Infinite jest - David Wallace

[97] It’s both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college scholarship (or ‘Ride’), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not Orin Incandenza) have any real kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self-esteem-wise, since opting for the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an admission of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show.

[98] And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose lordotic presence in a room Tavis’d flee just as Avril was fleeing from the temptation of overlobbying Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a room there’d be the sound of a tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and Avril’s flights’ vectors met.

[99] MA Dept. of Revenue.

[100] The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9 % of what goes on in one’s life is actually none of one’s business, with the.1 % under one’s control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9 %, which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately’s forehead turn purple.

[101] Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild.

[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.

[104] In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side.

[105] A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D. discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them.

[106] There’s a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP’s w/ phone consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid from lurking in his office’s waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on ‘the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield’ — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room’s units) can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity that E.T.A.’s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place.

[107] E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only viewing, later this month.

[108] Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several weeks; WETA doesn’t broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so many prorectors’ classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I, to Saturdays.

[109] Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc’s its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth.

[110] Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario’s old Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon’s odd mismatched challenge matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The air still damp after lunchtime’s rain. Hal’s own odd match was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow’s Interdependence Day communal supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person’s own specially selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have their own special private day-before-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts’ north sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday’s postprandial gala and filmiest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the telephone’s power unit’s console. Its antenna is retracted and it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone’s ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system’s power console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario’s TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin’s days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see everything’s quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from Orin at I4l2h. Orin had said he’d just called to ask whether by any chance Hal’d ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. Dickinson’s canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose (of Texas).’ ‘Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for Me,’ Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. ‘I hope the Father in the skies Will lift his little Girl.’ Actually more like sort of sung. There’d been professional-locker-room sounds in the background — locker doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, personal stereos, hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of locker rooms everywhere, junior or pro. ‘On my volcano grows the Grass A meditative spot/ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult skin. A black man’s falsetto laughter. Orin’s recorded voice said he’d just grabbed an odd free second to inquire what Hal’s machine might make of this fact.

Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the bedside table, idly and for no special reason riffling through densely packed letters tri-folded and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal correspondence Mario’s rescued from wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and quietly saved in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet’s stuff. Mario’s closet has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket of very cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one bucket to the other and back again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls’ West Courts. Someone little in the hall outside the closed door shouts ‘Guess again!’ to someone else farther down the hall. None of the Hush Puppy box’s snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario’s bed is loosely, unanally made. Hal’s bed is unmade. Hal and Mario’s mother had done her undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons in E. Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around him. The phone twitters. Ample make this bed, or Ample make this bed. The phone twitters again.

A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL INCANDENZA HAS SENT HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE the FELO DE SE OF DR. J. O. INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY

QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT — HERE’S THE MOVING PART — SEEMS to IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, STILL

20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D.

Dear Filbert,3

It’s been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsakenb — today is perishing hot, windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral unit on the grounds has its pistil aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless fashion, for the bees are about. The whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday, your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous it sounded like a tuba, and he dispatched Mr. Harde and the grounds crew with skeet rifles and orders to ‘ …bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down.’ I shall spare you details of the subsequent misadventures of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering satisfactorily.

The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams’ departure yesterday for Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the pedagogical tiller. It seems not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest off on the European clay junket. I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window’s glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane’s impossible little bullet-hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.

As for me, I’ve swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles’s videophone and trying to cajole the editors of various supermarket trade publications to run M.G.M.’sc latest plea for amending Less to Fewer’m those!*#!*# Express Check-Out lanes. One old editorial codger said that he’d dearly love to help me out but that his newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues of promotional display. When I suggested that a little comic relief in the form of the L--->F bulletin might not be amiss, he chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However, I did manage to twist the arms (harder to do telephonically than one might think) of Produce Weekly, Star Market s Quarterly Register, and PriceChopper’s Shelf and Cart, so the wheels of adjectival justice continue, albeit creakily, to turn.

The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood cholesterol tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered was no worse than a rather unperspicuous “Normal to Upper-normal” (sic), the penultimate modifier has caused, as you might anticipate, much pacing and high-decibel whingeing, as well as vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles has already, for some months now, made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of fish-liver oil just before he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night. Your brothers have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his oil, purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward. I e-ordered the poor man a low-lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell present the day the results came in, and your Uncle Charles has already pored over the thing and marked several yummers. We’re to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight, fast-laners that we are. I do suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice brand into his toothpaste before this spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart — as it were!

My, this machine does let one maunder on. I’d best get back to harrying grocers. One of this fall’s matriculates6 is the son of a man who’s apparently become an immensely wealthy Telegrocerf in the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue will simply disappear in these here parts as well.

It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at all appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy vegetable per day.

Oh — ‘twas wonderful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a detailed account and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to know you.

Miss You and Love You Lots, and c.

AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT

Ms. Incandenza Dear__________________

Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints® are so fortunate enough to receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid8, we regrettably say

ORTKTINCANDENZA #71__________can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans Saints”________________ ______has asked me to say

Thank-You for your message of support, and best wishes.

Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 X 25 centimeter personally autographed

action photo of ORIN INCANDENZA_______________#71___________________} as

our way of saying Thank-You and how important you’re letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine

Assistant Mailroom Technician

And c.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like “Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

‘A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink. Plus I don’t think you quite meant proviso.’’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’