolis Kahn puts his head in and asks what happened upstairs, and if Hal's going to breakfast. Hal doesn't answer. He thinks that if it came down to a choice between competitive tennis and Bob Hope it would be nearly impossible to decide. He's appalled by how distantly this appalls him. Rumor has it that there's to be a small Eschaton game today overseen by Pemulis himself, who seems to be avoiding Hal since he returned from the meeting in Natick. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking, even when he was. Hal contemplates the etymology of the word 'blizzard.' He remembers Orin alleging in YTMP [2003] that when he borrowed the Moms's car in the morning he found smeared prints of nude human feet inside on the windshield. John Wayne had been taken to St. Elizabeth's after the incident with the radio broadcast on Tuesday, and stayed overnight, but had recovered enough to come home the next day. The Moms had stayed by his side late into the night. Hal reviews the technical definition of 'blizzard' from a science dictionary, and revels at the dedication required for this level of perspicacity. It seems both admirable and pathetic that people are willing to give their lives to something. 'A flight from in the form of a plunging into.' This is why they start them so young at the Academy, before the questions of 'why and to what grow real beaks and claws.' The original meaning of 'addiction' was being bound over, and dedicated to either legally or spiritually. Hal considers Stice's ghost question, and thinks of Hamlet who for all his questioning, never questions the ghost, or whether his own madness might be real-- that he might be feigning feigning. He thinks of the professor's final soliloquy in Himself's unfinished parody of academia [that the Moms had considered a personal slap] 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency.' Hal considers getting up and checking on Stice, but remains on the floor. The Moms and Tavis were probably not related. Her mother died when she was 8 and shortly afterwards her father disappeared on a drinking binge. He was found and bailed out, and returned with a new bride, who from the wedding photo appears to have been a dwarf, and her infant son, CT. The new bride is homodontic and bears several similarities with Mario. Most of the information on her comes from Orin who at age 7 had had an extended conversation with CT, while the Moms was in labor with Mario, and is thus the info is pretty much suspect. The Moms and CT had never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close. 'The attack of panic and prophylactic focus's last spasm' overwhelms Hal with 'the intense horizontality' that surrounds him in the viewing room-- every line of everything in the room seems horizontal to him. He feels awakened to some basic dimension he's neglected during years of being mostly upright. 'I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.'
notes:
It's noteworthy that Hal's panic attack leaves him feeling more lucid as opposed to disoriented. He becomes divorced from his self, and gazes upon his life from outside. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking. He ponders the possibility that Hamlet was actually mad, but never questioned whether his feigned madness was itself feigned. Are these related? Perhaps Hal's muteness was real, and he cannot accept that. Was there a specific suspected partner in Orin's story of the footprints on the windshield? It seems all but confirmed that Mario is the offspring of CT.
p 902-906
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately's decline from promising football player to drug addict is chronicled, presumably as Gately lies semi-conscious in the hospital ward. His cognomen Bim or Bimmy was derived from the acronym for Big Indestructible Moron. Even at 12 his head was huge, too big for a regulation helmet, and he seemed to be about a yard wide, and every coach who encountered him spoke of limitless possibilities. He played linebacker on defense and fullback on offense, and in spite of his size he was fast, he ran a 40 in 4.4 in the 7th grade. His head was indestructible, whether coming at an opponent with his special helmet, or being used to win bets-- he'd bet a 6-pack that he could endure being clocked in the head with various objects. He was definitely a boy's boy; he had no idea how to impress girls other than to let them watch someone do something extreme to his head. He wasn't a defender of the weak, but neither was he a bully. Gately smoked his first duBois at age 9, and soon he and the other players he hung around wanted nothing much else than to get high and having pissing contests, or talk about Xing big-haired girls. Gately was the only one who was truly interested in football. He had been classified as ADD and Special-Ed from grade school on, and had specific problems with 'Language Arts.' His whole memory of his sinsemilla/screwdriver beginnings telescopes to pissing orange juice into the Atlantic, while the waves washed it back up around his ankles, which he speaks of in AA, as pissing on himself with alcohol right from the start. At 13 he moves on to quaaludes and beer, and the attack of the killer sidewalks. He moved on to a whole new social set including Trent Kite, a laptop-carrying wienie who was perhaps the last fanatical Grateful Dead enthusiast in the east coast, and whose special talent was transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents into a rudimentary lab for the synthesis of drugs. Gately's favorites were Kite's Quaalude isotopes, which he called 'QuoVadis' and which with a couple of beers inevitably led to the attack of a killer sidewalk. It was basically a 2-year brownout, which also coincided with the ex-MP leaving Gately's mother for a Newburyport divorcee, who apparently put up a more sporting fight. Amazingly, none of this really hurt Gately's football playing. He limited his intake to nighttime, not so much as a beer before 6pm. He caught up on sleep during classes. Most of the kids he hung out with were expelled by sophomore year, Gately made it until 17. QuoVadis and beer are lethal in terms of homework, and Gately had enough academic troubles even straight. Kite managed to tutor him through remedial math and science, and he and another player had arranged for the French teacher to have her 'strabysmic eyeballs fucked out' by a tanned football coach. English was Gately's tripping point. The coaches tried out all 4 English teachers, but none would agree to pass a student who couldn't do the work, regardless of his tragic home situation and his limitless football promise. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp in May, losing eligibility for the fall season, and withdrew for a year to preserve his junior season. His whole 16th year is a blur, he survived on the vegetables from his mother's vodka drinks, and when he returned for junior year season at 17 he was flabby and enervated, and could hardly keep the shakes off on the field. His coaches sent him for PET scans, and his ability to endure Ethan From, even in comic book form was gone. Kite was gone to college at Salem State to study computer science, which meant that Gately was on his own in math and science now. Just before midterms that Gately was set to fail, his mother had the cirrhotic hemorrhage, and the backs of Gately's eyeballs were too itchy [from Percocet] to even wave goodbye as the ambulance took her away. He smoked his first gasper, from her half empty pack, and he never went back to school or played organized ball again.
notes:
This section is a sort of microcosm for the book--a hilarious trip through Gately's past, which by the time it's finished is incredibly sad.
p 906-911
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal may have been dozing. He seems to remember people poking their heads in. Then at some point Pemulis appeared, his right eye either twitchy or swollen from sleep. Hal considers asking him to explain where he's been, but opts for a less complicated response, telling him that he's just lying here. Pemulis says he heard something about hysterics. Pemulis doesn't look good; he's unshaven and his color isn't good. Hal is thinking of the lecture in 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...' and also of CT's misadventure at Himself's funeral. Meanwhile Pemulis is asking that Hal come and do some 'important interfacing.' Pemulis says Eschaton's a no-go, and asks if Hal has seen the Moms around. Pemulis implies that this partly has to do with the DMZ, and Hal reminds him of the 30 days of drug-free living. Freer interrupts them to tell of the piece of human flesh that's stuck to the window. Pemulis tries to shrug him off, saying this is a tete-a-tete. Kiernan McKenna arrives and says that Troeltsch is charging $2 to see. Pemulis says this is what he means about going somewhere private, and asks when he's ever asked Hal to urgently dialog before. Hal answers not in the last few days. Pemulis says that he's going to have to eat before seeing Stice anyway, so maybe he'll come back afterwards. Hal asks him to get down the cartridge of Good-Looking Men...and cue it 2300 or 2350. Pemulis muses over the titles of Himself's films, half of which he hasn't even heard of. Meanwhile Hal's mind goes back to the funeral, which took place April 5 or 6, just west of the Great Concavity. A gull had shit on CT and when he'd opened his mouth in shock, a fly had flown in his mouth. The Moms had laughed hardest. Pemulis had cued the cartridge to the place where Paul Anthony Heaven, a a data-entry drone that Himself had loved to employ for his monotone speech, was delivering the lecture, saying that the real consequence of the Flood is revealed to be a pandemic of hydrophobia. Behind him a film by Peterson called The Cage was running. There are shots of the bored students. The lecturer says 'We thus become in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God.' Hal considers how the critics miss the pathos of Heaven's speech, instead focussing on the presence of dumb or unappreciative audiences in Himself's films as evidence of the auteur's hostility toward the audience. The lecture continues, 'for while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead.' All the while Heaven is silently weeping, tears running down his gaunt face and falling from view. Hal muses 'then this too began to seem familiar.'
the italicized words in this section
clinamen- the 'swerve' or indeterminacy in the motion of atoms, taken up by literary critic Harold Bloom to describe the inclination of writers to 'swerve' from the influence of their predecessors.
tessera- an individual tile in a mosaic, or in math a curvilinial parallelogram, also the Greek number 4
kenosis- Greek for emptiness, having a religious meaning of being empty and receptive to being filled with God.
daemonization- daemons are good or malevolent supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as the ghosts of dead heroes.
askesis- Greek for the discipline of repressing lust or other worldly concerns
notes:
Is Pemulis's eye twitching because he has been freed from the worry over urinalysis, and gone on a binge? It's notable that Himself would use The Cage in the background of his own film, and also that the critics interpreted his obsession with the 'figurant' as a disdain for the audience. Once again Himself's film seems to precipitate what will transpire in his own [after]life. Is it just the tears that Hal finds familiar or is it the battle to the death with the loved one? It's pretty ironic that Himself has reached Hal on a level that few fathers ever reach their sons, and neither he nor Hal can recognize it.
p 911-916
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
More of Gately's backstory unfolds while he lies in the trauma ward. After he left school, Gately didn't go straight to burglary, although he did steal a few valuables from some of the nurses from whom he copped drug samples. His first job was for Whitey Sorkin, a North Shore bookie. Gately and Gene Fackelmann were Sorkin's muscle, collecting debts. Gately had never understood Whitey's moniker, since he spent hours under UV lamps to treat his cluster headache, and his skin was roughly the color of the Pakistani MD who had informed Gately that his mother's cirrhotic stroke had left her 'at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout.' Fackelmann was also a huge guy, and their collective nickname was the Twin Towers. The weren't bodyguards, and they didn't call Sorkin Boss, mostly they just collected debts. They didn't have to break bad debtor's kneecaps, usually Gately would just inform them that Sorkin was concerned, and work out an arrangement. The size of the Twin Towers was usually deterrent enough. The only cases that called for coercion were the real addict types who'd get themselves in a hole and try to bet their way out, and who would make up sob-stories of ill loved ones, which Gately would have to listen to and then report to Sorkin, and find out whether to believe them. This was Gately's first exposure to real addiction. These cases were what caused Sorkin's cluster headaches. Actual violence only entered the picture when the hole was deep enough that Sorkin was willing to forego future patronage, and then he'd try to demonstrate that he was the least pleasant bookie to be indebted to. Fackelmann would always handle the first stages, a light beating and a broken finger or two. This was partly because Gately would get carried away too easily, and reduce the guy to a condition not conducive to future gambling, or debt paying, and this would cause Gately great remorse, and lead to massive and temporarily debilitating drug use. So usually Gately only got called into action on the really serious, write-off type cases. Although Sorkin paid them handsomely, $1000 a week wasn't enough to support their escalating addictions. Fackelmann moonlighted with IDs and 'creative personal checking' while Gately worked security for card games and drug deliveries. They were able to cop together since Fackelmann was devoted to Dilaudid and Gately to Percocets. When Trent Kite got the boot from Salem State, he joined the crew, Fackelmann turned him on to Dilaudid and they were friends for life. They started the fake-ID, credit-history, luxury-apartment scam. Gately trying to Abide in the trauma ward, remembers one afternoon in Dec 2001 [the last year of unsubsidized time] in an apartment, helping with laminating a rush order on fake IDs while the other two were out fencing the furnishings, save for the TV viewer, which was always the last thing to go. He was watching Boston U play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl, in which Boston's punter is inspiring the announcers to rhapsodize. Gately is suddenly and out of nowhere struck by the loss of organized ball, and begins to cry like a babe. It was 2 days later that he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another in Danvers, and 3 months later he was in Billerica Minimum Security.
notes:
Gately is unconsciously linked to the Incandenza's 8 years before the fact by way of Orin's performance in the Forsythia Bowl.
p 916
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 20
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis is about to retrieve his stash to take it to the Entrepot [trading post]. He finds that the ceiling panel in the hallway of Subdorm B has fallen to the floor, and there seems to be no trace of 'the shoe.'
