6/3/09

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.

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