‘Ponder the picture of the parliament’s nails bitten all the way down to the ragged pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it looks more and more like Canada versus O.N.A.N.’
Hal’s in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts up off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. ‘But this is all —’
‘Kyaaaa!’ Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal’s bed and tries to claw at the transparent phone’s antenna like he’s going to break it off. Hal turns to protect the phone with a shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt.
Orin is saying ‘What I’m asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that Québec, after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it look like it’s all of Canada, the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this deal: Parliament gets the P.M. and the government to get the other provinces to let Québec go, Separate, aller, partir — and in return Québec’ll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. harassment and insurgency while dropping the pretense of other provinces being involved and all of Canada insurging and make it publicly clear that it’s Québec and Québec alone that’s O.N.A.N.’s real nemesis. They tell Ottawa they’ll offer the contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason and send absolutely everything they’ve got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle, taking full credit each time. Offering themselves as the culprit and de-Reconfiguration as the objective.’
‘So your multilevelled journalist’s hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.’ Hal can hear Pemulis’s whistle-lipped breathing. ‘Separation is still the Québecer insurgents’ real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.’ Hal’s in the dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. ‘It’s supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.’s ire at Canada so the Québecers can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’
‘Trying to engineer it so that Canada’ll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’ Orin says. ‘And I’m saying I don’t have the background or lobes to even know whether she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’
‘You’ve always had a special dread of depth-testing.’
‘How about why don’t you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me’ll go down and get things ready and wait for you,’ Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal’s slacks’ bottom, which is pretty much all that’s visible from under the desk. Hal’s hand comes up out of the leg-space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP’s disk- and cartridge-drive, which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone’s console and power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive’s side.
Hal’s voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of dust-bunnied wire to find something. ‘Except Orin I don’t see a great deal of pondering required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far’s been too hapless and small-potato for her theory to work. The odd pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None of this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or Québec look like any kind of serious threat.’
Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but not whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the drive and console’s power unit, as if killing time by casually dusting. His other hand’s jingling pocket-change. There’s the sound of Hal clunking his head on something under the desk. His bottom is bony and his belt has missed two loops. The power unit’s toggle’s next to a little red jewel of a power-light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the toggle’s on ON.
Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit’s top. Orin sounds like he’s sitting up straight. ‘Hallie kid now you’re right with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into 1(a), if you remember, when she raised this samizdat -word in connec—’ (back to text)
111. Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint. (back to text)
112. The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Roll-ents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Québec. (back to text)
113. Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as ‘neural-gray.’ (back to text)
114. © B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v. Note 78). All Rights Reserved. (back to text)
115. Volkmann’s contracture’s some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms following a fracture that hadn’t been set right or splinted or where the arm’s been allowed to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals; bradyauxesis refers to some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the body — Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem-solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes, which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario’s movements, an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention to whatever’s being done. (back to text)
116. Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited numbers by Paillard Cinématique of Sherbrooke, Québec, CAN, just weeks before its manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up. (back to text)
117. … overshot the place to mention that Mario’s head — in perverse contradistinction to the arm-trouble — is hyper auxetic, and two to three times the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies. (back to text)
118. You’d somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar custodial and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it’s odd, he and they never have much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including Mario has anything interpersonal to do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into the dining hall’s steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems far more sullen and ungrateful than shy. (back to text)
119. … also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it’s a source of unending struggle for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he’s around him he has to fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like that. (back to text)
120. This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call ‘Historical Consciousness.’ (back to text)
121. Eschaton’s pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game gets gotten up every like month or so at most, almost always on Sunday, but even then not all twelve of a year’s kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude and surplus in game-personnel. (back to text)
122. O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series W–520–500–268–6W–9W–9W– 14W4, © B.S. 1994, Rand McNally & Company. (back to text)
123. Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait and like inscribe [sic ] it anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value formula for dividing available megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch out a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results so Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse [occasional verbal flourishes Hal’s — HJI]. The formula’s also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV Theorem itself has a proof that’s just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the whole of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we’ll keep it compact, even though this whole thing is real interesting if you’re interested and whatnot.
Say you’ve got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average of all the past megatonnages he’s gotten in the past. The exact average is called the ‘Mean Value,’ which ought to give us a bit of a giggle, given the hostility of the context here.
So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant’s constantly fluctuating ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We want to find A and give the Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it’s pretty elegant, and all you need for it is two pieces of data: the most his ratio’s ever been and the least it’s ever been. These two datums [sic ] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A’s the Mean Value, by the way.
So then but so let ƒ be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on the interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least the ratio’s ever been and the most it’s ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating [sic ]? Inc’s looking at me like butter would freeze. It’s hard to know what to assume v. what to explain. I’m trying to be as clear as I can be [sic ]. And now he’s looking at me like I’m digressing. Why don’t you just pass that certain item back on over here, Inculator. But so we’ve got ƒ and we’ve got [a, b]. And let r and R be the smallest and biggest values of the function ƒ(x) on the interval [a, b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and height R over the interval [a, b] in the diagram marked let’s go ahead and mark it say PEEMSTER:
The Mean Value we’re after, A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [sic ] than r but shorter [sic ] than R. From here on it’s just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant. Inc’s nodding his head sarcastically like I think I’m saying something sage. Let d be any constant, for computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let d be the size of Hal’s Unit.
Hal Incandenza’s Addendum: In meters.