p 916-934
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately hadn't suspected that Fackelmann had been skimming money from Sorkin all along, and he didn't find out until the 'not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob' which took place while Gately was out on bail. Gately had lost his taste for violence and had taken to burglary instead. Fackelmann had a new partner, Bobby C, a 'bad news' fuchsia-haired punk kid who liked to hurt people. Fackelmann had been keeping long-shot bets here and there, without calling them in, which is suicidal because if they came in he'd have to cough up the money. It wasn't until Fackelmann's map had been presumably eliminated, that Gately and Kite found $22,000 taped to his porn-cartridge case. Gately was amazed that Fackelmann had had the will to save this money against those long-shot bets. Gately split the money with Kite, and then turned his half over to Sorkin, mostly out of guilt for not knowing that Fax had been scamming the overgenerous boss, but also to cheer Sorkin up, and also in Fax's memory. Gately didn't rat out Kite, who spent his half of the money on Grateful Dead bootlegs and computer gear, all of which he quickly sold for drugs, and by the time Gately was out of Billerica, Kite was so far gone that Gately had to become the brains of the team. The beautiful RN who had flushed his colon returns to Gately's room with a doctor whom Gately doesn't recognize, and they set up some kind of device on the adjacent bed. Gately remembers that Fackelmann's favorite expression was 'that's a goddamned lie!' which he used in response to nearly everything. Bobby C claimed to have a collection of ears. The new MD is childlike and Gately despises him. The RN is so beautiful that it's 'almost grotesque' and Gately eyes her 'healthy' breasts, and laments the fact that he's never actually been with a healthy or even sober woman. When the nurse reaches up to unscrew a bolt, Gately thinks more ghostwords as he gazes at her thighs, 'lisle' [a fine thread used to make underwear] and 'embrasure' [an opening in a window with slanted sides making it wider on the outside than on the inside]. Then as he watches the obvious sexual tension as the MD ogles the RN, a third ghostword comes to mind, 'circumambient' [surrounding]. He realizes as he averts his gaze, that it's sleeting outside. The RN says her name is Cathy/Kathy, and Gately is self-conscious of his body odor. As they assemble something above the bed that looks to Gately like part of an electric chair, the nurse tells the doctor that Gately is allergic and doesn't get any meds. Gately wallows in the shame of having taken a dump in front of anyone as healthy and beautiful as the nurse. The MD whose name sounds like Pressburger or Prissburger, asks what Gately is intubated for. The nurse explains in technical language that Dr. Pendleton was concerned that he would get an infection from a fragment of the projectile, or have a hemorrhage or mucoidal flux. The RN says she'll try to fit in a sponge bath before she goes on break, and tells the doctor to let her screw in the cranial brace, with which he's been fumbling. The MD tries to impress the nurse with some technical jargon, which Gately finds pathetic. Gately thinks that since they never brought him the notepad, perhaps Joelle's visit was a dream, which means that it was also a dream that she was wearing Erdedy's sweatpants. Gately notes the sun, and thinks that it must be nearly 1600h, which means maybe he can avoid the horror of getting sponged by the C/Kathy, and instead get sponged by the 'big hairy-moled 1600-2400 nurse.' He wishes again for the pen and paper to communicate his desire to watch the Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show at 1600, which had been a tradition with Kite and Fackelmann and him. He ponders if perhaps the man with the hat in the hallway had intercepted the request from Joelle, and was trying to keep him from getting his story straight before they interrogated him. Gately, like most addicts, suffers late-afternoon dread and has always tried to have some way to block it out, whether Mr. Bouncety-Bounce or Meetings. He traces his fear of being left alone in a room to his childhood, when his mother would pass out nightly, leaving him essentially all alone. The tube in his throat is functioning the same way now, leaving him alone in his head. Plus the late afternoon was the time of day that the wraith had visited him yesterday. He admits to himself that he liked the dialog, the fact that the wraith had been able to communicate with him. Then suddenly he returns to the memory of Fackelmann's demise, and Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep's involvement. Pamela was an upscale but directionless and unhealthy girl from Danvers, whom Gately became involved with. She fell in love with any man 'chivalrous' enough to drive her home without raping her after she had 'swooned and passed out' at one of the clubs on Route 1, which she did on a nightly basis. Fackelmann had handed her off to him one night, and Gately drove her home. She was always either leglessly drunk or passively hungover, meaning that any sex with her, would qualify as 'taking advantage' which Gately never did. She was a beautiful sleeper, and she spent so much time asleep that Gately pictured her at her hospital job asleep. Kite and Fackelmann thought Gately was out of his mind. Gately loved that she would awaken from her stupor long enough to laugh whenever he made the joke about being robbed as he carried her into the stripped apartment. She wore long white gloves, and called drinks 'highballs' in imitation of her mother, who was more of a lush than Gately's own mother. It was Pamela who first clued Gately into the suicidal mistaken-bet scam that Fackelmann had gotten himself into. Gately has to coax the story out of Pamela, whose coherence is not too dependable. Fackelmann had taken a bet from a guy known only as 'Eighties Bill' who was a 50-ish 'corporate take-overer' with red suspenders and docksiders. He had received some kind of a tip that made him want to bet $125K against his Yale, his alma mater, and Fackelmann has to call into Sorkin to get approval. Except Sorkin is being treated for his facial pain by Dr. Robert ['Sixties Bob'] Monroe, who had interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary's original circle, and also friends with Kite, by way of their shared enthusiasm for the Grateful Dead. He often took Kite around to search out Dead-related paraphernalia, and even fenced stuff for Kite [and hence for Gately] covering the money for Kite, and trading the stuff later. Gately has to slip an ice cube into Pamela's neckline to keep her focussed on the important details. So the point was that Sorkin couldn't take Fackelmann's call, and he got instead, Sorkin's secretary Gwendine O'Shay, a fomer IRA moll who'd been hit on the head one too many times, and whose skull was 'soft as puppy shit in the rain.' She's familiar with Eighties Bill and his penchant for Yale, and she gets the bet wrong, thinking that Eighties Bill is trying to bet for Yale. And she verifies that there's a fix against Yale, namely that a team of cheerleaders has been recruited go pantyless in order to exploit the neurologic disorder of Yale's star forward, which renders him vertiginous after intercourse. So O'Shay OKs the bet, which she thinks is for Yale. But then there's a wrench in the fix caused by a last minute intervention by the 'Female Objectification Protection and Protest Phalanx' [the FOPPPs] who swoop in on their Harley's and remove the pantyless cheerleaders, leaving the star forward's neurology intact. When Yale wins by 20 points, Fackelmann collects the money from Eighties Bill, and brings it to Sorkin, not knowing that the bet had been mixed up. Sorkin is working on spreadsheets with special goggles that look like lobsters' eyes on stalks. Sorkin eyes the 'Go Bruins' bag in Fackelmann's hands and says he fails to see the joke. He gives Fackelmann the money to give to Eighties Bill, and says that he can't really blame Fax or O'Shay, because the fix was supposed to have been in. Fackelmann says nothing, but eventually realizes what's going on here, and starts to visualize how much Dilaudid $250K will buy from a certain Chinatown dealer, and how much the street value of the drugs would be, provided he and Kite could move to some far away urban market. By this time Pamela is 'irreversibly swooned' but Gately can put the rest of the story together on his own. When he saw the massive amount of wholesale Dilaudid from Dr. Wo, Kite would have filled Fackelmann in that Eighties Bill is the son of Sixties Bob, Sorkin's personal migrainologist. And even if Sixties Bob somehow didn't tell Sorkin, he'd probably hear from Bobby C who regularly scored from Dr. Wo, and was sure to hear about his coworker's massive purchase. In short, Fackelmann was a Dead Man. Instead of donning a disguise and getting as far from Boston as possible, Fax did what any drug addict would do, he beelined it to the luxury apartment and started shooting up. And this is why he's been squatting in a corner of the living room for the past few days. Gately realizes that at root a drug addict is a 'craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.' The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela was spoon her. The worst part to Gately, was the pretense that he was getting up to check on Fackelmann. He knew full well that the first thing that Fax would do would be to unwrap a new syringe and invite him to share in the mountain of Dilaudid. Which to Gately's shame he did, telling himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company. At this point Gately's memory is punctuated by a fever dream that he's riding north in a bus the same color as its own exhaust. The dream goes on and on without any kind of arrival. Gately comes to when he feels what feels like the tongue of his pet kitten Nimitz on his forehead. When he opens his eyes he sees that the wraith is back, and that the tongue belongs not to Nimitz, but to another more physically fit wraith in 'faggy biking shorts' who is licking his forehead. No man has licked Gately's forehead and lived! He strikes out reflexively, and realizes that the wraith's breath has no warmth or smell. The pain wakes him temporarily and the wraiths vanish. He falls back into something that's not quite sleep and his dreams continue. One dream consists only of the color blue. He's both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out of the room but never Joelle or Ferocious Francis. He dreams there are people in the room, but he's not one 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.'
notes:
As Gately passively ogles the attractive nurse, there's a distinct aura of Himself in his thoughts. In a typical DFW move, Gately has to try to keep Pamela focussed on the 'important' details, when in reality her diversion about Sixties Bob being a fence, is perhaps the most important detail to the overall story. Presumably he was the fence for the stash of the 'arty looking film cartridges' from the DuPlessis burglary [p 55-60]. The 'dream' that begins with the long busride, and Gately being inside of a blue bag and continues with Gately and Hal digging up the corpse of Himself is clearly no dream, since we know already from p 15-17 that Hal has a memory of the same episode. Presumably Gately has been kidnapped from the hospital in a blue body bag and driven by bus with Hal to Himself's gravesite, and made to dig up the corpse, only to discover that they are too late and the cartridge that was buried with him is already gone.
p 934
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
A 'grotesquely huge' woman with stubble bulging in her hose grabs Joelle as she comes out of the hospital, and tells her that she's in almost mind-boggling danger. Joelle says 'this is supposed to be news?'
p 934-938
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Back at the luxury apartment Gately and Fackelmann are still indulging in narcotics and M&M's the next morning, watching a video consisting of nothing but flames of different kinds, that Fackelmann got from Kite. Kite had declined to join them, and had packed up everything he owned and was on his way to a supposed trade show in another zip code. Pamela gets up, vomits and mousses her hair before leaving for work. Gately and Fackelmann continue their binge at a furious pace. Every time Gately asks anything about how Fackelmann had come into so much Dilaudid, Fackelmann gives the standard answer: 'that's a goddamn lie.' They found this increasingly funny. Eventually Fackelmann wets his pants, and the urine pools on the floor. The phone rang. At some point Gately tried to stand and was assaulted by the floor, and then he wet his own pants. The intercom's buzzer rang. Around sunset, Fackelmann has a convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants. The sun seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo. They ran out of distilled water and Fackelmann sopped up some candy-stained urine from the floor and used it to cook up the Dilaudid. Gately nods into a dream that he's on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides say 'Paragon Bus Lines: The Gray Line' and he realizes [in the trauma ward] that this is the same bus from his dream that went on and on. But he has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream. His fever returns to new heights that make his heart monitor send an alert to the nurse station. Back in the apartment, the buzzer sounds again and it's Pamela voice on the intercom, asking to be let in. Fackelmann was making his hand into the shape of a claw and then a spider. Gately gets up and tries to take a step, and misses the floor. He crashes down with a giant thud that knocks the TP viewer to the floor. Fackelmann holds out the spider for Gately's inspection.
notes:
Once again the 'dream' of the bus ride is the real part. Perhaps this is the same bus on which Fortier is riding [p 724-728]
p 938-941
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place presumably near St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle is being interviewed presumably by Steeply. The questions are given only as 'Q.' She explains that she was only in two scenes. In the first scene she's going through s revolving door, when she sees someone whom she hasn't seen in a long time, and with whom she was formerly very close. They're to give each other shocked looks of recognition. She tries to follow the other person out through the revolving door, while he tries to follow her in. They do that for several whirls. The actor was male, not one of Jim's regulars, but the character is epicene [indeterminate sex]. She says she assumes the interviewer can relate.The other scene was filmed by a camera mounted in a bassinet, and had her in a floor length gown, leaning over the camera in the crib and apologizing. There were at least 20 minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry.' She says that she was 'not exactly veiled.' The camera in the crib was fitted with an 'auto wobble' to make it blur, and looked like an eyestalk. She says that Jim cared more about lenses than the camera, and he made his own. She said the wobble was meant to reproduce the 'neonatal nystagmus' of an infant's vision, and that's what was driving the scene. Her face wasn't important, and wasn't meant to be captured realistically by the lens. She says that she never saw it, and that the masters were to be buried with him, at least according to his will. She says it had nothing to do with him killing himself. He'd stopped being drunk all the time and that's what killed him-- he couldn't take it, but he'd made a promise. She says she doesn't know if he even finished the master, but that there was nothing unendurable or enslaving about either of her scenes. She says he 'joked' about making something too perfect, and that he always referred to his work as 'entertainments' but he meant it ironically. He never would have carried the joke far enough to make an anti--version or an antidote. She says that when he spoke of it being terminally compelling it was a jab at her, because she used to say that the veil was there to disguise the fact that she was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a joke she'd gotten from one of his films, the Medusa-Odalisk one. Even in UHID she'd hidden by hiddenness. She says that Jim had called his failed piece 'too perfect to release' as an ironic joke to her. She says that 'if it got made, and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried.' After several undisclosed questions she says that where he's buried is itself buried now, in the annulation-zone, and that's the part of the joke that he didn't know, but would certainly have enjoyed, that if they want the cartridge now...
notes:
Joelle's description of the Entertainment is quite different than Molly Notkin's [p 787-795] but jibes with the wraith's description [p 827-845]. Perhaps even with the auto wobble, Joelle's unveiled face is too lethally beautiful for people to stand. She clearly doesn't buy that explanation. But the fact that she sees the cartridge as an ironic joke sheds doubt on her understanding of it. Himself's wraith suggested that the film was by no means ironic. The references eyestalks permeate these final pages, and this description of Himself's cameral with its special lens seems as close to a source.
p 941-958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
By coincidence when Hal returns to his room he finds Coyle watching one of Himself's cartridges, Accomplice!, while Mario gets dressed. Mario notes that Hal woke up early, and that he looks sad. Mario describes how Troeltsch had tried to put toilet paper on Stice's forehead, and now that is stuck. Coyle is removing his apnea mouthguard, and Hal tells him not to think of putting it on his bed. Coyle tells Mario to tell him the worst part, which is that Coyle awoke to find Ortho missing and his bed appeared to be bolted to the ceiling. Coyle says that Stice explained to him that he had been selected by some kind of beneficiary ghost, who's trying to teach him not to underestimate the value of ordinary things, in order to help his game. Coyle says Stice is losing it, and that he had bet Coyle that he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, which after a half hour of trying he hadn't been able to do. Coyle can't decide whether to go Schtitt, because what if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game. Mario reminds Hal that there are messages on the machine. Cosgrove Watt [star of Accomplice!] had been one of Himself's regulars, and one of the few professional actors that he used. Himself thought that amateur actors would help strip away the realism, and remind the audience that they were in fact watching actors. The irony that it required non-actors to achieve the I'm-only-acting feel, was one of the critics' principle interests in Himself's early work. The truth was that Himself had simply not wanted the actors to get in the way of his technical achievements. One way to look at his late work was that in abandoning this, he had been so desperate to make something entertaining and 'conducive to self forgetting' that he had professionals and amateurs emoting wildly all over the place. Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but not a very good one, and before Himself discovered him, his claim to fame had been portraying a Dancing Gland in a series of TV spots. Once Himself had recruited Watt, he used him in almost every project, and even put him and his family up at ETA for a time. Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles in which he plays a depraved older man who meets a young male prostitute at a bus station and takes him home to his apartment, which was in reality the apartment that Himself had rented for Orin and the PGOAT. The boy agrees to have sex with the man, but insists that he use a condom. The old man's thoughts are rendered by thought bubbles, revealing that he's enraged by the insinuation that he might have It, the HIV virus. He dons the condom, and the sex scene is done under bright lamps without any soft-focus or music. What the boy doesn't realize is that the old man is holding a razor in his hand which he uses to cut through condom and phallus alike. Himself uses a footnote to point out that he's honoring what is apparently a homosexual-sex-scene convention that the recipient keeps his face turned away from the camera until the dominant partner is finished. When the old man removes his bloody deflated phallus, the boy turns to the audience and utters a mute howl, as he sees that his thigh is marked with the eight spidery tentacles of the Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is the symptom of It. The boy is sobbing that the old man has made him a murderer, and then he shrieks 'Murderer!' over and over for 500 seconds, which amounts to a third of the total length of the cartridge. Hal has argued with Mario about this ending, questioning whether there was a theoretical end to which the ending strived, or if Himself was simply a shitty editor. it was only after Himself's death that theorists really addressed this issue-- a woman at UC Irvine had earned tenure arguing that the reason-vs-no-reason debate illuminated one of the central conundra of apres-garde film, which involved the question of why so much ambitious film was so boring, and so much shitty commercial entertainment was so much fun. Outside the window the snow was piling up, and the TP was showing weather reports, which were all about snow, showing cars abandoned and buried in snow, and reporters floundering in gusts of snow trying to deliver their reports. This was the worst snowstorm since BS 1998 and the second worst since BS 1993. The news shows a man in a wheelchair staring stonily at the snow-covered ramp outside the State House. The news says that this storm was not a Nor'easter, but rather a collision of a moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front. A man impotently brushing the snow from his windshield becomes a thematic image of the news broadcasts. Hal has never skied, skated, or snowmobiled, since winter sports were all but forbidden by ETA. Hal can barely recall the '98 blizzard, which happened when the academy had only been open for a few months. The storm came barreling in from southeast Canada in March. The players had to be led to the Lung single file holding a rope, with Schtitt in the lead carrying a flare. Hal remembers Himself sitting in a chair sipping brandy throughout the storm. His interest moved from tennis pedagogy to film almost as soon as the academy was completed. The move to ETA from Weston had dragged on for nearly a year, because the Moms had attachments. Hal is lying on his subdorm's carpet which he had acquired during his Byzantine erotica phase. Hal had seen a titillating reference in the OED, and like Himself, he had stumbled from one obsession to another. Hal cannot distinguish his memories of the Weston house, from Mario's description of his own memories. He remembers a three-story Victorian, high above an elmed street. The Moms had an intricate garden, and her dog S. Johnson had a pen abutting the garage. Hal's memories seem more like tableaux or snapshots than films. He remembers 'Block Mother' in the front window. He remembers the smell of Lemon Pledge and a 'chilling' framed photo of Fritz Lang directing Metropolis which predates Himself's film obsession. He remembers chairs covered in protective plastic, a divan with cigarette burns and books, videos, cans in the kitchen, all alphabetized. He has a 'surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane.' Some of the memories must be confabulated or dreamed since the Moms would never have a divan with burns in it. Hal recalls Himself slumped in a chair while the Moms told him that she'd long since lost hope he could hear what she was telling him. It's impossible for Hal to reconcile the Himself of his memories with the director of Accomplice! with its sodomy and razors. Hal remembers a church down the street with a sign reading 'Life is like tennis-Those who serve-Best usually win.' In Hal's dorm room he has the 'really prurient part' of the Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, dating from his Byzantinalia phase. There are five chairs in a room where no one even uses chairs. Hal knows that the rooms guilloche consists of 811 interwoven circles. He realizes that he cannot remember what he has done with a Constantine frieze that once hung from the guilloche. 'There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.' The Weston living room had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum lighting and the Moms's jungle of Green Babies. It takes Hal way too long to recall the concise term for optical perspective, when looking down at his NASA glass resting on his chest. It's hard to remember the Weston living room, in part because many of the things were transferred to the ETA living room, including a table on which Mario had chipped a tooth after an 'accidental' shove from Orin. The table had been a gift from Himself's mother who had died of emphysema. The Moms's mother had died of an infarction when she was 8, and her father had died under unknown circumstances during her sophomore year at McGill. The L'Islet potato farm is now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost. Orin had liked to do an impersonation of Himself's mother in her wheelchair, extending a claw. It's easier to see the climacteric [menopausal] changes in the Moms's body since she's confined herself to the Headmaster's House. Hal thinks of how he had to lie in answer to therapists questions like 'how does watching your mother age make you feel inside?' because the truth, Nothing At All, sounds like a textbook lie. It occurs to Hal with some force, that he doesn't want to play today, even if an indoor meet is arranged. He imagines contriving an accident where he injures his bad ankle, perhaps tearing the ligaments so that he never has to play again, so that he can be the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. he's then hit with 'the really moving thing' Himself had said to Orin concerning adult films, which films Hal finds more sad than nasty. Orin and some friends had gotten ahold of an X-rated video, and word got back to Himself that they were planning a screening. Himself brought Orin into the office, gave him a soda, and got a confession out of him without saying a word. Himself said that Orin was old enough, and could, if he desired, go ahead with the screening discreetly keeping the younger kids away. But if Orin wanted his fatherly advice, he'd advise that Orin not watch pornography until he'd experienced for himself what a moving thing sex can be. He said he was afraid Behind the Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality. Orin had claimed that what he found so moving was the assumption that he was still a virgin. Hal finds it sad that this rare openness on the part of Himself was wasted on Orin. Hal tries to picture Stice hoisting his bed up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Hal knows John Wayne has come into the room by the sound of his stride and breathing. He doesn't look at him, and neither speaks. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin until he met the Moms, and he will concede that he was faithful to her, and that his attachment to Joelle wasn't sexual. The Moms has made little attempt to hide her liaison with John Wayne. Hal cannot imagine the Moms and Himself in a sexual situation, but he pictures the Moms and CT as having 'frenetic and weary' sex, with the Moms staring at the ceiling while CT talked nonstop. Hal imagines all of the Moms's affairs were more a matter of athleticism and flexibility than passion. The passion would come in keeping it hidden. Hal wonders if there's a connection between this and all of the Himself films titled Cage, or to the veiled girl whom he became so attached to. Hal's picture of John Wayne and Moms having sex involves her staring upward motionless, and him above her face between her breasts and tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard.
