Infinite Jest (197 page)

44.
Professional euphemism for involuntary interrogation, either w/ or w/o physical inducements.

45.
See Note 304
sub
.

46.
Over-the-counter topical stuff for the corticatization of skin, tincture of benzoin
facilitates the development of the kinds of callus that don’t get blood-blisters underneath.
Way more common and universal among serious players than Lemon Pledge. Finding the
smell of t. of b. nauseous, some junior players prefer an applied layer of corn starch
or baby powder, which makes the t. of b. easier to wash off later but also leaves
weird little white fingerprints over everything you touch.

47.
Le Front de la Libération de la Québec,
rather a younger and rowdier and less implacably businesslike cell than the A.F.R.,
and symbolically adopting certain cultural customs, musics and motifs associated with
Hawaii, supposedly an ironic nod to the idea that Québec is now, too, a kind of annex
or territory of the U.S., a Canadian province only on paper, and separated from its
real captor-nation by distances of space and culture that are unbridgeable.

48.
The progressive asymmetrical narrowing of one or more cardiac sinuses; can be either
atherosclerotic or neoplastic; rare before continental Interdependence; now the third-leading
cause of death among adults of Québec and New Brunswick and the seventh among adults
of the Northeastern U.S.A.; associated with chronic low-level exposure to 2,3,7,8
Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Di- and -Trioxin compounds.

49.
Redundancy
sic
.

50.
Said galoots also known, in the old founder’s AA circle, Enfield MA’s White Flag
Group, as ‘The Crocodiles.’

51.
Syntax
sic,
which had helped drive Mrs. Avril Incandenza—her Op-Ed letters and formal complaints
apparently ignored at every political level—to help found the Militant Grammarians
of Massachusetts, ever since a bramble in the flank of advertisers, corporations,
and all fast-and-loose-players with the integrity of public discourse—see
sub.

52.
The Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectometry scan uses particle-bombardment and a positive-ion
read by a spectrometer. It’s the mid-range test of choice for corporations and athletic
bodies, way less expensive than chromosomatic breakdowns of hair samples, but—as long
as environmental controls on the hardware’re strictly observed—more comprehensive
and reliable than the older E.M.I.T. and AbuScreen/RIA urine tests.

53.
Eschaton is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the EndStat®
ROM-run nuclear-conflagration game.

54.
Viz. Prescriptive Grammar (Grade 10), Descriptive Grammar (11), Grammar and Meaning
(12).

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.

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….

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.

58.
Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor.

59.
Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C-II Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

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.

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).

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.

63.
(the student engineer’s analogy)

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.

65.
E.T.A.s’ moniker for the Headmaster’s House.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

74.
Davis Cup is male, Wightman female.

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 WhataBurger,
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.