53. Eschaton is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the EndStath ROM-run nuclear-conflagration game. (back to text)
54. Viz. Prescriptive Grammar (Grade 10), Descriptive Grammar (11), Grammar and Meaning (12). (back to text)
55. Hal, who personally thinks the term that’d apply here would be suborned, not entrapped — unless the caller were himself a police officer — keeps his own counsel on this point and basically goes along to get along. (back to text)
56. … or PMA, Grievous Bod., nutmeg’s myristicin, or Hawaiian baby-woodrose seeds’ ergine, or the African iboga’s ibogaine, the yagé’s harmaline… or the fly agaric fungus’s well-known muscimole, which fitviavi’s derived DMZ resembles chemically sort of the way an F-18 resembles a Piper Cub…. (back to text)
57. Ingesters’ accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn’t completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph’s toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who’d ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes. (back to text)
58. Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor. (back to text)
59. Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C-II Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. (back to text)
60. Replacing the old neo-Georgian J. A. Stratton Student Center, right off Mass. Ave. and gutted with C4 during the so-called M.I.T. Language Riots of twelve years past. (back to text)
61. An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence, the school derived somewhat from both the narrative bradykineticism of Antonioni and the disassociative formalism of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, comprising periods in the careers of the late Beth B., the Snow brothers, Vigdis Simpson, and the late J. O. Incandenza (middle period). (back to text)
62. At the zenith of the self-help-group movement in the B.S. mid-1990s, there were estimated to be over 600 wholly distinct Step-based fellowships in the U.S.A., all modelled, however heretically or flakily, on the ‘12 Steps’ of Alcoholics Anonymous. By Y.D.A.U., the number has dropped to about one-third of that. (back to text)
63. (the student engineer’s analogy) (back to text)
64. Not 100% clear on this, but the thrust is that the T and Q are the two basic courses of study leading historically to the like 18th-century equivalent of a H.S. diploma and a B.A., or maybe M.A., respectively, at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and Cambridge U. during the time of Samuel Johnson — more or less the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass — and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then if you’re still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, astronomy, and music, and that none of the classes — including the potentially lightweight astronomy and music — were in fact lightweight, which is one possible reason why the portraits of all these classical and neo-classical B.A.s and D.Phil.s at Oxford and Cambridge look so pale and wasted and haunted and grim. Not to mention that the only day E.T.A.s get off classes is Sunday, partly to make up for how much they’re away from the classroom on trips; and back at E.T.A. classless Sunday is a three-session day on the courts, all of which strikes people outside academies as almost fanatically brutal. For more general pedagogy here see P. Beesley’s somewhat frumpy and dated B.S.-era Revival of the Humanities in American Education, or better yet Dr. A. M. Incandenza’s updated version of same, with its prose updated and typos eradicated and argument rather more keenly honed, available on CD-ROM through [email protected] or in trade paperback from Cornell University Press, 3rd edition © Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. (back to text)
65. E.T.A.s’ moniker for the Headmaster’s House. (back to text)
66. Some M.I.T.s are compulsive about taping the shows and then listening to the musics again and trying to track them down in stores and college archives, not unlike the way some of their parents had killed whole evenings trying to parse out the lyrics on R.E.M. and Pearl Jam tapes, etc. (back to text)
67. A couple of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Security officers know E.T.A.’s Hal Incandenza from having met his brother Mario when James O. Incandenza had hired the officers as lineless figurant background-extra cops for both Dial C for Concupiscence and Three Cheers for Cause and Effect The E.M. officers are sometimes down in The Unexamined Life tavern on Blind Bouncer nights when Hal is in there with like Axford, Hal hitting The Life quite a bit less frequently than Axford and Struck and Troeltsch, who rarely miss a Bring-Your-Braille-I.D. theme-night at The Unexamined Life, and seem able to function during A.M. drills even after several parasolled Mudslides or the House-Specialty Blue Flame cognac-based things you have to blow out before sipping from their huge blue-rimmed snifters. The E.M. cops are both young dim big good regular blue(literally)-collar Boston guys, high-school tackles now going soft, their jowls razor-burned and purpling with gin, and they’ll sometimes regale the E.T.A.s w/r/t some of the more colorful E.M. specimens they’re paid to keep secure. There’s something a little compulsive about the cops’ particular interest in #5 chronic catatonics, especially. The E.M. cops call Unit #5 ‘The Shed,’ they say, because its residents don’t seem housed there so much as more like stored there. The E.M. cops pronounce stored ‘stew-wad.’ The chronic catatonics themselves they refer to as ‘objay darts,’ which is something else Don G. over in #6 has never understood. Over Mudslides, they’ll often give little thumbnail anecdotes about various of The Shed’s objay darts, and one of the reasons why they regale the E.T.A.s only when Hal’s down there at The Unexamined Life is that Hal is the only E.T.A. who seems truly interested, which is the sort of thing your veteran off-duty cop can always sense. E.g. one of the objay darts they’re into is the lady who sits very still with her eyes closed. The cops explain that the lady is not catatonic in the strict sense of catatonic but rather a ‘D.P.,’ which is mental-health-facility slang for Debilitatingly Phobic. Her deal is apparently that she’s almost psychotically terrified of the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as she keeps her eyes shut tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she’d be able to see, they say; but that if she were ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be able to see, she reasons, she’s lost that precious like margin of hope that she’s maybe not blind. Then they run through her similar reasoning behind sitting absolutely motionless out of a phobia of being paralyzed. After each anecdote-tale like (they’ve got like an anecdote-routine, the E.M. cops), the shorter E.M. Security officer always uses his tongue to manipulate the little green parasol from one side of his mouth to the other as he holds his snifter tight in both hands and makes his jowls accordionize as he nods and posits that the terrifying thing is that the common unifying symptom of most of The Shed’s objay darts is a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror come true, somehow, which observation always makes both of the big dim workingmen shiver an identical and kind of almost delicious-looking shiver, pushing their hats back and shaking their heads at their glasses, as Hal blows out the fire of the second Blue Flame they’ve bought him, making a wish before he blows. (back to text)
68. Freer’s ‘The Viking’ moniker is his own invention, and nobody else uses it, instead referring to him as just ‘Freer,’ and regarding it as a classic pathetic Freer-type move that he goes around trying to get people to refer to him as ‘The Viking.’ (back to text)
69. NA = Nar