notes:
The wraith has apparently revealed his purpose to Stice, or perhaps just implanted the info in his head, like he did the ghostwords in Gately's head. Note that Himself's idea of entertainment is 'self-forgetting' which is half way to self-eliminating, which apparently his final film achieved. It seems that Hal's suggestion that the ending of Accomplice was the result of bad editing, is close to the truth, which seems to be that Himself was so engrossed in accomplishing his objective, that he was oblivious to the fact that it would make for a boring film. Also, it seems worth noting that the 'murderer!' ending is pretty similar to the endless repeated variations of "I's so very sorry' that apparently comprise most of his final film. Note that Hal remembers the alphabetized soup cans and the knife in the mirror, perhaps DFW is trying to clue the reader in to recalling the crucial opening section [p 15-17], in which Hal remembers both of these things as well as the episode where a masked John Wayne watches while he and Gately dig up Himself's head. Note that the Moms tells Himself that she has lost hope of him hearing what she tells him. This seems related to the fact that Hal either doesn't speak, or Himself cannot hear him. Again the reference to Byzantine erotica seems to draw our attention back to the opening section of the book. It's perhaps crucial that Himself was responsible for developing annulation which produced the Great Concavity, which in turn demolished what remained of The Moms's family's estate. There are layers of irony in the story of Orin's porn tape, with Himself's own apparently impoverished and lonely idea of sexuality being passed to his sons in very different ways. And Orin's idea coming [perhaps even directly] more from the Moms. Hal cannot apparently see sex in anything but a detached way, much like one his tableaux.
p 958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle figures that they've let her loose just to see where she'll go, so she goes to Ennet House. Her clothes and veil are soaked from the snow [hence the dating of these episodes to Nov 20, or later]. She had thought of removing the veil in an attempt to get away from the linebacker federal lady. She considers whether Pat will be convinced to put her in quarantine and remove the wheelchair ramps. She sees a police car in the snow outside Ennet House as she approaches.
notes:
The fact that the last time Gately saw Joelle at the hospital was Nov 20 or later, implies that the episode that he 'dreams' of digging up Himself's head must have happened at least a few days after that, presumably after the AFR had acquired Hal from ETA.
p 958-960
YDAU [2009] presumably
place unknown lunchtime AA meeting
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Someone named Mikey is speaking at an AA meeting. He tells of going to pickup his son to take him bowling. The son is in the custody of his sister, whom he calls 'the cunt' and his mother, and Mikey has been issued a restraining order, requiring him to get their permission to visit. He calls to get permission and the sister asks him to wait while she checks with the mother, when she returns to the phone to announce he's been granted permission he asks if she wants a medal for letting him see his son, and she hangs up. This brings out the 'old Mikey' and drives over and parks on the grass, and goes to the door and says 'fuck you you cunt' and tells her she needs therapy. The sister says that the son has just recently had his cast removed after the stunt that Mikey pulled with 'that bimbo' and tells Mikey to get off the porch, denying him permission to see the son. When Mikey refuses, the sister gets the phone and threatens to call the police, and finally he gets in his truck, and in spite of his rage manages to leave. Then driving along he starts to pray and realizes that he has to go back and apologize. He does apologize and asks to at least see the kid without his cast, and the sister says 'fuck you... we don't accept your fucking apology.' To the AA members he says that he needed to share this because he scared himself. He asks if he's trying to set himself up to need a drink. He says that it looks like Vinnie is about to gong him, and calls on Tommy E. to speak next.
notes:
The meaning and placement of this section are, to this reader, completely elusive,
p 960-964
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Pat M]
synopsis:
Pat M is meeting with the ADA from the North Shore, who says that he's here about one the residents but not professionally, which is apparently the condition for Pat to have allowed the meeting. He says that he's been at St. Elizabeth for three days now, and he needs to share this to get up his nerve, and that his sponsor's no help. He says that he's in Phob-Comp-Anon, which is for codependency issues with loved ones who are phobic and/or compulsive. He says that Tooty's tormented by some oral-hygiene-violation issues, which it turns out have roots in her childhood. He says he's at the Ninth step, working on making direct amends with whomever he's harmed. He says it's Gately, and acknowledges her constraints, and assures her he wants nothing from her on him. He says he's held Gately accountable for making Tooty's issues reflare, and has been waiting to get him, and then this last chance 'went federal and then fizzled.' His entire group has said that pursuing Gately for the incident out of resentment will doom him, and will not help Tooty. He says he needs to let it go, not just prosecution, that was the easy part, he's already tossed the file for this man he's long wanted nothing more than to see behind bars. He says that the worst part is that he has to make amends, to reach out to him and ask for forgiveness. He says that he hasn't tossed the Canadian file, just let it simmer without pursuing it, because ironically if he tossed it, it would expose him to conflict of interest. He asks for Pat's confidence in this matter. He says that he cannot do it. He's sat outside Gately's room repeating the Serenity Prayer, but still believes that Gately is evil, and he can't go through with it. Pat says that it sounds very hard. He says he doesn't know why he's come here, and that he doesn't expect help or counsel. He says he's accepted that he has to do it, but that he hasn't yet been willing.
notes:
This explains why the shadowy figure outside the hospital room didn't just apprehend Gately.
p 964-971
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 [immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fete]
place ETA
narrated in first person by a player other than Hal
synopsis:
The unnamed ETA student says that usually part of the experience of having a gala is getting to watch the different people arrive, but not so for this one. The players are all in the locker room getting ready to exhibit. John Wayne hunched as always, with a towel over his head, is running a coin over the backs of his fingers. Arslanian is still blindfolded. Rumors have circulated about the Quebec Jr team, and about the courts at MIT, where they were to play. Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early morning, but Doucette said that he was lurking around the West House dumpsters looking 'anxiously depressed.' A small cheer went up when Otis P Lord entered, having returned from having the monitor removed from his neck. He would not be playing today. Rumor had it that the Quebec team had been seen, and they were in reality some kind of Special-Olympicish adult wheelchair-tennis contingent. A couple of the sub-14s went to check it out and never returned. Across the wall on the female side Thode could be heard. She had thrown a tantrum because Poutrincourt was apparently AWOL. Loach is shaving Hal's left ankle for the taping, and people note that Hal isn't eating thew customary Snickers or AminoPal. Traub and Whale later said that Hal was being weird, for example asking Loach if he ever felt like being in a pre-match locker room gave him the feeling that he'd been there so many times before that it was all pre-recorded, that they all existed as basically Fourier Transforms of postures and routines, all recorded and call-uppable, but as a consequence also erasable. Usually before a match Hal's face had a wide-eyed ingenuish anxiety of someone who'd never been in this situation before, but today
p 809-827
YDAU [2009] Nov 12
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately is lying in the trauma wing hallucinating that the ceiling is bulging and deflating, just as the polyurethane covering a hole in the ceiling above his bed had done when he was a child. As a child he had named the polyurethane hole Herman. He couldn't feel his upper right side, and he couldn't really move. His throat burned when he breathed. The blurred figure in the next bed sat upright very still, and 'seemed to have a box on its head.' He had been having a 'repetitious ethnocentric dream' where he's trying unsuccessfully to tie an 'Oriental' without a nose or mouth to a chair. He perceives going in and out of consciousness as light cycles, or as being held underwater and occasionally coming up for air. One time he comes up for air and finds that Tiny Ewell is seated beside him. Ewell had shaved his goatee. This was Gately's first full night in the trauma ward, and he feels as if he's been encased in hot cement. Ewell has been talking to Gately, presumably since before he had become aware. Ewell says that his wife had called the soul 'personality' and said that Tiny's was incorrigibly dark especially when drinking. Gately can't tell if Ewell thinks he's awake or not. Ewell tells the story of growing up in a tough Irish neighborhood, and how he although he failed to do even a single pull-up in the fitness exam, he still became the leader of the pack of blue collar kids and their club, the Money-Stealers' Club. He wins the kids over with his rhetoric and his big scheme to collect donations for a phony youth hockey club. Gately perceives Ewell and the other figures as receding and then looming in. Ewell says he was reveling in the discovery of fraud. He had persuaded the others to let him be the keeper of the can full of money, and he soon begins to dip into the funds, spending the money on candy, toys and magazines. To cover the fact that he had spent most of the money, he fabricated band statements. Eventually as Christmas nears, the boys decide that they want their share of the money. He puts them off until he can get the supposed money out of the bank, and then stays home sick from school. Gately cannot speak in response. Ewell finally decided to raid the 'IBEW Local 517 Petty Slush' in his father's closet to get the money to pay back the kids. The kids pummel him anyway, and going home and facing his own shame was worse. He had buried the whole thing until the other night after the fracas and Don's reluctant 'se offendendo' [which a footnote explains is either blundered Latin for self defense, or an oblique reference to Hamlet's graveyard scene, from which the title of this book also comes] Ewell had dreamed the whole episode again and awakened sans goatee. Gately starts to remember being offered Demerol, event though his chart had clearly been marked to indicate his history of narcotics dependency. The bullet had fragmented and passed through the tissue in his shoulder, and the surgeon had warned Gately that after the local anesthetic had worn off, the pain would be unlike any Gately had ever imagined, and also that he had developed toxemia because the bullet had possibly been treated with something unclean. Gately comes to again and it's nighttime and Ewell is still there intoning. Ewell asks how he'll be able to follow the 9th step and make amends to all those he defrauded, and to his mother, whom the revelations would kill. Ewell's wife shields his mother from anything unpleasant about Tiny, in fact she now thinks he's at a tax-law symposium. Ewell has the revelation that his whole descent into drinking may have been an attempt to bury his third-grade feelings of despicability. Gately's pain is intensifying, but he can neither move nor call out. The last thing he hears Tiny say is 'I'm scared' and he wishes that he could tell him that he can totally ID with him. Gately sleeps and dreams of a storm that rips the polyurethane vacuole over his bed off while a man with a shepherd's crook is beating up his mother. He broke out of his crib and ran down the beach trying to escape the tornado on his tail. He swims into the ocean and when he surfaces for air, he sees the tornado just outside the house and his mother standing on the porch with a bloody Ginsu knife. The tornado swallows his mother in its maw and when he awakes he really has to piss, and Tiny Ewell is gone. Later someone who is either Joelle or a nurse in a veil is running a cold washcloth over his forehead. After she's gone, he finally gives up and urinates and finds that he is catheterized, which term he'd always mistaken for castrated. At some point Pat M comes in tells him everything will be alright and that she's so sorry he had to deal with a situation like that all by himself. Her hair is a less radiant red than Joelle's. Gately is surprised the cops haven't come. He never shared certain things about his past with Pat M, namely the remorseless ADA or the suffocated Nuck. Pat tells him that he's showing tremendous resolution by not taking the narcotic painkillers, and that it wouldn't necessarily be a relapse, if he knew in heart that it wasn't. The whole interface was possibly unreal, because he couldn't think of a reason why she would have burst into tears. He's more sure that he dreamed seeing Mrs. Lopate in her wheelchair in the room, although his realization in the dream that she had been the same woman he'd often seen at night touching a tree in #5's lawn, when he was first on staff. He awoke again to find Joelle in a chair beside his bed. At some point senior Ennet House counselor Calvin Thrust straddles the chair beside the bed and goes on a longwinded rant, which explains more or less what happened in the aftermath of the incident. He says that they managed to drag Gately inside before the police came. Gately recalls having seen Thrust in a porn cartridge, having sex with a one-armed lady on a trapeze. Thrust explains that Lenz had complained that he would get blamed for the incident, and Bruce Green had rammed him against the cabinets, but then refused to rat him out. Thrust says that he could tell Lenz was coked up, and offered him the choice of resigning from Ennet House, or submitting to a spot-urine. Meanwhile Gately had been bleeding on the couch in Pat's office, while the veiled girl had unwittingly revealed parts beneath her robe while trying to stanch the blood. He says that he hadn't taken him straight to the hospital because it was known that Gately was on probation, and it wasn't clear exactly who had done what to whom in the melee. When Pat arrived they heaved him into Thrust's Corvette and Pat had driven her Aventura ahead of them to the hospital with Joelle riding shotgun. Thrust says not to worry, that the blood in his car was the least of the problems, which worries Gately in ways he cannot express. What Gately really wants to know is were any of the Nucks killed, and has there been an ADA looking into Gately's involvement. He also would like to whether any of the Ennet House residents might make a respectable enough witness, and also 'what the fuck Thrust was thinking of' when he let Lenz go. Thrust says it's lucky that Gately is so huge, so that even though he lost so much blood, he's still alive. He said that both Joelle and Pat had been pretty upset that he had let Lenz go before his involvement could be established. He says he had basically let him go to keep himself from eliminating Lenz's map right then and there. Lenz had tried to get his Duster started, but had apparently left without it because the new resident, Amy J had seen it being towed in the early morning. He says that the House Manager had kept the cops at bay, convincing them that they had no right to enter without a court order. Thrust says that the gun they'd shot Gately with had been serious ordnance, and asks if they've informed him how much of his shoulder and arm he'd be able to keep. Gately pictures himself as a pirate with a hook for a hand, and then with a prosthetic voice box. Thrust said that Hester Thrale had disappeared during the 'freakas' and Gately remembered seeing her running off. Thrust says that the porch is cluttered with all the bags of former residents' stuff that'd been set out. Gately tries to calculate the date based on this. Thrust says that Emil Linty got house restriction after being caught removing an undergarment from Hester's stuff. Thrust says that Ruth van Cleve and Kate Gompert had their purses snatched on the way to NA, and only Ruth had returned. Pat had a warrant issued for Kate on account of her suicidal impulses. Thrust gives an update of house-related news including mention of a new resident Dave K, who had come in after a drunken incident at Interdependence Day office party, where he attempted a limbo-dance challenge and injured his spine, and now scuttles around the house like a crab. He says the biggest issue at the House meeting was that Clenette had brought a bunch of cartridges back from the tennis academy, and Pat won't let them be disseminated until they're screened. He says Green hasn't said a thing about the 'embryoglio' but apparently shouts in his sleep about nuts and cigars. He says that something seems to have snapped in Tiny Ewell, who shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, and was heard weeping in the bathroom. Gately imagines Joelle in her room dressed as Madame Psychosis, eating a peach. He suddenly has anxiety over who's fixing dinner at the house. Gately finds Thrust insufferable but admits that he is keeping Gately's mind off the pain. Gately's heart skips and sinks as Thrust tells him that all of the residents whose legal status permits them to file depositions have backed Gately up 110% to the cops and the weird federal guys with crewcuts, who were probably called in on account of the Nucks. Several of the witnesses indicated that the Nucks appeared to be under the influence of some Substance. The biggest problem is that the weapon cannot be located. Green was the last one to see it when he dropped it on the lawn after taking it away from 'the Nuck the nigger girls stomped.' Gately's heart is somewhere near his knees at the mention of the feds, and he's dying to find out whether he actually killed anyone. Thrust says that finding the weapon is going to be in the best interests of Yolanda Willis too, since her spiked shoe was left in the eye socket of the guy that she'd killed. The sun was starting to go down, and night is when the ceiling breathes.
