The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in ‘solitary confinement,’ and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO

  Death in Scarsdale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. Bain; 78 mm.; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-caption subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed with a boy (Bain) he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED

  Fun with Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy Tolan, Pam Heath; 35 mm.; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/ non-human screams and howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch) performs sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic (Tolan) he suspects of involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD.

  Infinite Jest (II). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath; 35/78 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Unfinished, unseen attempt at remake of Infinite Jest (I). UNRELEASED

  Immanent Domain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pam Heath, Pamela-Sue Voorheis, Herbert G. Birch; 35 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white w/ microphotography; sound. Three memory-neurons (Fukuoka-Hearn, Heath, Voorheis (w/ polyurethane costumes)) in the Inferior frontal gyrus of a man’s (Watt’s) brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new memory-neurons as the man undergoes intensive psychoanalysis. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #340–03–70 (Y.P.W.)

  Kinds of Pain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Anonymous cast; 35/78 mm.; 6 minutes; color; silent. 2,222 still-frame close-ups of middle-aged white males suffering from almost every conceivable type of pain, from an ingrown toenail to cranio-facial neuralgia to inoperable colo-rectal neoplastis. CELLULOID, LIMITED METRO BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET-DRIVE

  Various Small Flames. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of neoconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ignited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with antinarrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background’s lit hallway. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY 1960s US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA—INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #330–54–94 (Y.T.-S.D.B.)

  Cage III—Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357–65–65

  ‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque.’ B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; zone-plating laser holography by James O. Incandenza and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; holographic fight-choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 78 mm.; 29 minutes; black and white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

  The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./National Film Board of Canada. Narrator P. A. Heaven; 78 mm.; 35 minutes; color; sound. Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography. UNRELEASED DUE TO US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS

  Homo Duplex. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Narrator P. A. Heaven; Super-8 mm.; 70 minutes; black and white; sound. Parody of Woititz and Shulgin’s ‘poststructural antidocumentaries,’ interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

  Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Ken N. Johnson, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Otto Brandt, E. J. Kenkle; 35 mm.; 82 minutes; black and white/color; silent. The intricate Ocha-Kai is conducted 2.5 m. off the ground in the Johnson Space Center’s zero-gravity-simulation chamber. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357–40–01 (Y.P.W.)

  Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/ uncredited voices; 35 mm.; 59 minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini’s ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’ PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

  The Joke. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. × 2 cameras; variable length; black and white; silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton’s ‘audience-specific events,’ two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the ‘film’ ’s audience and project the resultant raster onto screen—the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious ‘joke’ and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film’s involuted ‘antinarrative’ flow. Incandenza’s first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kultcher’s Sperber credited it with ‘unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.’ NONRECORDED MAGNETIC VIDEO SCREENABLE IN THEATER VENUE ONLY, NOW UNRELEASED

  Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

  Every Inch of Disney Leith. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Medical Imagery of Alberta, Ltd. Disney Leith; computer-enlarged 35 mm./x 2 m.; 253 minutes; color; silent. Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and interior of one of Incandenza’s technical crew as he sits on a folded serape in the Boston Common listening to a public forum on uniform North American metricization. PRIVATE RELEASE ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357–56–34 (Y.P.W.)

  Infinite Jest (III). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 16/35 mm.; color; sound. Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest (I), (II). UNRELEASED

  Found Drama I.

  Found Drama II.

  Found Drama III.… conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

  The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Gerhardt Schtitt; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; black and white; sound. A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357–59–00

  Found Drama V.

  Found Drama VI.… conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

  The American Century as Seen Through a Brick. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narration by P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; 52 minutes;
color w/ red filter and oscillophotography; silent w/ narration. As U.S. Boston’s historical Back Bay streets are stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Québec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper, all intercut with ambiguous shots of a human thumb’s alterations in the interference pattern of a plucked string. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

  The ONANtiad. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Claymation action sequences © Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Squyre Frydell, Marla-Dean Chumm, Herbert G. Birch, Everard Meynell; 35 mm.; 76 minutes; black and white/color; sound/silent. Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

  The Universe Lashes Out. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator Herbert G. Birch; 16 mm.; 28 minutes; color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on the evacuation of Atkinson NH/New Québec at the inception of Continental Reconfiguration. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

  Poultry in Motion. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 56 minutes; color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on renegade North Syracuse NNY turkey farmers’ bid to prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithaca. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

  Found Drama IX.

  Found Drama X.

