The David Foster Wallace Reader
Page 49
Accomplice! Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Stokely ‘Dark Star’ McNair; 16 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. An aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-10-10 withdrawn from dissemination after Cartridge Scene reviewers called Accomplice! ‘… the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career.’ NOW UNRELEASED
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Dial C for Concupiscence. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne, Marla-Dean Chumm, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Yves Francoeur; 35 mm.; 122 minutes; black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style tribute to Bresson’s Les Anges du Peché, a cellular phone operator (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne), mistaken by a Québecois terrorist (Francoeur) for another cellular phone operator (Chumm) the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne) and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attaché (Chawaf). RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES—MARCH/Y.T.-S.D.B.—AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–75–43
Insubstantial Country. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt; 16 mm.; 30 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. An unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else’s delusion that his (Watt’s) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute. PRIVATE CARTRIDGE RELEASE BY POOR YORICK ENTERTAINMENT UNLIMITED
It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill; 16 mm.; 5 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out. RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES—MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B.—AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357–75–50
Cage IV—Web. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Cage V—Infinite Jim. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Death and the Single Girl. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.
The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.’ Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. James O. Incandenza, Disney Leith, Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr., Jane Ann Prickett, Herbert G. Birch, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Marla-Dean Chumm, Marlon Bain, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, Ken N. Johnson, Dianne Saltoone; Super-8 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. Fictional ‘interactive documentary’ on Boston stage production of Weiss’s 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary’s chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates’ dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade’s dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat’s scripted death, whereupon the play’s nearsighted director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat’s medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death (‘Psychosis’) descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience’s first row. 8 MM. SYNC-PROJECTION CELLULOID. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION, HOSPITALIZATION
Too Much Fun. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
The Unfortunate Case of Me. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Sorry All Over the Place. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Infinite Jest (V?). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. ‘Madame Psychosis’; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. Incandenza’s last film, Incandenza’s death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used ‘Psychosis,’ thus list the film under Incandenza’s output for Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to the film as ‘extraordinary’d and ‘far and away [James O. Incandenza’s] most entertaining and compelling work.’e West Coast archivists list the film’s gauge as ‘16… 78… n mm.,’ basing the gauge on critical allusionsf to ‘radical experiments in viewers’ optical perspective and context’ as IJ(V?)’s distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.
25. More like July-October, actually.
58. Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor.
59. Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C-II Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.
69. NA = Narcotics 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.
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.
71. The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is ‘You Can’t Unring a Bell.’
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.
81. ‘Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah’s Use of Red,’ Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).
102. International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers.
103. A quote ‘episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive [movements],’ plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing.
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 Inderala 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.
208. From Ch. 16, ‘The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,’ in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut für Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY.
224. Q.v. William James on ‘… that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,’ the line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a huge large-print edition he’d found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL–Random House–Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a volume that’s come to mean a great deal to Lenz.
225. ® The Mobil Chemical Co.’s Consumer Products Branch’s Plastics Division, Pittsford NNY.
226. ® Ibid.
227. A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.
246. A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville’s Davis Square where AAs and NAs—mostly new and young—get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are excruciating to see.
247. A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet’s version of the Hole, and it’s dreaded.
248. Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who’s decided he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in—Calvin T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2.
249. It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.
250. (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious)
251. This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn’t understand all the language of, and fears.
252. It’s against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms—more Insurance Reasons—and a week’s Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat’s personally a fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn’t see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in his sleep he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.
253. (the items from the House’s donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and far)
254. Gately’s made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight.
255. NNE street argot for any kind of handgun.
256. (Erdedy’s hands still up, w/ keys)
280. Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.
281. This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.
282. (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)
283. S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Pr
ozac were the ancestors.
305. (she thought then)
306. Some of her and Jim’s best arguments had been over the connotations of ‘Everybody’s a critic,’ which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge.
307. Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee. It’s unclear which if either’s memory is accurate, though it’s noteworthy that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, the other being the ‘Swiss hand-model’ on whose nude flank he’s been furiously tracing infinity signs all during the Moment Subject’s absence.
308. = point of view.
316. Like e.g. the times C.T. and the Moms would come out to Logan to pick Mario and Himself up from a filming trip, Mario lugging gear, Himself damp and pasty from the cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always clicking with little plastic bottles with unopenable caps, and 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.
317. © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Plc, London UK, wildly expensive hdcover; not on disk.
318. Maine having been lost altogether, recall.
319. Incandenza family idiom for leftovers.
320. Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge.
337. Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet—namely V.i. 9.