Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest Page 169

by David Foster Wallace

383. Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues. (back to text)

  384. A.k.a. Lorazepam — ® Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale. (back to text)

  385. Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis’s doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics. (back to text)

  386. Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes. (back to text)

  387. Metro Boston’s third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid a — hSanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes. (back to text)

  388. Talwin-NX —®Sanofi Winthrop U.S. (back to text)

  a. Tenuate’s the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, technically a prescription antiobesity agent, favored by some athletes for its mildly euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth-grinding and hideous post-blood-spike crash that the hairier-chested ’drines like Fastin and Cylert inflict, though with a discomfitting tendency to cause post-spike ocular nystagmus. Nystagmus or no nystagmus, Tenuate’s a particular favorite of Michael Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he can lay hands on, and does not sell or trade them, except sometimes to roommate Jim Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also goes into Pemulis’s special entrepôt-yachting-cap and promotes still more of them on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling that they help his sports-color-commentary loquacity, which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear. (back to text)

  a. Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over-counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier. (back to text)

  a. Following the Continental Controlled Substance Act of Y.T.M.P., O.N.A.N.D.E.A.’s hierarchy of analgesics/antipyretics/anxiolytics establishes drug-classes of Category-II through Category-VI, with C-II’s (e.g. Dilaudid, Demerol) being judged the heaviest w/r/t dependence and possible abuse, down to C-VI’s that are about as potent as a kiss on the forehead from Mom. (back to text)

  a. From Comstock, Posner, and Duquette, ‘The Laughing Pathologists: Exemplary Works of the Anticonfluential Après Garde: Some Analyses of the Movement Toward Stasis in North American Conceptual Film (w/ Beth B., Vivienne Dick, James O. Incandenza, Vigdis Simpson, E. and K. Snow).’ ONANite Film and Cartridge Studies Annual, vol. 8, nos. 1–3 (Year of D.P. from the A.H.), pp. 44–117. (back to text)

  b. With the possible exception of Cage III — Free Show , Incandenza’s Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson’s 1947 classic, The Cage. (back to text)

  c. See Romney and Sperber, ‘Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?’ Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7–9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4–26. (back to text)

  d. E. Duquette, ‘Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Après Garde Films,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 2, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 35–39. (back to text)

  e. Anonymous, ‘Seeing v. Believing,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 4, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 93–95. (back to text)

  f. Ibid. (back to text)

  a. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. Wheelchair Assassins, pretty much Québec’s most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell. (back to text)

  b. See Note 304 sub. (back to text)

  a. Don’t ask. (back to text)

  b. Ibid. (back to text)

  c. I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston. (back to text)

  d. The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster’s anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze. (back to text)

  e. The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him. (back to text)

  f. At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. As of Y.D.A.U. it’s still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele-grocery service didn’t even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s), and it’s still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly. (back to text)

  g. InterLace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly speaking) an entertainment-dissemination ‘Grid.’ (back to text)

  h. After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa’s fifth and final attempt to placate Québec with a constitutional amendment formalizing the Gallic province’s right to ‘preserve and promote’ a ‘distinct society and culture.’ (back to text)

  i. The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as ‘La Guerre des Britanniques et des Sauvages,’ BS c. 1754–60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham in ’59 and Montreal in ’60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large way that’s never quite been forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his trusty smallpox-blankets. (back to text)

  j. Grammar and Meaning. (back to text)

  k. The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. (back to text)

  l. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx. (back to text)

  a. Propranolol hydrochloride, Wyeth-Ayerst, a beta-blocking antihypertensive. (back to text)

  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, Québec, 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) (back to text)

  a. ‘Accept’ isn’t the same as ‘be crazy about,’ of course. (back to text)

  a. 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. (back to text)

  b. sic. (back to text)

  * a proud member of the ACMÉ Family of Gags ’N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises (back to text)

  a. This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called “Marijuana Thinking”; and by the way, 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. Note that the overwhelming hunger (the so-called “munchies”) that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of practical function, since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food. (back to text)

  b. Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not even all that keen on S. Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with his left leg. And anyway, S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza’s dog, and was normally exercised only by Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly specific times of day. (back to text)

  c. Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not “valuable ” but “valued.” (back to text)

  a. This is a corollary of Boston AA’s suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reas
on for this, Boston AAs with time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn’t pan out (which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even more hole-pain than before and now don’t have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include ‘Addicts Don’t Have Relationships, They Take Hostages’ (sic) and ‘An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.’ And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy’s often the issue that separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There. (back to text)

  a. N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m. (back to text)

  a. Q.v. Note 304 sub. (back to text)

  4 CBC/PATHÉ 1200h.–0000h. Summary Cartridge # 911–24–04, 4 May Y.P.Wc., © Y.P. Wc., PATHÉ Nouvelle Toujours, Ltd. (back to text)

  5 in Phelps and Phelps, The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N. North America, © Y.P.W. (back to text)

  6 Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game. (back to text)

  a. Pimple cream. (back to text)

  b. ‘Reason for all-out war,’ which Struck inserts without bothering even to check for the definition Day’d been too befogged to give, which is in and of itself almost suicidal, given that Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck’s got, or rather hasn’t. (back to text)

  a. q.v. Note 334 sub. (back to text)

  a. Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips, eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates and the Y.T.M.P.’s ‘aluminum-causes-impotence’ panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players’ minds. (back to text)

  b. A good many seniors’ schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent-Study stuff slated for last period, and when two of these seniors — e.g. Pemulis & Freer — are scheduled for a P.M. challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead of 1515h., and usually then finish up early, which is a great perk, given that they’ll get to hit both the weight room and the locker room at slack and empty times. (back to text)

  c. An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots of sun on your feet and chest, because you’re knocked out of competition by like the second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive status, maybe like toothlessness in hockey or something. (back to text)

  d. Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and thus to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs. (back to text)

  e. Q.v. Note 22 supra. (back to text)

  f. For example, during the first month of last summer’s Euroclay junket, at some prear-ranged signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around brachiatishly with their knuckles just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going ‘Er ah ee oo ah,’ over and over, until prorector N. Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did it again in the line for Customs at L’Aéroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome in someone that tall that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it’d started. (back to text)

  a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ. (back to text)

  a. (Which of course assumes there’s a point.) (back to text)

  a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché’s seminal corporation’s name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television’s term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning. … A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing. (back to text)

  a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza’s felo de se — it’s not like anybody asked her to keep the thing up. (back to text)

  a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol. (back to text)

 

 

 


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