Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 969
David Foster Wallace
[102] International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers.
[103] A quote ‘episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive [movements],’ plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing.
[104] In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side.
[105] A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D. discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them.
[106] There’s a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP’s w/ phone consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid from lurking in his office’s waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on ‘the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield’ — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room’s units) can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity that E.T.A.’s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place.
[107] E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only viewing, later this month.
[108] Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several weeks; WETA doesn’t broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so many prorectors’ classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I, to Saturdays.
[109] Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc’s its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth.
[110] Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario’s old Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon’s odd mismatched challenge matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The air still damp after lunchtime’s rain. Hal’s own odd match was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow’s Interdependence Day communal supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person’s own specially selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have their own special private day-before-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts’ north sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday’s postprandial gala and filmiest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the telephone’s power unit’s console. Its antenna is retracted and it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone’s ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system’s power console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario’s TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin’s days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see everything’s quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from Orin at I4l2h. Orin had said he’d just called to ask whether by any chance Hal’d ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. Dickinson’s canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose (of Texas).’
