Infinite Jest (205 page)

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.

124.
Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a division
of InterLace TelEntertainment.

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.

(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.

127.
A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis’s
TRIGSIT, which is 100% all biz.

P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land.

128.
Most Valuable Lobber.

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.

130.
Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread.’

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.

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.

133.
Gately’s little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basement 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.

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 paralyzing 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.

^a.
Propranolol hydrochloride, Wyeth-Ayerst, a beta-blocking antihypertensive.

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.’

136.
Trade-name Fastin,
^®
SmithKline Beecham Inc., a low-level ’drine not unlike Tenuate, though w/ more associated
tooth-grinding.

137.
None of these are Don Gately’s terms.

138.
In e.g. Boston: join Group, get Active, get phone #s, get sponsor, audio-call sponsor
daily, hit meetings daily, pray like fiend for release from Disease, don’t kid self
that you can still buy rodneys in liquor stores or date your dealer’s niece or think
for a second you can still hang out in bars playing darts and just drinking Millennial
Fizzies or vanilla Yoo-Hoos, etc.

139.
Volunteer Counselor Eugenio (‘Gene’) M. favors entomologic tropes and analogies,
which is especially effective with brand-new residents fresh from subjective safaris
through the Kingdom of Bugs.

140.
Don G.’s North Shore’s vulgate signifier for trite/banal is:
limp
.

141.
Likewise that his private term for blacks is
niggers,
which is unfortunately still all he knows.

142.
The speaker doesn’t actually use the terms
thereon, most assuredly,
or
operant limbic system,
though she really had, before, said
chordate phylum
.

143.
Sic.

144.
E.g. see Ursula Emrich-Levine (University of California-Irvine), ‘Watching Grass
Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and
Stasis in James O. Incandenza’s
Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony,
and
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,
’
Art Cartridge Quarterly,
vol. III, nos. 1–3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.

145.

TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENT FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE
MOMENT
MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY
PUTATIVE
MOMENT
MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN STEEPLY, 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘Q.’

‘Well, there are odd sorts of consolations in having somebody go progressively bats
in front of your eyes, such as for example sometimes The Mad Stork would go off on
things in sort of a funny way. We always thought he was funny a good bit of the time.

‘You’ve got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and
light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as they go on. With him it was
the opposite. A lot of his funniest stuff was very abstract. Are those earrings real
copper? Can you wear real copper?’

‘Q.’

‘You’ve got to remember that he came out of all these old artish directors that were
really “ne pas à la mode” anymore by the time he broke in, not just Lang and Bresson
and Deren but the anti–New Wave abstracters like Frampton, wacko Nucks like Godbout,
anticonfluential directors like Dick and the Snows who not only really belonged in
a quiet pink room somewhere but were also self-consciously behind the times, making
all sorts of heavy art-gesture films about film and consciousness and isness and diffraction
and stasis et cetera. Most extremely beautiful women I’ve ever met complain of getting
a sort of itchy green crust when they wear real copper. So the tenure-jockeys and
critics who were hailing this millennial new Orthochromatic Neorealism thing as the
real new avant-garde thing were getting tenure by blasting Dick and Godbout and the
flying Snow Brothers and The Stork for trying to be avant-garde, when really they
were self-consciously trying to be more like
après
-garde. I never did get straight on what
Orthochromatic
means, but it was very trendy. But The Mad Stork talked a lot about intentional atavism
and retrogradism and stasis. Plus the academics who hated him hated the artificial
sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had a total fetish for weird lenses
and chiaroscuro.

‘After the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque came out, and
The Joke,
and the film-establishment theory-queers were holding their noses and saying Incandenza’s
still mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic
abstraction, after a while Himself, The Stork, in his own progressively bats way,
decided to get revenge. He planned a lot of it out at McLean Hospital, which’s out
in Belmont, which is where Himself had almost his own private reserved room, by then.
He made up a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism and got some film-journals
to run some proclamatory edictish things he wrote about it, and he got Duquette at
M.I.T. and a couple other younger tenure-jockeys who were in on it to start referring
and writing little articles in journals and quarterlies about it and talking at art
openings and avant-garde theater and film openings, feeding it into the grapevine,
hailing some new movement they called Found Drama, this supposedly ultimate Neorealism
thing that they all declared was like the future of drama and cinematic art, etc.

‘Because I’m thinking if you like copper stuff and little Aztec suns there’s a small
place down in Tempe where I know the owner and he has some incredible little copper
pieces we could parp down and have you look at. My own theory is it takes an incredible
natural complexion to be able to wear the baser metals, though it might just be an
allergy-thing, the way some women react and some don’t.’