6/3/09

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.

1 comment:

alexander james aguilar said...

i might be wrong, but i think it was Himself's father who had the fear of spiders. JOI sr.