Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1031

[277] Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’

[278] Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.

[279] The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating.

[280] Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

[281] This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

[282] (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)

[283] S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.

[284] A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse.

[285] This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it.

[286] Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ‘drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ‘drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though.

[287] Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3.

[289] In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS: OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to.

[290] Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.