p 3-17
--
The sections of the book that are demarcated by one of the circular shapes will be discussed individually and the subsections [I'll call these 'parts'--whenever there occurs a break in the text without a circle] will be noted, with a [re]iteration, wherever possible, of the setting. The spoiler-free synopses will precede the notes, which will be somewhat subjective, and may contain suggestions toward unravelling the plot that could be seen to contain spoilers.
--
this section in 5 parts
p 3-10
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal Incandenza
Hal Incandenza is being interviewed by three nameless deans at the University of Arizona [UA], and is accompanied by his uncle Charles Tavis [CT] and Aubrey F. deLint. The scene is related by Hal in first person, but he does not speak. It is related that he is 18 and about to graduate from Enfield Tennis Academy [ETA] in Enfield, MA, where he has been in residence since age 7. The university began courting him in February, and he has brought deLint along because he was also an ETA alum who had gone to UA. Hal is in Arizona to play in a tournament, in which he has performed impressively thus far. Hal's incommunicativeness begins to trouble the deans, CT tries to allay their fear, saying that Hal's all but ready to sign a letter of intent. In his head Hal corrects the word usage errors of the deans, revealing his firm[possibly nerdy] grasp of language. The deans raise questions about the disparity between Hal's abominable test scores, and his 'incredible' grades, which have fallen off to merely outstanding in the last year. They also question whether he wrote the essays on obscure topics included with his application. CT objects to the insinuations, and the deans ask deLint and CT to leave, so they can speak with Hal. Hal alternates his own thoughts with what the deans are saying,confirming that the essays are his, albeit old. Finally he speaks, telling the deans that the grades are his, and that the transcript may have 'dickied' a bit to get him past a 'rough spot' and then says he can't make himself understood--'call it something I ate.'
p 10-11
ca. 1997
Weston MA
narrated in first person: Hal
Hal relates a childhood story from March or April when Hal was around 5. His older brother Orin and his mother [the Moms] were gardening when Hal announced 'I ate this' referring to a nauseous mold. [The scene is mostly described from his brother Orin's questionable perspective.] The Moms is running around screaming hysterically for help.
p 11-13
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
Back at the interview Hal is apparently hysterical himself, telling the deans that his application is not bought, that he's complex and insanely well-read, at which point he apparently has some kind of a seizure and makes some very strange noises causing the deans great alarm, and eventually an ambulance is apparently called.
p 13-15
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
Hal is being dragged into or through a men's room by the deans with whom CT argues that Hal is fine. The deans argue effusively that Hal has serious problems, while on the tennis court he's a 'genius' and they reveal that he has southwest roots, and that his brother is in the NFL. Hal apparently goes in and out of consciousness as they put him in an ambulance.
p 15-17
Year of Glad [2010] November
place Tucson AZ
narrated in first person: Hal
In the ambulance he reveals that his brother Orin lives/lived in Arizona. He says he once dismissed deLint as a '2-D martinet.' Hal is taken to the emergency room in a 'special' ambulance with a psychiatric paramedic on board. He recalls the only other emergency room he has ever been in, almost exactly a year ago, when his stretcher was parked next to a Quebecois with a gigantism in her breast, which she called her 'titty' and went on about for 20 minutes until Hal was rolled away. As he lies in the stretcher he half hallucinates, and his mind flashes briefly on various things-
- having seen the word knife written in the steam of a mirror in a non-public bathroom
-the late Cosgrove Watt
-the hypophalangial grief therapist
-The Moms alphabetizing soup cans
-Himself's [his father] umbrella hanging in the foyer of the Headmaster's house
-the fact that the bad ankle hasn't ached once this whole year
-John NR Wayne [who would have won this year's WhataBurger tournament] in a mask, watching while Donald Gately and Hal dig up the head of Hal's father
-that Venus Williams owns a house in Green Valley and may attend the tennis finals.
He notes that he will be sedated and thus be rested and thus have an advantage in his semifinal match the next day against Dymphna, apparently a blind player who requires special sonic balls. He imagines what will happen as he is diagnosed. he notes that there are 19 words for unresponsive in the OED-6 [way more than there are in the current OED-2]. He speculates that he'll play either Stice or Polep in the finals. He speculates that someone blue-collar will look down at him in the stretcher and ask 'what's your story?'
notes
It's probably crucial to note that the opening scene takes place after everything else in the book--the Year of Glad is the last year of subsidized time, and that Hal has clearly undergone something traumatic in the past year, probably having something to do with digging up the head of his father with Donald Gately.
6/3/09
p 17-27
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment [2009]-- month?
place near Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The episode is told in third person, but the narrator is clearly inside the head of Erdedy who is waiting for an unnamed woman to bring him $1250 worth of marijuana. She is supposed to get the pot from an unpleasant guy with a harelip in Allston. Erdedy has tried many times to quit smoking pot, and each time he starts again he has to locate a new source, because he has asked all of his prior sources to cut him off. The scene is frequently interrupted by descriptions of an insect that goes in and out the holes on the girder holding up the shelf on which his stereo sits. Erdedy is nervously fretting as he awaits his dealer, because he's not entirely sure that she will show. As he does each time he goes on a bender, he has assembled everything he needs to hole up and do nothing but smoke pot for days on end-- a new bong, snack foods, vaseline for masturbation, etc. He remembers the last woman whom he had engaged as his source, an unnamed 'appropriation artist' whom he had tricked into scoring pot for him, by telling her it was to keep from indulging his methamphetamine addiction. After she scored the pot for him, he quickly disposed of her, ending their sexual liaison. He has also had sex with the current supplier, even though she lives with her partner. As he waits he prepares his supply of 'entertainment cartridges' for his bender. The scene ends when the phone and doorbell ring at the same time.
notes:
introduces the paranoid addiction theme and also the idea of the entertainment cartridge. interesting technique of zooming in/out by way of shifting to/from the insect. it's not clear who this character is or how he might relate to characters from the previous scene, other than by proximity to Boston, where Hal was a student at the time.
place near Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The episode is told in third person, but the narrator is clearly inside the head of Erdedy who is waiting for an unnamed woman to bring him $1250 worth of marijuana. She is supposed to get the pot from an unpleasant guy with a harelip in Allston. Erdedy has tried many times to quit smoking pot, and each time he starts again he has to locate a new source, because he has asked all of his prior sources to cut him off. The scene is frequently interrupted by descriptions of an insect that goes in and out the holes on the girder holding up the shelf on which his stereo sits. Erdedy is nervously fretting as he awaits his dealer, because he's not entirely sure that she will show. As he does each time he goes on a bender, he has assembled everything he needs to hole up and do nothing but smoke pot for days on end-- a new bong, snack foods, vaseline for masturbation, etc. He remembers the last woman whom he had engaged as his source, an unnamed 'appropriation artist' whom he had tricked into scoring pot for him, by telling her it was to keep from indulging his methamphetamine addiction. After she scored the pot for him, he quickly disposed of her, ending their sexual liaison. He has also had sex with the current supplier, even though she lives with her partner. As he waits he prepares his supply of 'entertainment cartridges' for his bender. The scene ends when the phone and doorbell ring at the same time.
notes:
introduces the paranoid addiction theme and also the idea of the entertainment cartridge. interesting technique of zooming in/out by way of shifting to/from the insect. it's not clear who this character is or how he might relate to characters from the previous scene, other than by proximity to Boston, where Hal was a student at the time.
p 27-31
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad [2003] April 1
place near Enfield/Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The episode is entirely dialog with no narrator. Hal at age 10 [he'll be 11 in June] has been sent by his father to 'converse' with an unnamed 'professional conversationalist' [PC]. Hal's patience is tried by the PC, whom he sees as his intellectual inferior. When the PC asks Hal if he knows the meaning of 'implore' Hal impatiently quotes the OED definition verbatim, and says that he tends to get beat up for that. Hal gets annoyed when PC looks at his watch, reminding him that Himself has paid for the time. When the PC tries to one-up him with a dictionary quotation, Hal shreds him for using Webster's 7th, which is inferior to the OED and is also out of date. He reveals the nicknames of Himself [as in the man Himself] for his father, and the Moms [which he credits his brother Orin with] for his mother. He says that Himself is having a hallucination that Hal never speaks. The PC reveals that he has done some research on Hal, and knows of his interest in Byzantine erotica, and has researched his connection with the 'intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec' and his family's 'sordid liaison with the Pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. duPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative Luria P------'. Hal asks if he has mixed up his calendar, reminding him that he is the 10 year old tennis prodigy whose mother is a prescriptive grammarian and his father is an avant-garde filmmaker who single handedly founded ETA. The PC continues rambling about how leaked photos of the liaison have caused deaths, and that his mother has had affairs with a bisexual bassoonist and over 30 Near Eastern medical attaches. His mother has introduced esoteric steroids, which are chemically similar to the formula used in both Hal's complimentary tennis racquet, and the cartridge implanted in Himself's cerebrum. At around this point Hal comes to realize that his father is pulling an April Fool's hoax, and has rented the office and the face, in order to have a conversation with his son that doesn't end like all the others, with Hal staring and Himself swallowing. Which this one apparently does.
notes
This scene is clearly crucial in setting up the family's connections to duPlessis, as well as the mysterious steroid/narcotic trade
place near Enfield/Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The episode is entirely dialog with no narrator. Hal at age 10 [he'll be 11 in June] has been sent by his father to 'converse' with an unnamed 'professional conversationalist' [PC]. Hal's patience is tried by the PC, whom he sees as his intellectual inferior. When the PC asks Hal if he knows the meaning of 'implore' Hal impatiently quotes the OED definition verbatim, and says that he tends to get beat up for that. Hal gets annoyed when PC looks at his watch, reminding him that Himself has paid for the time. When the PC tries to one-up him with a dictionary quotation, Hal shreds him for using Webster's 7th, which is inferior to the OED and is also out of date. He reveals the nicknames of Himself [as in the man Himself] for his father, and the Moms [which he credits his brother Orin with] for his mother. He says that Himself is having a hallucination that Hal never speaks. The PC reveals that he has done some research on Hal, and knows of his interest in Byzantine erotica, and has researched his connection with the 'intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec' and his family's 'sordid liaison with the Pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. duPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative Luria P------'. Hal asks if he has mixed up his calendar, reminding him that he is the 10 year old tennis prodigy whose mother is a prescriptive grammarian and his father is an avant-garde filmmaker who single handedly founded ETA. The PC continues rambling about how leaked photos of the liaison have caused deaths, and that his mother has had affairs with a bisexual bassoonist and over 30 Near Eastern medical attaches. His mother has introduced esoteric steroids, which are chemically similar to the formula used in both Hal's complimentary tennis racquet, and the cartridge implanted in Himself's cerebrum. At around this point Hal comes to realize that his father is pulling an April Fool's hoax, and has rented the office and the face, in order to have a conversation with his son that doesn't end like all the others, with Hal staring and Himself swallowing. Which this one apparently does.
notes
This scene is clearly crucial in setting up the family's connections to duPlessis, as well as the mysterious steroid/narcotic trade
p 32-33
YDAU [2009] May 9
place ETA [Boston]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is preparing to leave his dormitory room for his morning tennis practice, and his older brother Mario is still asleep. It is implied that there is something wrong with Mario, he can't play tennis, he needs all the sleep he can get and his enormous head requires 4 pillows to support it. As Hal packs his gear for the day, the phone rings. Hal answers 'Mmmyellow' as his father [who is now possibly dead] had. He has a brief conversation with his brother Orin, who tells him that his head is 'filled with things to say,' Hal answers that he can wait for ever, and Orin retorts 'that's what you think' and hangs up. Mario wakes and asks who it was, Hal answers 'no one you know.'
notes
This scene seems to simply establish the character of Mario, and show the brotherly dynamics between Hal and each of the others. Perhaps there is something meaning to the enigmatic conversation, which will be revealed by way of proximity to the exact date.
place ETA [Boston]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is preparing to leave his dormitory room for his morning tennis practice, and his older brother Mario is still asleep. It is implied that there is something wrong with Mario, he can't play tennis, he needs all the sleep he can get and his enormous head requires 4 pillows to support it. As Hal packs his gear for the day, the phone rings. Hal answers 'Mmmyellow' as his father [who is now possibly dead] had. He has a brief conversation with his brother Orin, who tells him that his head is 'filled with things to say,' Hal answers that he can wait for ever, and Orin retorts 'that's what you think' and hangs up. Mario wakes and asks who it was, Hal answers 'no one you know.'
notes
This scene seems to simply establish the character of Mario, and show the brotherly dynamics between Hal and each of the others. Perhaps there is something meaning to the enigmatic conversation, which will be revealed by way of proximity to the exact date.
p 33-39
This section is divided into three parts
p 33-37 YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part centers around an unnamed medical attache, half Arab but born in and a resident of Canada. He is a consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q----, Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment who is in Boston to cut a 'mammoth' deal with Interlace TelEntertainment. His main duties are to assist in draining the sores of the face and sinus that result from the fact that the Prince eats almost nothing but Toblerone Chocolate. Ordinarily he arrives at home to find that his wife has prepared a piping hot dinner and an evening's worth of entertainment cartridges. She then wordlessly attends to him until he's asleep. But Wednesdays his wife has her weekly tennis league, and this particular Wednesday the attache gets home early and is at a loss as to how to procure the entertainment cartridges he needs. He tries watching the regularly programmed TV, but finds nothing better than an aerobics show which threatens to elicit impure thoughts. He goes in search of cartridges and finds among the days mail a padded cartridge-mailer, with 'happy anniversary' [it's not his anniversary] and a smiley face in place of a return address, postmarked Phoenix, but not with the official stamp of Prince Q----'s legation in Phoenix. Inside is a standard cartridge with no label aside from another smiley face. He heats his dinner in the microwave and begins viewing the cartridge at 1927h.
p 37-38
Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] month?
place Brighton [MA?]
narrated in first person [Clenette]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect by Clenette who tells a very repetitive complicated web of stories which I will try to summarize:
Wardine's mother has beaten her with a coat hanger causing lacerations on her back. Her mother blamed her for 'tempting' her boyfriend Roy Tony 'into sin,' when in reality Roy Tony had molested her (or at least tried to). Much of this told to the narrator by Reginald who is in love with Wardine, but Wardine's mother has threatened to kill her if she has sex with Reginald before she is 16. Roy tony is out on parole for killing Columbus Epps over a lover's spat involving the narrator's mother. Roy Tony's brother is Wardine's father, but he's gone. Wardine begs Reginald and Clenette [the narrator] not to tell their mothers. Wardine also calls Clenette her half sister. Clenette decides not to tell her mother, because her mother is frightened by Roy Tony. However she suspects that Reginald did tell his mother. Reginald says that he is going to stand up to Roy Tony and tell him to leave Wardine alone. Clenette thinks that Roy Tony will then kill Reginald and leave. She thinks that Wardine's mother will beat her to death with the hanger, and she will then be the only one who knows. And she's pregnant.
p 38-39
presumably Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] ?
place Winchester [MA?]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part concerns Bruce Green who in the 8th grade is hopelessly in love with Mildred Bonk, who is a fatally pretty, nubile and wraithlike flaxen-haired beauty. She reaches puberty well ahead of Bruce Green, and drives him crazy with lust. Then in 10th grade she transforms into a pot-smoking, beer drinking vixen with teased up hair who skips school and hangs around guys with low slung cars. So Bruce becomes one of those guys in order to win her. Win her he does, and by the time they would have graduated they are married with a baby living in a trailer in Allston with another couple as well as Tommy Doocey who is a harelipped pot dealer. Mildred gets high and watches serial cartridges, while Bruce works at Leisure Time Ice. Their life is one big party.
notes
April 1 does fall on a Wednesday in 2009, confirming that YDAU is almost certainly 2009. The Near East medical attache in the first part obviously suggests some relation to the Moms, and it's perhaps significant that this episode also takes place on April 1, albeit six years after the 'professional conversationalist' episode [p 27-31]. The anonymous cartridge also portends importance, and it's perhaps important to note that it comes from Phoenix.
If Clenette and Wardine are half-sisters then Roy Tony's brother must be father to both.
The harelipped pot dealer Tommy Doocey, is the same person from whom Erdeddy's source is planning to get the pot [p 17-27]
p 33-37 YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part centers around an unnamed medical attache, half Arab but born in and a resident of Canada. He is a consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q----, Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment who is in Boston to cut a 'mammoth' deal with Interlace TelEntertainment. His main duties are to assist in draining the sores of the face and sinus that result from the fact that the Prince eats almost nothing but Toblerone Chocolate. Ordinarily he arrives at home to find that his wife has prepared a piping hot dinner and an evening's worth of entertainment cartridges. She then wordlessly attends to him until he's asleep. But Wednesdays his wife has her weekly tennis league, and this particular Wednesday the attache gets home early and is at a loss as to how to procure the entertainment cartridges he needs. He tries watching the regularly programmed TV, but finds nothing better than an aerobics show which threatens to elicit impure thoughts. He goes in search of cartridges and finds among the days mail a padded cartridge-mailer, with 'happy anniversary' [it's not his anniversary] and a smiley face in place of a return address, postmarked Phoenix, but not with the official stamp of Prince Q----'s legation in Phoenix. Inside is a standard cartridge with no label aside from another smiley face. He heats his dinner in the microwave and begins viewing the cartridge at 1927h.
p 37-38
Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] month?
place Brighton [MA?]
narrated in first person [Clenette]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect by Clenette who tells a very repetitive complicated web of stories which I will try to summarize:
Wardine's mother has beaten her with a coat hanger causing lacerations on her back. Her mother blamed her for 'tempting' her boyfriend Roy Tony 'into sin,' when in reality Roy Tony had molested her (or at least tried to). Much of this told to the narrator by Reginald who is in love with Wardine, but Wardine's mother has threatened to kill her if she has sex with Reginald before she is 16. Roy tony is out on parole for killing Columbus Epps over a lover's spat involving the narrator's mother. Roy Tony's brother is Wardine's father, but he's gone. Wardine begs Reginald and Clenette [the narrator] not to tell their mothers. Wardine also calls Clenette her half sister. Clenette decides not to tell her mother, because her mother is frightened by Roy Tony. However she suspects that Reginald did tell his mother. Reginald says that he is going to stand up to Roy Tony and tell him to leave Wardine alone. Clenette thinks that Roy Tony will then kill Reginald and leave. She thinks that Wardine's mother will beat her to death with the hanger, and she will then be the only one who knows. And she's pregnant.
p 38-39
presumably Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar [2004] ?
place Winchester [MA?]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part concerns Bruce Green who in the 8th grade is hopelessly in love with Mildred Bonk, who is a fatally pretty, nubile and wraithlike flaxen-haired beauty. She reaches puberty well ahead of Bruce Green, and drives him crazy with lust. Then in 10th grade she transforms into a pot-smoking, beer drinking vixen with teased up hair who skips school and hangs around guys with low slung cars. So Bruce becomes one of those guys in order to win her. Win her he does, and by the time they would have graduated they are married with a baby living in a trailer in Allston with another couple as well as Tommy Doocey who is a harelipped pot dealer. Mildred gets high and watches serial cartridges, while Bruce works at Leisure Time Ice. Their life is one big party.
notes
April 1 does fall on a Wednesday in 2009, confirming that YDAU is almost certainly 2009. The Near East medical attache in the first part obviously suggests some relation to the Moms, and it's perhaps significant that this episode also takes place on April 1, albeit six years after the 'professional conversationalist' episode [p 27-31]. The anonymous cartridge also portends importance, and it's perhaps important to note that it comes from Phoenix.
If Clenette and Wardine are half-sisters then Roy Tony's brother must be father to both.
