Infinite Jest (196 page)

Very Low Impact.
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Marla-Dean
Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 minutes; color; sound.
A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students
and employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357–97–29

The Night Wears a Sombrero.
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?). Ken N. Johnson, Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne
Saltoone, ‘Madame Psychosis’; 78 mm.; 105 minutes; color; silent/sound. Parody/homage
to Lang’s
Rancho Notorious,
a nearsighted apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing vengeance for a gunslinger’s
(Johnson’s) rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner
(Saltoone) he (the cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger
after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally
aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’).
Listed by some archivists as completed the preceding year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE
#357–56–51

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# 357–10–10 withdrawn from dissemination after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 allusions
^f
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.

^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.

^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
.

^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.

^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.

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

^f.
Ibid.

25.
More like July–October, actually.

26.
Synthetically enhanced enkephalin, an opiate-like pentapeptide or so-called endorphin
manufactured in the human spine, one of the compounds prominently involved in the
infamous ‘CadaverGate’ scandal that brought down so many funeral directors in the
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.

27.
Metro Boston subdialectical argot—origin unknown—for cannabis, pot, grass, du-Bois,
dope, ganja, bhang, herb, hash, m. jane, kif, etc.; with ‘Bing Crosby’ designating
cocaine and organic methoxies (’drines), and—inexplicably—‘Doris’ standing for synthetic
dickies, psychs, and phenyls.

28.
Monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, a venerable class of antidepressants/anxiolytics, of
which Parnate—SmithKline Beecham’s product-name for tranylcypromine sulfate—is a member.
Zoloft is sertraline hydrochloride, a serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor (SRI) not all that
dissimilar to Prozac, manufactured by Pfizer-Roerig.

29.
Electro-Convulsive Therapy.

30.
A neutral boric acid eyewash, a kind of turbo-charged Visine, available over-counter
from Wyeth Labs, with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue plastic that’s downright
gorgeous when held up to a window’s light.

31.
Schtitt’s term for Mr. A. deLint, which means technically ‘soulmate’ or ‘spouse’
but isn’t meant at all sexually w/r/t deLint, we can rest assured.

32.
Roughly, ‘They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.’

33.
I.e., ‘Before Subsidization’ or the beginning of the subsidized O.N.A.N.ite lunar
calendar under President Gentle; see
sub
.

34.
A.k.a. ‘E.L.D.,’ that still-green shoot off the pure branch of math that deals with
systems and phenomena whose chaos is beyond even Mandelbrotian math’s Strange Equations
and Random Attractants, a delimiting reaction against the Chaos Theories of fractal-happy
meteorologists and systems analysts, E.L.D., whose post-Gödelian theorems and nonexistence
proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat in certain cases,
hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification. Incandenza, whose frustrated
interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four different careers, would
have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had he survived.

35.
I.e., presumably, ‘of-Georg-Cantor,’ Cantor being a 1900s-era set-theorist (German
also) and more or less founder of transfinite mathematics, the man who proved some
infinities were bigger than other infinities, and whose 1905-ish Diagonal Proof demonstrated
that there can be an infinity of things between any two things no matter how close
together the two things are, which D. Proof deeply informed Dr. J. Incandenza’s sense
of the transstatistical aesthetics of serious tennis.

36.
Low-Bavarian for something like ‘wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory
beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,’ supposedly.

37.
Wheelchair.

38.
Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g.
q.v. Part I of Goethe’s
Faust,
the Walpurgisnacht six-toed danceathon on the Harz-Bröcken, in which there’s described
a classic
‘Bröckengespenstphänom.’
(
Gespenst
means specter or wraith.)

39.
Marathe’s superior in the A.F.R.,
^a
the leader of the Wheelchair Assassins’ U.S.A. cell, and the former boyhood friend
of Rémy Marathe’s late older brothers, both struck and killed by trains.
^b

^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.

^b.
See Note 304
sub
.

40.
In other words, M. Fortier and the A.F.R. (as far as Marathe knew) believed that
Marathe was functioning as a kind of ‘triple agent’ or duplicitous ‘double agent’—at
Fortier’s direction, Marathe had pretended to approach B.S.S. seeking to trade knowledge
of the A.F.R.’s anti-O.N.A.N. activities for protection and medical care for his hideously
ill wife (Marathe’s)—only (as far as Marathe can know) Marathe and very few B.S.S.
operatives know that Marathe is now only
pretending
to pretend to betray, that M. Steeply is fully aware that Marathe responds to B.S.S.’s
summonses with what M. Fortier believes is his (Fortier’s) full knowledge, that M.
Fortier is not (as far as Marathe and Steeply can reasonably posit) aware that Steeply
and B.S.S. are aware that Fortier is aware of Marathe’s meetings with Steeply, and
that Marathe’s own violent death will be the smallest of his (Marathe’s) problems
should his Mont-Tremblant countrymen come to suspect the even-numbered total of his
final loyalties.

41.
Intra-O.N.A.N. sobriquet for ‘acting as a double agent’; similarly w/ ‘tripling,’
and so on.

42.
The ‘thing of important’ seems to be that Marathe’s A.F.R. superiors believe he only
is pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technology
for his wife; but that in fact he really
is
betraying them (the superiors, his country)—probably actually for that medical tech—and
is thus only pretending only to pretend.

43.
Chronic inflammation of the terminal ileum and adjacent tissues, named in dubious
honor of a Dr. Crohn in B.S. 1932.