David Wallace - Infinite jest

[197] (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.)

[198] Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: ‘The central activity of the MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dangerous drugs and other techniques [sic] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service Division employees, agents, and contractors.’ — Civil Action #80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980.

[199] Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.’s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule C–IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties.

[200] Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss’s analysis, which you can bet was developed outside Gately’s earshot.

[201] Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside of hinges, etc.

[202] Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to go anywhere near it.

[203] Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic.

[204] Jolly-Jolt® hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy® (celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo® cigars, Oh, Waiter® plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See London!® X-ray specs, etc. usually just trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards, from the Waltham facilities of Acme Inc., a.k.a. ‘The Acme Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises,’ at a substantial and politically motivated discount, seeing that the company’s owned by the Quebec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul who’d been such a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and who over a decade back had exploited the then-U.S.-owned then-Acme’s severe PR and cash-flow problems right after the serial Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile t/o the firm for about 30 % of its real worth.

[205] Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank. Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub.

[206] Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that ‘To hear the squeak’ is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada’s euphemisms for sudden and violent de-mapping.

[207] L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable ‘va chier, putain!’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context.

[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 fur Neutronenphysik und Reak-tortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY.

[209] E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome’s fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo-Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they’re pale. Hal at the height of his toss, knees more bent than he’d like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up over Axford’s head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid’s hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx’s U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy Wingo’s front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. They’re not in a straight line; they’re more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet off what looks like Longwood’s synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year’s seniors out in the pavilion’s webbed chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. Clarke’s cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman’s call. Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the whole court’s tilted.

[210] Hal and Mario have long since had to accept athe fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males.

a. ‘Accept’ isn’t the same as ‘be crazy about,’ of course.

[211] As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis’s deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now in his final E.T.A. year the dread’s increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis takes such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars — making a Substance-customer explicitly suborn him, etc. — and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last birthday with the poster over Pemulis’s room’s console that has a careworn large-crowned King sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, I’M PARANOID — BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?

[212] Though it’s unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis’s charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle’s; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline.

[213] Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible humans, errant shots are always going off sticks’ frames and net-posts and even fences and bouncing and rolling into other people’s territory. In starting at usually the quarterfinal rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other people’s balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell ‘Sorry!’ or ‘A little help on Three?’ or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a point to be finished, to get their own balls. It’s a curious inability to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey deLint can seem to correct.

[214] Where it’s a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run-all — the — way — back — up — and — tap — the — netcord — with — your — stick — j ust — as — Nwangi — or — Thode-hits-another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back-or-they-pile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment pure pain-fest.

[215] A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D. had called MA’s Department of Social Services and characterized disciplinary Pukers as child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed and humorless D.S.S.-ladies who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt’s actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid who’d dropped the dime.

[216] No clue.

[217] Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams, because a singular disadvantage of attending a North American academy is that O.N.A.N.T.A. rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age-division, and John Wayne got the nods.

[218] The late J. O. Incandenza’s Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.’s development of those weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza’s first unsettling entrepreneurial payday — E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened Charles Tavis.

[219] Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children’s program.

[220] ® CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of r.p.m.s, so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting hurled backwards all the way across the office by the machine, which is what accounts for the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall opposite the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with at first, once requiring a back-brace.

[221] The Satellite pro Hal’d gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal’s name was AIL

[222] N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but cont. id. Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninílected grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply barely got an ‘Acceptable’ in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna / Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.