The harelipped pot dealer Tommy Doocey, is the same person from whom Erdeddy's source is planning to get the pot [p 17-27]
p 39-49
this section is in 3 parts.
p 39-42
YDAU [2009] month?
place ETA, Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The scene is purely dialog without narration. Mario and Hal are in their dorm room trying to sleep, and Mario is keeping his brother awake. Mario is lavishly praising Hal's tennis victory earlier in the day. Hal tells him not to rehash these things. and tries to get him to go to sleep. Mario [aka Booboo] says that Hal rooms with him because he feels sorry for him. Hal says petulance is a sign of too little sleep. Mario asks if Hal believed in God while he was winning the game. Hal says 'this again' and then to shush him says he has 'administrative bones to pick' about God's 'laid-back management style' and that unlike him God is 'pro death.' Mario asks if he's talking about the death of Himself. Hal bypasses the question saying they have an 'unbridgeable difference' on the issue. Hal tells Mario a joke:'what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic... someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.' Mario asks why the Moms never cried when Himself died, and asks if she even seems happier now. He says she stopped traveling for the corporate grammar and library protest things. Hal says that she even more OC than ever and that she just goes back in forth in the tunnel between her office and the headmaster's house. Mario says her eyes are better, not so sunk in and she laughs at CT more than she ever did at Himself. Hal says he's pretty sure that she was sad, just in her own way. Hal asks if Mario remembers how the flag was flown at half-mast, and still is once a year. He notes that there are two ways to do this--by lowering the flag halfway, or by raising the pole to twice it's height.
p 42
YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache is still watching the unlabeled cartridge at 2010h [43 minutes later].
p42-49
YDAU [2009] October
place Phoenix
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, but very much from inside Orin's head. Orin [Hal's brother]wakes up alone in his apartment in Phoenix, with his fetally curled impression sweated into the sheets, even though the AC is cranked. Morning is his worst time psychically. He finds an "Ambush" perfume scented note from last night's 'Subject' with her phone #and school-girl handwriting with hearts over the i's. On this October morning the heat outside is 'beastly' while inside it's so cold that the floor hurts his bear feet. He eats breakfast of toast and honey outside by the pool in the center of his ring-shaped apartment complex The plants are described as malevolent and tortured by the weather. He has just returned from a football game in Chicago, where his team was beaten, and he and the place kicker are the only players not still in pain. He recalls sitting in the jacuzzi 5 days ago, 'caring for the leg' [he's a punter] when a bird drops dead and falls into the jacuzzi out of the empty sky. Orin previously played for New Orleans before being traded to Phoenix [for 3 players and cash.] The huge 'sewer roaches' in Phoenix are 'armored-vehicle-type bugs' and Orin has found that the only way to kill them is to cover them with a tumbler until they asphyxiate. He's also not crazy about spiders, but nowhere near as much as Himself [who grew up in Tucson]. Orin's true horror is roaches, and back in New Orleans, he had decided to seek being traded after a spate of flying roaches had been attacking infants, resulting, in combination with flooding, of body parts coming to rest in his yard. Mornings are the worst time for Orin, especially if the Subject is still there wanting to cuddle or make him breakfast. Even when alone 'these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.' His bad dreams have gotten worse here in the land his father abandoned in his unhappy youth. In a nod to his own youth his dreams always open with competitive tennis situation [Orin had apparently been a tennis player before playing football] eventually he is submerged in something that suffocates him only to emerge with his mother's neatly amputated head is attached to his head with the gut string from a tennis racquet. Last night's Subject's note had said that she awakened to him gripping her head. His second to last Subject before the recent one had awakened him watching an extremely gruesome Interlace educational cartridge on schizophrenia,wherein a schizophrenic subject is pumped full of radioactive dye and sent through a PET scanner. Orin waited impatiently for her to leave and then sent her kid a gift and changed his phone number. Orin's team is pressuring him to give an interview, and answer in a 'blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms. Orin shaves in the shower without a mirror using upward strokes.
notes
the first scene reveals a lot more about the family history and the dynamic between the parents, and between Hal and Mario. It's still not exactly clear what's wrong with Mario, but it's clear that Hal kind of looks out for him as if he were the younger.
the natural environment of the third section is almost pre-apocalyptic [was DFW hip to the threat of global warming back then?] The reader is left wondering why Orin is so tormented by morning, by roaches, by intimacy, and what it all has to do with his father's unhappy childhood, with his mother and her severed head, with calling Hal to reopen the Pandora's box of worms.
p 39-42
YDAU [2009] month?
place ETA, Boston
no narration
synopsis:
The scene is purely dialog without narration. Mario and Hal are in their dorm room trying to sleep, and Mario is keeping his brother awake. Mario is lavishly praising Hal's tennis victory earlier in the day. Hal tells him not to rehash these things. and tries to get him to go to sleep. Mario [aka Booboo] says that Hal rooms with him because he feels sorry for him. Hal says petulance is a sign of too little sleep. Mario asks if Hal believed in God while he was winning the game. Hal says 'this again' and then to shush him says he has 'administrative bones to pick' about God's 'laid-back management style' and that unlike him God is 'pro death.' Mario asks if he's talking about the death of Himself. Hal bypasses the question saying they have an 'unbridgeable difference' on the issue. Hal tells Mario a joke:'what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic... someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.' Mario asks why the Moms never cried when Himself died, and asks if she even seems happier now. He says she stopped traveling for the corporate grammar and library protest things. Hal says that she even more OC than ever and that she just goes back in forth in the tunnel between her office and the headmaster's house. Mario says her eyes are better, not so sunk in and she laughs at CT more than she ever did at Himself. Hal says he's pretty sure that she was sad, just in her own way. Hal asks if Mario remembers how the flag was flown at half-mast, and still is once a year. He notes that there are two ways to do this--by lowering the flag halfway, or by raising the pole to twice it's height.
p 42
YDAU [2009] April 1
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache is still watching the unlabeled cartridge at 2010h [43 minutes later].
p42-49
YDAU [2009] October
place Phoenix
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, but very much from inside Orin's head. Orin [Hal's brother]wakes up alone in his apartment in Phoenix, with his fetally curled impression sweated into the sheets, even though the AC is cranked. Morning is his worst time psychically. He finds an "Ambush" perfume scented note from last night's 'Subject' with her phone #and school-girl handwriting with hearts over the i's. On this October morning the heat outside is 'beastly' while inside it's so cold that the floor hurts his bear feet. He eats breakfast of toast and honey outside by the pool in the center of his ring-shaped apartment complex The plants are described as malevolent and tortured by the weather. He has just returned from a football game in Chicago, where his team was beaten, and he and the place kicker are the only players not still in pain. He recalls sitting in the jacuzzi 5 days ago, 'caring for the leg' [he's a punter] when a bird drops dead and falls into the jacuzzi out of the empty sky. Orin previously played for New Orleans before being traded to Phoenix [for 3 players and cash.] The huge 'sewer roaches' in Phoenix are 'armored-vehicle-type bugs' and Orin has found that the only way to kill them is to cover them with a tumbler until they asphyxiate. He's also not crazy about spiders, but nowhere near as much as Himself [who grew up in Tucson]. Orin's true horror is roaches, and back in New Orleans, he had decided to seek being traded after a spate of flying roaches had been attacking infants, resulting, in combination with flooding, of body parts coming to rest in his yard. Mornings are the worst time for Orin, especially if the Subject is still there wanting to cuddle or make him breakfast. Even when alone 'these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.' His bad dreams have gotten worse here in the land his father abandoned in his unhappy youth. In a nod to his own youth his dreams always open with competitive tennis situation [Orin had apparently been a tennis player before playing football] eventually he is submerged in something that suffocates him only to emerge with his mother's neatly amputated head is attached to his head with the gut string from a tennis racquet. Last night's Subject's note had said that she awakened to him gripping her head. His second to last Subject before the recent one had awakened him watching an extremely gruesome Interlace educational cartridge on schizophrenia,wherein a schizophrenic subject is pumped full of radioactive dye and sent through a PET scanner. Orin waited impatiently for her to leave and then sent her kid a gift and changed his phone number. Orin's team is pressuring him to give an interview, and answer in a 'blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms. Orin shaves in the shower without a mirror using upward strokes.
notes
the first scene reveals a lot more about the family history and the dynamic between the parents, and between Hal and Mario. It's still not exactly clear what's wrong with Mario, but it's clear that Hal kind of looks out for him as if he were the younger.
the natural environment of the third section is almost pre-apocalyptic [was DFW hip to the threat of global warming back then?] The reader is left wondering why Orin is so tormented by morning, by roaches, by intimacy, and what it all has to do with his father's unhappy childhood, with his mother and her severed head, with calling Hal to reopen the Pandora's box of worms.
p 49-63
this section in 7 parts.
p 49-54
YDAU [2009] month?[between June & November]
place ETA/Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part is narrated in third person, but definitely in Hal's head. Hal is 17 and he is covertly smoking pot with a 'brass one-hitter' pipe [which minimizes second hand smoke]. He does this in the ETA's underground 'Lung Pump Room' where he can exhale the smoke into the exhaust fan, and thus be very discreet. Hal thinks of it this way: 'total utilization of available resources=lack of publicly detectable waste.' Hal has a whole system worked out and it's clear that he smokes pot covertly on a regular basis. Hal calculates that only a handful of people know of his habit, but as he does so he thinks of a few more. There are a few of his friends who are known to get high, but only one, Michael Pemulis, with whom Hal has smoked pot. He takes care to note that Ortho ['the Darkness'] Stice also knows, and that Orin seems to know even though he lives in Phoenix. His mother and CT have no idea [although they assume he drinks occasionally] apparently having been reassured that any abuse would interfere with high level academic/tennis performance. Also worth noting that Avril [the Moms] loathes Hal's friends Pemulis and James Struck, and that she dreads the thought that Hal would ever become an alcoholic like his father or his father's father. It is also noted that CT and Dolores Rusk [?] have discussed Avril's phobic dread of any secrecy w/r/t her sons.
There's a lengthy description of the underground tunnels and how they connect the ETA facility [drawing anyone] which notably mentions 'the former optical and film development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased)]. The pump room is described as like a 'spider hanging upside down.' During the winter [Nov-Mar] when the pump Lung is up and running, Hal is forced to find an alternative, less covert plan for smoking pot, namely going to a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and blowing the smoke into the exhaust fan. This is why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of the WhataBurger classic [which must be in November]. There is apparently a wide range of drugs that are used occasionally by the students, who are often especially as they get older subject to the stress of competitive tennis. The drug policy is strict, but the enforcement is lax in part due to the fact that the prorectors are mostly former students who failed to make 'the Show' and have returned humbly to ETA to live in subterranean dorms and often have habits themselves. The pump room is also connected to the prorectors' dorms, which allows Hal access to the men's room to use toothbrush, eye drops, etc to conceal any residual evidence of his habit. Hal is not sure why he is so obsessed with concealing his habit.
p 54
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part flashes back to the medical attache's wife, who is just leaving after her tennis game, and post game festivities--smoking kif and making fun of their husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile the medicalattache is still watching the cartridge at 0020h [now 3:53 later] , which he has set to loop and which has caused to wet both his pants and the recliner.
p 54-55
YDAU [2009] month ?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part describes how Mario [18 in May] is often assigned to videotape drills and matches, focussing on a certain part of the court, so that Coach Stitt can point out what the players are doing wrong.
p 55-60
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland [2008] Autumn
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Donald Gately a drug addict (Demerol and Talwin) and by necessity a more or less professional burglar. Gately is stealthy in spite of his massive size [including a giant square head] and he is both ferocious and jolly, and he takes 'zero in the way of shit' from anyone. In order to get back at DA who sent him to jail, on suspicion alone, Gately sets up an elaborate prank, where he breaks into the DA's house steals a few things, but leaves the rest piled up to create the illusion that the delayed alarm [which he actually knew about] had caught the burglars by surprise. A month later he sent the DA a photo of him [masked] with his accomplice [id'd in the footnotes as almost surely being Trent Kite] each with a toothbrush belonging to either the DA or his wife stuck up his butt. He avoided working the area ever again, but still got himself into trouble, while attempting what looked to be the easiest burglary imaginable, except the owner of the house turned out to be home sick, instead of with the rest of the family and both of their cars in the Berkshires. Instead of hightailing it, Gately is seduced by the fact that there is wall-safe concealed behind a landscape painting in the bedroom [where, he knows, 90% of wall-safes are concealed] and by his drug-related needs, and the burglary becomes a robbery. The sick man is speaking in Quebecois French, trying to tell Gately where the valuables are, but neither Gately nor his accomplice can understand French. Which is why when Gately bounds and gags the guy, he also can't understand the victims pleading that he not be gagged on account of his very stuffed up nose. But he does gag him and off they go, with a pile of loot including [something mentioned only in footnote 18] some 'upscale arty looking film cartridges' which Gately's accomplice suspects may be valuable 'if they were rare, or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.' It is then revealed that the man about suffocate in his own nasal mucous, is 'the right hand man to probably the most infamous anti-ONAN organizer north of the Great Concavity' and that he had moved his family to Boston to act as a 'liaison between and general leash-holder for' mutually antagonistic Quebecer separatist groups and Albertan ultra-rightists, who are united only in their vilification of the US for the return of the 'so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity' to its northern neighbor and ONAN ally' which was an affront to Canadian honor. The victim is basically a VIP Canadian terrorist organizer by the name of Guillaume DuPlessis. The cops have no trouble linking the crime to Gately and his MO in disarming burglar alarms, and the DA whose wife now needs valium just to floss, is set to get even.
p 60
YDAU [2009]
no narration
synopsis:
This short part is written in the mock style of computer or audio equipment catalog, describing a state of the art 'InterLace Telentertainment' unit. It's kind of an all-in-one computer, videophone, TV, VCR, etc.
p 60-61
YDAU [2009] Nov 2
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Jim Troelsch [ranked #8 in ETA's boys 18 & under] has taken ill. It came on as he was suiting up for morning drills. He blames it on Graham Rader, who sneezed on his lunch tray the day before. His roommates Pemulis and ted Schacht are both gone, and Troelsch lies about in a half-sleep state surrounded by a plethora of drugs, some of which are seemingly illicit [and these he has pilfered from Pemulis]. He listens to the tennis sounds outside sound drifts into a daydream/feverdream state of sleep.
p 61-63
YDAU [2009] [presumably] Nov 2 [?]
place ETA
narrated in first person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in the first person [with a mix of colloquial second person], and although it follows directly after Troelsch falls asleep, it is unclear who the narrator is [he is revealed to be 12 only at the end]. The narrator describes the realization that the sensation of nightmares is the same as their form-- the sudden realization that the essence of the nightmare has been with you all along, it's just been overlooked. 'Your first nightmare away from home' is described as taking place in an academy dorm room, in which there lurks an evil 'for you alone' which does not affect the other boys in the room. The room is described as having a total of 3 bunk beds, the lower level of one being occupied by 'you' [presumably the narrator]. The description of the contents of the room [being illuminated by flashlight] devolves into a dreamlike language describing the possible presence of a nightmarish face on the floor--an 'evil' unfelt by the others whose 'mouth opens at your light.' And 'then you wake' and shine the flashlight all around, unable to find a face in the floor, but still unconvinced that it's not there.
notes
the first section takes place 1 to 1.5 years before the opening interview section, and it's surely worth considering how Hal's drug use and paranoid secrecy about it might well be leading to the 'rough spot' which is months away. Also notable that Himself [who singlehandedly built ETA] would design a pump Lung that resembled an upside down spider in spite of his arachnophobia.
the Gately section [p 55-60] is clearly extremely important given it's probable link to the Incadenza's by way of both the cartridges mentioned in the footnote, and the death of DuPlessis with whom the family [specifically the Moms] had a 'sordid liaison' [p 30] and also of course to the attache who has been tied to the Moms already, and to the mysterious cartridge. It's also notable that DFW introduces some of his weirdest concepts without fanfare, we've encountered but still haven't been told much about subsidized time, ONAN, the Great Concavity.
The raison d'etre for the fever-dream + anonymous nightmare sequence is elusive. Perhaps it's simply a generalizing of the terrors of the light/dark.
p 49-54
YDAU [2009] month?[between June & November]
place ETA/Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The first part is narrated in third person, but definitely in Hal's head. Hal is 17 and he is covertly smoking pot with a 'brass one-hitter' pipe [which minimizes second hand smoke]. He does this in the ETA's underground 'Lung Pump Room' where he can exhale the smoke into the exhaust fan, and thus be very discreet. Hal thinks of it this way: 'total utilization of available resources=lack of publicly detectable waste.' Hal has a whole system worked out and it's clear that he smokes pot covertly on a regular basis. Hal calculates that only a handful of people know of his habit, but as he does so he thinks of a few more. There are a few of his friends who are known to get high, but only one, Michael Pemulis, with whom Hal has smoked pot. He takes care to note that Ortho ['the Darkness'] Stice also knows, and that Orin seems to know even though he lives in Phoenix. His mother and CT have no idea [although they assume he drinks occasionally] apparently having been reassured that any abuse would interfere with high level academic/tennis performance. Also worth noting that Avril [the Moms] loathes Hal's friends Pemulis and James Struck, and that she dreads the thought that Hal would ever become an alcoholic like his father or his father's father. It is also noted that CT and Dolores Rusk [?] have discussed Avril's phobic dread of any secrecy w/r/t her sons.
There's a lengthy description of the underground tunnels and how they connect the ETA facility [drawing anyone] which notably mentions 'the former optical and film development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased)]. The pump room is described as like a 'spider hanging upside down.' During the winter [Nov-Mar] when the pump Lung is up and running, Hal is forced to find an alternative, less covert plan for smoking pot, namely going to a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and blowing the smoke into the exhaust fan. This is why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of the WhataBurger classic [which must be in November]. There is apparently a wide range of drugs that are used occasionally by the students, who are often especially as they get older subject to the stress of competitive tennis. The drug policy is strict, but the enforcement is lax in part due to the fact that the prorectors are mostly former students who failed to make 'the Show' and have returned humbly to ETA to live in subterranean dorms and often have habits themselves. The pump room is also connected to the prorectors' dorms, which allows Hal access to the men's room to use toothbrush, eye drops, etc to conceal any residual evidence of his habit. Hal is not sure why he is so obsessed with concealing his habit.
p 54
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part flashes back to the medical attache's wife, who is just leaving after her tennis game, and post game festivities--smoking kif and making fun of their husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile the medicalattache is still watching the cartridge at 0020h [now 3:53 later] , which he has set to loop and which has caused to wet both his pants and the recliner.
p 54-55
YDAU [2009] month ?
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This short part describes how Mario [18 in May] is often assigned to videotape drills and matches, focussing on a certain part of the court, so that Coach Stitt can point out what the players are doing wrong.
p 55-60
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland [2008] Autumn
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Donald Gately a drug addict (Demerol and Talwin) and by necessity a more or less professional burglar. Gately is stealthy in spite of his massive size [including a giant square head] and he is both ferocious and jolly, and he takes 'zero in the way of shit' from anyone. In order to get back at DA who sent him to jail, on suspicion alone, Gately sets up an elaborate prank, where he breaks into the DA's house steals a few things, but leaves the rest piled up to create the illusion that the delayed alarm [which he actually knew about] had caught the burglars by surprise. A month later he sent the DA a photo of him [masked] with his accomplice [id'd in the footnotes as almost surely being Trent Kite] each with a toothbrush belonging to either the DA or his wife stuck up his butt. He avoided working the area ever again, but still got himself into trouble, while attempting what looked to be the easiest burglary imaginable, except the owner of the house turned out to be home sick, instead of with the rest of the family and both of their cars in the Berkshires. Instead of hightailing it, Gately is seduced by the fact that there is wall-safe concealed behind a landscape painting in the bedroom [where, he knows, 90% of wall-safes are concealed] and by his drug-related needs, and the burglary becomes a robbery. The sick man is speaking in Quebecois French, trying to tell Gately where the valuables are, but neither Gately nor his accomplice can understand French. Which is why when Gately bounds and gags the guy, he also can't understand the victims pleading that he not be gagged on account of his very stuffed up nose. But he does gag him and off they go, with a pile of loot including [something mentioned only in footnote 18] some 'upscale arty looking film cartridges' which Gately's accomplice suspects may be valuable 'if they were rare, or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.' It is then revealed that the man about suffocate in his own nasal mucous, is 'the right hand man to probably the most infamous anti-ONAN organizer north of the Great Concavity' and that he had moved his family to Boston to act as a 'liaison between and general leash-holder for' mutually antagonistic Quebecer separatist groups and Albertan ultra-rightists, who are united only in their vilification of the US for the return of the 'so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity' to its northern neighbor and ONAN ally' which was an affront to Canadian honor. The victim is basically a VIP Canadian terrorist organizer by the name of Guillaume DuPlessis. The cops have no trouble linking the crime to Gately and his MO in disarming burglar alarms, and the DA whose wife now needs valium just to floss, is set to get even.
p 60
YDAU [2009]
no narration
synopsis:
This short part is written in the mock style of computer or audio equipment catalog, describing a state of the art 'InterLace Telentertainment' unit. It's kind of an all-in-one computer, videophone, TV, VCR, etc.
p 60-61
YDAU [2009] Nov 2
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Jim Troelsch [ranked #8 in ETA's boys 18 & under] has taken ill. It came on as he was suiting up for morning drills. He blames it on Graham Rader, who sneezed on his lunch tray the day before. His roommates Pemulis and ted Schacht are both gone, and Troelsch lies about in a half-sleep state surrounded by a plethora of drugs, some of which are seemingly illicit [and these he has pilfered from Pemulis]. He listens to the tennis sounds outside sound drifts into a daydream/feverdream state of sleep.
p 61-63
YDAU [2009] [presumably] Nov 2 [?]
place ETA
narrated in first person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in the first person [with a mix of colloquial second person], and although it follows directly after Troelsch falls asleep, it is unclear who the narrator is [he is revealed to be 12 only at the end]. The narrator describes the realization that the sensation of nightmares is the same as their form-- the sudden realization that the essence of the nightmare has been with you all along, it's just been overlooked. 'Your first nightmare away from home' is described as taking place in an academy dorm room, in which there lurks an evil 'for you alone' which does not affect the other boys in the room. The room is described as having a total of 3 bunk beds, the lower level of one being occupied by 'you' [presumably the narrator]. The description of the contents of the room [being illuminated by flashlight] devolves into a dreamlike language describing the possible presence of a nightmarish face on the floor--an 'evil' unfelt by the others whose 'mouth opens at your light.' And 'then you wake' and shine the flashlight all around, unable to find a face in the floor, but still unconvinced that it's not there.
notes
the first section takes place 1 to 1.5 years before the opening interview section, and it's surely worth considering how Hal's drug use and paranoid secrecy about it might well be leading to the 'rough spot' which is months away. Also notable that Himself [who singlehandedly built ETA] would design a pump Lung that resembled an upside down spider in spite of his arachnophobia.
the Gately section [p 55-60] is clearly extremely important given it's probable link to the Incadenza's by way of both the cartridges mentioned in the footnote, and the death of DuPlessis with whom the family [specifically the Moms] had a 'sordid liaison' [p 30] and also of course to the attache who has been tied to the Moms already, and to the mysterious cartridge. It's also notable that DFW introduces some of his weirdest concepts without fanfare, we've encountered but still haven't been told much about subsidized time, ONAN, the Great Concavity.
