Infinite Jest
Page 159
163. NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst’s CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony. (back to text)
164. Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal’s ephebic account; Lace-Forché and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and-place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably compelling. (back to text)
165. Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.’s apellate-court claims that InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike heels. (back to text)
166. ‘Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,’ descendents of the IBM/Apple ‘Power PCs,’ with mainframe-caliber response-time and .25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion-slots for various killer apps. (back to text)
167. A couple of Incandenza’s more accessible early documentaries were bought by Inter-Lace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself’s rearview-mirror fortune. InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for its ‘Howls from the Margin’ low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself’s lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn’t make any ILT menus until after his untimely death. (back to text)
168. It didn’t do J. Gentle F.C.’s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot of good around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest sign-carrying faithful had been E.T.A.’s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard that even people without watches looked at their watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled appointments whenever Schtitt’s eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he uttered any one of such terms as America, decadence, State, or Law; but Mario I. was pretty much the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt’s attraction to Gentle had more to do with Schtitt’s take on tennis than anything else: the Coach was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle’s proposals for waste, this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return. (back to text)
169. Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability makes it a popular ingredient in the ‘Happy Patches’ so prevalent in the American West and Southwest of Subsidized Time — Pharmochemical Quarterly 17, 18 (Spring, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) provides a detailed account of the synthesis and transdermal physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general. (back to text)
170. Québecois French: ‘working up steam.’ (back to text)
171. ‘Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’ (back to text)
172. ‘Pursuit of happiness.’ (back to text)
173. Q.v. Note 304 sub. (back to text)
174. ‘Absolutely no bonking,’ presumably. (back to text)
175. The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn’t really the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys. (back to text)
176. It’s also where Mario’s most derivative of Himself, whose own ONANtiad was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with political comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.’s film had concerned not Tine and a Québecois fatale but an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada’s ‘Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,’ the affair presented as doomed and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young Canadian Candida albicans specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast infection, driving both wife and Gentle to ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns during which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Québecois bullet-train and Gentle decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale. The ONANtiad was not Himself’s strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much everybody around E.T.A. agrees that Mario’s own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is funnier and more accessible than Himself’s, if also a bit heavier-handed. (back to text)
177. The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Concavity and Grand Convexité are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the media. (back to text)
178. A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: ‘Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.’ (back to text)
179. Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word AA; all he remembers from the time is just ‘Meetings’ and a Diagnosis he’d construed as chivalric. (back to text)
180. But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men’s Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario down to V.F. Rickey’s cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi and down to the YYY studio’s freezing pink basement, where the only person who didn’t talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer’s board, would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be all that long if the absent party hadn’t taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn’t had any idea M.P.’d used a screen, on-air. That’s when he’d gotten agitated. (back to text)
181. Corbett Thorp’s sobriquet among the less kind kids is ‘Th-th-th-th.’ (back to text)
182. Known also sometimes as ‘Pukers.’ (back to text)
183. The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets associated with Eschaton and yesterday’s debacle. (back to text)
184. Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known also as a ‘wrong-foot’ or ‘contre-pied,’ and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; ironically enough it’s Hal, since the explosion, who’s known as the real E.T.A. master of placement and opponent-yanking-around and the old contre-pied. Also a quick insertion that Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a Dutch immigrant low-level pro who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory guru, on the same level with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden. (back to text)
185. Stice’s legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he’s got two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing him foods the staff won’t let him eat. (back to text)
186. Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the true sign of the novice or hack. (back to text)
187. N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as ‘overhands,’ while South Africans sometimes also call them ‘pointers.’ (back to text)
188. The budget doesn’t allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a certain percentage of this fall’s residents ends up being literal. (back to text)
189. Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a Schedule C-II synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi Winthrop Laboratories in banana-flavored syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 10
0 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ D.W.G.) the 50 and 100 mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Bam-Bam, respectively. (D&D of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or ‘Probie,’ by the way.) (back to text)
190. If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defective pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon’s facing Murder-2 and unbargainable time, at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are concerned, since even though they’re not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety-consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive and fuzzily thought out at best. (back to text)
191. Also known as a case being ‘Blue-Filed,’ meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo for a specified period, and reopenable (‘Red-Filed’) at any time P.O.s and Boards decide the defendant isn’t making ‘satisfactory progress.’ (back to text)
192. She didn’t literally say shitstorm. (back to text)
193. Gately didn’t get any of this from Pat Montesian; it’s mostly like Ennet House mythology, with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust, both of whom think Pat M. just about hung the moon. (back to text)
194. A totally different thing than Volkmann’s contracture (cf. Note 115). (back to text)
195. Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi-Crocodile Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the crack with some weird fake-wood-resin, so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a whole new institutional table. (back to text)
196. E.g. ‘Kid, sobriety’s like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it’; they’d rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them. (back to text)
197. (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.) (back to text)
198. Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: ‘The central activity of the MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dangerous drugs and other techniques [sic ] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service Division employees, agents, and contractors.’ — Civil Action #80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980. (back to text)
199. Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.’s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule C-IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties. (back to text)
200. Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss’s analysis, which you can bet was developed outside Gately’s earshot. (back to text)
201. Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside of hinges, etc. (back to text)
202. Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to go anywhere near it. (back to text)
203. Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic. (back to text)
204. Jolly-Jolt® hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy® (celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo® cigars, Oh, Waiter® plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See London!® X-ray specs, etc. usually just trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards, from the Waltham facilities of Acmé Inc., a.k.a. ‘The Acmé Family of Gags ’N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises,’ at a substantial and politically motivated discount, seeing that the company’s owned by the Québec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul who’d been such a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and who over a decade back had exploited the then-U.S.-owned then-Acme’s severe PR and cash-flow problems right after the serial Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile t/o the firm for about 30% of its real worth. (back to text)
205. Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank. Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub. (back to text)
206. Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that ‘To hear the squeak’ is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada’s euphemisms for sudden and violent de-mapping. (back to text)
207. L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable ‘va chier, putain!’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context. (back to text)
208. From Ch. 16, ‘The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,’ in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut für Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (back to text)
209. E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome’s fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo-Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they’re pale. Hal at the height of his toss, knees more bent than he’d like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up over Axford’s head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid’s hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx’s U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy Wingo’s front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. They’re not in a straight line; they’re more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet off what looks like Longwood’s synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year’s seniors out in the pavilion’s webbed chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. Clarke’s cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman’s call. Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the whole court’s tilted. (back to text)
210. Hal and Mario have long since had to accept a the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males. (back to text)
212. Though it’s unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis’s charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle’s; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline. (back to text)
213. Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible humans, errant shots are always going off sticks’ frames and net-posts and even fences and bouncing and rolling into other people’s territory. In starting at usually the quarter-final rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other people’s balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell ‘Sorry!’ or ‘A little help on Three?’ or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a point to be finished, to get their own balls. It’s a curious inability to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey deLint can seem to correct. (back to text)