David Wallace - Infinite jest
The Night Wears a Sombrero. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?). Ken N. Johnson, Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne Saltoone, ‘Madame Psychosis’; 78 mm.; 105 minutes; color; silent/sound. Parody/homage to Lang’s Rancho Notorious, a nearsighted apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing vengeance for a gunslinger’s (Johnson’s) rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner (Saltoone) he (the cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’). Listed by some archivists as completed the preceding year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-56-51
Accomplice! Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cos-grove Watt, Stokely ‘Dark Star’ McNair; 16 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. An aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-10-10 withdrawn from dissemination after Cartridge Scene reviewers called Accomplice! ‘… the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career.’ NOW UNRELEASED
Entitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Dial C for Concupiscence. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne, Maria-Dean Chumm, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Yves Fran-coeur; 35 mm.; 122 minutes; black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style tribute to Bresson’s Les Anges du Peché, a cellular phone operator (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne), mistaken by a Québecois terrorist (Francoeur) for another cellular phone operator (Chumm) the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne) and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attache (Chawaf). RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B. — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-43
Insubstantial Country. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt; 16 mm.; 30 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. An unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else’s delusion that his (Watt’s) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute. PRIVATE CARTRIDGE RELEASE BY POOR YORICK ENTERTAINMENT UNLIMITED
It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill;
16 mm.; 5 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out. RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-50
Cage IV— Web. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Cage V–Infinite Jim. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Death and the Single Girl. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.
The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.’Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. James O. Incan-denza, Disney Leith, Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr., Jane Ann Prickett, Herbert G. Birch, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Maria-Dean Chumm, Marlon Bain, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, Ken N. Johnson, Dianne Saltoone; Super-8 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. Fictional ‘interactive documentary’ on Boston stage production of Weiss’s 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary’s chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates’ dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade’s dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat’s scripted death, whereupon the play’s nearsighted director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat’s medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death (‘Psychosis’) descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience’s first row. 8 MM. SYNC-PROJECTION CELLULOID. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION, HOSPITALIZATION
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’d and ‘far and away [James O. Incandenza’s] most entertaining and compelling work.’e West Coast archivists list the film’s gauge as ‘16 … 78 … n mm.,’ basing the gauge on critical allusionsf to ‘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.,a the 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).