The raison d'etre for the fever-dream + anonymous nightmare sequence is elusive. Perhaps it's simply a generalizing of the terrors of the light/dark.
p 63-66
this section in 2 parts, and one very lengthy footnote
p 63-65
as of YDAU [2009]--ie backstory
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in third person, with a detached tone. ETA has been in operation for 3 pre-subsidized years + 8 subsidized years [ie since 1999] First it was under Dr. James Incandenza then under his half brother-in-law Charles Tavis. Incandenza was the only child of a former Jr. tennis player and then promising pre-Method actor. The father is driven back to his native Tucson, and works as a tennis pro and a low-rent actor. He is crippled by arachnophobia and stage fright, and becomes more obsessed by Method acting. He makes his son into a tennis player 'the way other fathers might restore vintage autos.' James was compliant and became a gifted Jr. player,using tennis scholarships to fund his education, which eventually led to a Navy funded doctorate in optical physics, and top level government defense jobs, where 'his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels' helped make possible cold annular fusion leading to US energy independence. He then made a fortune in related patents and retired to start ETA and begin working on 'apres-garde' experimental film. His film work was still too ahead of [or behind?] it's time to be appreciated at the time of his death in YT-SDB [2004], although much of the film work was plain pretentious, due in part to his descent into alcoholism. [here there is an 8 page footnote listing the complete filmography of JOI, which is discussed separately below]. Incandenza had a May[or July] -October marriage to Avril Mondragon a prescriptive linguist with ties to Quebecois Separatists made obtaining visas difficult, and Orin's birth was in fact partly a legal maneuver. In his last five years, Incandenza liquidated his assets and ceded control of ETA to his wife's half-brother. His subsequent film career earned a small academic following for 'technical fleck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.' His untimely suicide at 54 was held as a great loss in the military, film and tennis worlds.
p 65-66
YDAU [2009] Nov. 1
Denver, CO
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, with close ties to Orin's perspective. Orin and his team are hang-gliding in bird-suits from the top of Mile High Stadium to the football field below, presumably as a pre-game ritual/stunt. Orin hates it 'with a clusterfucking passion.' He has told no one on the team or the counselor about his fear of heights and descent. he whispers 'please lord, spare the Leg' before each landing.
p 985-993
footnote 24, ['James O. Incandenza, a filmography']
by my count there are 78 films listed here. There are several series of films 'Cage' I through V, mostly unreleased; 'Found Drama' I-XI, all 'conceptual, conceptually unfilmable, unreleased.' And most notable 'Infinite Jest' I-V, with each being an attempted remake of it's precursor, and all unreleased. The final 'Infinite Jest (V?)' was his last film [starring only "Madame Psychosis"] and 'though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists' it has been described in journals as his 'most entertaining and compelling work' and allusions have been made to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context.' The 'master cartridge was vaulted sui testador'
Many of the films are unreleased, and the ones that predate subsidized time are not dated exactly. The films vary from documentaries, to narratives to parodies and P/R shorts for advertising. Several synopses sound familiar to events in the book, for example the scene with Hal and Himself posing as the shrink. There are actors and narrators that recur throughout the filmography, notably 'Madame Psychosis,' Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pamela-Sue Vooheis, Paul Anthony [P.A.] Heaven.
notes
The filmography is so rich, that it could almost stand alone as a short story. I'm convinced that most everything in there is relevant to some part of the main story, and I feel like my cursory summary probably warrants expansion.
p 63-65
as of YDAU [2009]--ie backstory
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section is narrated in third person, with a detached tone. ETA has been in operation for 3 pre-subsidized years + 8 subsidized years [ie since 1999] First it was under Dr. James Incandenza then under his half brother-in-law Charles Tavis. Incandenza was the only child of a former Jr. tennis player and then promising pre-Method actor. The father is driven back to his native Tucson, and works as a tennis pro and a low-rent actor. He is crippled by arachnophobia and stage fright, and becomes more obsessed by Method acting. He makes his son into a tennis player 'the way other fathers might restore vintage autos.' James was compliant and became a gifted Jr. player,using tennis scholarships to fund his education, which eventually led to a Navy funded doctorate in optical physics, and top level government defense jobs, where 'his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels' helped make possible cold annular fusion leading to US energy independence. He then made a fortune in related patents and retired to start ETA and begin working on 'apres-garde' experimental film. His film work was still too ahead of [or behind?] it's time to be appreciated at the time of his death in YT-SDB [2004], although much of the film work was plain pretentious, due in part to his descent into alcoholism. [here there is an 8 page footnote listing the complete filmography of JOI, which is discussed separately below]. Incandenza had a May[or July] -October marriage to Avril Mondragon a prescriptive linguist with ties to Quebecois Separatists made obtaining visas difficult, and Orin's birth was in fact partly a legal maneuver. In his last five years, Incandenza liquidated his assets and ceded control of ETA to his wife's half-brother. His subsequent film career earned a small academic following for 'technical fleck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.' His untimely suicide at 54 was held as a great loss in the military, film and tennis worlds.
p 65-66
YDAU [2009] Nov. 1
Denver, CO
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part is narrated in third person, with close ties to Orin's perspective. Orin and his team are hang-gliding in bird-suits from the top of Mile High Stadium to the football field below, presumably as a pre-game ritual/stunt. Orin hates it 'with a clusterfucking passion.' He has told no one on the team or the counselor about his fear of heights and descent. he whispers 'please lord, spare the Leg' before each landing.
p 985-993
footnote 24, ['James O. Incandenza, a filmography']
by my count there are 78 films listed here. There are several series of films 'Cage' I through V, mostly unreleased; 'Found Drama' I-XI, all 'conceptual, conceptually unfilmable, unreleased.' And most notable 'Infinite Jest' I-V, with each being an attempted remake of it's precursor, and all unreleased. The final 'Infinite Jest (V?)' was his last film [starring only "Madame Psychosis"] and 'though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists' it has been described in journals as his 'most entertaining and compelling work' and allusions have been made to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context.' The 'master cartridge was vaulted sui testador'
Many of the films are unreleased, and the ones that predate subsidized time are not dated exactly. The films vary from documentaries, to narratives to parodies and P/R shorts for advertising. Several synopses sound familiar to events in the book, for example the scene with Hal and Himself posing as the shrink. There are actors and narrators that recur throughout the filmography, notably 'Madame Psychosis,' Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pamela-Sue Vooheis, Paul Anthony [P.A.] Heaven.
notes
The filmography is so rich, that it could almost stand alone as a short story. I'm convinced that most everything in there is relevant to some part of the main story, and I feel like my cursory summary probably warrants expansion.
p 66-68
this section in 2 parts
p66-67
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is telling the younger kids at the pre-dinner "Big Buddy" powwow, about the organopsychedelic 'muscimole' which is 3 times as potent as psilocybin and causes any of the following semi-sleep-like trance with visions, synesthesia, increased strength, favorable distortions of body image, etc. He tells them that the drug comes from a mushroom revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity.The kids try to stay focussed on his speech.
p 67-68
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in first person [Hal]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in first person, presumably by Hal. He says that some players start using Bob Hope [pot] as early as 12, but he [not wanting to be like his father] didn't start until he was nearly 16 when Bridget Boone offered him a bong hit to help him with his insomnia. The low grade synthetic pot worked like a charm. He then describes a still recurring dream [presumably that he had after that first bong hit] where he is playing a competitive tennis match on a giant court whose baselines are 3 dimensional and very complex. The crowd is a tableau--silent, motionless and highly attentive in summer's citrus colors. The umpire, high overhead whispers play and Hal tries to figure out where exactly to direct his serve. He notices the Moms with her white sun umbrella, in a 'circle of a shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.' The umpire whispers again to play, and they sort of play, hypothetically.
notes
the first part implies that perhaps Pemulis might have been an influence on Hal's drug use, although the second part traces the exact source. The dream implies a pretty heavily idolized view of the Moms, with her all white figure raised above the crowd and with her unconditional support.
p66-67
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is telling the younger kids at the pre-dinner "Big Buddy" powwow, about the organopsychedelic 'muscimole' which is 3 times as potent as psilocybin and causes any of the following semi-sleep-like trance with visions, synesthesia, increased strength, favorable distortions of body image, etc. He tells them that the drug comes from a mushroom revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity.The kids try to stay focussed on his speech.
p 67-68
YDAU [presumably]
place ETA
narrated in first person [Hal]
synopsis:
This part is narrated in first person, presumably by Hal. He says that some players start using Bob Hope [pot] as early as 12, but he [not wanting to be like his father] didn't start until he was nearly 16 when Bridget Boone offered him a bong hit to help him with his insomnia. The low grade synthetic pot worked like a charm. He then describes a still recurring dream [presumably that he had after that first bong hit] where he is playing a competitive tennis match on a giant court whose baselines are 3 dimensional and very complex. The crowd is a tableau--silent, motionless and highly attentive in summer's citrus colors. The umpire, high overhead whispers play and Hal tries to figure out where exactly to direct his serve. He notices the Moms with her white sun umbrella, in a 'circle of a shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.' The umpire whispers again to play, and they sort of play, hypothetically.
notes
the first part implies that perhaps Pemulis might have been an influence on Hal's drug use, although the second part traces the exact source. The dream implies a pretty heavily idolized view of the Moms, with her all white figure raised above the crowd and with her unconditional support.
p 68-87
this section in 5 parts
p 68-78
YDAU [2009] month?
place Boston area
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part describes a doctor on a psych ward asking questions of Kate Gompert who has just tried to commit suicide. Kate is lying in the fetal position,with long-unwashed hair. She is under 24-hour suicide watch. the doctor who enters the room reads on her chart that she's 21, from Newton MA, data-clerk in a real estate office. This is her 4th hospitalization in 3 years, for unipolar clinical depression, she's had electro-convulsive treatment once, and been on and off various meds, which she has a history of abusing. She has attempted suicide twice, once by carbon monoxide and once by slitting her wrists. this time she took all of her [130+] antidepressants at once. Her mother found her and hallucinated that she was a newborn. The doctor takes out his pen and asks her why she tried to hurt herself, and if she would sit up. She answers that she is sitting up,and when he asks her if she feels as if she is in a sitting position, she sighs and sits u and says she was trying to kill herself, not hurt herself. When he asks the difference, she says she's not one of those self hating ones; she didn't want to punish herself, she just wanted to 'stop playing' or stop being conscious, she would have opted for shock, or a coma, if she could have. The doctor writes as she talks. She says she has a feeling that she feels throughout her body, more like horror than sadness. She fears this feeling more than anything, it's like nausea of every cell of the body. And even though it comes and goes, when she's having the feeling she forgets that. She says that she wants shock [ECT] or to be sedated for a month. She says that she sometimes thinks 'the feeling' has to do with Hope [pot, a nickname she explains: when you call a dealer you ask if Bob is in town in case of surveillance, and dealer answers 'Hope springs eternal' if so]. She explains that although pot is usually considered a minor drug, in her case she loves it so much that it's a whole other problem. She then explains her drug habit and obsession with concealing in what sounds like a combination of Hal's [paranoia about being discovered] and Erdeddy's [habitually quitting/restarting] habits. She explains that when she does manage to quit, 'the feeling' creeps back in, and she doesn't want to do anything. Part of the feeling is being willing to do anything to make it go away. The doctor who has stopped taking notes then asks, 'so this has happened in the past?' She answers 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' The doctor when summarizing her choice of treatment option on her chart, adds his own post assessment question, 'then what?'
p 78-79
YDAU [2009] April 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache's wife returns home at 0145h [6:18 since he began watching] to find her husband unresponsive in his soiled recliner. She tries to unsuccessfully to rouse him, and then noticing the expression on his face is 'positive, ecstatic even,' she turns her head to the cartridge-viewer
p 79-85
YDAU [2009] presumably
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Gerhard Schtitt who is the head coach and athletic director at ETA, who in spite of rumored impropriety involving a riding crop at his former job, was 'wooed fiercely' by James Incandenza. Pretty much everyone at ETA now thinks that the riding crop episode was exaggerated, because the weatherman's pointer he now uses instead, has yet to make 'corrective contact with even one athletic bottom.' He is more of a dispenser of abstractions & philosophy now. Mario is Schtitt's sidekick, and confidante. Mostly Schtitt talks and Mario listens. The fact that Mario is 'visibly damaged' allows Schtitt to let down his guard, as if there's no one in there. Schtitt is described as having a 'creepy wiriness' of old an man who exercises regularly. He has a white crewcut and 'glowingly white' skin. Schtitt argues [Mario listens] against the notion that the quickest path between 2 points is a straight line, saying that one always runs into something. He relates the locker room motto from his youth 'we are what we walk between' which is contrasted with both the original ETA slogan which is Latin for, roughly 'They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier' and the one to which CT changed it after Himself's death: 'the man who knows his limitations has none.' Most of the kids at ETA think Schtitt is bats, and mostly show him respect because he can make their morning workouts very unpleasant. One reason James Incandenza was drawn to Schtitt is that he's not the usual tennis coach, the basic 'hands-on practical straight-ahead problem solving statistical-data wonk.' He understood intuitively [with no knowledge of mathematics] that rather than reducing the chaos into patterns, in order to understand it, one must embrace the expansion to infinite limits of possibility. The infinities are mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, 'bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.' Mario asks with total incomprehension, 'you mean like baselines'? Schtitt was taught that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, but questions what the point of that is in the current state, where the only public consensus a boy has to surrender to is: 'the happy pleasure of the person alone.' He laments that without something bigger, there is 'nothing to contain and give the meaning.' On the way to get ice cream, he tells Mario that as a youth he was in love with a tree and would visit the tree daily. The thrust of Schtitt's view is that the 'true opponent, the enfolding boundary is the player himself.' Mario thinks of a flagpole raised to twice it's normal height. Schtitt says the game that students are at ETA to learn is 'life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.' As he grapples with whether that means 'destroying yourself,' some kids make fun of Mario's appearance. When they get to the ice cream place Mario opts for the old standby, chocolate while Schtitt experiments with something exotic, and concludes 'and so. no different maybe... except the chance to play' and laughs.
p 85-87
YDAU [2009] early November
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Tiny Ewell is 'tiny, an elf sized US male' who is being driven in a taxi from the hospital to the halfway house. He had returned home to find that his wife packed up his clothing, changed the locks and filed a restraining order. His Florsheim shoes still bear a scuff where he kicked the door. This is the first time he's been allowed to wear them [instead of the hospital provided 'happy slippers'] after he had used the to try to whack the mice he hallucinated during detox. Ewell looks like a scaled down Burl Ives, with his round shape white goatee, and 'violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort.' His former roommate at the detox unit is now sitting alone turning the air condition up and down [in November] and amusing himself. He, like Tiny has the 'rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. He gives Tiny the 'screaming meemies.' The rehab staffer accompanies Tiny to Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. The cabbie asks if Tiny is sick, and tiny answers 'so it would seem.'
p 87
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By mid-afternoon the medical attache has been joined by a whole cast of characters in watching the recursive loop from the cartridge, these include
-his wife
-the personal assistant of Prince Q--'s personal physician [who came looking for the attache]
-the personal physician [who came looking for the assistant]
-two armed security guards [dispatched by the prince to find the physician]
-two 7th day adventists [who had happened by]
notes
The Kate Gompert section was awfully sobering for this reader, in light of the author's death. It shows quite clearly an author who, while obviously a master of irony, did not seek refuge behind it.
The Schtitt section points up one of DFW's amazing gifts--switching the voice of the third person narrator to incorporate the way the scene's central character thinks. The Schtitt section is thorny and packed with math/philosphy-related stuff.