notes:
The figure with the box on its head must be Otis P. Lord, who was taken to the hospital to have the monitor removed from his head. This will allow us to date some of what happens, in spite of the fact that Gately cannot figure out the date himself. It has become unclear at times whether Gately is dreaming or not. The vacuole on the ceiling seems similar to Kate's billowing sail [p 648-651] as well as Joelle's veil.
p 827-845
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 12-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately awakes again to find Geoffrey Day sitting where Thrust had been. It's night. Day informs him that Johnette is no Gately in the kitchen. It might be a different night, the ceiling no longer bulges. His side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It's now a deep tight pain with a flavor of emotional loss. Day is telling Gately about his developmentally-challenged brother who had a phobia of leaves, and whom Day would torment by threatening him with leaves. Gately has become much more popular since he's become paralyzed and mute. He sees a 'tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision's periphery' but Gately may be sleeping. Gately's recurring dream ever since getting clean has been a 'tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman' looking down at him. Nothing happens she's just looking down at him, which means that either he's lying down or he has become smaller than the tiny woman. There is also a menacing dog standing just past the woman. When he awakes Day is gone and his bed has been moved over so it's right next to the adjacent patient, as if they are a 'sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds.' He strains to yell which wakes him up [implying perhaps that he wasn't actually awake] and his bed has returned to its original place. Sometime later in the night, but before midnight parking switch, he dreams of the ghostish figure who finally stays in one place long enough for Gately to see him. The figure is a very tall man with glasses and a sunken chest wearing very high-water chinos Gately flashes back to youthful beating of kids with floods. He experiences, in the dream, a remorseful flash that this tall figure might represent one of those kids. But the figure shrugged and said that no it was just a plain old 'garden variety wraith.' Gately considers the fact that in the dream he knows he's dreaming and is considering the 'up front dream quality' of the dream, and it all gets mulitlevelled and confusing. The wraith discourages him from getting hung of on the 'dream-v-real' stuff and take note of the important thing, which is that the wraith can hear him, even though Gately cannot speak. The wraith says it's difficult for him to stay in one position long enough for Gately to be able to see him, and he's not sure how long he can keep it up. Gately tries to pretend to go to sleep to see if the wraith will go away, and then he does actually sleep because the tiny Oriental woman returns. When he awakes from the dream's dream, the wraith is still there, now standing on the bed's railing, towering over him. Gately can see the wraith's nostril hair and brown socks, and notes that these are not the sort of details he associates with dreaming. The wraith was nodding in empathy with Gately's thoughts of his 'suffocated speechlessness' and explaining that wraiths never spoke out loud, which is why their words always seemed like thoughts in your head. The wraith said that very few wraiths have anything important enough to interface about to overcome their impatience and stand still long enough for a person to see them clearly, preferring to whiz around at the speed of quanta. He says that wraiths 'exist' in a completely different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. Gately is thinking 'for fuck's sake what was this,' first Day and Ewell, and now even in his dreams, everyone suddenly wants to talk to him about their problems, now that he's mute. The wraith disappears and reappears several times, bringing each time another object- first a picture of Johnny Gentle, then a Coke can with Oriental writing in place of the logo. 'The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream's worst moment.' The wraith then starts to defy nature appearing upside down and doing pirouettes on Gately's chest. Gately realizes he doesn't know the term 'PIROUETTE' which appears to him in all caps. He starts to feel something like 'lexical rape' as terms obscure to him appear in his head [see complete list below] the words suggest links to Hamlet, to annulation, to optics, to black widows, left-handedness, and levirate marriage [where the widow must marry one of her husband's brothers] all relating the wraith incontrovertibly to James O. Incandenza. Gately wants to scream, and the next time the wraith appears, it is sitting above him on the heart monitor in Lyle's cross-legged position, and the Oriental coke can is sitting on Gately's forehead smelling like low tide. An orderly shines a flashlight into the room and the wraith disappears. It occurs to Gately that the wraith may be Gately's 'Higher Power' but the wraith reappears to say 'don't we both wish.' Gately ponders the burglary-related implications of having the wraiths abilities, and wonders if wraith means 'ghost, as in dead.' The wraith tells Gately that he can Identify with his 'feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation' and asks if Gately remembers TV sitcoms. Gately laughs inside because everyone knows that drug addicts and TV go hand in hand. He waxes poetic about his favorites, most notably 'Cheers' which he loved because took place in Boston and because everyone always had a beer in hand. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the 'huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom.' The wraith asks if Gately remembers the 'figurant' actors, those that served as 'human scenery' and were never heard. The wraith says that he spent the bulk of his animate life that way, especially to those closest to him. The wraith says you can't understand the pathos of figurants, until you realized how 'trapped and encaged' they are in their peripheral status. It's not as if one could just suddenly stand up and start yelling in a scene in 'Cheers.' Gately speculates briefly about lower-rung actor suicide rates. The wraith explains that he himself dabbled in making filmed entertainments, and that he went out of his way to make sure that unless the film was silent, you could hear the voice of each and every actor, no matter how peripheral. His critics often perceived this as a self-conscious heavy-art directorial pose instead of as radical realism. Gately is remembering how he would pretend that Nom was his father, who would be sarcastic and witty to Gately's mother instead of beating her. Gately is trying to focus on the ring of cold the foreign Coke can has left on his forehead, instead of either the pain or the memory of his mother trying to escape to the lockable bathroom without detection by her inebriated paramour. The wraith tells Gately that he's had to sit still for the equivalent of 3 weeks, so that Gately could see him. This reminds Gately that no one has mentioned how long he's been in here. Gately wonders why his sponsor Francis G has not yet come to visit. The wraith disappears briefly and returns to say he's paid a call to Francis G who seems to be on his way. The wraith says that when he was alive in the world he had seen his own son becoming something like a figurant. He said that witnessing this had marred the end of his animate life, and admits the foolishness of ever having blamed it on the boy's mother. Gately muses that 'resentment is the #1 offender' is one of the AA cliches he's starting to believe, not that he wouldn't mind a few minutes alone with Lenz. The wraith says to imagine spending your own youth trying to be heard or noticed by your own father only to have your own son become mute. The son who had done everything with an unslumped grace the father never could, had begun to disappear, and no one else in the family noticed. The family believed that the wraith was confusing the boy with his own boyhood self, or with his father's father who was notoriously wooden and had purportedly driven his father to drink. The wraith says that near the end, he feared his son was experimenting with substances. His family just thought the wraith had 'gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to get sober, again.' Gately asks if he tried to 'Surrender and Come In.' The wraith says he spent the whole last 90 days of his life sober trying to create a 'medium via which he and his muted son simply converse,' to make something so compelling that it would reverse thrust on his 'fall into the womb of solipsism,' to bring out of himself, a way to say 'I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard.' Gately recognizes this as self-pity, and doubts that the wraith could stay sober with such a poor-me attitude. The wraith says that he had, and he had found the AA cliches too vapid, not to mention their disdain for abstraction. The wraith says he bets Gately is dying to know if he ever came up with the thoroughly engaging entertainment. Gately thinks how he's spent his own sobriety fending off memories of the ex-MP, his mother's paramour, to which the wraith replies that any conversation is better than none at all. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure as much pain as he does to hear Gately's brain-voice. Instead of asking him if he's representing the Higher Power Gately pretends to think he's wondering why the wraith is spending so much wrath-time here with Gately instead of just trying to interface with the son. He thinks maybe that would make the son kind of bats, though. He tries to keep from thinking of demerol. He thinks of the ex-MP, who had never laid a hand on Gately, but who scared him. He remembers the ex-MP teaching him the basics of weightlifting, and not being terribly happy when Gately became capable of lifting more. The ex-MP kept cafeful records in a little book of his weightlifting, and of his Heinekin consumption. When Gately remembers this stuff, he wonders why he never once thought to ask his mother why she loved him, in spite of the beatings. They never spoke his name when he was out of the house. He tries not to think about why he didn't just pull the ex-MP off of her. The ex-MP never hid the beatings from young Gately, and after a while he'd just turn the TV up or go off and lift weights. Without anyone's help, he soon figured out the difference between the beatings and the similar sounding activity in the bed. Gately remembers the ex-MP's way of dealing with house flies; instead of killing them he'd whack them hard enough to disable them, because he theorized that their screams of pain would scare off the other flies. Gately's memories fade into a dream where he's dressed Lenz's topcoat leaning over the Nuck whose head he just bashed in. When he wakes, he thinks he sees Francis G, who says at least Gately's still alive, and asks if he's sober still. Gately blinks and Francis is gone. There are 3 other White Flaggers in the room, and their talking about the tall well-dressed Civil-Service-looking guy in the hallway, with brown shoes and a hat, who appears to be in it for the long haul with his take-out food from many countries. Gately recognizes this as possibly a certain ADA, and grunts. The White Flaggers joke about CPR, which is their term for Al-Anon, the Church of Perpetual Revenge. Gately wishes he could laugh and get them to go away.
terms on p 832, with brief definitions
-acciacatura- a dissonant grace note used to embellish a note of a melody
-alembic- an alchemical still, or metaphorically something that refines or transforms through distillation
-lactrodectus mactans- black widow spider
-neutral density point- the point on which a photographer focuses to get the proper exposure
-proprioception--literally one's own perception, or the sense of relative position of neighboring parts of the body
-testudo- type of tortoise, or a military formation where soldiers aggregate together for protection
-annulate- the way energy is produced in IJ, invented in part by James O. Incandenza
-bricolage- something constructed out of whatever happens to be available, eg found art
-gerrymander- manipulation of boundaries to favor a certain group
-scopophilia- literally the love of looking, or 'male gaze' ie, objectification of women in films
-Laertes- the character who kills Hamlet
-extruding-thrusting or forcing out, or shaping by forcing through a die
-strigil- curved instrument used to scrape sweat off the skin
-lexical-relating to words or to the lexicon of words
-lordosis-curvature of the spine
-impost- a tax, or the handicap weight carried by a racehorse
-sinistral- left-handed
-meniscus-a lens that is concave on one side and convex on the other
-chronaxy-the minimum time required to excite a nerve using an electrical current of twice the threshold voltage
-Poor Yorick- the character whose skull is dug up in Hamlet, in the scene from which the title 'Infinite Jest' comes
-Luculus-Roman general famous for giving lavish banquets
-Cerise Montclair- deep red Montclair [the car James O. Incandenza's father had]
-De Sica neo-real crane dolly- a crane dolly named for Italian neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica
-Circumambientfounddramaleviratemarriage
-circumambient- surrounding,
-found drama- JOI's unfilmable films,
-levirate marriage- widow is required to marry the husband's brother after the husband's death
notes:
This is among the most densely packed sections of the book. Himself explains that he made Infinite Jest to get through to Hal, and to apologize. Nearly all of the book's symbols make an appearance here, with the chilling image of the 'figurant' actors being central. In typical DFW style, the revelations raise more questions than they answer. Why is the Asian script on the Coke can the most disturbing thing about an otherwise pretty disturbing dream? Are we to assume that Lyle is also a wraith, or perhaps just that Himself's wraith visits Lyle and helps him give the students advice. Who is the tiny acne scarred Asian woman? It must have been the wraith that moved Gately's bed right next to Otis P. Lord's bed, thus suggesting that Himself's wraith has been responsible for the bed moving and other inexplicable occurrences at ETA. The last 90 days of his life presumably refers to the making of Infinite Jest, and we thus have an explanation for why he made it, and possibly what it is about, at least from his perspective. This suggests that Molly Notkin's synopsis of the film [p 787-795] is spurious.
p 845-846
YDAU [2009] Nov 19
place Antitoi Brothers
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
After Marathe, Ossowiecke and Balbalis failed to turn up the veiled performer, Fortier and Marathe turned to the final and most drastic means of trying to locate the cartridge, to acquire members of the Auteur's immediate family, which Marathe would be in charge of. Broullime was carrying out further tests on 'viewer willingness' on his newly acquired test subjects. One test subject is an irritating, eccentrically dressed homeless man with a white wig [Lenz] who was cutting off not his own fingers but the fingers of the other test subject, a weakened addict dressed as a gauche woman, and found carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature [Poor Tony]. This of course marred the statistics of the experiment, and Bruillime considers a 'lethal technical interview.' Fortier is going to Phoenix to assist Luria P__ in a more important technical interview, and leaving Marathe in charge of the 'preliminary acquisition.' A direct attack on the tennis academy was out of the question , on account of the tall steep hill. Instead he put Balbais in charge of acquiring the Quebecois team that was en route to play against ETA, while he remained at Antitoi's, occasionally going to nearby Ryle's for 'jazz nights.' Balbais would use the mirror across the highway trick to force the bus of the Quebecois players off the road, and then several AFR members would take the place of the young players. Marathe apparently had some plausible explanation prepared to deal with the issue of the wheelchairs and the beards of the putative youngsters.
notes:
This short section explains what happens at the book's end, namely that Hal and Orin will be acquired, and 'interviewed' to determine the location of the master cartridge. It also confirms that Marathe has sold out and failed to mention the fact that he did locate Joelle, and possibly another copy of the cartridge at Ennet House. It's not clear, though, why Marathe would still go ahead with the acquisition of the family members. Perhaps he handed Joelle over to Steeply in order to get a deal for his wife, while still maintaining his cover with AFR by going ahead with the operation.
