6/3/09

p 68-87

this section in 5 parts

p 68-78
YDAU [2009] month?
place Boston area
narrated in third person

synopsis:

This part describes a doctor on a psych ward asking questions of Kate Gompert who has just tried to commit suicide. Kate is lying in the fetal position,with long-unwashed hair. She is under 24-hour suicide watch. the doctor who enters the room reads on her chart that she's 21, from Newton MA, data-clerk in a real estate office. This is her 4th hospitalization in 3 years, for unipolar clinical depression, she's had electro-convulsive treatment once, and been on and off various meds, which she has a history of abusing. She has attempted suicide twice, once by carbon monoxide and once by slitting her wrists. this time she took all of her [130+] antidepressants at once. Her mother found her and hallucinated that she was a newborn. The doctor takes out his pen and asks her why she tried to hurt herself, and if she would sit up. She answers that she is sitting up,and when he asks her if she feels as if she is in a sitting position, she sighs and sits u and says she was trying to kill herself, not hurt herself. When he asks the difference, she says she's not one of those self hating ones; she didn't want to punish herself, she just wanted to 'stop playing' or stop being conscious, she would have opted for shock, or a coma, if she could have. The doctor writes as she talks. She says she has a feeling that she feels throughout her body, more like horror than sadness. She fears this feeling more than anything, it's like nausea of every cell of the body. And even though it comes and goes, when she's having the feeling she forgets that. She says that she wants shock [ECT] or to be sedated for a month. She says that she sometimes thinks 'the feeling' has to do with Hope [pot, a nickname she explains: when you call a dealer you ask if Bob is in town in case of surveillance, and dealer answers 'Hope springs eternal' if so]. She explains that although pot is usually considered a minor drug, in her case she loves it so much that it's a whole other problem. She then explains her drug habit and obsession with concealing in what sounds like a combination of Hal's [paranoia about being discovered] and Erdeddy's [habitually quitting/restarting] habits. She explains that when she does manage to quit, 'the feeling' creeps back in, and she doesn't want to do anything. Part of the feeling is being willing to do anything to make it go away. The doctor who has stopped taking notes then asks, 'so this has happened in the past?' She answers 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' The doctor when summarizing her choice of treatment option on her chart, adds his own post assessment question, 'then what?'


p 78-79
YDAU [2009] April 2
place Boston
narrated in third person

synopsis:

The medical attache's wife returns home at 0145h [6:18 since he began watching] to find her husband unresponsive in his soiled recliner. She tries to unsuccessfully to rouse him, and then noticing the expression on his face is 'positive, ecstatic even,' she turns her head to the cartridge-viewer

p 79-85
YDAU [2009] presumably
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

This part introduces Gerhard Schtitt who is the head coach and athletic director at ETA, who in spite of rumored impropriety involving a riding crop at his former job, was 'wooed fiercely' by James Incandenza. Pretty much everyone at ETA now thinks that the riding crop episode was exaggerated, because the weatherman's pointer he now uses instead, has yet to make 'corrective contact with even one athletic bottom.' He is more of a dispenser of abstractions & philosophy now. Mario is Schtitt's sidekick, and confidante. Mostly Schtitt talks and Mario listens. The fact that Mario is 'visibly damaged' allows Schtitt to let down his guard, as if there's no one in there. Schtitt is described as having a 'creepy wiriness' of old an man who exercises regularly. He has a white crewcut and 'glowingly white' skin. Schtitt argues [Mario listens] against the notion that the quickest path between 2 points is a straight line, saying that one always runs into something. He relates the locker room motto from his youth 'we are what we walk between' which is contrasted with both the original ETA slogan which is Latin for, roughly 'They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier' and the one to which CT changed it after Himself's death: 'the man who knows his limitations has none.' Most of the kids at ETA think Schtitt is bats, and mostly show him respect because he can make their morning workouts very unpleasant. One reason James Incandenza was drawn to Schtitt is that he's not the usual tennis coach, the basic 'hands-on practical straight-ahead problem solving statistical-data wonk.' He understood intuitively [with no knowledge of mathematics] that rather than reducing the chaos into patterns, in order to understand it, one must embrace the expansion to infinite limits of possibility. The infinities are mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, 'bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.' Mario asks with total incomprehension, 'you mean like baselines'? Schtitt was taught that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, but questions what the point of that is in the current state, where the only public consensus a boy has to surrender to is: 'the happy pleasure of the person alone.' He laments that without something bigger, there is 'nothing to contain and give the meaning.' On the way to get ice cream, he tells Mario that as a youth he was in love with a tree and would visit the tree daily. The thrust of Schtitt's view is that the 'true opponent, the enfolding boundary is the player himself.' Mario thinks of a flagpole raised to twice it's normal height. Schtitt says the game that students are at ETA to learn is 'life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.' As he grapples with whether that means 'destroying yourself,' some kids make fun of Mario's appearance. When they get to the ice cream place Mario opts for the old standby, chocolate while Schtitt experiments with something exotic, and concludes 'and so. no different maybe... except the chance to play' and laughs.

p 85-87
YDAU [2009] early November
place Boston
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Tiny Ewell is 'tiny, an elf sized US male' who is being driven in a taxi from the hospital to the halfway house. He had returned home to find that his wife packed up his clothing, changed the locks and filed a restraining order. His Florsheim shoes still bear a scuff where he kicked the door. This is the first time he's been allowed to wear them [instead of the hospital provided 'happy slippers'] after he had used the to try to whack the mice he hallucinated during detox. Ewell looks like a scaled down Burl Ives, with his round shape white goatee, and 'violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort.' His former roommate at the detox unit is now sitting alone turning the air condition up and down [in November] and amusing himself. He, like Tiny has the 'rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. He gives Tiny the 'screaming meemies.' The rehab staffer accompanies Tiny to Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. The cabbie asks if Tiny is sick, and tiny answers 'so it would seem.'


p 87
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person

synopsis:

By mid-afternoon the medical attache has been joined by a whole cast of characters in watching the recursive loop from the cartridge, these include
-his wife
-the personal assistant of Prince Q--'s personal physician [who came looking for the attache]
-the personal physician [who came looking for the assistant]
-two armed security guards [dispatched by the prince to find the physician]
-two 7th day adventists [who had happened by]


notes
The Kate Gompert section was awfully sobering for this reader, in light of the author's death. It shows quite clearly an author who, while obviously a master of irony, did not seek refuge behind it.
The Schtitt section points up one of DFW's amazing gifts--switching the voice of the third person narrator to incorporate the way the scene's central character thinks. The Schtitt section is thorny and packed with math/philosphy-related stuff.
The Enfield VA hospital is presumably near the Enfield Tennis Academy, although I cannot recall any mention of the street location, that would place it on or near Commonwealth Ave.

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