The Enfield VA hospital is presumably near the Enfield Tennis Academy, although I cannot recall any mention of the street location, that would place it on or near Commonwealth Ave.
p 68-78
YDAU [2009] month?
place Boston area
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part describes a doctor on a psych ward asking questions of Kate Gompert who has just tried to commit suicide. Kate is lying in the fetal position,with long-unwashed hair. She is under 24-hour suicide watch. the doctor who enters the room reads on her chart that she's 21, from Newton MA, data-clerk in a real estate office. This is her 4th hospitalization in 3 years, for unipolar clinical depression, she's had electro-convulsive treatment once, and been on and off various meds, which she has a history of abusing. She has attempted suicide twice, once by carbon monoxide and once by slitting her wrists. this time she took all of her [130+] antidepressants at once. Her mother found her and hallucinated that she was a newborn. The doctor takes out his pen and asks her why she tried to hurt herself, and if she would sit up. She answers that she is sitting up,and when he asks her if she feels as if she is in a sitting position, she sighs and sits u and says she was trying to kill herself, not hurt herself. When he asks the difference, she says she's not one of those self hating ones; she didn't want to punish herself, she just wanted to 'stop playing' or stop being conscious, she would have opted for shock, or a coma, if she could have. The doctor writes as she talks. She says she has a feeling that she feels throughout her body, more like horror than sadness. She fears this feeling more than anything, it's like nausea of every cell of the body. And even though it comes and goes, when she's having the feeling she forgets that. She says that she wants shock [ECT] or to be sedated for a month. She says that she sometimes thinks 'the feeling' has to do with Hope [pot, a nickname she explains: when you call a dealer you ask if Bob is in town in case of surveillance, and dealer answers 'Hope springs eternal' if so]. She explains that although pot is usually considered a minor drug, in her case she loves it so much that it's a whole other problem. She then explains her drug habit and obsession with concealing in what sounds like a combination of Hal's [paranoia about being discovered] and Erdeddy's [habitually quitting/restarting] habits. She explains that when she does manage to quit, 'the feeling' creeps back in, and she doesn't want to do anything. Part of the feeling is being willing to do anything to make it go away. The doctor who has stopped taking notes then asks, 'so this has happened in the past?' She answers 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' The doctor when summarizing her choice of treatment option on her chart, adds his own post assessment question, 'then what?'
p 78-79
YDAU [2009] April 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The medical attache's wife returns home at 0145h [6:18 since he began watching] to find her husband unresponsive in his soiled recliner. She tries to unsuccessfully to rouse him, and then noticing the expression on his face is 'positive, ecstatic even,' she turns her head to the cartridge-viewer
p 79-85
YDAU [2009] presumably
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This part introduces Gerhard Schtitt who is the head coach and athletic director at ETA, who in spite of rumored impropriety involving a riding crop at his former job, was 'wooed fiercely' by James Incandenza. Pretty much everyone at ETA now thinks that the riding crop episode was exaggerated, because the weatherman's pointer he now uses instead, has yet to make 'corrective contact with even one athletic bottom.' He is more of a dispenser of abstractions & philosophy now. Mario is Schtitt's sidekick, and confidante. Mostly Schtitt talks and Mario listens. The fact that Mario is 'visibly damaged' allows Schtitt to let down his guard, as if there's no one in there. Schtitt is described as having a 'creepy wiriness' of old an man who exercises regularly. He has a white crewcut and 'glowingly white' skin. Schtitt argues [Mario listens] against the notion that the quickest path between 2 points is a straight line, saying that one always runs into something. He relates the locker room motto from his youth 'we are what we walk between' which is contrasted with both the original ETA slogan which is Latin for, roughly 'They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier' and the one to which CT changed it after Himself's death: 'the man who knows his limitations has none.' Most of the kids at ETA think Schtitt is bats, and mostly show him respect because he can make their morning workouts very unpleasant. One reason James Incandenza was drawn to Schtitt is that he's not the usual tennis coach, the basic 'hands-on practical straight-ahead problem solving statistical-data wonk.' He understood intuitively [with no knowledge of mathematics] that rather than reducing the chaos into patterns, in order to understand it, one must embrace the expansion to infinite limits of possibility. The infinities are mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, 'bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.' Mario asks with total incomprehension, 'you mean like baselines'? Schtitt was taught that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, but questions what the point of that is in the current state, where the only public consensus a boy has to surrender to is: 'the happy pleasure of the person alone.' He laments that without something bigger, there is 'nothing to contain and give the meaning.' On the way to get ice cream, he tells Mario that as a youth he was in love with a tree and would visit the tree daily. The thrust of Schtitt's view is that the 'true opponent, the enfolding boundary is the player himself.' Mario thinks of a flagpole raised to twice it's normal height. Schtitt says the game that students are at ETA to learn is 'life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.' As he grapples with whether that means 'destroying yourself,' some kids make fun of Mario's appearance. When they get to the ice cream place Mario opts for the old standby, chocolate while Schtitt experiments with something exotic, and concludes 'and so. no different maybe... except the chance to play' and laughs.
p 85-87
YDAU [2009] early November
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Tiny Ewell is 'tiny, an elf sized US male' who is being driven in a taxi from the hospital to the halfway house. He had returned home to find that his wife packed up his clothing, changed the locks and filed a restraining order. His Florsheim shoes still bear a scuff where he kicked the door. This is the first time he's been allowed to wear them [instead of the hospital provided 'happy slippers'] after he had used the to try to whack the mice he hallucinated during detox. Ewell looks like a scaled down Burl Ives, with his round shape white goatee, and 'violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort.' His former roommate at the detox unit is now sitting alone turning the air condition up and down [in November] and amusing himself. He, like Tiny has the 'rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. He gives Tiny the 'screaming meemies.' The rehab staffer accompanies Tiny to Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. The cabbie asks if Tiny is sick, and tiny answers 'so it would seem.'
p 87
YDAU [2009] Apr 2
place Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
By mid-afternoon the medical attache has been joined by a whole cast of characters in watching the recursive loop from the cartridge, these include
-his wife
-the personal assistant of Prince Q--'s personal physician [who came looking for the attache]
-the personal physician [who came looking for the assistant]
-two armed security guards [dispatched by the prince to find the physician]
-two 7th day adventists [who had happened by]
notes
The Kate Gompert section was awfully sobering for this reader, in light of the author's death. It shows quite clearly an author who, while obviously a master of irony, did not seek refuge behind it.
The Schtitt section points up one of DFW's amazing gifts--switching the voice of the third person narrator to incorporate the way the scene's central character thinks. The Schtitt section is thorny and packed with math/philosphy-related stuff.
The Enfield VA hospital is presumably near the Enfield Tennis Academy, although I cannot recall any mention of the street location, that would place it on or near Commonwealth Ave.
p 87-127
this section in 11 parts
p 87-92
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section introduces the characters Remy Marathe and M. Hugh Steeply, who meet in the desert outside Tucson AZ,presumably in secret. Steeply is a transvestite operative for the [USA] Office of Unspecified Services,or BSS as the Quebecois separatists refer to it. He is a large man, who seems to appear rather absurd in drag, and has trouble controlling his giant prosthetic breasts and his wig. Marathe is a member of the AFR --'Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [wheelchair assassins]. Even though Steeply's Quebecois is better than Marathe's English, they usually converse in English, because Marathe has chosen to betray the AFR in order to secure medical treatment for his wife, back in Quebec. Plus, he now pretends to his superiors that he's pretending to feed info to the BSS, but Steeply apparently knows about this false double-double-agent status, which gives Steeply the upper hand-- ergo they converse in English. Steeply asks how he got up there [in a wheelchair] and Marathe dodges the question. Steeply asks if he has heard about the incident in which the cartridge [referred to as 'the Entertainment'] was delivered to the medical attache, with connections to the Saudi ministry of Entertainment, by postal routes that track back to the Phoenix area, apparently implicating Marathe's organization. Steeply explains around 20 people were done in by the incident including police, and also that the attache had diplomatic status and connections to the royal family and plus he was a compatriot of Marathe's. Marathe responds that they have no such names on the AFR list [which Steeply has seen,] that they have 'larger seafood to cook.' Marathe sniffs his nose a lot, they face the same direction as they speak. Steeply points out that the attache was Ottowan [much hated by Marathe] and that he was possibly connected to the widow of the 'auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment.' The wife was teaching at Brandeis where the victim did his residency, and she was known to sleep with 'just about everything with a pulse... particularly a Canadian pulse.' Marathe denies knowledge, saying that 'civilians as individual warnings to ONAN are not out desire. Steeply says he was asked to seek personal verification. Marathe asks if he was asked by Rodney [Rod the God] Tine, chief of Unspecified Services and 'acknowledged architect of ONAN and continental Reconfiguration' who by the way shared a personal stenographer [and love interest]-- Luria Perec--with M. DuPlessis former assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance. And there's the question of whether Tine was doubling or possibly tripling [only pretending to divulge secrets].
p 93
presumably YDAU [2009]?
place [what used to be] Vermont
narrated in third person [as if a public service announcement]
synopsis:
A herd of feral hamsters is thundering across the southern part of the Great Concavity [in former Vermont], creating a cloud which is visible as far away as boston and Montreal. the herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free 'at the beginning of Experialist Migration' in Year of the Whopper [2002]. the herd is relentlessly crossing the denuded terrain toward the forests of what used to be Maine. All these territories are now property of Canada. People are advised to steer clear of the hamsters, and the southwest Concavity for that matter. Americans are advised to head south toward a metropolis or the points between where the giant ATHSCME fans blow the toxic clouds back toward Canada.
p 93-95
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply is trying to light a cigarette, and not being able to do so in a lady-like fashion. Marathe has his wheelchair's brakes locked and his hand on the grip of his machine-pistol. Steeply asks if Marathe will report the incident back to Fortier, and Marathe answers 'bien sur' [of course]. Steeply says that he must be tripling or quadrupling since he knows that Fortier and the AFR know that Marathe is here. Marathe asks but do they know that you know this. In a footnote it's explained that the important thing is that Marathe's superiors seem to believe that he is only pretending to betray them [to get medical technology for his wife] but in reality is betraying them by pretending to pretend. Steeply says it's not personal, it's just obsessive caution. He says that DuPlessis always suspected Tine 'tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.' And Marathe says that DuPlessis is now dead under 'circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion... an inept burglary and grippe.' Marathe says that if 'Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware,' because of Luria.
p 95-97
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person [partly as if a diary entry]
synopsis:
The section starts with a day in the life of ETA student, with all the drills classes etc, ending with him slumped on the locker room floor with the other players. '...to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness?' Which turns out to be a question about the exam the boys have just taken. Hal answers that the exam was asking about Tolstoy's syntax, not about real unhappy families. The cast of characters includes John (N.R.) Wayne, Troelsch, Pemulis, Schacht, Ortho Stice and others. They discuss a possible test question on Disney R.Leith's [prof of History of Entertainment I & II] pop quiz--the most crucial difference between historical broadcast TV and cartridge-capable TP. Troelsch then quizzes the others to define 'acutance' which Hal does without trouble. The rest of the boys tease him and say they'll be vying for seats next to him for the quiz.
p 97
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. This odd little section contains no dialog. It describes dusk in the desert--the violet sky and the rustling of things about to emerge for the night. Steeply examines a scratch on his arm.
p 97-105
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to the locker room. Everyone has a white towel around his waist, except for Stice with his trademark black towel. The big Buddy system is described-- each 18 & under has a group of 14 & unders assigned to him. Beak, Blott and [the ethnically vague, but non-causcasian] Arslanian are all in Hal's group, plus effectively Ingersoll, whom he traded for Possalthwaite. Axford was supposed tobe Ingersoll's Buddy, but inexplicably despised the kid and begged Hal to make the trade. Big Buddies are there to show the little kids the rope and act as liaison between the kids and the prorectors, but also to keep the prorectors informed on who seems on shaky ground. Hal also feels the strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, but resists. He likes being a Big Buddy. Back in the locker room-- other than Hal 'who's atavistically dark-complected,' the players have either weirdly piebald suntans or they spray themselves with Lemon Pledge which acts as the world's most effective sunscreen, if you can stand the smell. Stice says he's tired [pronounced 'tard'] and the boys all chime in with hyperbolic and 'hyperbolicker' words describing their fatigue. Stice request only black form the companies that give him clothes/gear,and has the nickname 'The Darkness.' The kids tease Hal some more about being freakishly smart, he flips them offby the method of using the left hand to slowly crank up the right's middle finger. Hal takes after Himself in appearing slightly ethnic, while Orin 'got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype,' and Mario resembles no one they know. Most days Hal sneaks away from the locker room to get high. The boys talk about how it would be a more pleasant exhaustion if only they could...[get high, get laid etc]. Ingersoll interjects that they get Saturday off for Interdependence Day. It's revealed that Schacht, who is in one of the toilet stalls has Crohn's disease [inflammation of the ileum]. The boys come to a consensus that they had 5 hours of continuous exertion. John Wayne has said nothing the whole time. He buttons his shirt all the way as if he were going to put on a tie. The others argue whether it's Tavis or Schtitt who's more responsible for their personal pain. A jocular fight ensues.
p 105-109
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. The sun has set and Tucson begins to twinkle below them. Steeply says that the love of Rod Tine for Luria was great and timeless, the kind that is sung about, the kind people die for,and then rattles off pairs of star-crossed lovers, notably mistakenly pairing Agamemnon and Helen. Marathe corrects him-- Paris and Helen--and decries his ignorance. Steeply recalls the anonymous gift that was not a gift, brought to the door. Marathe scoffs that Paris and Helen were the *excuse* for the war, that the real reasons for the war were political. He says that Steeply likes to believe that the love of one woman could do this. Steeply counters that those around Rod The God say he would die twice for Luria, which is why he still has the presidents ear, divided loyalties or no-- 'if he does it for love-- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political.' Marathe sniffs scornfully,and says that Tines love is only a fanatical attachment, a temple at which he worships, and that the problem with those from the USA is that they do not choose attachments carefully. He says dying for one person is craziness, but your nation and your cause outlive you. He asks 'you would die without thinking for what?' Steeply knows that the AFR file on him makes reference to his recent divorce and to the fact that on assignment he had to drive a green sedan with an aspirin advertisement on it. Steeply counters that sometimes there is no choice what to love, and Marathe answers that in that case you become a slave, not even tragic. Tucson appears ghostly white below, and Black Widows' spider webs are on the outcroppings just below them. Marathe 'thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs,' [here there is a lengthy footnote,see below] and began singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' out of tune. The cold desert night was coming on, but they themselves were not chilled because their proximity created a 'form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth.' Marathe thinks that AFR Ops base here is like the surface of the moon.
p 109-121
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is conducting his Big Buddy group with a hypnotic cartridge in the TP of Stan Smith hitting one perfect forehand [and later backhand] after another. He tells them that the end of the day fighting is part of Schtitt and deLint's plan. The kids are struggling with how anyone can put up with the day in/day out difficulty of the academy for years. One suggests it's because they want the Show [the ATP tour with fame & fortune etc] another suggests that it's for scholarships. Hal dismisses all of this. He tells them to consider that they're all sitting around bitching and moaning *together* even though the system has 'inequality as an axiom.' Everyone knows where they're ranked [ John Wayne> Hal> Struck, Shaw>Troeltsch>Freer>Schacht>Pemulis] and they're all in one another's food chain. What they share is this aloneness. 'The suffering unites us' he tells them, and Schtitt and deLint set it up this way on purpose. it's not the bodies they're working on here, it's the heads. They purposely give them unstructured time after the most grueling workout, so that they'll get together and complain. Hal realizes that Ingersoll is so repellant to Hal because he sees in things about himself that he can't or won't accept. Hal broods on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high more than the getting high itself. If he doesn't get high by dinnertime, his eyes water and his mouth fills with spit, and he feels sick to his stomach and can't eat, and so when he gets high later he overeats later and wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
Down the hall John Wayne conducts his Big Buddy group [LaMont Chu, 'Sleepy TP' Peterson, Kieran McKenna, Brian van Vleck]. The mood in Wayne's group is quite different, essentially pedagogical. Chu acts as Wayne's mouthpiece, explaining to the others what Wayne thinks: that you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus [plateuax, corrects Wayne] and that the ones who don't hang in there are three. [1] the despairing type who can't stand the stall of improvement when he hits the plateau, and gives up in frustration [2] the obsessive type who when he hits the plateau tries to will himself upward by force and ends up injured [3] the complacent type who just accepts it when he hits the plateau and little by little his rank slides as others get better. Van Vleck asks wayne for verification that this is not just Chu palming his advice disguised as Wayne's. Wayne says he's said all he has to say [nothing]. Due to his continental #2 ranking [possibly #1 after the WhataBurger] he is the most sought after Big Buddy.
Pemulis plays poker [?] with his group [which includes Todd Posalthwaite (wasn't he traded to Axford?), Otis P. Lord and 2 others], Schacht gives his 5 kids a demonstration on flossing on a dental mock-up. Troeltsch tells his group that until they're 15 it's all about repetition until the mechanics are hardwired in, and then they really come after you with the 'concentration and character shit.'
Struck leads a Q&A with his kids. Traub asks if he should reciprocate when his opponent is kertwanging [presumably an obnoxious and only semi-legal act], Struck answers no, but if you lose, you can spike the opponents water after the match. 'Violently cross-eyed Carl Whale asks what if you have to fart, but there's the possibility that you might actually need to defecate. Struck answers that you resist: 'nothing leaves my bottom during play.' Stice lectures his boys [on Schtitt, presumably] telling them that he says it's about more than tennis, it's about sacrifice and suffering to get at the parts of yourself you didn't know were there. he says he'd 'chew fiberglass for that old man.' With dinner about to begin Hal contemplates getting high, as he spits he feels a twinge in a tooth on the left side of his mouth.
p 121-126
YDAU [2009] mid October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section has a title 'Mario Incandenza's first and only even remotely romantic experience, thus far.' After he drifts away from during a stroll together [sensing that Hal needs some alone time] Mario is confronted the USS Millicent Kent, 16 year old, 400 lb girl, ranked #1, who can take on any of the guys at the bench press. The USSMK takes Mario on a hunt for a Husky VI telescoping tripod that she says is hidden in the thickets. She grabs Mario's 'claw' and proceeds to drag him to show him. Millicent reveals that she has always thought Mario had the 'prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents.' She also reveals that even though she's a great tennis player, her true love is modern interpretive dance, and that when she was a kid she would spend hours in her leotard before the mirror. She also reveals that after her mother ran off with the ConEdison repair man,that she came in to find her very obese father dressed in her leotard posing before the mirror. Mario tries to tell a joke about inbreeding in West Virginia. As fate would have it she was recruited by ETA that same day. She also asks if Mario has ever seen a girls 'yin-yang' and reveals that her sister also had a similar experience with the father, for which she was seeing a counselor at the Ice Capades, where she's a skater. She then smashes Mario's head against her stomach and confesses that his eyelashes drive her 'right around the bend with sensual feeling.'When she eventually gets her hands inside his elaborate outfit and starts 'rooting around for a penis' he becomes so ticklish that he bursts into laughter, allowing Hal to find him. On the way back, they find the tripod in the middle of a not very tall or thick thicket at all.
p 126-127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply says he thinks they chose Boston as the Ops center because it's the 'place of the supposed Entertainment's origin.' Marathe counters simply that it's the closest USA city to the Convexity, and Quebec. Steeply says they're not sure that they have copies, and asks if the supposed 'anti-Entertainment' [which counters the lethality of the cartridge] even exists. Marathe answers that they have no evidence except rumors. Marathe asks why they never send Steeply into the field as himself, last time it was as a negro. Steeply corrects him--a Haitian. A coyote howls a car horn sounds repeatedly, and the cold wind gives Steeply's bare arms a 'plucked-chicken look.' Marathe can't remember Steeply removing his sunglasses but considers this detail unimportant to his report of 'every word and gesture' to M. Fortier [an AFR comrade] who considers Marathe to have near perfect recall of details.
p 127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This one sentence section says that Marathe has several times called the USA 'your walled nation' or your 'murated nation' \
on p 108 is footnote 45 which in turn refers us to footnote 304:
p 1055-1062 [footnote 304]
YDAU[2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis
Struck is working on a term paper for his 'History of Canadian Unpleasantness Course thing.' He is basically plagiarizing an article about the AFR from an article on something like the internet [BPL ArchFax database]. The article he is plagiarizing says that unlike the 'massive feral infants formed by toxicity' which are 'essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt' the legless wheelchair assassins have wreaked havoc disrupting 'Empire Waste Displacement's launch and reception facilities' and most infamously assassinating certain Canadian officials who have a passive position on 'Sudetenlandization' which seems to be essestially the foisting of contaminated land and waste in the northern US onto Canada. The AFR are feared and mythologized in Canadian culture. Apparently they are very stealthy and you only get 'to hear the squeak' when it's too late. And they leave a signature set of tracks in a double S pattern. While most of the separatist groups simply call for Quebec's secession, the AFR call for returning all 'Reconfigured territories' to USA and the cessation of all waste disposal and 'ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity.' The AFR formed in the wake of the 'nearly simultaneous inaugurations of ONAN-ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar ONAN calendar.' Struck struggles to taylor his plagiarism to avoid sounding unlike a student. The AFR has it's roots in a cult of 'Le Jeu du Prochain Train' which is a game where players try to be the last of the six to jump across the tracks in front of a speeding train [and live]. It's also noted that to not jump at all is unimaginable, the only known non jumper was Bernard Wayne, who was disgraced and later drowned [this fails to set off any light bulbs in Struck's head.] There is little doubt that the legless assassins of the AFR came up through the ranks of cult of Prochain train.
notes
The introduction of Marathe and Steeply begins the third thread of the book in earnest, and on my second reading of the book, I was struck by just how blatantly DFW spells things out here. All the reviewers who claimed that the threads never come together must have snoozed through this section [and the book's opening]--because it's all here plain as day. Here we learn that the mysterious cartridge 'the Entertainment' was in fact made by Himself [and is presumably his final film, 'Infinite Jest (V?)'] and that Marathe's organization is at least suspected of having sent the tape to the attache, and also that DuPlessis, the unfortunate victim of Gately's robbery was connected to Marathe's organization [as well as, we have already learned, the Incadenzas], suggesting the connection to the Gately thread of the novel. We're also seeing the concepts of identity and self emerge time and again, and in this thread they are flagrantly parodied, with Steeply's ridiculous drag get-up, and Marathe's double, triple, quadruple-crossing, and pretending to pretend to be pretending.
The ETA scenes in this chapter are hilariously sad in a special DFW way. We definitely get some more character insight into the tennis players--something sure is strange about John Wayne, he seems to have no sense of humor or anything else personality-trait-wise for that matter. I thought for sure that I would find the hypnotic Stan Smith cartridge listed in the filmography, but I have yet to. I also thought it a curious coincidence that Hal and Marathe share DFW's eidetic abilities.
The OED defines murated as 'walled or encompassed with walls' not as mutated as some have suggested. But why two ways to say 'walled'?