p 846-851
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 13-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately dreams that he is with Joelle in motel with Joelle in the South. Joelle raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his forehead. She is promising him a night of near terminal pleasure, as she disrobes revealing a incredible 'inhuman' body. Then she removes the veil revealing the face of Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls. Gately is jolted awake briefly. He then remembers Mrs. Waite, who was his neighbor when he lived with his mother and the MP. There was something about Mrs. Waite, but no one said what it was. Her house and yard are in disarray, and she kept jars of brown-green viscous vegetoid stuff in her garage. She never left her house. Some of the littler kids said she was a witch. Mrs. Gately forbade Don to fuck with her. Although she was in no position to enforce such a rule, Don followed it. He didn't buy the witch stories, but was afraid of her. Eventually however, he developed a relationship of sorts with her. He went over once or twice under forgotten circumstances and interfaced with her in her kitchen. She never tried to feed him viscous stuff from a jar. She eventually hung herself. She was found by a meter-reader a few weeks after Gately's birthday. Realizing that Gately's mother was too pathetic to do much of anything for Don, she made him a cake and brought it to the birthday party that some other kids allowed Don to share with them, since he had no party of his own. He knew that she had given up cigarettes to save up money to make him the cake. The party's Mom accepted the cake without inviting Mrs. Waite to come in, but she forbade the kids to eat it or even blow out the candles, and put it directly into the trash. There's no way Mrs. Waite could have seen the mom throw the cake away, and Gately wasn't so into self-torture to think her suicide was related to the cake being thrown out. He didn't mourn her or even think about her for many years, which is what makes his next dream even more disturbing. The dream takes place in Mrs. Waite's kitchen with Joelle plays the part of Mrs. Waite, sitting on a pink plastic ring, again naked and unveiled, with the same unbelievable body, but this time instead of Winston Churchill there is the face of an angel. It's not a sex dream though, Mrs. Waite/Joelle is the figure of death. Death explains to Gately that death happens over and over, you have many lives and at the end of each one a woman kills you to release you into the next life, in which she will be your mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remembers. As Gately begins to understand, he becomes sad. He's seeing Joelle/Death through a milky filter, reminiscent of the way a baby sees a parent. He begins cry and asks Joelle/Death to set him free. She shakes her unfocussed head and says: Wait.
notes:
Gately's dream/vision seems to be similar to Molly Notkin's description of Infinite Jest [p 787-795] Perhaps the wraith has put the vision in his head. The head of Winston Churchill atop the perfect body is reminiscent of the description of Ortho Stice [727-638]
p 851-854
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
The header reading 'Gaudeamus Igitur' [Let us therefore rejoice] is a college drinking song. Hal awakes from a dream where he's in a zoo, that has no animals or cages. It's 5am and Mario is asleep. He puts in a plug of Kodiak tobacco and notes that he feels bad, 'a sort of nausea of the head.' He's felt on the verge of crying for a week. He gets up to stand on one foot, which is therapeutic for his ankle. It has begun snowing and the snow on the ground is purple from the light. The Boards and AP exams are 3 weeks from tomorrow. This is the first day without dawn drills since Interdependence Day [Nov 8] and he has missed a chance to sleep until breakfast. He had awakened early the day before as well, after seeing in his sleep Kevin Bain crawling toward him. The wind outside rattled the subdorm doors in their frames. The Lung hadn't been inflated and Hal is hopeful that this might be cancellation weather for the exhibition meet. He can't ever remember hoping to not play before, and he can't remember feeling strongly one way or another for a long time. The message machine is blinking twice, meaning 2 messages. Hal notes the relationship between this flashing and that of the light in the smoke detector. Pemulis has coached him through enough math for him to determine that the formula for this relationship would be that of an ellipse. Since the Wayne incident the lessons have stopped and Pemulis has been very scarce. Every year between I Day and the WhataBurger the academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for purposes of fundraising, and each year Tavis has a team from another country flown in to compete against ETA. The teams chosen are always subpar, making the ETA kids look good. This year's opponents would be Quebecois, but Hal has his doubts about planes landing in this weather. It has occurred to Hal that without a few one-hitters to look forward to, he was waking up feeling like there was nothing to look forward to. The implied question was whether Bob Hope had become not just the high point of the day, but its actual meaning, which he finds pretty appalling. Hal is in charge of the messages on the machine, and this week their outgoing message goes 'this is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza...'
notes:
Hal's answering machine message seems an apt metaphor, if an unconscious one. Pemulis has been scarce but apparently Hal doesn't know he's been kicked out. Who has left the messages on Hal's machine?
p 854-864
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
When Gately wakes from the Joelle/Death dream, the actual Joelle is leaning over him wetting his forehead with a cloth. She's wearing a clean veil, and her hair seems darker red to Gately. He had never been into Madame Psychosis, but had known many who were, mostly 'Organics men' [heroin/opium users] and he feels an odd vividness that he is being swabbed by a celebrity. He has no idea how heroic and/or romantic he appears to her, and she has no idea that newly sober people are prone to see people with more sober time as heroic and/or romantic. Joelle says she can't stay long this time and as she moves away he notices that her sweatpants have the word BUM down one leg, and he thinks these were once Erdedy's sweatpants. The bed next to him is now empty. She tells Gately how she'd gone to St. Columbkill's Meeting and there'd been a guy from her home state of Kentucky named Wayne who had awakened in a disconnected sewage drain pipe after a ten year blackout. Wayne had a deep furrow across his face where his alcoholic father in the grip of post-binge Horrors had hit him with a hatchet. The gash had just about healed when his father dropped dead. He dragged his father under the farmhouse and began charging kids $5 to see a bona fide dead man. He took the money and headed out to 'lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.' Next thing he remembers is waking up in the drain pipe near Boston, with some 'right nasty' medical issues but the timer bell cuts him off, and he points at Joelle to speak next. Gately has to remind himself that Joelle is only 3 weeks clean. She has a big flat notebook in her lap, and when she looks down, the veil hangs loose like a white screen with nothing behind it. She raises her head and her veiled features return. She announces that she has to leave, but that she can come back later and bring him whatever he wants. He hikes an eyebrow. She says that now that his fever is down, they'll hopefully remove his feeding tube. Gately realizes that this is why he cannot speak, and Thanks God. Joelle compulsively flexes and twiddles her thumb and says that unlike her radio show, at Meetings, she doesn't know what she'll say until it comes out. She speaks about Recovery issues in an intellectualish way. She says that Pat keeps telling her to build a wall around each day, and not to look over or back or to add up the days. She says that she realizes this is why she could never quit. If she went straight, she always counted the days, and when she looked ahead it seemed like too staggering a number. She likens it to Evel Knievel jumping over cars on his motorcycle. Gately recalls his own detox in jail in Revere, when he had to build a wall around each second to endure it, but once the heaves and chills vanished so did this sense of the endless Now. His shoulder hurt now but nothing like the hurt of 'the Bird.' The White Flaggers call the Now 'The Present' -- the true gift of AA. Joelle says that when Wayne pointed to her to go up there, she realized that she really could do it, if she chose to do it as one endless day. He tries to give her a look that will validate her breakthrough. Gately has his own breakthrough and realizes that he can endure this pain and fear of the ADA the same he way. He decides that if he gets through this, he'll take the Evel Knievel picture from his wall and give it to Joelle. Joelle opens the big book in her lap to a picture of her own personal Daddy. There's a dog in the photo, and Joelle explains that none of her Daddy's dogs had names, and this one was later called the one that got hit by the UPS truck. She explains that her father was a low-pH chemist, and that her mother had inherited a farm, so her father moved them out there and 'jick-jacked' with farming. The nurse comes to change the catheter-receptacle and Joelle doesn't seem to notice, as she flips through the album showing him pictures of all the farm animals, who do have names. Gately realizes he could reach his left hand up and brush the veil aside as she shows him a picture of Uncle Lum, her father's partner who inhaled fumes and began acting strangely. He does move his hand enough to touch her wrist, and get her attention, and then mimics writing. Ordinarily when an attractive female so much as looks at Gately, he plays out a whole fantasy sequence in his mind which either ends with happily married sunset years, or a bitter divorce. With Joelle, though it ends with either bouncing veiled babies, or a a honeymoon eve deveiling, which reveals Winston Churchill. But still, he can't help envisioning 'the old X' with Joelle veiled and yelling 'And Lo!' Having Joelle sharing her personal photos with him, jumps his mind right over the moments wall. He envisions her smitten with him, volunteering to help in his escape from the hospital and from the Feds or whoever that is in the hallway. This fantasy fills him with shame, because even contemplating a romantic thing with a newcomer is known as 13th stepping and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders, and considered tantamount to rape. He realizes that it's no accident that his most vivid fantasy is the flight-from-the-law one, where the newcomer helps clean up his mess. His eyes roll back in his head in disgust.
notes
Since the bed next to Gately is now empty, this must be Nov 20 or later, since Otis P. Lord is brought back to ETA on Nov 20. This is also confirmed on p 96-964, when Joelle leaves the hospital the snowstorm of Nov 20 has already happened. Is there an intended allusion to John Wayne with Wayne from Kentucky? Why would Joelle have on Erdedy's sweatpants? The billowing of Joelle's veil, with nothing behind it,when she looks down [and away from Gately] is reminiscent of the vacuole in the ceiling [p 809-827], and of the black sail [p 648-651].
p 864-876
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal can hear the sounds of early morning weeping from behind dorm doors as he goes down the hall to brush his teeth. Snow had piled up in the sill of a window left open, and Hal puts his head out to have a look, but visibility is too low to see the ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air. The Headmaster's House was little more than a lump, but Hal can picture CT fretting over the snow, and possible consequences on the exhibition tournament. Hal pulls his head back when it becomes numb and realizes that he hasn't had to go to the bathroom in a serious way for 3 days. The digital display on the intercom reads '11-18 EST0456' [although this seems to be the same day as p 851-854, which was given as 11/20]. He finds Ortho Stice making an odd chanting sound with his forehead up against the glass of his window. When Hal enters, Stice asks without turning his head if Hal had been crying. Hal says no, and then contemplates that for the past 10 days, he had felt worst in the morning. Stice mentions playing the 'furriners' today, and Hal says if we do it's not going to be out there on the courts. Hal says they'll shuttle the kids around to various indoor courts, if the Quebecois kids managed to fly in before the airport closed. Hal says he figures they're stuck up at Dorval, and CT is probably on the case now. He expects Stice to do his CT impersonation, but Stice remains face to the window. After a silence, Stice tells Hal a joke about 3 statisticians duck hunting-- the first misses low, the second misses high, at which point the third jumps up whooping 'we got him!' Out the window Hal can see a figure sitting in the bleachers, getting buried with snow. It had never snowed like this in November, and the whole scene out the window has a pathos to it. Hal asks why Stice has his forehead up against the window this way, and isn't it getting cold. Stice says the forehead lost all feeling a couple of hours ago, and reveals that his forehead is actually stuck to the window. He had been unable to sleep, and feeling hot and sweaty, brought a chair to sit by the window where it was cool. He rested his head against the window, and before he knew it he was stuck. He had tried to unstick the head a couple hours later, but the sound it began to make discouraged him. He then just waited for someone to come along, praying it wouldn't be Pemulis, who surely would have thought of something cruel to do to him. Or Troeltsch who to Hal's surprise is sleeping in Axhandle's single room. Hal decides to try and pull him free. Stice asks if Hal believes in 'little kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit' and Hal says he won't feel a thing. Hal says he used to believe in vampires, and that Himself used to claim to see his father's ghost, but they had written that off, because he also used to claim that Hal wasn't speaking even though he was. And Mario says that he's seen paranormal figures, and Mario never lies. So Hal says he's withholding judgement. Stice says if Hal pulls him free, he'll show him some paranormal stuff that'll shake his tree good. Hal counts to 3, but then pulls on 2, and there is a horrible sound as his forehead distended, pulling his ordinarily jowly flesh tight, giving Hal a view of what Stice would look like with a radical facelift. It all happened in less than a second, Stice screamed out for him to let go, and Hal does so, deciding that they're going to have to thaw it off. Troeltsch emerges from Axford's room and begins mock-announcing into his fist about reports of screaming. They discuss possibilities for thawing the head. It was as if there were a tacit agreement not to mention Troeltsch's being in Axford's room or to ask where Axford was. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance of impropriety. Hal leaves Stice alone with Troeltsch and goes in search of Kenkle and Brandt, the janitors. Brandt is is the submoronic sidekick to Kenkel who had risen from the rough Roxbury Crossing neighborhood to earn a doctorate in low-temperature Physics, had taken a job with the Office of Naval Research, and then had been court-martialed, for an offense that changes each time he's asked about. He's an incredible spitter, and their janitorial technique consists of Kenkel spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt is about to clean. Himself had met them on the T which they rode recreationally, and they had steered him toward the proper train, and all but carried him to his door, where they were invited in at 2am and have been employed at ETA ever since. As Hal approaches, they are in the midst of a one-sided conversation about 'Canine-Style interface favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings.' Brandt introduces himself to Hal, presumably for the umpteenth time, and Kenkle greets him as 'Good prince Hal.' Hal explains the Stice situation and Kenkle says they are in route, but asks why the hilarity. Hal tries to make a serious face, but Kenkle stills sees it as mirthful. Hal tries to examine his face in the reflection of a window, but it has gotten too light and he looks 'tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.'
notes:
Who is the figure in the bleachers covered in snow? Why does Hal's faith appear as mirthful to Kenkle while to Hal it seems ghostly? It's interesting that Himself was visited by his father's ghost. Can Hal not see his own father's ghost, or has Himself just decided it's no use visiting Hal. What is Himself's ghost trying to accomplish by visiting Stice, and by moving all of the objects around?
p 876-883
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place 8th floor, State House Annex, Boston
no narration, partial transcript of a meeting.
synopsis:
This section transcribes the meeting between Rodney Tine, his son Rodney Jr.. Maureen Hooley from the children's division of Interlace, Carl Yee from Glad Corporation and Tom Veals from Viney & Veals Advertising. Tine has been delayed because of the weather to this meeting which has been called to get an OK before disseminating a 30-second advertising spot aimed at 6-10 year old demographic, to be shown during the 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show.' They discuss the costs, which Yee thinks are a bit high. Tine Jr. reminds him that the following year is Glad's year, and asks if he wants everyone 'staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge' the whole year. Tine Sr. tells him shut up and stop tapping the ruler on the table. Veals, who has a cold, announces that they had to can 'Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie' icon because it had tested as uncool. He says that the present version is rough because there have been some bugs with 'Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass.' Ms. Hooley explains that the mule icon provokes empathy, doesn't come off as an authority figure, plus everything besides the cockroach and the ass is basically copyrighted. Yee says surely he doesn't present himself as an ass. Hooley explains that he's never just Phil, he's Fully Functional Phil, in contrast with the adult figure who reclines passively before the Canadian cartridge. tine says he's foreseeing trouble selling the president on a prancing ass. Hooley explains that Phil's message is that not every cartridge is safe, that there are wicked cartridges with a smily face on the case. At 14 seconds there's a traumatic graphic where the animated cartridge has yellow fangs and is driving away with a kidnapped kid splayed against the car's rear window. 'Stuff of fucking nightmares' Veals says. At this point Yee has an epileptic seizure. Hooley says he'll be fine, just be sure not to mention it happened. Tine Sr finally takes the ruler, actually a weatherman's pointer away from Tine Jr. Hooley says that at this point Phil says that they don't even know what the cartridge to watch out for is even about, just that it looks like something you'd really want to watch, and that it's Canadian, which is why the kidnapper wears a plaid cap. At 19 seconds Phil dances a 'Native-American-cum-Breakdance-type' dance and says be sure to check with Mommy and Daddy before watching any cartridges. Yee is back up, and mentions floppy-ear and buck-teeth product tie-ins. Tine Jr asks if Yee's OK, which sends him into another seizure. Hooley continues, saying that at 25.35 seconds Phil emphatically warns that if Mommy or Daddy is observed in front of the viewer for a long time, that 'No-ho-ho-ho way' should you join them and watch whatever they're watching. Tine Sr says they're ready to view. Hooley says that Veals has already storyboarded an adolescent version of Phil for music videos and soft-core, with a more ironic angle. His trademark expression is 'It's your ass, ace.'