Michael Pemulis’s Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked-illuminating PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area we want:
is going to be bigger than the area of the rectangle with height r and but also smaller than the area of the rectangle with height R. Pure mental reason [sic] compels, then, that [sic ] somewhere in there between r and R there’s an exact height, f (x;), such that (I have to say that every demonstration of a stats theorem has Let and such that in them, mostly I think because they’re so wicked much fun to say) such that the rectangle of this height f (x;) over the whole interval [a, b] has exactly the Area we want, the Mean Value of all the historic [sic ] expenditure-ratios; in other words in abstracted form:
f (x)dx = f (x')(b – a)
where (b − a) is just the size of the interval. And so have a look at the revealing diagram labeled HALSADICK:
This fucking works. You don’t have to crunch out a whole new ratio each time for each Combatant to dole out the ordnance. You just skim the highest and lowest ratios off the Eschaton records the Beanie-man keeps on each time. This is wicked. This is fucking elegant. Note that (Note that’s another like compulsitory [sic ] term) note that the Combatant’s Mean-Value megatonnage will change, slightly, from Eschaton to Eschaton, exactly the way a like hitter’s season average will alter just a bit from at-bat to at-bat, depending integrally on what he delivered on his last trip to the plate and whatnot. Note also that you can use this Mean-Value time-saver with anything that varies within a (definable) set of boundaries and whatnot — like any line, or a tennis court’s boundaries, or like maybe say a certain drug’s urine-level range between Clean and Royally Pinched. As a like exercise, if you’re interested, play three hours of high-level competitive jr. top-level [sic ] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the ratios of first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve-and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent his match-performance is. DeLint does this kind of exercise every morning sitting on the can. It’s going to be interesting to see if [sic ] Hal, who thinks he’s just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person tense [sic ] like some jowly old Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic ], if Inc can transpose [sic? ] the math here without help from his Mumster. Later.
P.S. Allston Rules. (back to text)
124. Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a division of InterLace TelEntertainment. (back to text)
125. Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able to dribble up more balls with your stick’s face; the cast-off janitorial buckets are the size of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and their hard-polymer composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port Washington. (back to text)
(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like ‘Ball-Hopper’ and ‘Ball-Bank’ — the general Academy consensus is these are for dilettantes and pussies.)
126. It being well-nigh impossible to keep the present from infecting even a playful and childlike Historical Consciousness, Canadians often end up playing picayune but villainous roles in Eschatonic TRIGSITs. (back to text)
127. A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis’s TRIGSIT, which is 100% all biz. (back to text)
P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land.
128. Most Valuable Lobber. (back to text)
129. M. Pemulis is, in the best Allston MA tradition, a good friend and a bad-news enemy, and even E.T.A.s who don’t like him are careful not to do or even say anything that might call for score-settling, because Pemulis is a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge gourmet, and is not one bit above dosing someone’s water-jug or voltaging their door-knob or encoding something horrid in your E.T.A. med-files or dickying with the mirror over the bureau in the little recessed part of your subdorm room so that when you look in the mirror in the A.M. to comb or tend to a blackhead or something you see something staring back at you that you’ll never entirely get over, which is what took over two years to finally happen to M. H. Penn, who afterward wouldn’t say what he’d seen but stopped shaving altogether and, it’s agreed, has never been quite himself since. (back to text)
130. Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread.’ (back to text)
131. Before Boston Groups’ regular speaker meetings there are often closed, half-hour Beginners’ Discussion Meetings, where newcomers can share their cluelessness, weakness, and despair in a warm supportive private atmosphere. (back to text)
132. The word Group in AA Group is always capitalized because Boston AA places enormous emphasis on joining a Group and identifying yourself as a member of this larger thing, the Group. Likewise caps in like Commitment, Giving It Away, and c. (back to text)
133. Gately’s little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basemen
t is plastered all over every part of every wall that’s dry enough to take tape with cutout Scotch-taped photos of all sorts of variegated and esoteric celebrities past and present, which are varied as residents throw magazines into the E.M.P.H.H. dumpsters and are frequently selected because the celebrities are somehow grotesque; it’s a kind of compulsive habit held over from Gately’s fairly dysfunctional North Shore childhood, when he’d been a clipping and taping fiend. (back to text)
134. And if you’re brand-new, as in like your first three days, and so on mandatory nonpunitive House Restriction — like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who last night had pumped her full of Inderal a and nitro had looked upon her unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest, a consequence of which after Joelle regained consciousness and speech had involved placing a call to Pat Montesian, whose paralyzying alcoholic stroke the physician had treated in this very same E.R. almost seven years before, and in whose case he’d also taken a special interest and had followed, such that he was now a personal friend of the sober Pat M.’s and sat honorarily on Ennet House’s Board of Directors, so that his call to Pat’s home on Saturday night had gotten Joelle into the House on the spot, as of Interdependence Day A.M.’s discharge from B&W, leap-frogging literally dozens of waiting-list people and putting Joelle into Ennet House’s intensive program of residential treatment literally before she even knew what was happening, which in retrospect might have been lucky — if you’re this new you’re actually not supposed ever to leave the Staffer’s sight, though in practice this rule gets suspended when you have to go to the ladies’ room and the Staffer’s male, or vice versa. (back to text)
135. A conviction common to all who Hang In with AA, after a while, and abstracted in the slogan ‘My Best Thinking Got Me Here.’ (back to text)
Infinite Jest Page 157