The OED contains no entry for kertwanging, I have a feeling it's simply onomatopoeic.
p 87-92
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section introduces the characters Remy Marathe and M. Hugh Steeply, who meet in the desert outside Tucson AZ,presumably in secret. Steeply is a transvestite operative for the [USA] Office of Unspecified Services,or BSS as the Quebecois separatists refer to it. He is a large man, who seems to appear rather absurd in drag, and has trouble controlling his giant prosthetic breasts and his wig. Marathe is a member of the AFR --'Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [wheelchair assassins]. Even though Steeply's Quebecois is better than Marathe's English, they usually converse in English, because Marathe has chosen to betray the AFR in order to secure medical treatment for his wife, back in Quebec. Plus, he now pretends to his superiors that he's pretending to feed info to the BSS, but Steeply apparently knows about this false double-double-agent status, which gives Steeply the upper hand-- ergo they converse in English. Steeply asks how he got up there [in a wheelchair] and Marathe dodges the question. Steeply asks if he has heard about the incident in which the cartridge [referred to as 'the Entertainment'] was delivered to the medical attache, with connections to the Saudi ministry of Entertainment, by postal routes that track back to the Phoenix area, apparently implicating Marathe's organization. Steeply explains around 20 people were done in by the incident including police, and also that the attache had diplomatic status and connections to the royal family and plus he was a compatriot of Marathe's. Marathe responds that they have no such names on the AFR list [which Steeply has seen,] that they have 'larger seafood to cook.' Marathe sniffs his nose a lot, they face the same direction as they speak. Steeply points out that the attache was Ottowan [much hated by Marathe] and that he was possibly connected to the widow of the 'auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment.' The wife was teaching at Brandeis where the victim did his residency, and she was known to sleep with 'just about everything with a pulse... particularly a Canadian pulse.' Marathe denies knowledge, saying that 'civilians as individual warnings to ONAN are not out desire. Steeply says he was asked to seek personal verification. Marathe asks if he was asked by Rodney [Rod the God] Tine, chief of Unspecified Services and 'acknowledged architect of ONAN and continental Reconfiguration' who by the way shared a personal stenographer [and love interest]-- Luria Perec--with M. DuPlessis former assistant coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance. And there's the question of whether Tine was doubling or possibly tripling [only pretending to divulge secrets].
p 93
presumably YDAU [2009]?
place [what used to be] Vermont
narrated in third person [as if a public service announcement]
synopsis:
A herd of feral hamsters is thundering across the southern part of the Great Concavity [in former Vermont], creating a cloud which is visible as far away as boston and Montreal. the herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free 'at the beginning of Experialist Migration' in Year of the Whopper [2002]. the herd is relentlessly crossing the denuded terrain toward the forests of what used to be Maine. All these territories are now property of Canada. People are advised to steer clear of the hamsters, and the southwest Concavity for that matter. Americans are advised to head south toward a metropolis or the points between where the giant ATHSCME fans blow the toxic clouds back toward Canada.
p 93-95
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply is trying to light a cigarette, and not being able to do so in a lady-like fashion. Marathe has his wheelchair's brakes locked and his hand on the grip of his machine-pistol. Steeply asks if Marathe will report the incident back to Fortier, and Marathe answers 'bien sur' [of course]. Steeply says that he must be tripling or quadrupling since he knows that Fortier and the AFR know that Marathe is here. Marathe asks but do they know that you know this. In a footnote it's explained that the important thing is that Marathe's superiors seem to believe that he is only pretending to betray them [to get medical technology for his wife] but in reality is betraying them by pretending to pretend. Steeply says it's not personal, it's just obsessive caution. He says that DuPlessis always suspected Tine 'tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.' And Marathe says that DuPlessis is now dead under 'circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion... an inept burglary and grippe.' Marathe says that if 'Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware,' because of Luria.
p 95-97
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person [partly as if a diary entry]
synopsis:
The section starts with a day in the life of ETA student, with all the drills classes etc, ending with him slumped on the locker room floor with the other players. '...to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness?' Which turns out to be a question about the exam the boys have just taken. Hal answers that the exam was asking about Tolstoy's syntax, not about real unhappy families. The cast of characters includes John (N.R.) Wayne, Troelsch, Pemulis, Schacht, Ortho Stice and others. They discuss a possible test question on Disney R.Leith's [prof of History of Entertainment I & II] pop quiz--the most crucial difference between historical broadcast TV and cartridge-capable TP. Troelsch then quizzes the others to define 'acutance' which Hal does without trouble. The rest of the boys tease him and say they'll be vying for seats next to him for the quiz.
p 97
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. This odd little section contains no dialog. It describes dusk in the desert--the violet sky and the rustling of things about to emerge for the night. Steeply examines a scratch on his arm.
p 97-105
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to the locker room. Everyone has a white towel around his waist, except for Stice with his trademark black towel. The big Buddy system is described-- each 18 & under has a group of 14 & unders assigned to him. Beak, Blott and [the ethnically vague, but non-causcasian] Arslanian are all in Hal's group, plus effectively Ingersoll, whom he traded for Possalthwaite. Axford was supposed tobe Ingersoll's Buddy, but inexplicably despised the kid and begged Hal to make the trade. Big Buddies are there to show the little kids the rope and act as liaison between the kids and the prorectors, but also to keep the prorectors informed on who seems on shaky ground. Hal also feels the strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, but resists. He likes being a Big Buddy. Back in the locker room-- other than Hal 'who's atavistically dark-complected,' the players have either weirdly piebald suntans or they spray themselves with Lemon Pledge which acts as the world's most effective sunscreen, if you can stand the smell. Stice says he's tired [pronounced 'tard'] and the boys all chime in with hyperbolic and 'hyperbolicker' words describing their fatigue. Stice request only black form the companies that give him clothes/gear,and has the nickname 'The Darkness.' The kids tease Hal some more about being freakishly smart, he flips them offby the method of using the left hand to slowly crank up the right's middle finger. Hal takes after Himself in appearing slightly ethnic, while Orin 'got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype,' and Mario resembles no one they know. Most days Hal sneaks away from the locker room to get high. The boys talk about how it would be a more pleasant exhaustion if only they could...[get high, get laid etc]. Ingersoll interjects that they get Saturday off for Interdependence Day. It's revealed that Schacht, who is in one of the toilet stalls has Crohn's disease [inflammation of the ileum]. The boys come to a consensus that they had 5 hours of continuous exertion. John Wayne has said nothing the whole time. He buttons his shirt all the way as if he were going to put on a tie. The others argue whether it's Tavis or Schtitt who's more responsible for their personal pain. A jocular fight ensues.
p 105-109
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Marathe and Steeply. The sun has set and Tucson begins to twinkle below them. Steeply says that the love of Rod Tine for Luria was great and timeless, the kind that is sung about, the kind people die for,and then rattles off pairs of star-crossed lovers, notably mistakenly pairing Agamemnon and Helen. Marathe corrects him-- Paris and Helen--and decries his ignorance. Steeply recalls the anonymous gift that was not a gift, brought to the door. Marathe scoffs that Paris and Helen were the *excuse* for the war, that the real reasons for the war were political. He says that Steeply likes to believe that the love of one woman could do this. Steeply counters that those around Rod The God say he would die twice for Luria, which is why he still has the presidents ear, divided loyalties or no-- 'if he does it for love-- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political.' Marathe sniffs scornfully,and says that Tines love is only a fanatical attachment, a temple at which he worships, and that the problem with those from the USA is that they do not choose attachments carefully. He says dying for one person is craziness, but your nation and your cause outlive you. He asks 'you would die without thinking for what?' Steeply knows that the AFR file on him makes reference to his recent divorce and to the fact that on assignment he had to drive a green sedan with an aspirin advertisement on it. Steeply counters that sometimes there is no choice what to love, and Marathe answers that in that case you become a slave, not even tragic. Tucson appears ghostly white below, and Black Widows' spider webs are on the outcroppings just below them. Marathe 'thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs,' [here there is a lengthy footnote,see below] and began singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' out of tune. The cold desert night was coming on, but they themselves were not chilled because their proximity created a 'form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth.' Marathe thinks that AFR Ops base here is like the surface of the moon.
p 109-121
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal is conducting his Big Buddy group with a hypnotic cartridge in the TP of Stan Smith hitting one perfect forehand [and later backhand] after another. He tells them that the end of the day fighting is part of Schtitt and deLint's plan. The kids are struggling with how anyone can put up with the day in/day out difficulty of the academy for years. One suggests it's because they want the Show [the ATP tour with fame & fortune etc] another suggests that it's for scholarships. Hal dismisses all of this. He tells them to consider that they're all sitting around bitching and moaning *together* even though the system has 'inequality as an axiom.' Everyone knows where they're ranked [ John Wayne> Hal> Struck, Shaw>Troeltsch>Freer>Schacht>Pemulis] and they're all in one another's food chain. What they share is this aloneness. 'The suffering unites us' he tells them, and Schtitt and deLint set it up this way on purpose. it's not the bodies they're working on here, it's the heads. They purposely give them unstructured time after the most grueling workout, so that they'll get together and complain. Hal realizes that Ingersoll is so repellant to Hal because he sees in things about himself that he can't or won't accept. Hal broods on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high more than the getting high itself. If he doesn't get high by dinnertime, his eyes water and his mouth fills with spit, and he feels sick to his stomach and can't eat, and so when he gets high later he overeats later and wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
Down the hall John Wayne conducts his Big Buddy group [LaMont Chu, 'Sleepy TP' Peterson, Kieran McKenna, Brian van Vleck]. The mood in Wayne's group is quite different, essentially pedagogical. Chu acts as Wayne's mouthpiece, explaining to the others what Wayne thinks: that you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus [plateuax, corrects Wayne] and that the ones who don't hang in there are three. [1] the despairing type who can't stand the stall of improvement when he hits the plateau, and gives up in frustration [2] the obsessive type who when he hits the plateau tries to will himself upward by force and ends up injured [3] the complacent type who just accepts it when he hits the plateau and little by little his rank slides as others get better. Van Vleck asks wayne for verification that this is not just Chu palming his advice disguised as Wayne's. Wayne says he's said all he has to say [nothing]. Due to his continental #2 ranking [possibly #1 after the WhataBurger] he is the most sought after Big Buddy.
Pemulis plays poker [?] with his group [which includes Todd Posalthwaite (wasn't he traded to Axford?), Otis P. Lord and 2 others], Schacht gives his 5 kids a demonstration on flossing on a dental mock-up. Troeltsch tells his group that until they're 15 it's all about repetition until the mechanics are hardwired in, and then they really come after you with the 'concentration and character shit.'
Struck leads a Q&A with his kids. Traub asks if he should reciprocate when his opponent is kertwanging [presumably an obnoxious and only semi-legal act], Struck answers no, but if you lose, you can spike the opponents water after the match. 'Violently cross-eyed Carl Whale asks what if you have to fart, but there's the possibility that you might actually need to defecate. Struck answers that you resist: 'nothing leaves my bottom during play.' Stice lectures his boys [on Schtitt, presumably] telling them that he says it's about more than tennis, it's about sacrifice and suffering to get at the parts of yourself you didn't know were there. he says he'd 'chew fiberglass for that old man.' With dinner about to begin Hal contemplates getting high, as he spits he feels a twinge in a tooth on the left side of his mouth.
p 121-126
YDAU [2009] mid October
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This section has a title 'Mario Incandenza's first and only even remotely romantic experience, thus far.' After he drifts away from during a stroll together [sensing that Hal needs some alone time] Mario is confronted the USS Millicent Kent, 16 year old, 400 lb girl, ranked #1, who can take on any of the guys at the bench press. The USSMK takes Mario on a hunt for a Husky VI telescoping tripod that she says is hidden in the thickets. She grabs Mario's 'claw' and proceeds to drag him to show him. Millicent reveals that she has always thought Mario had the 'prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents.' She also reveals that even though she's a great tennis player, her true love is modern interpretive dance, and that when she was a kid she would spend hours in her leotard before the mirror. She also reveals that after her mother ran off with the ConEdison repair man,that she came in to find her very obese father dressed in her leotard posing before the mirror. Mario tries to tell a joke about inbreeding in West Virginia. As fate would have it she was recruited by ETA that same day. She also asks if Mario has ever seen a girls 'yin-yang' and reveals that her sister also had a similar experience with the father, for which she was seeing a counselor at the Ice Capades, where she's a skater. She then smashes Mario's head against her stomach and confesses that his eyelashes drive her 'right around the bend with sensual feeling.'When she eventually gets her hands inside his elaborate outfit and starts 'rooting around for a penis' he becomes so ticklish that he bursts into laughter, allowing Hal to find him. On the way back, they find the tripod in the middle of a not very tall or thick thicket at all.
p 126-127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Back to Steeply and Marathe. Steeply says he thinks they chose Boston as the Ops center because it's the 'place of the supposed Entertainment's origin.' Marathe counters simply that it's the closest USA city to the Convexity, and Quebec. Steeply says they're not sure that they have copies, and asks if the supposed 'anti-Entertainment' [which counters the lethality of the cartridge] even exists. Marathe answers that they have no evidence except rumors. Marathe asks why they never send Steeply into the field as himself, last time it was as a negro. Steeply corrects him--a Haitian. A coyote howls a car horn sounds repeatedly, and the cold wind gives Steeply's bare arms a 'plucked-chicken look.' Marathe can't remember Steeply removing his sunglasses but considers this detail unimportant to his report of 'every word and gesture' to M. Fortier [an AFR comrade] who considers Marathe to have near perfect recall of details.
p 127
YDAU [2009] Apr 30
place Tucson
narrated in third person
synopsis:
This one sentence section says that Marathe has several times called the USA 'your walled nation' or your 'murated nation' \
on p 108 is footnote 45 which in turn refers us to footnote 304:
p 1055-1062 [footnote 304]
YDAU[2009] Nov 11
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis
Struck is working on a term paper for his 'History of Canadian Unpleasantness Course thing.' He is basically plagiarizing an article about the AFR from an article on something like the internet [BPL ArchFax database]. The article he is plagiarizing says that unlike the 'massive feral infants formed by toxicity' which are 'essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt' the legless wheelchair assassins have wreaked havoc disrupting 'Empire Waste Displacement's launch and reception facilities' and most infamously assassinating certain Canadian officials who have a passive position on 'Sudetenlandization' which seems to be essestially the foisting of contaminated land and waste in the northern US onto Canada. The AFR are feared and mythologized in Canadian culture. Apparently they are very stealthy and you only get 'to hear the squeak' when it's too late. And they leave a signature set of tracks in a double S pattern. While most of the separatist groups simply call for Quebec's secession, the AFR call for returning all 'Reconfigured territories' to USA and the cessation of all waste disposal and 'ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity.' The AFR formed in the wake of the 'nearly simultaneous inaugurations of ONAN-ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar ONAN calendar.' Struck struggles to taylor his plagiarism to avoid sounding unlike a student. The AFR has it's roots in a cult of 'Le Jeu du Prochain Train' which is a game where players try to be the last of the six to jump across the tracks in front of a speeding train [and live]. It's also noted that to not jump at all is unimaginable, the only known non jumper was Bernard Wayne, who was disgraced and later drowned [this fails to set off any light bulbs in Struck's head.] There is little doubt that the legless assassins of the AFR came up through the ranks of cult of Prochain train.
notes
The introduction of Marathe and Steeply begins the third thread of the book in earnest, and on my second reading of the book, I was struck by just how blatantly DFW spells things out here. All the reviewers who claimed that the threads never come together must have snoozed through this section [and the book's opening]--because it's all here plain as day. Here we learn that the mysterious cartridge 'the Entertainment' was in fact made by Himself [and is presumably his final film, 'Infinite Jest (V?)'] and that Marathe's organization is at least suspected of having sent the tape to the attache, and also that DuPlessis, the unfortunate victim of Gately's robbery was connected to Marathe's organization [as well as, we have already learned, the Incadenzas], suggesting the connection to the Gately thread of the novel. We're also seeing the concepts of identity and self emerge time and again, and in this thread they are flagrantly parodied, with Steeply's ridiculous drag get-up, and Marathe's double, triple, quadruple-crossing, and pretending to pretend to be pretending.
The ETA scenes in this chapter are hilariously sad in a special DFW way. We definitely get some more character insight into the tennis players--something sure is strange about John Wayne, he seems to have no sense of humor or anything else personality-trait-wise for that matter. I thought for sure that I would find the hypnotic Stan Smith cartridge listed in the filmography, but I have yet to. I also thought it a curious coincidence that Hal and Marathe share DFW's eidetic abilities.
The OED defines murated as 'walled or encompassed with walls' not as mutated as some have suggested. But why two ways to say 'walled'?
The OED contains no entry for kertwanging, I have a feeling it's simply onomatopoeic.
p 127-135
this section in 2 parts
p 127-128
year unknown
place ETA
narrated in first person [an ETA student, not Hal]
synopsis:
There's an 'oiled guru' who sits in 'yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top' in the weight room at ETA. No one one knows where he comes from or why he's allowed to stay. He licks the sweat of the arms and foreheads of kids after their workout, but it's not, we're assured, a 'faggy or sexual thing.' Some of the younger kids won't go near him, and so he contentedly watches as they're lifted off the ground try to pull an weight greater than their own body on the shoulder-pull weight machine. His name is supposedly Kyle, he's around 40,and supposedly he goes way back with Dr. Incandenza.
p 128-135
year unknown, Dec. 24
place Boston
narrated in first person ['yrstruly']
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect, by someone who identifies himself only as 'yrstruly.' The narrator is a drug addict who, along with 'C' and 'Poor Tony' [a transvestite] are trying to score drugs on Christmas Eve. They assault and rob several people [including someone with no legs], and make several minor scores. They attempt unsuccessfully to locate Roy Tony, they consider raping a nurse on the train, but it's mostly all leading to the big score they're going to make at Dr. Wo's in chinatown. As payback to Poor Tony, Wo sells them heroin laced with Drano, and C [who is first to shoot up] goes into convulsions and dies. Poor Tony and yrstrly hide C's body in a dumpster. Yrstrly ponders whether he should 'elemonade Poor Tony's map for keeps' as retribution for letting C die,even though he knew the heroin was probably bad.
Other characters mentioned are Kely Vinoy [hooker], Eckwus [junky], Stokely Darkstar [junky with AIDS], Lolasister & Susan T. Cheese [junkies], Delphina [dealer]
notes
The yrstrly section is pretty chaotic and free associative, and I 'elemonaded' a lot of the little details, mostly about looking for dope. Clearly this section relates to the one on p 37-38, by way of the dialect [childlike in the first, adult in the second], and the one common character, Roy Tony. Also notable is the parody of Marathe & Steeply [transvestite & amputee] embedded here. Also, one can't help but wonder how these junkies and dealers might be related to the more suburban addicts we've already come across.
p 127-128
year unknown
place ETA
narrated in first person [an ETA student, not Hal]
synopsis:
There's an 'oiled guru' who sits in 'yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top' in the weight room at ETA. No one one knows where he comes from or why he's allowed to stay. He licks the sweat of the arms and foreheads of kids after their workout, but it's not, we're assured, a 'faggy or sexual thing.' Some of the younger kids won't go near him, and so he contentedly watches as they're lifted off the ground try to pull an weight greater than their own body on the shoulder-pull weight machine. His name is supposedly Kyle, he's around 40,and supposedly he goes way back with Dr. Incandenza.
p 128-135
year unknown, Dec. 24
place Boston
narrated in first person ['yrstruly']
synopsis:
This part is narrated in a heavy inner city dialect, by someone who identifies himself only as 'yrstruly.' The narrator is a drug addict who, along with 'C' and 'Poor Tony' [a transvestite] are trying to score drugs on Christmas Eve. They assault and rob several people [including someone with no legs], and make several minor scores. They attempt unsuccessfully to locate Roy Tony, they consider raping a nurse on the train, but it's mostly all leading to the big score they're going to make at Dr. Wo's in chinatown. As payback to Poor Tony, Wo sells them heroin laced with Drano, and C [who is first to shoot up] goes into convulsions and dies. Poor Tony and yrstrly hide C's body in a dumpster. Yrstrly ponders whether he should 'elemonade Poor Tony's map for keeps' as retribution for letting C die,even though he knew the heroin was probably bad.
