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Hal was on the bench with his hands on Loach’s shoulders through the whole little routine. Everybody’s had his hands on Loach’s shoulders at one time or another.
The coming story of Barry Loach is a very strong highlight for me, some of DFW's best writing in my opinion, and an absolutely perfect capper to the moral of the story.
Mlle. Luria P______, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject’s testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the Subject’s response would be when the speaker’s screen was withdrawn and the sewer roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself against the tumbler’s glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass’s side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at
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I would never have caught this as a 1984 reference if other readers hadn't pointed it out to me first. Same with the Beatles lyrics shared early on.
And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
I did not appreciate this line on my first reading. Now, with the cumulative weight of several read-throughs and a better eye for spotting the connections between different sections (especially shared imagery like the shore, the sky, the clouds, etc) it seems to me strikingly, mournfully, beautiful.
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.
✨Paula6070 ✨ and 7 other people liked this
quiet tales sometimes go around the Boston AA community of certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering persons who have pared away potential escape after potential escape until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or meditating or abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there completely motion- and escapeless until a long time later all that’s found in the empty chair is a very fine dusting of
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Transcendence through Absolute Abstinence.
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,
Ach, such a great job is done of keeping Joelle's alleged disfigurement a secret -- she could either be too beautiful for words or too hideous for the same and the text never tilts one way or the other.
137. None of these are Don Gately’s terms.
WHO THE F@$CK IS THE NARRATOR THEN???
Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet
Does this hat section serve any purpose beyond silly comedy?
silk-suited Vocalists snapping their fingers and telling their casino audiences they were beautiful human beings and but when it comes time to actually start crooning the Vocalists’ lips move but nothing Velvety emerges, all sound withheld, a Job Action, rendered even more chilling by the skill with which the Frankies and Tonies lip-synch to utter silence—and the way the beautiful casino audiences, hit someplace they lived, somehow, clearly, responded with near-psychotic feelings of deprivation and abandonment, became a mob, almost tore lounges down, upended little round tables, threw free
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I remember this struck me as especially profound my second read-through.
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
Hal's big strength results in his own injury. Some kind of psychic connection to addiction?
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.
216. No clue.
A very famous footnote, say all the critics with an eye towards postmodern writing technique.
unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, ‘l’algol,’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.
Evidence for Hal as narrator - the boy dictionary
came up with that new kind of window glass that doesn’t fog or smudge from people touching it or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it,
There are a few references to Avril having written somebody's name on the interior of the car, post-coitally, and this is a little bump towards fleshing that out. To what end, I haven't uncovered - and whose name she wrote remains unsettled among readers.
A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say clichés earned their status as clichés because they were so obviously true.’
This is Joelle, obliquely referenced, but interestingly enough relaying the same AA message Don Gately affirmed early on about cliches. Does this mean anything significant?
‘Q.’ ‘In the Moms’s family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad’s plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms’s home town’s wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I’d have to try to recall the town.
"Q" here presumably, "Where is your father buried?" And here Orin, who we've just seen pre-footnoted as possibly lying, attests he's never been to his father's gravesite.
I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the thing out toward the Moms’s figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding we had every January thaw.
Another recounting of the mold incident, pretty closely balanced from starting point to endpoint of the text (as a whole, page-wise)
This may be a lie—no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras in HmH’s kitchen, bathroom, etc.
Another blatant undercutting of trust in our narrator, further muddying the question of who's relating this story.
After my own parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter,
One of the little threads of intefconnection the book only occasionally makes this overt.
he thinks the way to escape that person’s influence is through renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it? I certainly think so.
it was not until we got all the way down to the Commonwealth–Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer days kept the Incandenzas’ beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let’s call it a nubbin. Let’s say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin.
This is sad.
Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?
the so-called “Amotivational Syndrome” consequent to massive Bob Hope–consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning, but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope–smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amotivated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth.
Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.
Another muddying-the-waters footnote to complicate the question of who's narrating: who is the I in "what I'd want to know."
in the car up to Enfield Mario’s uncle would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of chatter that would get Himself’s poor teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario came around to open the door and let Himself lean out and be ill there’d be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding.
Never noticed this "Ophelia" reference before. Another Hamlet tag!
‘In the dream the horror was that I wasn’t really singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like “Help! I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers! It’s me! It’s me, screaming for help!” ’ ‘A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and Mermanization were incidental.’ ‘There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that I’m screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping
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I think this is what plateaux-hopping up to the top does to somebody. I think a meaningful transcendent DMZ-type non-uremic-fallout interlude before Tucson is just what the carpenter ordered, for the old hinges. Keep you from going back to just smoking that Bob Hope day in day out when the test’s up.
You want to quit because you’re starting to see you need it, and—’ ‘That’s exactly it. Peems, think how horrible that’d be, if somebody needed it. Not just liked it a great great great deal. Needing it becomes a whole separate order of…. It seems horrific. It seems like the difference between really loving something and being—’ ‘Say the word, Inc.’ ‘…’
DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’
Y'know, on re-reading this footnote it occurs to me that maybe Pemulis does go to the Whataburger after all, to drop the DMZ voluntarily with Hal (assuming he finds it? Or was it included in the toss of his possessions we just saw? Hmmmm)
(least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet—namely V.i. 9.
Another blatant Hamlet connection I glossed over.
Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident—the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril,
Sometimes I forget that Gately is a murderer, and here it seems not only once but twice.
