David Wallace - Infinite jest

Too Much Fun. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

The Unfortunate Case of Me. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Sorry All Over the Place. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Infinite Jest (Vï). 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’ dand ‘far and away [James O. Incandenza’s] most entertaining and compelling work.’ eWest Coast archivists list the film’s gauge as ‘16 … 78 … n mm.,’ basing the gauge on critical allusions fto ‘radical experiments in viewers’ optical perspective and context’ as IJ(Vì)’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.

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 endor-phin 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!9OOs-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., athe 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 Quebec’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.

[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 Liberation de la Quebec, 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 Quebec 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 Quebec 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).