p 883-896
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
In the wake of Joelle's visit, and the ensuing fantasies Gately has yet to really get around to the implications of the wraith, that there may swarms of them flitting around his room. Gately couldn't get through 'Ethan From' in high school and he has no clue where ghostwords like 'sinistral' and 'ommatophoric' [having stalks with eyes at the end] are coming from. Not to mention ghostwords, which he thinks is at least a real word [although it is not]. The nurse gives him a stenographic notebook and a pen, saying that the visitor said that he requested it. He sees that Ferocious Francis has taken up the bedside chair, with his oxygen tank in tow. He coughs as a way of saying hello, and says 'still sucking air I see.' Gately tries to write 'yo' but it comes out illegible. Francis says he's heard that Gately was giving God a little help, protecting his fellowman from his consequences. Francis says he heard Gately had taken on six armed Hawaiians, broken one's nose, shoving bits of it into his brain. Gately tries to ask in writing whether any were dead and who the guy in the hall might be. A doctor comes in, it's one that Gately dislikes, an Indian or Pakistani doctor who had tried to hook Gately up to Demerol drip 4-8 days ago. The doctor looks at Gately's chart and says 'grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation' and asks if the pain is much worse today. He says that the pain is estimated to be comparable to ectopic labor. He asks if Gately is ready to succumb and accept the proper pain medication. He lists a host of 'very safe' alternatives. Gately wishes that Francis would step in help out here. But Francis sits silently and the doctor doesn't appear to notice him. The doctor says that he is Moslem and he too abstains from drugs by religious law, but that under these circumstances, he would accept relief from pain, since no god would will needless suffering on his children. Gately has written 'AA' on the paper, and shooting Francis a 'please-jump-in-here' look. Francis is blowing his nose, and Gately is remembering the taste in the mouth when Demerol is injected. The doctor looks uncomprehending at what Gately has scribbled, and Gately thinks that this must be the disease, the Spider talking. The doctor offers him Talwin, which was Gately's #2 after Demerol. Gately starts to feel that if the doctor offers him Demerol again that he will succumb. Then he thinks that this is the Disease telling him that he won't be able to handle a dosage of medically required Demerol. Instead of stepping in Francis says he's going to leave and let Gately handle this. The doctor pleads with 'Mr. Gately Senior' to help convince Gately of the extreme discomfort to come. Francis dismisses this saying 'Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do.' Gately takes his still good left hand and reaches over and grabs the doctor's balls and squeezes. The doctor screams out 'like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet' and the sound of the scream wakes Gately and causes so much pain that he hits nearly the same operatic note. When he wakes the morning light is 'Dilaudid-colored' and the visitor's chair is back by the wall. The stenographer's notebook was either part of the dream, or has been knocked off the bed. But the railing is folded down, so the part where Joelle had sat there showing him pictures was probably real. He really does have a tube in his throat. For the first time in the trauma wing, he realizes the need to shit, and suspects that the arrangements for that will not be pleasant. The dream could have been either a fever dream, or the Disease. In AA they teach you to accept that thoughts of the Substance pop into your head, and you should let them come and go; just don't entertain them. Gately had always found Demerol with a Talwin kicker to be a 'symmetrical buzz.' He tries to think about anything else to get his mind away from it-- bumper stickers, lobsters in traps with their eyestalks poking through, Joelle, the nurse who sold him bottles Demerol and then let him X her, etc. A large black nurse enters and calls him baby. He tries to convey the need to defecate. Gately was introduced to Demerol at age 23, when the intra-ocular itching forced him to switch from Percocet. The Demerol tabs were called Pebbles [50 mg] and Bam Bam [100 mg] and they were very small, and at first he'd been suspicious they'd have no effect. But once he ran out of everything else and tried them, he never went back. Gately remembers crewing for many of the Percocet/Demerol era with Fackelman and Kite [who had a background in computer hacking], whose scam was to manufacture fake background checks, and then rent a furnished luxury apartment, sell all the furnishings and live there getting high off the proceeds until they received notice for overdue rent. Gately remembers Fackelman bringing girls home to the apartment and pretending that they'd been robbed of all their furnishings. Fackelman and Kite thought that it was odd that Gately was a narcotics man, because he was such a good and stand-up guy, but while on the substance he became taciturn and what Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep called 'Other-Directed.' McDade and Diehl come into Gately's room after visiting Doony Glynn in the gastroenterology ward. They announce that they may not be able to legally depose for Gately after all, due to legal issues. They also inform him that it's looking like the gun with which Gately was shot may be in Lenz's possession, to which he reacts by making a 'whole new kind of noise.' They tell him that Lenz had possibly been spotted, totally relapsed, drunk, wearing a tux and a sombrero with balls. They say that Unit #3 is going to be rented out as a place that treats agoraphobia, and they are arranging to print invitations to a big welcome party. Gately realizes that it must have been them that put the 'help wanted' sign outside the window of the woman who cries for help. Diehl produces an unsigned 'get well' card, which Gately is sure is shoplifted. This brings on a wave of self-pity and resentment, about the fact that these losers won't stand up for him, about having to say no to the grinning doctor, about not getting his notebook, about having to shit. He starts to think that maybe the God of AA is really a cruel one who gets you straight only so you can feel the severity of the punishment more keenly. There are purple cords standing up on Gately's neck, and the visitors are backing away as the nurse comes in with a kidney shaped bedpan and cleaning fluid. The visitors duck out, and Gately's heart sinks with a thud when he sees the attractive nurse, whose job it is to clean up his shit and wipe his ass.
notes:
The doctor is reminiscent of the near Eastern medical attache and seems to possibly have been planted in Gately's dream, along with the fancy vocabulary, by the wraith.
p 896-902
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal is going back up to check on Stice and Mario, check his reflection for signs of unintentional hilarity, and listen to the death aria from 'Tosca.' As he's walking down the hall he's hit with 'some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match.' He's never felt this way off-court before. It was as Lyle had taught them, not totally unpleasant. His advice had been to focus on the your heightened perception on the fear itself. '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 almost edible, there for the ingesting.' Sleepy Perterson passes in his robe. 'But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with overcognitive, bad-trip-like element... something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world...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 the Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect.' Hal starts to imagine all the times he's ever done and ever will do certain things all added up-- the volume of food he'll ever eat added up, a huge room bulging with all the excrement he'll produce. He braces himself and hunches waiting for the worst of it to pass. He lies down in Viewing Room 5, with his toothbrush in the NASA glass balanced on his chest, fighting the feeling that either he'd never been there before, or he'd spent a whole lifetime there. Peterson puts his head in to ask if this qualifies as a blizzard, and after a long silence goes away. Hal lies there letting the saliva drip post-nasally and reviews his family history. His mothers mother was Quebecois and her father was an Anglo-Canadian binge-drinker. Himself's middle name was Orin, the name of his own grandfather. He considers the design and lighting of the viewing room, and the arrangement of Himself's films on the shelf. The Moms's full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza and she's 197 cm tall [13.4 more than Hal, but only up to Himself's ear]. She had an aversion to overhead lighting. Petropolis Kahn puts his head in and asks what happened upstairs, and if Hal's going to breakfast. Hal doesn't answer. He thinks that if it came down to a choice between competitive tennis and Bob Hope it would be nearly impossible to decide. He's appalled by how distantly this appalls him. Rumor has it that there's to be a small Eschaton game today overseen by Pemulis himself, who seems to be avoiding Hal since he returned from the meeting in Natick. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking, even when he was. Hal contemplates the etymology of the word 'blizzard.' He remembers Orin alleging in YTMP [2003] that when he borrowed the Moms's car in the morning he found smeared prints of nude human feet inside on the windshield. John Wayne had been taken to St. Elizabeth's after the incident with the radio broadcast on Tuesday, and stayed overnight, but had recovered enough to come home the next day. The Moms had stayed by his side late into the night. Hal reviews the technical definition of 'blizzard' from a science dictionary, and revels at the dedication required for this level of perspicacity. It seems both admirable and pathetic that people are willing to give their lives to something. 'A flight from in the form of a plunging into.' This is why they start them so young at the Academy, before the questions of 'why and to what grow real beaks and claws.' The original meaning of 'addiction' was being bound over, and dedicated to either legally or spiritually. Hal considers Stice's ghost question, and thinks of Hamlet who for all his questioning, never questions the ghost, or whether his own madness might be real-- that he might be feigning feigning. He thinks of the professor's final soliloquy in Himself's unfinished parody of academia [that the Moms had considered a personal slap] 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency.' Hal considers getting up and checking on Stice, but remains on the floor. The Moms and Tavis were probably not related. Her mother died when she was 8 and shortly afterwards her father disappeared on a drinking binge. He was found and bailed out, and returned with a new bride, who from the wedding photo appears to have been a dwarf, and her infant son, CT. The new bride is homodontic and bears several similarities with Mario. Most of the information on her comes from Orin who at age 7 had had an extended conversation with CT, while the Moms was in labor with Mario, and is thus the info is pretty much suspect. The Moms and CT had never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close. 'The attack of panic and prophylactic focus's last spasm' overwhelms Hal with 'the intense horizontality' that surrounds him in the viewing room-- every line of everything in the room seems horizontal to him. He feels awakened to some basic dimension he's neglected during years of being mostly upright. 'I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.'
notes:
It's noteworthy that Hal's panic attack leaves him feeling more lucid as opposed to disoriented. He becomes divorced from his self, and gazes upon his life from outside. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking. He ponders the possibility that Hamlet was actually mad, but never questioned whether his feigned madness was itself feigned. Are these related? Perhaps Hal's muteness was real, and he cannot accept that. Was there a specific suspected partner in Orin's story of the footprints on the windshield? It seems all but confirmed that Mario is the offspring of CT.
p 902-906
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately's decline from promising football player to drug addict is chronicled, presumably as Gately lies semi-conscious in the hospital ward. His cognomen Bim or Bimmy was derived from the acronym for Big Indestructible Moron. Even at 12 his head was huge, too big for a regulation helmet, and he seemed to be about a yard wide, and every coach who encountered him spoke of limitless possibilities. He played linebacker on defense and fullback on offense, and in spite of his size he was fast, he ran a 40 in 4.4 in the 7th grade. His head was indestructible, whether coming at an opponent with his special helmet, or being used to win bets-- he'd bet a 6-pack that he could endure being clocked in the head with various objects. He was definitely a boy's boy; he had no idea how to impress girls other than to let them watch someone do something extreme to his head. He wasn't a defender of the weak, but neither was he a bully. Gately smoked his first duBois at age 9, and soon he and the other players he hung around wanted nothing much else than to get high and having pissing contests, or talk about Xing big-haired girls. Gately was the only one who was truly interested in football. He had been classified as ADD and Special-Ed from grade school on, and had specific problems with 'Language Arts.' His whole memory of his sinsemilla/screwdriver beginnings telescopes to pissing orange juice into the Atlantic, while the waves washed it back up around his ankles, which he speaks of in AA, as pissing on himself with alcohol right from the start. At 13 he moves on to quaaludes and beer, and the attack of the killer sidewalks. He moved on to a whole new social set including Trent Kite, a laptop-carrying wienie who was perhaps the last fanatical Grateful Dead enthusiast in the east coast, and whose special talent was transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents into a rudimentary lab for the synthesis of drugs. Gately's favorites were Kite's Quaalude isotopes, which he called 'QuoVadis' and which with a couple of beers inevitably led to the attack of a killer sidewalk. It was basically a 2-year brownout, which also coincided with the ex-MP leaving Gately's mother for a Newburyport divorcee, who apparently put up a more sporting fight. Amazingly, none of this really hurt Gately's football playing. He limited his intake to nighttime, not so much as a beer before 6pm. He caught up on sleep during classes. Most of the kids he hung out with were expelled by sophomore year, Gately made it until 17. QuoVadis and beer are lethal in terms of homework, and Gately had enough academic troubles even straight. Kite managed to tutor him through remedial math and science, and he and another player had arranged for the French teacher to have her 'strabysmic eyeballs fucked out' by a tanned football coach. English was Gately's tripping point. The coaches tried out all 4 English teachers, but none would agree to pass a student who couldn't do the work, regardless of his tragic home situation and his limitless football promise. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp in May, losing eligibility for the fall season, and withdrew for a year to preserve his junior season. His whole 16th year is a blur, he survived on the vegetables from his mother's vodka drinks, and when he returned for junior year season at 17 he was flabby and enervated, and could hardly keep the shakes off on the field. His coaches sent him for PET scans, and his ability to endure Ethan From, even in comic book form was gone. Kite was gone to college at Salem State to study computer science, which meant that Gately was on his own in math and science now. Just before midterms that Gately was set to fail, his mother had the cirrhotic hemorrhage, and the backs of Gately's eyeballs were too itchy [from Percocet] to even wave goodbye as the ambulance took her away. He smoked his first gasper, from her half empty pack, and he never went back to school or played organized ball again.
notes:
This section is a sort of microcosm for the book--a hilarious trip through Gately's past, which by the time it's finished is incredibly sad.
p 906-911
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal may have been dozing. He seems to remember people poking their heads in. Then at some point Pemulis appeared, his right eye either twitchy or swollen from sleep. Hal considers asking him to explain where he's been, but opts for a less complicated response, telling him that he's just lying here. Pemulis says he heard something about hysterics. Pemulis doesn't look good; he's unshaven and his color isn't good. Hal is thinking of the lecture in 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...' and also of CT's misadventure at Himself's funeral. Meanwhile Pemulis is asking that Hal come and do some 'important interfacing.' Pemulis says Eschaton's a no-go, and asks if Hal has seen the Moms around. Pemulis implies that this partly has to do with the DMZ, and Hal reminds him of the 30 days of drug-free living. Freer interrupts them to tell of the piece of human flesh that's stuck to the window. Pemulis tries to shrug him off, saying this is a tete-a-tete. Kiernan McKenna arrives and says that Troeltsch is charging $2 to see. Pemulis says this is what he means about going somewhere private, and asks when he's ever asked Hal to urgently dialog before. Hal answers not in the last few days. Pemulis says that he's going to have to eat before seeing Stice anyway, so maybe he'll come back afterwards. Hal asks him to get down the cartridge of Good-Looking Men...and cue it 2300 or 2350. Pemulis muses over the titles of Himself's films, half of which he hasn't even heard of. Meanwhile Hal's mind goes back to the funeral, which took place April 5 or 6, just west of the Great Concavity. A gull had shit on CT and when he'd opened his mouth in shock, a fly had flown in his mouth. The Moms had laughed hardest. Pemulis had cued the cartridge to the place where Paul Anthony Heaven, a a data-entry drone that Himself had loved to employ for his monotone speech, was delivering the lecture, saying that the real consequence of the Flood is revealed to be a pandemic of hydrophobia. Behind him a film by Peterson called The Cage was running. There are shots of the bored students. The lecturer says 'We thus become in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God.' Hal considers how the critics miss the pathos of Heaven's speech, instead focussing on the presence of dumb or unappreciative audiences in Himself's films as evidence of the auteur's hostility toward the audience. The lecture continues, 'for while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead.' All the while Heaven is silently weeping, tears running down his gaunt face and falling from view. Hal muses 'then this too began to seem familiar.'
the italicized words in this section
clinamen- the 'swerve' or indeterminacy in the motion of atoms, taken up by literary critic Harold Bloom to describe the inclination of writers to 'swerve' from the influence of their predecessors.
tessera- an individual tile in a mosaic, or in math a curvilinial parallelogram, also the Greek number 4
kenosis- Greek for emptiness, having a religious meaning of being empty and receptive to being filled with God.
daemonization- daemons are good or malevolent supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as the ghosts of dead heroes.
askesis- Greek for the discipline of repressing lust or other worldly concerns
notes:
Is Pemulis's eye twitching because he has been freed from the worry over urinalysis, and gone on a binge? It's notable that Himself would use The Cage in the background of his own film, and also that the critics interpreted his obsession with the 'figurant' as a disdain for the audience. Once again Himself's film seems to precipitate what will transpire in his own [after]life. Is it just the tears that Hal finds familiar or is it the battle to the death with the loved one? It's pretty ironic that Himself has reached Hal on a level that few fathers ever reach their sons, and neither he nor Hal can recognize it.
