Pages 219–223
7 November, the day before the big O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence holiday. At a third-floor Cambridge party celebrating Molly Notkin's doctoral Orals, a veiled woman named Joelle van Dyne — the name is new; this is her introduction — sits in a fiberglass chair molded as a film director, planning to lock herself in a bedroom or bath and freebase cocaine until her heart stops. The scene says so plainly and early; it is a suicide plan narrated from inside, braided with the day's wet walk across Boston and, at the end, with last night. The party runs in present tense, the walk in long unspooling sentences — the braid is the design, not a difficulty.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Cukor / Murnau / Méliès (p. 219) — real directors: Hollywood's studio craftsman; the German silent expressionist; cinema's first magician. Notkin's chairs are molded in their likenesses.
- Orals (p. 220) — real academia: the spoken doctoral qualifying exams, here in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory.
- G. W. Pabst (p. 220) — real Weimar-era German director, the specialty of Notkin's tormented beloved.
- sororal twins (p. 221) — real term: fraternal twins, female; Joelle's word for herself and Notkin.
- I.W.D. dumpsters (p. 221) — initials the scene never expands; waste infrastructure, kin to p. 216's E.W.D.
- NOTRE RAI PAYS (p. 222) — as printed; the French would be notre vrai pays, "our true country" — Québécois sentiment on a beggar's cap.
- Big Red Soda Water (p. 222) — real red cream soda, a Southern staple; the Kentucky ask the Store 24 can't fill.
- Chore Boy (p. 222) — real copper scouring pad; in freebase practice it screens the pipe and traps a smokable resin.
- Cage III: Free Show (p. 222) — one of Jim's films; it's in endnote 24's filmography, keyed back at p. 64.
After you read: three things
1. Track the purse (pp. 221–222). A cigar bought and immediately discarded — the glass tube kept; a Pepsi poured foaming down a clogged drain — the bottle kept; "There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store 24." The walk is quietly a shopping trip, and that last sentence tells you she already owns the one item that matters; the scene's final paragraph shows you why.
2. You've heard this woman before — the scene lets you place her. Veiled; "her retreat into broadcast sound"; "barely getting through the hour's show"; the letters YYY; and a life that ran "from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim." Nothing is stated outright, but every piece points at the midnight voice of pp. 181–193 — and at two Incandenzas. Do the placing; the scene trusts you to.
3. The cage paragraph (p. 222). "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage…. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage." "The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much." And the turn's occasion: "that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away" — the call you heard on p. 192. She "had in a way done as they'd made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness"; who "they" are, the scene doesn't say.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.