cotics Anonymous; CA = Cocaine Anonymous. In some cities there are also Psychedelics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous (also, confusingly, called NA), Designer Drugs Anonymous, Steroids Anonymous, even (especially in and around Manhattan) something called Prozac Anonymous. In none of these Anonymous fellowships anywhere is it possible to avoid confronting the God stuff, eventually. (back to text)
70. Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge-viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks’-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves, such that 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 off-white ashy stuff that you can wipe away completely with like one damp paper towel. (back to text)
71. The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is ‘You Can’t Unring a Bell.’ (back to text)
72. About which Pakistani manager and his ancestry and ratty little mustache and officious management style McDade has a colorful thing or two to say, boy. (back to text)
73. One of the graduate prorectors’ little tasks is supposedly to go around to different Subdorm floors and check the rooms for things like are the beds made up drum-tight, with unpleasant little extra drills added to the regimens of bed-making and toothpaste-cap-replacing slackers, though few of the prorectors have the combination anality and drive actually to go around to their assigned rooms with a checklist, the exceptions being Aubrey deLint, Mary Esther Thode, and the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi, who’s got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all times. (back to text)
74. Davis Cup is male, Wightman female. (back to text)
75. Hal’s private dread is that Tavis will want him to offer up his personal competitive map and dignity to John (‘N.R.’) Wayne — who’s never in several matches lost more than three games in a set to Hal — for the titillation of the alumni and patrons at the November Fundraiser-gala’s exhibitions, though this is pretty unlikely right before the What-aBurger, when Hal’ll be apt to face Wayne in the semis anyway, and Schtitt isn’t apt to want an utter demapping that fresh in Hal’s mind right before a major event. (back to text)
76. Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder — partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve’s acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D. — and for a while there’d been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis’s Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal’d been classified as somewhere between ‘Borderline Gifted’ and ‘Gifted’ — though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.’s diagnostic tests weren’t quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal’s monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing — and when he’d committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he’d pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure — the Weston MA School District in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called ‘Battle of the Books,’ which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest — when he’d extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he’d felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever. (back to text)
77. Granted, Pemulis, over the summer (he boards at E.T.A. during the summer but hasn’t qualified for the European trip since Y.P.W.), had made and distributed (at cost) a few copies of a highly amusing low-memory TP game whose graphics featured a picture of deLint and a mock-up of the hell-panel from H. Bosch’s tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights, which TP game continues to enjoy a select late-night vogue among the sub-16’s. (back to text)
78. (Subject to O.N.A.N. Dept. of Weights and Measures Oversight Committee ratification of final contract between G.F.R. Co., Zanesville OH, and the Bureau of Endorsement Revenue, United States Office of Unspecified Services, Vienna VA, 15 December Y.D.A.U.) (back to text)
79. And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond farewells from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond the grave were, after a brief and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only by the tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/ the very tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous dead Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells. (back to text)
80. Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren’t lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren’t lovers, although by the time of Joelle’s acquaintance with him Jim wasn’t in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking, though it’s not clear to Joelle whether Avril even knew this, since Jim and Avril hadn’t been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite some time, though Jim hadn’t known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo and had idly — and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not — and presumably post-coitally idly written the person’s first name in the steam of the steamed-up car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal ‘I’m-so-terribly-sorry’ monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he’d willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity, which Avril’d never have lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which could hardly be expected not to have solidified the appearance that they’d been lovers, Joelle and Jim. (back to text)
81. ‘Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah’s Use of Red,’ Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s). (back to text)
82. Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms’s compulsive cleaning thing, both Orin when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In Hal’s case this is facilitated by the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C’s prorector is the incredibly lax and laid-back Corbett Thorp, who may stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments on the younger
players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it’s not like he’s got all that much else to do. Hal’s fitted sheet and sheet are Bean-James River flannels in matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that’s of unknown origin and price because he got it for Xmas and it had all the tags removed. (back to text)
83. Boston Police Department. (back to text)
84. Available on ROM via [email protected] or in (remaindered) paperback from Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little,-Brown, itself a division of Bell Atlantic/TCI. (back to text)
85. = no academy affiliation. (back to text)
86. The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate embolism in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D. (back to text)
87. Q.v. Note 24 supra. (back to text)
88. Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dunlop rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston from E.T.A. see not one but three kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what amounted, Dunlop charged, almost to Conspiracy to Defraud, in YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s). (back to text)
89. The fact that it’s not at all clear day-to-day what this it and caring mean, or how you can be expected both to care passionately and not care at all, that huge amounts of internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable understanding of all this stuff, particularly from 16 to like 18, is not accidental or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht’s opinion, though a sizable contingent of E.T.A.s view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more by head prorector deLint’s clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford you a firm idea of where you stand, comparatively, at all times. (back to text)
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