Infinite Jest (194 page)

151
Actual term employed is downer-type.

152
A lightless and eye-averted late-night weight room being not exactly a last-name type of place.

153
Sometimes it's as straightforward as directing someone to give her fiance the roundhouse forehand slap she's been secretly aching to give him ever since he'd once teased her about putting some Band-Aids on those insect bites on her chest.

154
= the anticoníluental Cage HI — Free Show; q.v. Note 24 supra.

155
The Medusa wears a kind of chain-mail backless evening gown and Hellenic sandals, the Odalisque a Merry Widow.

156
Mario's speculative puppet-show comes down maybe a little hard on the implication that former O.C.D.-support-group-sponsor and later Clean U.S. Party campaign manager and now O.U.S. Chief Rodney P. Tine is the real dark force behind Reconfiguration and New England's de-mapping and the transfer of the Great Concavity, that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner was and remains a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his office is clean and his food's pre-tasted, and that it's actually been Tine behind C.U.S.P.'s geopolitical anality and Experialism, and that Tine was essentially pulling Gentle's strings all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration and mass relocation. This is, in point of fact, simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing, and tends to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway, since his own O.C.D. has been documented to be ruminative rather than hygienic, not to mention the fact that he's hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P------. J. O. Incandenza's own ONANtiad, being an adult production, was considerably more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue.

157
An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at the Headmaster's Table takes off the witch's hat and holds it by the brim and whips it around in an enthused circle three times over her head.

158
The umpires on the U.S. junior tour tend to be retired high-school principals whose only renumeration is the chance to exercise again some slight authority over the young.

159
Clipperton eventually perfecting the toss-with-the-same-hand-you-serve-with maneuver pioneered by South African doubles specialist Colin van der Hingle after a hideous turbo-prop-charter-aircraft-propeller accident took off his right arm, ear, and sideburn in only the second year of his Show career, in Durban.

160
Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton's suicide still exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally or professionally sensitive cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself's attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those lawyers, Avril, Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. O. Incandenza's dead body
^a
— yickily enough — there having been room in the bronze casket only because Incandenza's extreme height dictated a casket-size that his thin physique didn't nearly fill the width and depth of.

a. (in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert in the now over-lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in L'Islet Province, Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had to be delayed and then rushed to be fit in between annulation-cycles)

161
The other having been that predictive call for the catatonic hero, also for Ogilvie's Entertainment 2-termer.

162
Every Nielsen respondent seemed to respond with especial neural repulsion to one or another particular portrait. There was one of a woman with every carpenter's tool known to God exiting her face. One of a young male with a spear of scarlet light through the right temple and coming clear out the other side. A woman with her crown between the incisors of some sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame. A grandmotherly type with roses, human hands, a pencil, and other lush-type flora all coming serpentine out of her open skull's top. A head coming out in a long string from a throttled tube of paste; a Talmudic scholar bearded in needles; a Baconian pope with his hat on fire. Three or four dental ones that sent people scrambling to the bathroom to floss themselves bloody. The painting that had particularly nailed nine-year-old Hal and had had him popping Nunhagen compulsively until his ears started ringing and didn't stop for almost a week had been of a deeply parlor-tanned and vaguely familiar upscale male, a disembodied fist yanking a handful of brains out of the guy's left ear while the guy's overhealthy face, like most of the ad's faces, wears a queer look of intense unhappy concentration, one more of like brooding than conventionally expressive of pain.

163
NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst's CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

170
Québecois French: 'working up steam.’

171
'Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’

172
'Pursuit of happiness.’

173
Q.v. Note 304 sub.

174
'Absolutely no bonking,' presumably.

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.

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 Him-self'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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

181
Corbett Thorp's sobriquet among the less kind kids is 'Th-th-th-th.’

182
Known also sometimes as 'Pukers.’

183
The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets associated with Eschaton and yesterday's debacle.

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.

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.

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.

187
N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as 'overhands,' while South Africans sometimes also call them 'pointers.’

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.

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 100 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 Barn-Bam, respectively. (DôcD of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or 'Probie,' by the way.)