Other characters mentioned are Kely Vinoy [hooker], Eckwus [junky], Stokely Darkstar [junky with AIDS], Lolasister & Susan T. Cheese [junkies], Delphina [dealer]
notes
The yrstrly section is pretty chaotic and free associative, and I 'elemonaded' a lot of the little details, mostly about looking for dope. Clearly this section relates to the one on p 37-38, by way of the dialect [childlike in the first, adult in the second], and the one common character, Roy Tony. Also notable is the parody of Marathe & Steeply [transvestite & amputee] embedded here. Also, one can't help but wonder how these junkies and dealers might be related to the more suburban addicts we've already come across.
p 135-151
this section in 7 parts
p 135-137
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal receives a phone call from Orin, who asks why he always feels like he's interrupting Hal in the middle of masturbating. Hal dislikes talking on the phone when he's high. Hal estimates that 60% of the things he tells Orin on the phone are lies. Orin says it's 90+ degrees [in Nov] and that he just witnessed a pedestrian in a pith helmet, collapse on the street from the heat, and just lie there while everyone else avoided him. Hal wonders if his lying to Orin is reciprocated, and this leads him to question his intelligence. He tells Orin that SATs are in 6 weeks, and Pemulis isn't really helping him with the math. Orin jokes that he's considering starting a kleenex and lubricant concession at ETA. Orin says he's missing New Orleans, especially during advent. Hal says that Orin seems 'a little off.' Orin says it's the heat, but also that he's met somebody, 'a possibly very special somebody,' and then asks Hal what he knows about Separatism.
p 137-138
no year-backstory
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy noted as sic] was founded in Year of the Whopper [2002] by an anonymous [last name not Ennet] chronic drug addict who spent most of his life in prison, and had a spiritual awakening in the shower after his fourth sober month in AA. Ennet House is located in the former physicians dormitory of the VA hospital, and can hold 22 clients. The anonymous founder would at times lead the newly sober addicts in burglary expeditions, and it's said that in the early days incoming residents were required to eat rocks. The founder died in Year of the Yushiyu...[2007]
p 138-140
Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland [2008]
place boston/Bloomington IL
no narration--this part in the form of email correspondence
synopsis:
An email from one insurance worker to several others describes an incident in Boston that spring where the claimant was impaired [blood alcohol of .3+] so even though the insurers are probably off the hook, the first page of the claimants letter is included. In the letter, the claimant, a bricklayer explains how he was attempting to lower 900 kg of bricks, using a pulley, and due to the fact that he weighs 75 kg, he was jerked off the ground and hit in the head with the barrel of bricks on its way down. He then fell back to ground when the bottom of the barrel gave way and left the bricks on the ground, after which the now empty barrel crashed on top of him.
p 140-142
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken [2005]
place ETA
no narration--this part in the form of an essay that Hal wrote
synopsis:
Hal's essay is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's his first 'remotely filmic' writing for his 7th grade class 'Introduction to Entertainment Studies.' He received only a B/B+ because the concluding paragraph was deemed as unsupported. The essay itself compares 70s era police chief Steve McGarrett [Hawaii Five-O] with the 80s era Captain Frank Furillo [Hill Street Blues]. McGarrett is a classic modern hero-- the camera is always on him, he always has a single case at a time and the audience always knows who's guilty, so there's no drama aside from watching him home in on the truth. In contrast Furillo is a post-modern hero-- he commands a precinct,and is beset by a complex tangle of multiple cases, and conflicts within the precinct. His heroism is one of 'triage and compromise and administration' and is infinitely more complex than the simple heroism of McGarrett. In the notorious final paragraph Hal ponders what kind of hero comes next, and predicts that he will be the 'hero of non-action, the catatonic hero' who is 'divorced from all stimulus' and carried around by drugged up extras.
p 142-144
YDAU[2009] Aug 10
no place or narration
this part in the form of a magazine article by 'Helen' Steeply
synopsis:
Steeply's article is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's the 'electrolysis-rashed' journalists only published article before beginning her 'soft profile' on Orin Incadenza, that had anything to do with Boston. It notes that the article was published 4 years after James Incadenza committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven. The Moment Magazine article describes the tragic death of the second person to have received a 'Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.' The heart was stored in the woman's purse, and pumped blood through tubes into the woman's arms. While window shopping in Cambridge MA, the woman's purse was stolen, by a transvestite purse snatcher, after whom she chased shouting 'stop her, she stole my heart.' After four blocks she expired and the heart was found later behind the library in a Copley Square, having been smashed with stone or hammer.
p 144
no year
no place or narration
this part in the form of a list of anti ONAN terrorist groups
synopsis:
The list is preceded by an explanation that the groups 'opposition to interdependence/reconfiguration is designated by RCMP and USOUS are terrorist/exortionist.' Each group is rated Quebecois, Environmental Separatist, violent or very violent
-Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [q, s, vv]
-Le Bloc Quebecois [q,s,e]
-Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx [e,v]
-Les fils de Montcalm [q, e]
-Les fils de Pampineau [q,s,v]
-Le Front de la Liberation de la quebec [q, s, vv]
-Le Parti Quebecois [q,s,e]
p 144-151
YDAU [2009]
no place or narration
this part in the form of a catechism explaining the failure of video-telephony
synopsis:
A page-long single sentence poses the question of how and why video telephones came and went so that by YDAU [2009] only 10% of calls used any video component, and the majority of people prefer the old voice-only phones. The answer is given in 3 parts
1. emotional stress -- with traditional voice phones it was possible conceal the fact that neither the caller nor receiver were giving the other his/her undivided attention. the video phones made this fantasy apparent, and it was especially difficult to realize that you were commanding as little attention as you were paying.
2. vanity-- people became so obsessed with how they looked that eventually led to the development of formfitting masks [which produced fears of going outside without the masks], and then to 'Transmittable Tableaux' in which a carefully doctored photograph was transmitted instead of the converser's face.
3. 'a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of high tech'-- the curve followed by videophony is: first an amazing hi-tech advance occurs, then the advance is revealed to have unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer which are in turn addressed by entrepreneurial verve producing compensation for the disadvantages, which in turn reveals the limitations in the original high tech advance, and the consumers are back where they started, thus leading to 'massive shirt loss for precipitant investors.' Eventually the tableaux were shelved and people simply the black lens cover on their cameras.
notes
There is a concordance between the videophony section and the first section where Hal wonders if his lies to Orin are reciprocated. Orin's special someone is presumably connected to Separatism. Could it be 'Helen' Steeply, interviewing him in the fifth section? Presumably Steeply is interviewing Orin as a cover for tracking and/or protecting him from the AFR. The purse snatcher in Steeply's earlier article is clearly Poor Tony, but why would Steeply have been interested in this story?
Has Hal become his own projected 'catatonic hero' in the opening scene of the novel?
The bricklayer's accident is a parody [or is it the other way around] of the young weightlifters in the 'oiled guru' section [p 127-128]
p 135-137
YDAU [2009] Nov 3
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal receives a phone call from Orin, who asks why he always feels like he's interrupting Hal in the middle of masturbating. Hal dislikes talking on the phone when he's high. Hal estimates that 60% of the things he tells Orin on the phone are lies. Orin says it's 90+ degrees [in Nov] and that he just witnessed a pedestrian in a pith helmet, collapse on the street from the heat, and just lie there while everyone else avoided him. Hal wonders if his lying to Orin is reciprocated, and this leads him to question his intelligence. He tells Orin that SATs are in 6 weeks, and Pemulis isn't really helping him with the math. Orin jokes that he's considering starting a kleenex and lubricant concession at ETA. Orin says he's missing New Orleans, especially during advent. Hal says that Orin seems 'a little off.' Orin says it's the heat, but also that he's met somebody, 'a possibly very special somebody,' and then asks Hal what he knows about Separatism.
p 137-138
no year-backstory
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy noted as sic] was founded in Year of the Whopper [2002] by an anonymous [last name not Ennet] chronic drug addict who spent most of his life in prison, and had a spiritual awakening in the shower after his fourth sober month in AA. Ennet House is located in the former physicians dormitory of the VA hospital, and can hold 22 clients. The anonymous founder would at times lead the newly sober addicts in burglary expeditions, and it's said that in the early days incoming residents were required to eat rocks. The founder died in Year of the Yushiyu...[2007]
p 138-140
Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland [2008]
place boston/Bloomington IL
no narration--this part in the form of email correspondence
synopsis:
An email from one insurance worker to several others describes an incident in Boston that spring where the claimant was impaired [blood alcohol of .3+] so even though the insurers are probably off the hook, the first page of the claimants letter is included. In the letter, the claimant, a bricklayer explains how he was attempting to lower 900 kg of bricks, using a pulley, and due to the fact that he weighs 75 kg, he was jerked off the ground and hit in the head with the barrel of bricks on its way down. He then fell back to ground when the bottom of the barrel gave way and left the bricks on the ground, after which the now empty barrel crashed on top of him.
p 140-142
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken [2005]
place ETA
no narration--this part in the form of an essay that Hal wrote
synopsis:
Hal's essay is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's his first 'remotely filmic' writing for his 7th grade class 'Introduction to Entertainment Studies.' He received only a B/B+ because the concluding paragraph was deemed as unsupported. The essay itself compares 70s era police chief Steve McGarrett [Hawaii Five-O] with the 80s era Captain Frank Furillo [Hill Street Blues]. McGarrett is a classic modern hero-- the camera is always on him, he always has a single case at a time and the audience always knows who's guilty, so there's no drama aside from watching him home in on the truth. In contrast Furillo is a post-modern hero-- he commands a precinct,and is beset by a complex tangle of multiple cases, and conflicts within the precinct. His heroism is one of 'triage and compromise and administration' and is infinitely more complex than the simple heroism of McGarrett. In the notorious final paragraph Hal ponders what kind of hero comes next, and predicts that he will be the 'hero of non-action, the catatonic hero' who is 'divorced from all stimulus' and carried around by drugged up extras.
p 142-144
YDAU[2009] Aug 10
no place or narration
this part in the form of a magazine article by 'Helen' Steeply
synopsis:
Steeply's article is introduced by a paragraph-long title in all caps, which explains that it's the 'electrolysis-rashed' journalists only published article before beginning her 'soft profile' on Orin Incadenza, that had anything to do with Boston. It notes that the article was published 4 years after James Incadenza committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven. The Moment Magazine article describes the tragic death of the second person to have received a 'Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.' The heart was stored in the woman's purse, and pumped blood through tubes into the woman's arms. While window shopping in Cambridge MA, the woman's purse was stolen, by a transvestite purse snatcher, after whom she chased shouting 'stop her, she stole my heart.' After four blocks she expired and the heart was found later behind the library in a Copley Square, having been smashed with stone or hammer.
p 144
no year
no place or narration
this part in the form of a list of anti ONAN terrorist groups
synopsis:
The list is preceded by an explanation that the groups 'opposition to interdependence/reconfiguration is designated by RCMP and USOUS are terrorist/exortionist.' Each group is rated Quebecois, Environmental Separatist, violent or very violent
-Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [q, s, vv]
-Le Bloc Quebecois [q,s,e]
-Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx [e,v]
-Les fils de Montcalm [q, e]
-Les fils de Pampineau [q,s,v]
-Le Front de la Liberation de la quebec [q, s, vv]
-Le Parti Quebecois [q,s,e]
p 144-151
YDAU [2009]
no place or narration
this part in the form of a catechism explaining the failure of video-telephony
synopsis:
A page-long single sentence poses the question of how and why video telephones came and went so that by YDAU [2009] only 10% of calls used any video component, and the majority of people prefer the old voice-only phones. The answer is given in 3 parts
1. emotional stress -- with traditional voice phones it was possible conceal the fact that neither the caller nor receiver were giving the other his/her undivided attention. the video phones made this fantasy apparent, and it was especially difficult to realize that you were commanding as little attention as you were paying.
2. vanity-- people became so obsessed with how they looked that eventually led to the development of formfitting masks [which produced fears of going outside without the masks], and then to 'Transmittable Tableaux' in which a carefully doctored photograph was transmitted instead of the converser's face.
3. 'a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of high tech'-- the curve followed by videophony is: first an amazing hi-tech advance occurs, then the advance is revealed to have unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer which are in turn addressed by entrepreneurial verve producing compensation for the disadvantages, which in turn reveals the limitations in the original high tech advance, and the consumers are back where they started, thus leading to 'massive shirt loss for precipitant investors.' Eventually the tableaux were shelved and people simply the black lens cover on their cameras.
notes
There is a concordance between the videophony section and the first section where Hal wonders if his lies to Orin are reciprocated. Orin's special someone is presumably connected to Separatism. Could it be 'Helen' Steeply, interviewing him in the fifth section? Presumably Steeply is interviewing Orin as a cover for tracking and/or protecting him from the AFR. The purse snatcher in Steeply's earlier article is clearly Poor Tony, but why would Steeply have been interested in this story?
Has Hal become his own projected 'catatonic hero' in the opening scene of the novel?
The bricklayer's accident is a parody [or is it the other way around] of the young weightlifters in the 'oiled guru' section [p 127-128]
p 151-156
YDAU [2009] Oct 15
place ETA
narrated in third person
It is one of the quarterly urine checks for drug use at ETA, conducted by the ONANTA on all players in the top 64 in their division, which an impressive percentage of ETA players are. Pemulis is now selling 'clean urine' to the same 1/4 of the students to whom he sells drugs. He collects urine from the younger students and sells it from a hot dog vendor's tub during the tests. The urine is stored in Visine bottles which he employs Mario to rescue from the dumpsters the day after the drug tests. It's revealed that in addition to the regular janitor, Dave ['fall down very'] Harde, some of the janitorial work is done by 'sullen and shifty eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill.' In the months between the testing, the hot dog vendor rig and visine bottles are all stored in the refurbished tow truck that Pemulis and his urine sales partner Trevor Ashford co-own with Hal and Jim Struck. The truck is painted in school colors [red and gray] and features the ONAN ensign- 'a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star studded cloth.'
Mario, who although he cannot even play recreational tennis, is allowed by the dean to bunk with Hal [in a double room], holds up his weight at ETA by recording matches and drills for the staff. Today, however he is filming the urine sales using his 'strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle.' Pemulis and Ashford aren't worried because no one except Mario will see the footage, which Mario will edit into a 'Himself-inspired conceptual' cartridge. It's revealed that Pemulis is a scholarship student who was discovered playing in a 'grim section of tract housing and vacant lots' in nearby Allston, who is known less for his rather mediocre game, than for providing reasonably priced narcotics to a good portion of the junior-circuit. He is also on academic probation, because even Hal's best attempts at tutelage barely get him through Avril's rigorous grammar classes. He is however a math and science whiz, and for this he is the JOI geometrical optics scholarship which allows him access to all of 'the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Hal and Mario both consider Pemulis a good friend, and Hal gets his urine for free, an account of his assistance with grammar. Hal, who has always been a lexical prodigy is now turning out to be something of an 'erumpent' tennis prodigy, now rated 4th best in USA. Pemulis is not ranked high enough to get sponsorship clothes, so he wears T-shirtsand a painter's cap. He fears the potential of being wiretapped, so he has developed a system wherein the caller in search of drugs has to ask him to commit a crime and threaten him if he refuses, then Pemulis makes an appointment to plead for his safety, thereby allowing him to claim entrapment if the phone is tapped. Those substituting the clean urine are encouraged to stow the Visine bottle in their armpit to bring it up to body temperature.
notes
We see in this section how the Ennet House thread might overlap with the ETA thread of the story, by way of drugs, proxity and perhaps the Ennet House residents working at ETA. Also we start to get more of an idea about Mario, and what he inherited [if not the athletic ability] from his parents. Is he somehow carrying on the work of Himself? And what other activities might Pemulis use the optics for?
place ETA
narrated in third person
It is one of the quarterly urine checks for drug use at ETA, conducted by the ONANTA on all players in the top 64 in their division, which an impressive percentage of ETA players are. Pemulis is now selling 'clean urine' to the same 1/4 of the students to whom he sells drugs. He collects urine from the younger students and sells it from a hot dog vendor's tub during the tests. The urine is stored in Visine bottles which he employs Mario to rescue from the dumpsters the day after the drug tests. It's revealed that in addition to the regular janitor, Dave ['fall down very'] Harde, some of the janitorial work is done by 'sullen and shifty eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill.' In the months between the testing, the hot dog vendor rig and visine bottles are all stored in the refurbished tow truck that Pemulis and his urine sales partner Trevor Ashford co-own with Hal and Jim Struck. The truck is painted in school colors [red and gray] and features the ONAN ensign- 'a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star studded cloth.'
Mario, who although he cannot even play recreational tennis, is allowed by the dean to bunk with Hal [in a double room], holds up his weight at ETA by recording matches and drills for the staff. Today, however he is filming the urine sales using his 'strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle.' Pemulis and Ashford aren't worried because no one except Mario will see the footage, which Mario will edit into a 'Himself-inspired conceptual' cartridge. It's revealed that Pemulis is a scholarship student who was discovered playing in a 'grim section of tract housing and vacant lots' in nearby Allston, who is known less for his rather mediocre game, than for providing reasonably priced narcotics to a good portion of the junior-circuit. He is also on academic probation, because even Hal's best attempts at tutelage barely get him through Avril's rigorous grammar classes. He is however a math and science whiz, and for this he is the JOI geometrical optics scholarship which allows him access to all of 'the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Hal and Mario both consider Pemulis a good friend, and Hal gets his urine for free, an account of his assistance with grammar. Hal, who has always been a lexical prodigy is now turning out to be something of an 'erumpent' tennis prodigy, now rated 4th best in USA. Pemulis is not ranked high enough to get sponsorship clothes, so he wears T-shirtsand a painter's cap. He fears the potential of being wiretapped, so he has developed a system wherein the caller in search of drugs has to ask him to commit a crime and threaten him if he refuses, then Pemulis makes an appointment to plead for his safety, thereby allowing him to claim entrapment if the phone is tapped. Those substituting the clean urine are encouraged to stow the Visine bottle in their armpit to bring it up to body temperature.
notes
We see in this section how the Ennet House thread might overlap with the ETA thread of the story, by way of drugs, proxity and perhaps the Ennet House residents working at ETA. Also we start to get more of an idea about Mario, and what he inherited [if not the athletic ability] from his parents. Is he somehow carrying on the work of Himself? And what other activities might Pemulis use the optics for?
p 157-181
this section in 4 parts
p 157-169
BS 1960 winter
place Tucson AZ
narrated as a monologue by the father of James Incandenza
synopsis:
This part features a 10-year-old James Incandenza [Jim] being lectured by his increasingly intoxicated father. He begins his lecture berating Jim for opening the garage door improperly. He blames Jim's mother and by turn Marlon Brando whom she reveres, having had a bit part in one of his films. He then goes on a tirade accusing the mother of misunderstanding Brando's 'animal grace' and hence passing to young Jim all manner of bad habits, eg the garage door. He then shifts to praising Jim's tennis potential, saying he will a great player, while he himself was only nearly great. He compares him to the 1956 Mercury Montclair in the garage. He tells him that the 'head is body' and that he is 'a machine a body an object' like the car. He's distracted from his monologue long enough to ask Jim to use his racquet to kill a 'nasty fat spider.' He announces that he's coming to the crux of what he's trying to impart to his son before actually getting out there to actuate his tennis potential. He says the tennis ball is the 'ultimate body. Perfectly round... but empty inside.' He cuts the ball open to show him. he shows him his gnarled thumb. He offers Jim a drink from his flask, and then tries to force it into his hands, telling him he'll first have to put down the 'Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices.' Jim drops the book, and his father scolds him and then scolds him further for being 'oversensitive.' He waxes poetic on the sounds his flask produces, and then on the sound of a well-hit tennis ball. He tells Jim that they're soon to move to California so he can give it the one last shot his waning [film] talent deserves. He says he's just giving him advance notice, because Jim had made it so clear that their previous move [to the mobile home in Tucson] had been traumatic. He invites Jim to go ahead and cry, but that it gets less effective each time, except with Jim's mother. He then launches into a story about his own father who had 'never once' come to see him play, even though he was winning trophies and excelling at tennis-- his father was 'a golf man' [contemptuous tone]. He notes that the flask is nearly empty and suggests that they rain-check the tennis lesson, and tell his mother that Jim's 'not feeling up to snuff.' He suggests postponing until the weekend, when they can rent the courts for $10 [for which he lays a guilt trip on Jim.] He returns to the story of his own father, who finally did come to a match, because he was playing against a client's son. Jim's father was 'handing the dandy his pampered ass' while his own father sat not in the shade of the palm [due to his 'healthy respect' for spiders] but right out in the 95 degree heat, and without sweating. As the game progresses, he's handily beating his opponent when by luck the opponent hits a 'lucky dribbler of a drop-shot' and instead of conceding the point he goes all out to try to hit the ball and ends up face down on the court, having permanently ruined his knees. But, he's careful to point out he had already fallen when he heard his father reply to the opponent's father's comment that Jim was a good player--'but he'll never be great.' He theorizes it may have been a spider or a palm frond that caused him to slip. His speech becomes more and more disjointed, presumably due to the contents of his flask. He admits to respecting his father, comparing the situation to his with Jim-- saying that Jim takes him for granted. He confesses his fear of dying without ever being really *seen* He wants Jim to understand that he was giving it his all that day, when he ruined his chances of ever being a great player and his opportunity to get parts in any of those beach movies. He says that he learned what it is to be a body. He compares being dragged off the court with being dragged home drunk, saying that 'both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.'