p 911-916
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
More of Gately's backstory unfolds while he lies in the trauma ward. After he left school, Gately didn't go straight to burglary, although he did steal a few valuables from some of the nurses from whom he copped drug samples. His first job was for Whitey Sorkin, a North Shore bookie. Gately and Gene Fackelmann were Sorkin's muscle, collecting debts. Gately had never understood Whitey's moniker, since he spent hours under UV lamps to treat his cluster headache, and his skin was roughly the color of the Pakistani MD who had informed Gately that his mother's cirrhotic stroke had left her 'at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout.' Fackelmann was also a huge guy, and their collective nickname was the Twin Towers. The weren't bodyguards, and they didn't call Sorkin Boss, mostly they just collected debts. They didn't have to break bad debtor's kneecaps, usually Gately would just inform them that Sorkin was concerned, and work out an arrangement. The size of the Twin Towers was usually deterrent enough. The only cases that called for coercion were the real addict types who'd get themselves in a hole and try to bet their way out, and who would make up sob-stories of ill loved ones, which Gately would have to listen to and then report to Sorkin, and find out whether to believe them. This was Gately's first exposure to real addiction. These cases were what caused Sorkin's cluster headaches. Actual violence only entered the picture when the hole was deep enough that Sorkin was willing to forego future patronage, and then he'd try to demonstrate that he was the least pleasant bookie to be indebted to. Fackelmann would always handle the first stages, a light beating and a broken finger or two. This was partly because Gately would get carried away too easily, and reduce the guy to a condition not conducive to future gambling, or debt paying, and this would cause Gately great remorse, and lead to massive and temporarily debilitating drug use. So usually Gately only got called into action on the really serious, write-off type cases. Although Sorkin paid them handsomely, $1000 a week wasn't enough to support their escalating addictions. Fackelmann moonlighted with IDs and 'creative personal checking' while Gately worked security for card games and drug deliveries. They were able to cop together since Fackelmann was devoted to Dilaudid and Gately to Percocets. When Trent Kite got the boot from Salem State, he joined the crew, Fackelmann turned him on to Dilaudid and they were friends for life. They started the fake-ID, credit-history, luxury-apartment scam. Gately trying to Abide in the trauma ward, remembers one afternoon in Dec 2001 [the last year of unsubsidized time] in an apartment, helping with laminating a rush order on fake IDs while the other two were out fencing the furnishings, save for the TV viewer, which was always the last thing to go. He was watching Boston U play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl, in which Boston's punter is inspiring the announcers to rhapsodize. Gately is suddenly and out of nowhere struck by the loss of organized ball, and begins to cry like a babe. It was 2 days later that he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another in Danvers, and 3 months later he was in Billerica Minimum Security.
notes:
Gately is unconsciously linked to the Incandenza's 8 years before the fact by way of Orin's performance in the Forsythia Bowl.
p 916
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 20
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis is about to retrieve his stash to take it to the Entrepot [trading post]. He finds that the ceiling panel in the hallway of Subdorm B has fallen to the floor, and there seems to be no trace of 'the shoe.'
p 916-934
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately hadn't suspected that Fackelmann had been skimming money from Sorkin all along, and he didn't find out until the 'not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob' which took place while Gately was out on bail. Gately had lost his taste for violence and had taken to burglary instead. Fackelmann had a new partner, Bobby C, a 'bad news' fuchsia-haired punk kid who liked to hurt people. Fackelmann had been keeping long-shot bets here and there, without calling them in, which is suicidal because if they came in he'd have to cough up the money. It wasn't until Fackelmann's map had been presumably eliminated, that Gately and Kite found $22,000 taped to his porn-cartridge case. Gately was amazed that Fackelmann had had the will to save this money against those long-shot bets. Gately split the money with Kite, and then turned his half over to Sorkin, mostly out of guilt for not knowing that Fax had been scamming the overgenerous boss, but also to cheer Sorkin up, and also in Fax's memory. Gately didn't rat out Kite, who spent his half of the money on Grateful Dead bootlegs and computer gear, all of which he quickly sold for drugs, and by the time Gately was out of Billerica, Kite was so far gone that Gately had to become the brains of the team. The beautiful RN who had flushed his colon returns to Gately's room with a doctor whom Gately doesn't recognize, and they set up some kind of device on the adjacent bed. Gately remembers that Fackelmann's favorite expression was 'that's a goddamned lie!' which he used in response to nearly everything. Bobby C claimed to have a collection of ears. The new MD is childlike and Gately despises him. The RN is so beautiful that it's 'almost grotesque' and Gately eyes her 'healthy' breasts, and laments the fact that he's never actually been with a healthy or even sober woman. When the nurse reaches up to unscrew a bolt, Gately thinks more ghostwords as he gazes at her thighs, 'lisle' [a fine thread used to make underwear] and 'embrasure' [an opening in a window with slanted sides making it wider on the outside than on the inside]. Then as he watches the obvious sexual tension as the MD ogles the RN, a third ghostword comes to mind, 'circumambient' [surrounding]. He realizes as he averts his gaze, that it's sleeting outside. The RN says her name is Cathy/Kathy, and Gately is self-conscious of his body odor. As they assemble something above the bed that looks to Gately like part of an electric chair, the nurse tells the doctor that Gately is allergic and doesn't get any meds. Gately wallows in the shame of having taken a dump in front of anyone as healthy and beautiful as the nurse. The MD whose name sounds like Pressburger or Prissburger, asks what Gately is intubated for. The nurse explains in technical language that Dr. Pendleton was concerned that he would get an infection from a fragment of the projectile, or have a hemorrhage or mucoidal flux. The RN says she'll try to fit in a sponge bath before she goes on break, and tells the doctor to let her screw in the cranial brace, with which he's been fumbling. The MD tries to impress the nurse with some technical jargon, which Gately finds pathetic. Gately thinks that since they never brought him the notepad, perhaps Joelle's visit was a dream, which means that it was also a dream that she was wearing Erdedy's sweatpants. Gately notes the sun, and thinks that it must be nearly 1600h, which means maybe he can avoid the horror of getting sponged by the C/Kathy, and instead get sponged by the 'big hairy-moled 1600-2400 nurse.' He wishes again for the pen and paper to communicate his desire to watch the Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show at 1600, which had been a tradition with Kite and Fackelmann and him. He ponders if perhaps the man with the hat in the hallway had intercepted the request from Joelle, and was trying to keep him from getting his story straight before they interrogated him. Gately, like most addicts, suffers late-afternoon dread and has always tried to have some way to block it out, whether Mr. Bouncety-Bounce or Meetings. He traces his fear of being left alone in a room to his childhood, when his mother would pass out nightly, leaving him essentially all alone. The tube in his throat is functioning the same way now, leaving him alone in his head. Plus the late afternoon was the time of day that the wraith had visited him yesterday. He admits to himself that he liked the dialog, the fact that the wraith had been able to communicate with him. Then suddenly he returns to the memory of Fackelmann's demise, and Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep's involvement. Pamela was an upscale but directionless and unhealthy girl from Danvers, whom Gately became involved with. She fell in love with any man 'chivalrous' enough to drive her home without raping her after she had 'swooned and passed out' at one of the clubs on Route 1, which she did on a nightly basis. Fackelmann had handed her off to him one night, and Gately drove her home. She was always either leglessly drunk or passively hungover, meaning that any sex with her, would qualify as 'taking advantage' which Gately never did. She was a beautiful sleeper, and she spent so much time asleep that Gately pictured her at her hospital job asleep. Kite and Fackelmann thought Gately was out of his mind. Gately loved that she would awaken from her stupor long enough to laugh whenever he made the joke about being robbed as he carried her into the stripped apartment. She wore long white gloves, and called drinks 'highballs' in imitation of her mother, who was more of a lush than Gately's own mother. It was Pamela who first clued Gately into the suicidal mistaken-bet scam that Fackelmann had gotten himself into. Gately has to coax the story out of Pamela, whose coherence is not too dependable. Fackelmann had taken a bet from a guy known only as 'Eighties Bill' who was a 50-ish 'corporate take-overer' with red suspenders and docksiders. He had received some kind of a tip that made him want to bet $125K against his Yale, his alma mater, and Fackelmann has to call into Sorkin to get approval. Except Sorkin is being treated for his facial pain by Dr. Robert ['Sixties Bob'] Monroe, who had interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary's original circle, and also friends with Kite, by way of their shared enthusiasm for the Grateful Dead. He often took Kite around to search out Dead-related paraphernalia, and even fenced stuff for Kite [and hence for Gately] covering the money for Kite, and trading the stuff later. Gately has to slip an ice cube into Pamela's neckline to keep her focussed on the important details. So the point was that Sorkin couldn't take Fackelmann's call, and he got instead, Sorkin's secretary Gwendine O'Shay, a fomer IRA moll who'd been hit on the head one too many times, and whose skull was 'soft as puppy shit in the rain.' She's familiar with Eighties Bill and his penchant for Yale, and she gets the bet wrong, thinking that Eighties Bill is trying to bet for Yale. And she verifies that there's a fix against Yale, namely that a team of cheerleaders has been recruited go pantyless in order to exploit the neurologic disorder of Yale's star forward, which renders him vertiginous after intercourse. So O'Shay OKs the bet, which she thinks is for Yale. But then there's a wrench in the fix caused by a last minute intervention by the 'Female Objectification Protection and Protest Phalanx' [the FOPPPs] who swoop in on their Harley's and remove the pantyless cheerleaders, leaving the star forward's neurology intact. When Yale wins by 20 points, Fackelmann collects the money from Eighties Bill, and brings it to Sorkin, not knowing that the bet had been mixed up. Sorkin is working on spreadsheets with special goggles that look like lobsters' eyes on stalks. Sorkin eyes the 'Go Bruins' bag in Fackelmann's hands and says he fails to see the joke. He gives Fackelmann the money to give to Eighties Bill, and says that he can't really blame Fax or O'Shay, because the fix was supposed to have been in. Fackelmann says nothing, but eventually realizes what's going on here, and starts to visualize how much Dilaudid $250K will buy from a certain Chinatown dealer, and how much the street value of the drugs would be, provided he and Kite could move to some far away urban market. By this time Pamela is 'irreversibly swooned' but Gately can put the rest of the story together on his own. When he saw the massive amount of wholesale Dilaudid from Dr. Wo, Kite would have filled Fackelmann in that Eighties Bill is the son of Sixties Bob, Sorkin's personal migrainologist. And even if Sixties Bob somehow didn't tell Sorkin, he'd probably hear from Bobby C who regularly scored from Dr. Wo, and was sure to hear about his coworker's massive purchase. In short, Fackelmann was a Dead Man. Instead of donning a disguise and getting as far from Boston as possible, Fax did what any drug addict would do, he beelined it to the luxury apartment and started shooting up. And this is why he's been squatting in a corner of the living room for the past few days. Gately realizes that at root a drug addict is a 'craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.' The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela was spoon her. The worst part to Gately, was the pretense that he was getting up to check on Fackelmann. He knew full well that the first thing that Fax would do would be to unwrap a new syringe and invite him to share in the mountain of Dilaudid. Which to Gately's shame he did, telling himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company. At this point Gately's memory is punctuated by a fever dream that he's riding north in a bus the same color as its own exhaust. The dream goes on and on without any kind of arrival. Gately comes to when he feels what feels like the tongue of his pet kitten Nimitz on his forehead. When he opens his eyes he sees that the wraith is back, and that the tongue belongs not to Nimitz, but to another more physically fit wraith in 'faggy biking shorts' who is licking his forehead. No man has licked Gately's forehead and lived! He strikes out reflexively, and realizes that the wraith's breath has no warmth or smell. The pain wakes him temporarily and the wraiths vanish. He falls back into something that's not quite sleep and his dreams continue. One dream consists only of the color blue. He's both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out of the room but never Joelle or Ferocious Francis. He dreams there are people in the room, but he's not one 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.'
notes:
As Gately passively ogles the attractive nurse, there's a distinct aura of Himself in his thoughts. In a typical DFW move, Gately has to try to keep Pamela focussed on the 'important' details, when in reality her diversion about Sixties Bob being a fence, is perhaps the most important detail to the overall story. Presumably he was the fence for the stash of the 'arty looking film cartridges' from the DuPlessis burglary [p 55-60]. The 'dream' that begins with the long busride, and Gately being inside of a blue bag and continues with Gately and Hal digging up the corpse of Himself is clearly no dream, since we know already from p 15-17 that Hal has a memory of the same episode. Presumably Gately has been kidnapped from the hospital in a blue body bag and driven by bus with Hal to Himself's gravesite, and made to dig up the corpse, only to discover that they are too late and the cartridge that was buried with him is already gone.
p 934
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
A 'grotesquely huge' woman with stubble bulging in her hose grabs Joelle as she comes out of the hospital, and tells her that she's in almost mind-boggling danger. Joelle says 'this is supposed to be news?'
p 934-938
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Back at the luxury apartment Gately and Fackelmann are still indulging in narcotics and M&M's the next morning, watching a video consisting of nothing but flames of different kinds, that Fackelmann got from Kite. Kite had declined to join them, and had packed up everything he owned and was on his way to a supposed trade show in another zip code. Pamela gets up, vomits and mousses her hair before leaving for work. Gately and Fackelmann continue their binge at a furious pace. Every time Gately asks anything about how Fackelmann had come into so much Dilaudid, Fackelmann gives the standard answer: 'that's a goddamn lie.' They found this increasingly funny. Eventually Fackelmann wets his pants, and the urine pools on the floor. The phone rang. At some point Gately tried to stand and was assaulted by the floor, and then he wet his own pants. The intercom's buzzer rang. Around sunset, Fackelmann has a convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants. The sun seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo. They ran out of distilled water and Fackelmann sopped up some candy-stained urine from the floor and used it to cook up the Dilaudid. Gately nods into a dream that he's on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides say 'Paragon Bus Lines: The Gray Line' and he realizes [in the trauma ward] that this is the same bus from his dream that went on and on. But he has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream. His fever returns to new heights that make his heart monitor send an alert to the nurse station. Back in the apartment, the buzzer sounds again and it's Pamela voice on the intercom, asking to be let in. Fackelmann was making his hand into the shape of a claw and then a spider. Gately gets up and tries to take a step, and misses the floor. He crashes down with a giant thud that knocks the TP viewer to the floor. Fackelmann holds out the spider for Gately's inspection.
notes:
Once again the 'dream' of the bus ride is the real part. Perhaps this is the same bus on which Fortier is riding [p 724-728]
p 938-941
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place presumably near St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle is being interviewed presumably by Steeply. The questions are given only as 'Q.' She explains that she was only in two scenes. In the first scene she's going through s revolving door, when she sees someone whom she hasn't seen in a long time, and with whom she was formerly very close. They're to give each other shocked looks of recognition. She tries to follow the other person out through the revolving door, while he tries to follow her in. They do that for several whirls. The actor was male, not one of Jim's regulars, but the character is epicene [indeterminate sex]. She says she assumes the interviewer can relate.The other scene was filmed by a camera mounted in a bassinet, and had her in a floor length gown, leaning over the camera in the crib and apologizing. There were at least 20 minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry.' She says that she was 'not exactly veiled.' The camera in the crib was fitted with an 'auto wobble' to make it blur, and looked like an eyestalk. She says that Jim cared more about lenses than the camera, and he made his own. She said the wobble was meant to reproduce the 'neonatal nystagmus' of an infant's vision, and that's what was driving the scene. Her face wasn't important, and wasn't meant to be captured realistically by the lens. She says that she never saw it, and that the masters were to be buried with him, at least according to his will. She says it had nothing to do with him killing himself. He'd stopped being drunk all the time and that's what killed him-- he couldn't take it, but he'd made a promise. She says she doesn't know if he even finished the master, but that there was nothing unendurable or enslaving about either of her scenes. She says he 'joked' about making something too perfect, and that he always referred to his work as 'entertainments' but he meant it ironically. He never would have carried the joke far enough to make an anti--version or an antidote. She says that when he spoke of it being terminally compelling it was a jab at her, because she used to say that the veil was there to disguise the fact that she was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a joke she'd gotten from one of his films, the Medusa-Odalisk one. Even in UHID she'd hidden by hiddenness. She says that Jim had called his failed piece 'too perfect to release' as an ironic joke to her. She says that 'if it got made, and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried.' After several undisclosed questions she says that where he's buried is itself buried now, in the annulation-zone, and that's the part of the joke that he didn't know, but would certainly have enjoyed, that if they want the cartridge now...