  Found Drama XI.… conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

  Möbius Strips. Year of the Whopper. Lactrodectus Mactans Productions. ‘Hugh G. Rection,’ Pam Heath, ‘Bunny Day,’ ‘Taffy Appel’; 35 mm.; 109 minutes; black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse’s All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist (‘Rection’), who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357–65–32 (Y.W.)

  Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Everard Maynell, Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven, Pamela-Sue Voorheis; 16 mm.; 19 minutes; black and white; sound. Possible parody/homage to B.S. public-service-announcement cycle of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,c a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.

  Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Telma Hurley, Pam Heath, Marla-Dean Chumm, Diane Saltoone, Soma Richardson-Levy, Cosgrove Watt; 35 mm.; 90 minutes; color; sound. Parody of revenge/recidivism action genre, a formerly delinquent nun’s (Hurley’s) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. INTERLACE TELENT PULSE-DISSEMINATION 21 JULY Y.T.M.P., CARTRIDGE #357–87–04

  Infinite Jest (IV). Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), ‘Madame Psychosis’(?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III). UNRELEASED

  Let There Be Lite. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Ken N. Johnson; 16mm.; 50 minutes(?); black and white; silent w/ narration. Unfinished documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon industry. UNRELEASED

  Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

  No Troy. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. No cast; liquid-surface holography by Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; 35 mm.; 7 minutes; enhanced color; silent. Scale-model holographic recreation of Troy NY’s bombardment by miscalibrated Waste Displacement Vehicles, and its subsequent elimination by O.N.A.N. cartographers. MAGNETIC VIDEO (PRIVATE RELEASE LIMITED TO NEW BRUNSWICK, ALBERTA, QUÉBEC) Note: Archivists in Canada and the U.S. West Coast do not list No Troy but do list titles The Violet City and The Violet Ex-City, respectively, leading scholars to conclude that the same film was released under several different appellations.

  Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

  Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill, Diane Saltoone; 16 mm.; 52 minutes; color; silent. Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama parody, a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

  Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against the real or holographic(?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

  Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Soma Richardson-Levy; Super-8 mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Shot on location north of Lowell MA, documentary on Essex County Sheriff’s Dept. and Massachusetts Department of Social Services’ expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–12–56

  As of Yore. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon Bain; 16/78 mm.; 181 minutes; black and white/color; sound. A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family’s garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–16–09

  The Clever Little Bastard. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED

  The Cold Majesty of the Numb. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED

  Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization. UNRELEASED

  Low-Temperature Civics. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Herbert G. Birch, Ken N. Johnson, Soma Richardson-Levy, Everard Maynell, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven; 35 mm.; 80 minutes; black and white; sound. Wyler parody in which four sons (Birch, Johnson, Maynell, Smothergill) intrigue for control of a sandwich-bag conglomerate after their CEO father (Watt) has an ecstatic encounter with Death (‘Psychosis’) and becomes irreversibly catatonic. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘CAVALCADE OF EVIL’ SERIES—JANUARY/YEAR OF TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR—AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–89–05

  (At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, ‘Hugh G. Rection’; 78 mm.; 26 minutes; black and white; sound. The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy (Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction’s ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting himself from his wife’s (Heath’s) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project’s architect (‘Rection’). CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

  (The) Desire to Desire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Robert Lingley, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Marla-Dean Chumm; 35 mm.; 99 minutes(?); black and white; silent. A pathology resident (Lingley) falls in love with a beautiful cadaver (‘Psychosis’) and the paralyzed sister (Chumm) she died rescuing from the attack of an oversi
zed feral infant. Listed by some archivists as unfinished. UNRELEASED

  Safe Boating Is No Accident. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad(?). Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited/X-Ray and Infrared Photography by Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, Enfield MA. Ken N. Johnson, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ P. A. Heaven. Kierkegaard/Lynch (?) parody, a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (’Johnson), struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancée’s (‘Psychosis’s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator with a defrocked Trappist monk, two overcombed missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an enigmatic fitness guru, the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety, and seven severely intoxicated opticians with silly hats and exploding cigars. Listed by some archivists as completed the following year, Y.T.-S.D.B. UNRELEASED

  Very Low Impact. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Marla-Dean Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 minutes; color; sound. A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students and employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–97–29

  The Night Wears a Sombrero. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?): Ken N. Johnson, Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne Saltoone, ‘Madame Psychosis’; 78 mm.; 105 minutes; color; silent/sound. Parody/homage to Lang’s Rancho Notorious, a nearsighted apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing vengeance for a gunslinger’s (Johnson’s) rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner (Saltoone) he (the cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’). Listed by some archivists as completed the preceding year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–56–51