p 169-171
YDAU [2009] Nov 4
place ETA and environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis takes a circuitous route by public transportation [to throw off would be pursuers] to pickup the tow truck which is parked in an underground lot. He's wearing his white yachting hat, which Mario refers to as his Mr. Howell hat and which has a detachable lining in which Pemulis can store drugs. He's driving the tow truck back to Enfield after his transaction, and after ingesting '150 mg of very mild 'drines.' Pemulis has presumably just scored some DMZ which is an incredibly potent amphetamine but 'resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid [footnote 56 compares it with 'fly agaric fungus's well-known muscimole]. It's effects differ from LSD, in that they're 'more like *temporally*-cerebral and almost ontological,' and the 'ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically and euphorically...altered.' DMZ is synthesized from an obscure mold that grows on other molds and was discovered by the same Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD, who as a result of DMZ was sent into an 'early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching.' It is known as the 'single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube' and the hardest recreational drug to acquire. DMZ is sometimes referred to as 'Madame Psychosis' after an early morning cult radio personality. Pemulis has a policy of not selling drugs to Ennet House residents, since they have unscheduled urine tests, and since his tennis and math talents have helped him get away from just that sort of character. When Pemulis pulls up to ETA, Hal is reading 'Hamlet' in order to help Mario with a conceptual film on the subject,and has his phone ready for Pemulis's call, but still waits until the third ring. He asks Pemulis to 'please commit a crime'
p 172-176
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile [2007]
place ETA
film narrated by Hal
synopsis:
Hal gives the narration to Mario's film 'Tennis and the the Feral Prodigy' which received honorable mention in the 'New Eyes, New Voices' young filmmakers' contest. The description implies that Mario was spuriously credited as writer, as Hal's narration is pretty clearly his own. He describes [presumably to an accompanying visual] virtually every aspect of his routine at ETA. 'Here's how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a a log.' He describes hitting serves to no one, how to call your racquet a stick, how to grip it, how to squeeze a tennis ball in your right hand at all times,except during meals. He describes drills, jogging, his father's expectations, his father's expectations of himself, and how surpassing them still left him unhappy. He describes escaping these thoughts by practicing until things run on autopilot. He describes 'justifying your seed' [reaching at least the round that you're supposed to at a tournament.] He describes playing fair and learning to let what is unfair teach you. He describes the use of lemon Pledge and muscle relaxants. He describes sitting through his father's art film openings. He says to expect rough dreams, and keep a flashlight by the bed. He says 'turn down dates' and shows how. he shows how to read the monthly ratings, and learn to care and not care-- never tell anyone where you are. This is also how not fear sleep or dreams. he says be a student of the game,and see yourself in your opponents. Accept that the game is about managed fear,that 'its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.'
p 176-181
YDAU [2009] Nov 4 1300-1500h
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in first person in 18 parts by different residents of EH
synopsis:
The all caps title of this part explains that it is transcripts from the drop-in office hours of the Ennet House director, Patricia Montesian, although she never speaks.
1. [176] A woman explains that another resident was drumming his fingers on the table at dinner. She likens the sound to what a girl hears in her head before she kills her family for taking the last of the peanut butter. She became rather homicidally agitated and 'sort of poked him' with her fork [it appears in reality that she stabbed him in the hand.] She says she's ready to own her part and wants to know if she can still go on her 'overnight' that Gene had previously approved.
2. [177] A man who identities himself as having been a personal-injury attorney for 16 years, is asking Patricia to define 'alcoholic.' He is claiming that he can hold his liquor--aside from a single incident at a Bar Association dinner, where he accused a judge of secretly masturbating in court. He admits to experiencing formication [sensation of insects crawling on the skin] during detox. He says that he is not in denial about anything 'empirical and objective' and states his lawyerly opinion that it's not denial unless 'the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties.'
3. [177] The victim of the knife incident gives his side. He says he's waiting for his meatloaf to cool and hears a 'sphincter-loosening shriek' and sees Nell leaping across the table [parallel to its surface] screaming about the sound of peanut butter. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of his hand and the table. He says the pain was unbearable but he refused the Percocet at the emergency room. He expresses outrage that she will apologize *if he will* and suggests that she be kicked out. He says that the 'pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough,' and pleads for the 'safe and nurturing environment' promised in the handbook.
3. [178] 'Im awfully sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if there's any sort of special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.'
4. [178] Alfonso speaks in broken English and acknowledges that he is a drug addict, and powerless.He fears that even so, he cannot stop. He asks if it's bad to hope for power.
5.[178] 'Sorry to barge in, there, PM division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was *ultimatum* that they said.'
6. [178] The person apologizes for bothering Pat about something not related to treatment, and describes try to do his [?] assigned Chore. There is something indescribable in the toilet of the mens room that won't flush
7. [179] The resident describes putting a pudding cup in the fridge and coming back for it later to find it gone. McDade offers to help look for it, but has pudding on his chin.
8. [179] The resident is clearly Bruce Green [p. 38-39]. He describes his harelipped [bad-speed/good-pot dealer] housemate who kept snakes, and gave Bruce and his girlfriend Mildred free pot in exchange for procurement of mice for the snakes. The harelip dealer wanted to have sex with Mildred and never washed his hair. Harriet makes Bruce leave after the dealer describes having sex with chickens. They move to a shelter where Harriet meets a guy in a hat who says he has a ranch in New Jersey., and off she goes taking their daughter Harriet with her. He says he was delivering ice to machines at gas stations, and 'who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?'
9. [180] The resident balks at the idea that s/he is being asked to pray to treat an alleged disease, asking if s/he has been transported to another sociohistorical era.
10. [180] The resident says s/he's happy to be there and that the tooth-grinding and the 'thing with the eyelid' are just tics.
11. [180] The resident is objecting [inner city dialect] to getting kicked out, and claiming to be 'trying' to get a job. S/he cites Clenette and 'the Thrale girl' as witnesses. S/he asks where s/he's supposed to go.
12. [180] Resident objects to being on House Restriction for using mouthwash, which is 2% proof, and is spit out.
13. [181] 'It's about somebody *else's* farting, why I'm here.'
14. [181] The lawyer says he's being asked to attest to facts he does not possess, which he calls 'duress.'
15. [181] 'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?'
16. [181] 'I'll come back when you're free.'
17. [181] 'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.'
18. [181] 'Fine just let me say one thing'
notes
The Tucson episode is [for this reader] among the saddest in the book. Sections like this really set DFW apart from his postmodern predecessors, by my lights. It's also notable that the dread inflicted on young Jim seems to have been passed on to Hal [whether inadvertently or not] as evidenced in the pathos he injects into the documentary film when speaking of his father.
The Pemulis episode is dragging the ETA thread of the story closer and closer to the Ennet House thread even as he categorically refuses to get involved with those people. Likewise the Ennet House interviews tie together some of the loose ends, we've encountered [eg, Clenette and Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk], and presumably will encounter [it would be interesting to come back later and attempt to track each interview to it's source character.] The third interview was pretty chilling for this reader, for obvious reasons.
p 157-169
BS 1960 winter
place Tucson AZ
narrated as a monologue by the father of James Incandenza
synopsis:
This part features a 10-year-old James Incandenza [Jim] being lectured by his increasingly intoxicated father. He begins his lecture berating Jim for opening the garage door improperly. He blames Jim's mother and by turn Marlon Brando whom she reveres, having had a bit part in one of his films. He then goes on a tirade accusing the mother of misunderstanding Brando's 'animal grace' and hence passing to young Jim all manner of bad habits, eg the garage door. He then shifts to praising Jim's tennis potential, saying he will a great player, while he himself was only nearly great. He compares him to the 1956 Mercury Montclair in the garage. He tells him that the 'head is body' and that he is 'a machine a body an object' like the car. He's distracted from his monologue long enough to ask Jim to use his racquet to kill a 'nasty fat spider.' He announces that he's coming to the crux of what he's trying to impart to his son before actually getting out there to actuate his tennis potential. He says the tennis ball is the 'ultimate body. Perfectly round... but empty inside.' He cuts the ball open to show him. he shows him his gnarled thumb. He offers Jim a drink from his flask, and then tries to force it into his hands, telling him he'll first have to put down the 'Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices.' Jim drops the book, and his father scolds him and then scolds him further for being 'oversensitive.' He waxes poetic on the sounds his flask produces, and then on the sound of a well-hit tennis ball. He tells Jim that they're soon to move to California so he can give it the one last shot his waning [film] talent deserves. He says he's just giving him advance notice, because Jim had made it so clear that their previous move [to the mobile home in Tucson] had been traumatic. He invites Jim to go ahead and cry, but that it gets less effective each time, except with Jim's mother. He then launches into a story about his own father who had 'never once' come to see him play, even though he was winning trophies and excelling at tennis-- his father was 'a golf man' [contemptuous tone]. He notes that the flask is nearly empty and suggests that they rain-check the tennis lesson, and tell his mother that Jim's 'not feeling up to snuff.' He suggests postponing until the weekend, when they can rent the courts for $10 [for which he lays a guilt trip on Jim.] He returns to the story of his own father, who finally did come to a match, because he was playing against a client's son. Jim's father was 'handing the dandy his pampered ass' while his own father sat not in the shade of the palm [due to his 'healthy respect' for spiders] but right out in the 95 degree heat, and without sweating. As the game progresses, he's handily beating his opponent when by luck the opponent hits a 'lucky dribbler of a drop-shot' and instead of conceding the point he goes all out to try to hit the ball and ends up face down on the court, having permanently ruined his knees. But, he's careful to point out he had already fallen when he heard his father reply to the opponent's father's comment that Jim was a good player--'but he'll never be great.' He theorizes it may have been a spider or a palm frond that caused him to slip. His speech becomes more and more disjointed, presumably due to the contents of his flask. He admits to respecting his father, comparing the situation to his with Jim-- saying that Jim takes him for granted. He confesses his fear of dying without ever being really *seen* He wants Jim to understand that he was giving it his all that day, when he ruined his chances of ever being a great player and his opportunity to get parts in any of those beach movies. He says that he learned what it is to be a body. He compares being dragged off the court with being dragged home drunk, saying that 'both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.'
p 169-171
YDAU [2009] Nov 4
place ETA and environs
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis takes a circuitous route by public transportation [to throw off would be pursuers] to pickup the tow truck which is parked in an underground lot. He's wearing his white yachting hat, which Mario refers to as his Mr. Howell hat and which has a detachable lining in which Pemulis can store drugs. He's driving the tow truck back to Enfield after his transaction, and after ingesting '150 mg of very mild 'drines.' Pemulis has presumably just scored some DMZ which is an incredibly potent amphetamine but 'resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid [footnote 56 compares it with 'fly agaric fungus's well-known muscimole]. It's effects differ from LSD, in that they're 'more like *temporally*-cerebral and almost ontological,' and the 'ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically and euphorically...altered.' DMZ is synthesized from an obscure mold that grows on other molds and was discovered by the same Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD, who as a result of DMZ was sent into an 'early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching.' It is known as the 'single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube' and the hardest recreational drug to acquire. DMZ is sometimes referred to as 'Madame Psychosis' after an early morning cult radio personality. Pemulis has a policy of not selling drugs to Ennet House residents, since they have unscheduled urine tests, and since his tennis and math talents have helped him get away from just that sort of character. When Pemulis pulls up to ETA, Hal is reading 'Hamlet' in order to help Mario with a conceptual film on the subject,and has his phone ready for Pemulis's call, but still waits until the third ring. He asks Pemulis to 'please commit a crime'
p 172-176
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile [2007]
place ETA
film narrated by Hal
synopsis:
Hal gives the narration to Mario's film 'Tennis and the the Feral Prodigy' which received honorable mention in the 'New Eyes, New Voices' young filmmakers' contest. The description implies that Mario was spuriously credited as writer, as Hal's narration is pretty clearly his own. He describes [presumably to an accompanying visual] virtually every aspect of his routine at ETA. 'Here's how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a a log.' He describes hitting serves to no one, how to call your racquet a stick, how to grip it, how to squeeze a tennis ball in your right hand at all times,except during meals. He describes drills, jogging, his father's expectations, his father's expectations of himself, and how surpassing them still left him unhappy. He describes escaping these thoughts by practicing until things run on autopilot. He describes 'justifying your seed' [reaching at least the round that you're supposed to at a tournament.] He describes playing fair and learning to let what is unfair teach you. He describes the use of lemon Pledge and muscle relaxants. He describes sitting through his father's art film openings. He says to expect rough dreams, and keep a flashlight by the bed. He says 'turn down dates' and shows how. he shows how to read the monthly ratings, and learn to care and not care-- never tell anyone where you are. This is also how not fear sleep or dreams. he says be a student of the game,and see yourself in your opponents. Accept that the game is about managed fear,that 'its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.'
p 176-181
YDAU [2009] Nov 4 1300-1500h
place Ennet House, Boston
narrated in first person in 18 parts by different residents of EH
synopsis:
The all caps title of this part explains that it is transcripts from the drop-in office hours of the Ennet House director, Patricia Montesian, although she never speaks.
1. [176] A woman explains that another resident was drumming his fingers on the table at dinner. She likens the sound to what a girl hears in her head before she kills her family for taking the last of the peanut butter. She became rather homicidally agitated and 'sort of poked him' with her fork [it appears in reality that she stabbed him in the hand.] She says she's ready to own her part and wants to know if she can still go on her 'overnight' that Gene had previously approved.
2. [177] A man who identities himself as having been a personal-injury attorney for 16 years, is asking Patricia to define 'alcoholic.' He is claiming that he can hold his liquor--aside from a single incident at a Bar Association dinner, where he accused a judge of secretly masturbating in court. He admits to experiencing formication [sensation of insects crawling on the skin] during detox. He says that he is not in denial about anything 'empirical and objective' and states his lawyerly opinion that it's not denial unless 'the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties.'
3. [177] The victim of the knife incident gives his side. He says he's waiting for his meatloaf to cool and hears a 'sphincter-loosening shriek' and sees Nell leaping across the table [parallel to its surface] screaming about the sound of peanut butter. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of his hand and the table. He says the pain was unbearable but he refused the Percocet at the emergency room. He expresses outrage that she will apologize *if he will* and suggests that she be kicked out. He says that the 'pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough,' and pleads for the 'safe and nurturing environment' promised in the handbook.
3. [178] 'Im awfully sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if there's any sort of special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.'
4. [178] Alfonso speaks in broken English and acknowledges that he is a drug addict, and powerless.He fears that even so, he cannot stop. He asks if it's bad to hope for power.
5.[178] 'Sorry to barge in, there, PM division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was *ultimatum* that they said.'
6. [178] The person apologizes for bothering Pat about something not related to treatment, and describes try to do his [?] assigned Chore. There is something indescribable in the toilet of the mens room that won't flush
7. [179] The resident describes putting a pudding cup in the fridge and coming back for it later to find it gone. McDade offers to help look for it, but has pudding on his chin.
8. [179] The resident is clearly Bruce Green [p. 38-39]. He describes his harelipped [bad-speed/good-pot dealer] housemate who kept snakes, and gave Bruce and his girlfriend Mildred free pot in exchange for procurement of mice for the snakes. The harelip dealer wanted to have sex with Mildred and never washed his hair. Harriet makes Bruce leave after the dealer describes having sex with chickens. They move to a shelter where Harriet meets a guy in a hat who says he has a ranch in New Jersey., and off she goes taking their daughter Harriet with her. He says he was delivering ice to machines at gas stations, and 'who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?'
9. [180] The resident balks at the idea that s/he is being asked to pray to treat an alleged disease, asking if s/he has been transported to another sociohistorical era.
10. [180] The resident says s/he's happy to be there and that the tooth-grinding and the 'thing with the eyelid' are just tics.
11. [180] The resident is objecting [inner city dialect] to getting kicked out, and claiming to be 'trying' to get a job. S/he cites Clenette and 'the Thrale girl' as witnesses. S/he asks where s/he's supposed to go.
12. [180] Resident objects to being on House Restriction for using mouthwash, which is 2% proof, and is spit out.
13. [181] 'It's about somebody *else's* farting, why I'm here.'
14. [181] The lawyer says he's being asked to attest to facts he does not possess, which he calls 'duress.'
15. [181] 'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?'
16. [181] 'I'll come back when you're free.'
17. [181] 'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.'
18. [181] 'Fine just let me say one thing'
notes
The Tucson episode is [for this reader] among the saddest in the book. Sections like this really set DFW apart from his postmodern predecessors, by my lights. It's also notable that the dread inflicted on young Jim seems to have been passed on to Hal [whether inadvertently or not] as evidenced in the pathos he injects into the documentary film when speaking of his father.
The Pemulis episode is dragging the ETA thread of the story closer and closer to the Ennet House thread even as he categorically refuses to get involved with those people. Likewise the Ennet House interviews tie together some of the loose ends, we've encountered [eg, Clenette and Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk], and presumably will encounter [it would be interesting to come back later and attempt to track each interview to it's source character.] The third interview was pretty chilling for this reader, for obvious reasons.
p 181-219
this section in 5 parts
p 181-193
YDAU [2009] late Oct [22nd actually]
place Boston [ETA and WYYY at MIT]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section starts out with a literally sophomoric radio program about a record-setting punt, read in the voice of Elmer Fudd. We eventually find out this is part of nerdy MIT radio program that precedes the 'rabidly popular Madam Psychosis Hour' which airs weeknights from midnight to 1am. Although the narration is in third person, the surroundings and action at WYYY 109 [the largest Whole prime on the FM band] are described in painfully academic language suggesting the POV of the unnamed late-shift student engineer, a grad student with 'bad lungs and occluded pores' who handles the technical aspects of the Madame Psychosis show. He has never seen Madam P, because she sits behind a 'jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon' and she sound-checks her plosives uncommunicatively with phrases like 'attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object' and 'like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.' After the 5 minutes of dead air that contractually precedes her show, she starts with her usual opening [which, it's noted, the thoroughly uncynical Mario, who is listening, always finds terribly compelling]: 'And lo the earth was empty of form, and void. / And darkness was all over the face of the deep. / And We said: / Look at that fucker Dance.' Even with it's small range of broadcast power, WYYY's ratings, especially for Madam P are rock solid, and if you're on the hill in Enfield, your reception is clear. After the music fades, she starts right in reading a list of what appear to be affliction, 'the acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. the enuretic...' The engineer leaves Madam P alone, as is SOP, and it's noted she rarely has guests. She just delivers her 'free-associative and intricately-structured' monologues, while smoking behind the screen. Sometimes she goes into film at length [never New Wave rather--early neorealist and expressionist, also apres garde and anticonfluential cinema] and then sometimes US sports, football in particular. The engineer monitors the program from the rooftop. In the one conversation he's had with her, she had him write out the home lab process for making Uranium 235, and to the consternation of MIT admin, she read the recipe on air. There's an impossibly complex passage describing the place on the roof where the engineer sits in his parka and fake-fur hat, as Madame P continues her list, revealing that she's reading it '...the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says.' The circular is apparently from a 12 -step program for the 'Hideously and Improbably Deformed.'