notes:
Joelle's description of the Entertainment is quite different than Molly Notkin's [p 787-795] but jibes with the wraith's description [p 827-845]. Perhaps even with the auto wobble, Joelle's unveiled face is too lethally beautiful for people to stand. She clearly doesn't buy that explanation. But the fact that she sees the cartridge as an ironic joke sheds doubt on her understanding of it. Himself's wraith suggested that the film was by no means ironic. The references eyestalks permeate these final pages, and this description of Himself's cameral with its special lens seems as close to a source.
p 941-958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
By coincidence when Hal returns to his room he finds Coyle watching one of Himself's cartridges, Accomplice!, while Mario gets dressed. Mario notes that Hal woke up early, and that he looks sad. Mario describes how Troeltsch had tried to put toilet paper on Stice's forehead, and now that is stuck. Coyle is removing his apnea mouthguard, and Hal tells him not to think of putting it on his bed. Coyle tells Mario to tell him the worst part, which is that Coyle awoke to find Ortho missing and his bed appeared to be bolted to the ceiling. Coyle says that Stice explained to him that he had been selected by some kind of beneficiary ghost, who's trying to teach him not to underestimate the value of ordinary things, in order to help his game. Coyle says Stice is losing it, and that he had bet Coyle that he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, which after a half hour of trying he hadn't been able to do. Coyle can't decide whether to go Schtitt, because what if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game. Mario reminds Hal that there are messages on the machine. Cosgrove Watt [star of Accomplice!] had been one of Himself's regulars, and one of the few professional actors that he used. Himself thought that amateur actors would help strip away the realism, and remind the audience that they were in fact watching actors. The irony that it required non-actors to achieve the I'm-only-acting feel, was one of the critics' principle interests in Himself's early work. The truth was that Himself had simply not wanted the actors to get in the way of his technical achievements. One way to look at his late work was that in abandoning this, he had been so desperate to make something entertaining and 'conducive to self forgetting' that he had professionals and amateurs emoting wildly all over the place. Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but not a very good one, and before Himself discovered him, his claim to fame had been portraying a Dancing Gland in a series of TV spots. Once Himself had recruited Watt, he used him in almost every project, and even put him and his family up at ETA for a time. Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles in which he plays a depraved older man who meets a young male prostitute at a bus station and takes him home to his apartment, which was in reality the apartment that Himself had rented for Orin and the PGOAT. The boy agrees to have sex with the man, but insists that he use a condom. The old man's thoughts are rendered by thought bubbles, revealing that he's enraged by the insinuation that he might have It, the HIV virus. He dons the condom, and the sex scene is done under bright lamps without any soft-focus or music. What the boy doesn't realize is that the old man is holding a razor in his hand which he uses to cut through condom and phallus alike. Himself uses a footnote to point out that he's honoring what is apparently a homosexual-sex-scene convention that the recipient keeps his face turned away from the camera until the dominant partner is finished. When the old man removes his bloody deflated phallus, the boy turns to the audience and utters a mute howl, as he sees that his thigh is marked with the eight spidery tentacles of the Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is the symptom of It. The boy is sobbing that the old man has made him a murderer, and then he shrieks 'Murderer!' over and over for 500 seconds, which amounts to a third of the total length of the cartridge. Hal has argued with Mario about this ending, questioning whether there was a theoretical end to which the ending strived, or if Himself was simply a shitty editor. it was only after Himself's death that theorists really addressed this issue-- a woman at UC Irvine had earned tenure arguing that the reason-vs-no-reason debate illuminated one of the central conundra of apres-garde film, which involved the question of why so much ambitious film was so boring, and so much shitty commercial entertainment was so much fun. Outside the window the snow was piling up, and the TP was showing weather reports, which were all about snow, showing cars abandoned and buried in snow, and reporters floundering in gusts of snow trying to deliver their reports. This was the worst snowstorm since BS 1998 and the second worst since BS 1993. The news shows a man in a wheelchair staring stonily at the snow-covered ramp outside the State House. The news says that this storm was not a Nor'easter, but rather a collision of a moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front. A man impotently brushing the snow from his windshield becomes a thematic image of the news broadcasts. Hal has never skied, skated, or snowmobiled, since winter sports were all but forbidden by ETA. Hal can barely recall the '98 blizzard, which happened when the academy had only been open for a few months. The storm came barreling in from southeast Canada in March. The players had to be led to the Lung single file holding a rope, with Schtitt in the lead carrying a flare. Hal remembers Himself sitting in a chair sipping brandy throughout the storm. His interest moved from tennis pedagogy to film almost as soon as the academy was completed. The move to ETA from Weston had dragged on for nearly a year, because the Moms had attachments. Hal is lying on his subdorm's carpet which he had acquired during his Byzantine erotica phase. Hal had seen a titillating reference in the OED, and like Himself, he had stumbled from one obsession to another. Hal cannot distinguish his memories of the Weston house, from Mario's description of his own memories. He remembers a three-story Victorian, high above an elmed street. The Moms had an intricate garden, and her dog S. Johnson had a pen abutting the garage. Hal's memories seem more like tableaux or snapshots than films. He remembers 'Block Mother' in the front window. He remembers the smell of Lemon Pledge and a 'chilling' framed photo of Fritz Lang directing Metropolis which predates Himself's film obsession. He remembers chairs covered in protective plastic, a divan with cigarette burns and books, videos, cans in the kitchen, all alphabetized. He has a 'surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane.' Some of the memories must be confabulated or dreamed since the Moms would never have a divan with burns in it. Hal recalls Himself slumped in a chair while the Moms told him that she'd long since lost hope he could hear what she was telling him. It's impossible for Hal to reconcile the Himself of his memories with the director of Accomplice! with its sodomy and razors. Hal remembers a church down the street with a sign reading 'Life is like tennis-Those who serve-Best usually win.' In Hal's dorm room he has the 'really prurient part' of the Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, dating from his Byzantinalia phase. There are five chairs in a room where no one even uses chairs. Hal knows that the rooms guilloche consists of 811 interwoven circles. He realizes that he cannot remember what he has done with a Constantine frieze that once hung from the guilloche. 'There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.' The Weston living room had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum lighting and the Moms's jungle of Green Babies. It takes Hal way too long to recall the concise term for optical perspective, when looking down at his NASA glass resting on his chest. It's hard to remember the Weston living room, in part because many of the things were transferred to the ETA living room, including a table on which Mario had chipped a tooth after an 'accidental' shove from Orin. The table had been a gift from Himself's mother who had died of emphysema. The Moms's mother had died of an infarction when she was 8, and her father had died under unknown circumstances during her sophomore year at McGill. The L'Islet potato farm is now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost. Orin had liked to do an impersonation of Himself's mother in her wheelchair, extending a claw. It's easier to see the climacteric [menopausal] changes in the Moms's body since she's confined herself to the Headmaster's House. Hal thinks of how he had to lie in answer to therapists questions like 'how does watching your mother age make you feel inside?' because the truth, Nothing At All, sounds like a textbook lie. It occurs to Hal with some force, that he doesn't want to play today, even if an indoor meet is arranged. He imagines contriving an accident where he injures his bad ankle, perhaps tearing the ligaments so that he never has to play again, so that he can be the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. he's then hit with 'the really moving thing' Himself had said to Orin concerning adult films, which films Hal finds more sad than nasty. Orin and some friends had gotten ahold of an X-rated video, and word got back to Himself that they were planning a screening. Himself brought Orin into the office, gave him a soda, and got a confession out of him without saying a word. Himself said that Orin was old enough, and could, if he desired, go ahead with the screening discreetly keeping the younger kids away. But if Orin wanted his fatherly advice, he'd advise that Orin not watch pornography until he'd experienced for himself what a moving thing sex can be. He said he was afraid Behind the Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality. Orin had claimed that what he found so moving was the assumption that he was still a virgin. Hal finds it sad that this rare openness on the part of Himself was wasted on Orin. Hal tries to picture Stice hoisting his bed up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Hal knows John Wayne has come into the room by the sound of his stride and breathing. He doesn't look at him, and neither speaks. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin until he met the Moms, and he will concede that he was faithful to her, and that his attachment to Joelle wasn't sexual. The Moms has made little attempt to hide her liaison with John Wayne. Hal cannot imagine the Moms and Himself in a sexual situation, but he pictures the Moms and CT as having 'frenetic and weary' sex, with the Moms staring at the ceiling while CT talked nonstop. Hal imagines all of the Moms's affairs were more a matter of athleticism and flexibility than passion. The passion would come in keeping it hidden. Hal wonders if there's a connection between this and all of the Himself films titled Cage, or to the veiled girl whom he became so attached to. Hal's picture of John Wayne and Moms having sex involves her staring upward motionless, and him above her face between her breasts and tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard.
notes:
The wraith has apparently revealed his purpose to Stice, or perhaps just implanted the info in his head, like he did the ghostwords in Gately's head. Note that Himself's idea of entertainment is 'self-forgetting' which is half way to self-eliminating, which apparently his final film achieved. It seems that Hal's suggestion that the ending of Accomplice was the result of bad editing, is close to the truth, which seems to be that Himself was so engrossed in accomplishing his objective, that he was oblivious to the fact that it would make for a boring film. Also, it seems worth noting that the 'murderer!' ending is pretty similar to the endless repeated variations of "I's so very sorry' that apparently comprise most of his final film. Note that Hal remembers the alphabetized soup cans and the knife in the mirror, perhaps DFW is trying to clue the reader in to recalling the crucial opening section [p 15-17], in which Hal remembers both of these things as well as the episode where a masked John Wayne watches while he and Gately dig up Himself's head. Note that the Moms tells Himself that she has lost hope of him hearing what she tells him. This seems related to the fact that Hal either doesn't speak, or Himself cannot hear him. Again the reference to Byzantine erotica seems to draw our attention back to the opening section of the book. It's perhaps crucial that Himself was responsible for developing annulation which produced the Great Concavity, which in turn demolished what remained of The Moms's family's estate. There are layers of irony in the story of Orin's porn tape, with Himself's own apparently impoverished and lonely idea of sexuality being passed to his sons in very different ways. And Orin's idea coming [perhaps even directly] more from the Moms. Hal cannot apparently see sex in anything but a detached way, much like one his tableaux.
p 958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle figures that they've let her loose just to see where she'll go, so she goes to Ennet House. Her clothes and veil are soaked from the snow [hence the dating of these episodes to Nov 20, or later]. She had thought of removing the veil in an attempt to get away from the linebacker federal lady. She considers whether Pat will be convinced to put her in quarantine and remove the wheelchair ramps. She sees a police car in the snow outside Ennet House as she approaches.
notes:
The fact that the last time Gately saw Joelle at the hospital was Nov 20 or later, implies that the episode that he 'dreams' of digging up Himself's head must have happened at least a few days after that, presumably after the AFR had acquired Hal from ETA.
p 958-960
YDAU [2009] presumably
place unknown lunchtime AA meeting
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Someone named Mikey is speaking at an AA meeting. He tells of going to pickup his son to take him bowling. The son is in the custody of his sister, whom he calls 'the cunt' and his mother, and Mikey has been issued a restraining order, requiring him to get their permission to visit. He calls to get permission and the sister asks him to wait while she checks with the mother, when she returns to the phone to announce he's been granted permission he asks if she wants a medal for letting him see his son, and she hangs up. This brings out the 'old Mikey' and drives over and parks on the grass, and goes to the door and says 'fuck you you cunt' and tells her she needs therapy. The sister says that the son has just recently had his cast removed after the stunt that Mikey pulled with 'that bimbo' and tells Mikey to get off the porch, denying him permission to see the son. When Mikey refuses, the sister gets the phone and threatens to call the police, and finally he gets in his truck, and in spite of his rage manages to leave. Then driving along he starts to pray and realizes that he has to go back and apologize. He does apologize and asks to at least see the kid without his cast, and the sister says 'fuck you... we don't accept your fucking apology.' To the AA members he says that he needed to share this because he scared himself. He asks if he's trying to set himself up to need a drink. He says that it looks like Vinnie is about to gong him, and calls on Tommy E. to speak next.
notes:
The meaning and placement of this section are, to this reader, completely elusive,
p 960-964
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Pat M]
synopsis:
Pat M is meeting with the ADA from the North Shore, who says that he's here about one the residents but not professionally, which is apparently the condition for Pat to have allowed the meeting. He says that he's been at St. Elizabeth for three days now, and he needs to share this to get up his nerve, and that his sponsor's no help. He says that he's in Phob-Comp-Anon, which is for codependency issues with loved ones who are phobic and/or compulsive. He says that Tooty's tormented by some oral-hygiene-violation issues, which it turns out have roots in her childhood. He says he's at the Ninth step, working on making direct amends with whomever he's harmed. He says it's Gately, and acknowledges her constraints, and assures her he wants nothing from her on him. He says he's held Gately accountable for making Tooty's issues reflare, and has been waiting to get him, and then this last chance 'went federal and then fizzled.' His entire group has said that pursuing Gately for the incident out of resentment will doom him, and will not help Tooty. He says he needs to let it go, not just prosecution, that was the easy part, he's already tossed the file for this man he's long wanted nothing more than to see behind bars. He says that the worst part is that he has to make amends, to reach out to him and ask for forgiveness. He says that he hasn't tossed the Canadian file, just let it simmer without pursuing it, because ironically if he tossed it, it would expose him to conflict of interest. He asks for Pat's confidence in this matter. He says that he cannot do it. He's sat outside Gately's room repeating the Serenity Prayer, but still believes that Gately is evil, and he can't go through with it. Pat says that it sounds very hard. He says he doesn't know why he's come here, and that he doesn't expect help or counsel. He says he's accepted that he has to do it, but that he hasn't yet been willing.
notes:
This explains why the shadowy figure outside the hospital room didn't just apprehend Gately.
p 964-971
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 [immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fete]
place ETA
narrated in first person by a player other than Hal
synopsis:
The unnamed ETA student says that usually part of the experience of having a gala is getting to watch the different people arrive, but not so for this one. The players are all in the locker room getting ready to exhibit. John Wayne hunched as always, with a towel over his head, is running a coin over the backs of his fingers. Arslanian is still blindfolded. Rumors have circulated about the Quebec Jr team, and about the courts at MIT, where they were to play. Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early morning, but Doucette said that he was lurking around the West House dumpsters looking 'anxiously depressed.' A small cheer went up when Otis P Lord entered, having returned from having the monitor removed from his neck. He would not be playing today. Rumor had it that the Quebec team had been seen, and they were in reality some kind of Special-Olympicish adult wheelchair-tennis contingent. A couple of the sub-14s went to check it out and never returned. Across the wall on the female side Thode could be heard. She had thrown a tantrum because Poutrincourt was apparently AWOL. Loach is shaving Hal's left ankle for the taping, and people note that Hal isn't eating thew customary Snickers or AminoPal. Traub and Whale later said that Hal was being weird, for example asking Loach if he ever felt like being in a pre-match locker room gave him the feeling that he'd been there so many times before that it was all pre-recorded, that they all existed as basically Fourier Transforms of postures and routines, all recorded and call-uppable, but as a consequence also erasable. Usually before a match Hal's face had a wide-eyed ingenuish anxiety of someone who'd never been in this situation before, but today