The narration shifts-- and Avril James Incadenza's marriage is described as 'an evolved product of concordance and compromise' [see soundcheck above]. Likewise the curriculum at ETA, which thanks to Avril is the 'only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium' [which a footnote explains is a hardcore 18th century style of education where grammar/logic/rhetoric precede math/geometry/astonomy/music]. Avril, however had to make some allowances for the fact that it was a tennis academy, and to the optic specialization that James was interested in and later willed into being maintained in the curriculum. And of course the Entertainment classes that James insisted on. Mario who was finally allowed to disenroll from the special school after refusing to even try to learn to read, insisting that he'd rather listen and watch, listens to Madam P with his ear right up the radio in the Headmaster's House [HmH] where the Moms lives with CT.Mario has to turn the radio down low on account of the Moms's 'thing about sound' and then listen very intently on account of her 'issues about enclosure' which result in there being very few internal walls. Also it's noted that the Moms has a green thumb. Madam P continues her list in a notably non-Boston accent. Her voice seems familiar to Mario like a childhood smell, as she continues reading the circular 'come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what's hidden inside.' The music she ahs chosen to accompany her program evokes 'something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.' Mario and Hal had come to HmH for a late night meal after Hal ad disappeared for half an hour. Mario is in part obsessed with Madam P's show, because he is sure that she can't herself 'sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air.' Madam P is 'one of only two people Mario would love to talk to, but would be scared to try. The word "periodic" pops into his head.' The music is periodic in that it 'leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.' The music she brings in is always obscure, and often very compelling. The Moms has maintained the L'Islet region practice of eating a late dinner, and Mario and Hal join her twice a week which is the maximum deLint will allow. Avril and CT have separate but adjacent bedrooms, and the only other room upstairs is Avril's office which has a poster of the wicked witch of the west on the door, and custom wiring for a [presumably never installed] TP console. Her office is connected by an underground tunnel to ETA, but luckily for Hal, in a way that doesn't require her to pass by the Pump room. The Moms approves of Hal occasionally bringing John [NR] Wayne [who rarely talks and eats like a horse] or Axford [who has trouble eating] but clearly disapproves of Pemulis and Struck, whom he no longer brings. Near the end of her program Madam P takes her usual lone caller, who informs her and the listeners that the moon revolves around the earth but does not itself revolve. The engineer heads back inside, but predicts that she'll make no reply. Madam P's sign-off is more dead air. For dessert Avril serves 'Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares.' Hal makes to leave at 1am, and the Moms says jokingly 'do not, under any circumstances, have fun' which cracks Mario up every time.
p 193-198
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The environs of Ennet House are described looking like 7 moons orbiting a dead planet. The VA hospital itself is abandoned, but the smaller buildings on the grounds are leased to various health agencies. The unit #s increase as they get further from hospital. Unit #1 houses an agency that counsels Vietnam vets, and Unit #2 is a methadone clinic. Visitors to both begin lining up around dawn. Don Gately was nearly discharged for [along with a meth addict] a hanging a fake 'Closed Until Further Notice' sign on the door of the Methadone clinic, which caused a panic among the former junkies, and Gately and the meth addict watching from the balcony accidently dropped the binoculars on the roof of EH counselor Calvin Thrust's corvette. The meth addict relapsed shortly thereafter, was arrested and then was killed in jail. Unit #3 is empty and #4 houses Alzheimer's patients, who 'wear jammies 24/7' and one of whom screams 'help!' constantly. Unit #6 is referred to as 'the Shed' and houses catatonic patients, a lengthy footnote explains [by way of mentioning that Hal, Axford, Struck and Troeltsch visit a bar called The Unexamined Life, and sometimes converse with security guards who were extras in Himself's films] that this is because the patients don't seem to live there so much as they're stored there. Unit #6 is a 3-story brick building at the end of the road, up against the ravine that houses Ennet House. Across the road is Unit #7 which was abandoned after an incident involving rubble from the construction of ETA [specifically the shaving off of the top of the mountain] which is directly up the hill. Unit #7 is now boarded up and serves as a secret locale for illicit drug intake by relapsers.
p 198-200
YDAU [2009] Nov 6, 1610h
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal and co are in the ETA weight room, with Lyle doing his sweat-licking thing with Graham Rader. The boys are groaning and grimacing as they lift weights and teasing one another. Pemulis is doing facial imitations [deLint jerking off, Schacht in a stall, etc.]
p 200-211
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Although in third person, this part is told through the voice of an insider at Ennet House--in a compulsive and free associative way, suggestive of a recovering addict. It starts by chronicling things that you'd know if you were to spend time around EH. That the once the state has taken a mother's children once, it can do so again and again, for next to no reason. That people in detox often get acne, that you can get an amphetamine-ish buzz from large quantities of oreos and soda on an empty stomach. That the 'God' of AA/NA doesn't require that you believe in him to help you. That half of addicts suffer from some other psychiatric disorder. That it's harder for people with high IQs to kick an addiction. That most substance-abusers are addicted to thinking. That 'bit' means jail sentence, and that Don Gately did 6 month bit in Billerica. That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' is more than a cliche. The slogan 'you can't Unring a bell' refers to the fact that people under the influence of Substance will often do things they'd never do when sober, and some of the consequences of these things can never be erased. At this point the narrative changes to describe Tiny Ewell's obsessive survey of the tattoos at Ennet House. To tiny the tattoo is a symbol of the 'chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.' He repeats his thoughts on this to all of the tattooed residents without much interest. Bruce Green listens politely, and Kate Gompert [who is untattooed, and clinically depressed] doesn't 'have the juice' to walk away. But the residents with tattoos readily show them off, and Tiny discerns two types in this regard--those without remorse, usually younger and filled with fake pride, and those older and more numerous types who show their tattoos with a stoic regret. Wade McDade has nest of serpents running down his arms. Former skinhead Doony Glynn has a black dotted line around his neck, and instructions on maintenance of his head, once severed, on his skull. In the regret department, Bruce Green has "Mildred Bonk" on his triceps, Emil Minty has "Doris" below his left breast, as well as "Fuck Nigers" on his biceps, which he is encouraged to keep covered at EH. Chandler Foss tried to de-regret his "Mary" tattoo by carving "Blessed Virgin" above it with a razor and Bic pen. Randy Lenz has "Pamela"tattooed by remembers neither getting the tattoo nor anyone by that name. Counselor and former porn actor Calvin Thrust supposedly has a tatoo on his penis which changes from his initials to his full name with erection. Tiny finds the faded tattoos of the decades-sober elder-statesmen guys who attend his Sunday night group. Near the end of his study, Tiny approaches Don Gately about his jailhouse tattoos, which Tiny considers a whole class of its own. Gately [who finds Tiny Ewell incomprehensible] tells him how the tattoos are done with sewing needles and a pen, which explains why they are always less than perfect. Gately has a square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on his [massive] left forearm. Gately is polite but curt in his answers, forcing Tiny to ask very specific questions. Gately considers the tattoos as minor 'Rung bells' compared to some of the really irrevocable impulsive mistakes he's made.
p 211-219
YDAU [2009] Nov 4-5
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is in his room with Hal and Axford and shows them the DMZ that he has procured. He uses a series of hyperbolic phrases to describe its potency. He says the pills are from the BS 1970s and that the CIA used them in shady mind-control experiments. They try to decide what an appropriate dose would be, and joke about slipping the drug into the Gatorade at a tournament. Pemulis had tried to research DMZ at Med.Com but found only vague references to the drug. Hal chides him about not going to the actual library. Pemulis relates an article he found in Moment magazine about an army convict in Leavenworth who lost his mind after being injected with DMZ,and spent the rest of his life singing show tunes in an Ethel-Merman voice.' Axford suggests that they designate the code-name Ethel for phone use. Pemulis scored the DMZ from a 'small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents' who run Antitoi Entertainment as a front for their 'small and probably pathetic outdated insurgency-projects.' They had to conduct the transaction without speaking because of the language barrier, and Pemulis feels like he got the better end of the deal. Hal insists that they go to the BU or MIT library and confirm that DMZ is organic and nonaddictive, which he and Pemulis do with Mario [and his head-mounted camera] in tow. Pemulis decides that a 36 hour window will be necessary to try the DMZ, and the next such window will occur Nov 20-21[the weekend before the WhataBurger], because they have tournament on Friday and a series of exhibition games on Saturday, one of them involving the Vaught [Siamese] twins. Pemulis has left out of his calculations the fact that he won't get that Saturday afternoon off if he doesn't make the traveling list for the WhataBurger, and he may not.
notes
The introduction to Madame Psychosis and the Ennet House section beginning on p 200 really allow DFW to show off what this reader finds to be one of his most amazing gifts-- tailoring a third person narrative to show the metal workings of a central character by way of language. The Madame P episode would have taken me weeks to read, had I looked up every obscure word DFW employs here. But it's more than showing off; it serves the story; likewise the amphetamine-fueled jitters that characterize the Ennet Hoiuse section.
This chapter also brings a lot of things together both explicitly and implicitly. We find a lot of the lesser characters finally showing up together under one roof at Ennet House, just down the hill from ETA. We find Pemulis dealing with some pretty shady Canadian separatist characters to buy the DMZ, which sounds like a drug that tthe ETA players have no business messing with. The fact that one of the only articles Pemulis could find on DMZ was in Moment magazine also raises the specter of a connection to Steeply.
We meet Madame Psychosis, another mysterious character with clear ties to the Incadenza's [she is mentioned repeatedly in the filmography [p 985-993], most notably in the final film 'Infinite Jest (V?)']. Mario clearly has some kind of connection with her. And then there's her love of football-- could that connect her to Orin?The Moms is beginning to sound seriously damaged, or at least rife with 'issues.'
p 181-193
YDAU [2009] late Oct [22nd actually]
place Boston [ETA and WYYY at MIT]
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The section starts out with a literally sophomoric radio program about a record-setting punt, read in the voice of Elmer Fudd. We eventually find out this is part of nerdy MIT radio program that precedes the 'rabidly popular Madam Psychosis Hour' which airs weeknights from midnight to 1am. Although the narration is in third person, the surroundings and action at WYYY 109 [the largest Whole prime on the FM band] are described in painfully academic language suggesting the POV of the unnamed late-shift student engineer, a grad student with 'bad lungs and occluded pores' who handles the technical aspects of the Madame Psychosis show. He has never seen Madam P, because she sits behind a 'jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon' and she sound-checks her plosives uncommunicatively with phrases like 'attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object' and 'like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.' After the 5 minutes of dead air that contractually precedes her show, she starts with her usual opening [which, it's noted, the thoroughly uncynical Mario, who is listening, always finds terribly compelling]: 'And lo the earth was empty of form, and void. / And darkness was all over the face of the deep. / And We said: / Look at that fucker Dance.' Even with it's small range of broadcast power, WYYY's ratings, especially for Madam P are rock solid, and if you're on the hill in Enfield, your reception is clear. After the music fades, she starts right in reading a list of what appear to be affliction, 'the acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. the enuretic...' The engineer leaves Madam P alone, as is SOP, and it's noted she rarely has guests. She just delivers her 'free-associative and intricately-structured' monologues, while smoking behind the screen. Sometimes she goes into film at length [never New Wave rather--early neorealist and expressionist, also apres garde and anticonfluential cinema] and then sometimes US sports, football in particular. The engineer monitors the program from the rooftop. In the one conversation he's had with her, she had him write out the home lab process for making Uranium 235, and to the consternation of MIT admin, she read the recipe on air. There's an impossibly complex passage describing the place on the roof where the engineer sits in his parka and fake-fur hat, as Madame P continues her list, revealing that she's reading it '...the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says.' The circular is apparently from a 12 -step program for the 'Hideously and Improbably Deformed.'
The narration shifts-- and Avril James Incadenza's marriage is described as 'an evolved product of concordance and compromise' [see soundcheck above]. Likewise the curriculum at ETA, which thanks to Avril is the 'only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium' [which a footnote explains is a hardcore 18th century style of education where grammar/logic/rhetoric precede math/geometry/astonomy/music]. Avril, however had to make some allowances for the fact that it was a tennis academy, and to the optic specialization that James was interested in and later willed into being maintained in the curriculum. And of course the Entertainment classes that James insisted on. Mario who was finally allowed to disenroll from the special school after refusing to even try to learn to read, insisting that he'd rather listen and watch, listens to Madam P with his ear right up the radio in the Headmaster's House [HmH] where the Moms lives with CT.Mario has to turn the radio down low on account of the Moms's 'thing about sound' and then listen very intently on account of her 'issues about enclosure' which result in there being very few internal walls. Also it's noted that the Moms has a green thumb. Madam P continues her list in a notably non-Boston accent. Her voice seems familiar to Mario like a childhood smell, as she continues reading the circular 'come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what's hidden inside.' The music she ahs chosen to accompany her program evokes 'something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.' Mario and Hal had come to HmH for a late night meal after Hal ad disappeared for half an hour. Mario is in part obsessed with Madam P's show, because he is sure that she can't herself 'sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air.' Madam P is 'one of only two people Mario would love to talk to, but would be scared to try. The word "periodic" pops into his head.' The music is periodic in that it 'leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.' The music she brings in is always obscure, and often very compelling. The Moms has maintained the L'Islet region practice of eating a late dinner, and Mario and Hal join her twice a week which is the maximum deLint will allow. Avril and CT have separate but adjacent bedrooms, and the only other room upstairs is Avril's office which has a poster of the wicked witch of the west on the door, and custom wiring for a [presumably never installed] TP console. Her office is connected by an underground tunnel to ETA, but luckily for Hal, in a way that doesn't require her to pass by the Pump room. The Moms approves of Hal occasionally bringing John [NR] Wayne [who rarely talks and eats like a horse] or Axford [who has trouble eating] but clearly disapproves of Pemulis and Struck, whom he no longer brings. Near the end of her program Madam P takes her usual lone caller, who informs her and the listeners that the moon revolves around the earth but does not itself revolve. The engineer heads back inside, but predicts that she'll make no reply. Madam P's sign-off is more dead air. For dessert Avril serves 'Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares.' Hal makes to leave at 1am, and the Moms says jokingly 'do not, under any circumstances, have fun' which cracks Mario up every time.
p 193-198
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
The environs of Ennet House are described looking like 7 moons orbiting a dead planet. The VA hospital itself is abandoned, but the smaller buildings on the grounds are leased to various health agencies. The unit #s increase as they get further from hospital. Unit #1 houses an agency that counsels Vietnam vets, and Unit #2 is a methadone clinic. Visitors to both begin lining up around dawn. Don Gately was nearly discharged for [along with a meth addict] a hanging a fake 'Closed Until Further Notice' sign on the door of the Methadone clinic, which caused a panic among the former junkies, and Gately and the meth addict watching from the balcony accidently dropped the binoculars on the roof of EH counselor Calvin Thrust's corvette. The meth addict relapsed shortly thereafter, was arrested and then was killed in jail. Unit #3 is empty and #4 houses Alzheimer's patients, who 'wear jammies 24/7' and one of whom screams 'help!' constantly. Unit #6 is referred to as 'the Shed' and houses catatonic patients, a lengthy footnote explains [by way of mentioning that Hal, Axford, Struck and Troeltsch visit a bar called The Unexamined Life, and sometimes converse with security guards who were extras in Himself's films] that this is because the patients don't seem to live there so much as they're stored there. Unit #6 is a 3-story brick building at the end of the road, up against the ravine that houses Ennet House. Across the road is Unit #7 which was abandoned after an incident involving rubble from the construction of ETA [specifically the shaving off of the top of the mountain] which is directly up the hill. Unit #7 is now boarded up and serves as a secret locale for illicit drug intake by relapsers.
p 198-200
YDAU [2009] Nov 6, 1610h
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Hal and co are in the ETA weight room, with Lyle doing his sweat-licking thing with Graham Rader. The boys are groaning and grimacing as they lift weights and teasing one another. Pemulis is doing facial imitations [deLint jerking off, Schacht in a stall, etc.]
p 200-211
YDAU [2009]
place Ennet House
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Although in third person, this part is told through the voice of an insider at Ennet House--in a compulsive and free associative way, suggestive of a recovering addict. It starts by chronicling things that you'd know if you were to spend time around EH. That the once the state has taken a mother's children once, it can do so again and again, for next to no reason. That people in detox often get acne, that you can get an amphetamine-ish buzz from large quantities of oreos and soda on an empty stomach. That the 'God' of AA/NA doesn't require that you believe in him to help you. That half of addicts suffer from some other psychiatric disorder. That it's harder for people with high IQs to kick an addiction. That most substance-abusers are addicted to thinking. That 'bit' means jail sentence, and that Don Gately did 6 month bit in Billerica. That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' is more than a cliche. The slogan 'you can't Unring a bell' refers to the fact that people under the influence of Substance will often do things they'd never do when sober, and some of the consequences of these things can never be erased. At this point the narrative changes to describe Tiny Ewell's obsessive survey of the tattoos at Ennet House. To tiny the tattoo is a symbol of the 'chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.' He repeats his thoughts on this to all of the tattooed residents without much interest. Bruce Green listens politely, and Kate Gompert [who is untattooed, and clinically depressed] doesn't 'have the juice' to walk away. But the residents with tattoos readily show them off, and Tiny discerns two types in this regard--those without remorse, usually younger and filled with fake pride, and those older and more numerous types who show their tattoos with a stoic regret. Wade McDade has nest of serpents running down his arms. Former skinhead Doony Glynn has a black dotted line around his neck, and instructions on maintenance of his head, once severed, on his skull. In the regret department, Bruce Green has "Mildred Bonk" on his triceps, Emil Minty has "Doris" below his left breast, as well as "Fuck Nigers" on his biceps, which he is encouraged to keep covered at EH. Chandler Foss tried to de-regret his "Mary" tattoo by carving "Blessed Virgin" above it with a razor and Bic pen. Randy Lenz has "Pamela"tattooed by remembers neither getting the tattoo nor anyone by that name. Counselor and former porn actor Calvin Thrust supposedly has a tatoo on his penis which changes from his initials to his full name with erection. Tiny finds the faded tattoos of the decades-sober elder-statesmen guys who attend his Sunday night group. Near the end of his study, Tiny approaches Don Gately about his jailhouse tattoos, which Tiny considers a whole class of its own. Gately [who finds Tiny Ewell incomprehensible] tells him how the tattoos are done with sewing needles and a pen, which explains why they are always less than perfect. Gately has a square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on his [massive] left forearm. Gately is polite but curt in his answers, forcing Tiny to ask very specific questions. Gately considers the tattoos as minor 'Rung bells' compared to some of the really irrevocable impulsive mistakes he's made.
p 211-219
YDAU [2009] Nov 4-5
place ETA
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Pemulis is in his room with Hal and Axford and shows them the DMZ that he has procured. He uses a series of hyperbolic phrases to describe its potency. He says the pills are from the BS 1970s and that the CIA used them in shady mind-control experiments. They try to decide what an appropriate dose would be, and joke about slipping the drug into the Gatorade at a tournament. Pemulis had tried to research DMZ at Med.Com but found only vague references to the drug. Hal chides him about not going to the actual library. Pemulis relates an article he found in Moment magazine about an army convict in Leavenworth who lost his mind after being injected with DMZ,and spent the rest of his life singing show tunes in an Ethel-Merman voice.' Axford suggests that they designate the code-name Ethel for phone use. Pemulis scored the DMZ from a 'small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents' who run Antitoi Entertainment as a front for their 'small and probably pathetic outdated insurgency-projects.' They had to conduct the transaction without speaking because of the language barrier, and Pemulis feels like he got the better end of the deal. Hal insists that they go to the BU or MIT library and confirm that DMZ is organic and nonaddictive, which he and Pemulis do with Mario [and his head-mounted camera] in tow. Pemulis decides that a 36 hour window will be necessary to try the DMZ, and the next such window will occur Nov 20-21[the weekend before the WhataBurger], because they have tournament on Friday and a series of exhibition games on Saturday, one of them involving the Vaught [Siamese] twins. Pemulis has left out of his calculations the fact that he won't get that Saturday afternoon off if he doesn't make the traveling list for the WhataBurger, and he may not.
notes
The introduction to Madame Psychosis and the Ennet House section beginning on p 200 really allow DFW to show off what this reader finds to be one of his most amazing gifts-- tailoring a third person narrative to show the metal workings of a central character by way of language. The Madame P episode would have taken me weeks to read, had I looked up every obscure word DFW employs here. But it's more than showing off; it serves the story; likewise the amphetamine-fueled jitters that characterize the Ennet Hoiuse section.
This chapter also brings a lot of things together both explicitly and implicitly. We find a lot of the lesser characters finally showing up together under one roof at Ennet House, just down the hill from ETA. We find Pemulis dealing with some pretty shady Canadian separatist characters to buy the DMZ, which sounds like a drug that tthe ETA players have no business messing with. The fact that one of the only articles Pemulis could find on DMZ was in Moment magazine also raises the specter of a connection to Steeply.
We meet Madame Psychosis, another mysterious character with clear ties to the Incadenza's [she is mentioned repeatedly in the filmography [p 985-993], most notably in the final film 'Infinite Jest (V?)']. Mario clearly has some kind of connection with her. And then there's her love of football-- could that connect her to Orin?The Moms is beginning to sound seriously damaged, or at least rife with 'issues.'
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
