Pages 375–376
One paragraph, undated except "early in the O.N.A.N.ite temporo-subsidized era": a single retrospective sentence-cluster about the night Himself came out of the E.T.A. sauna "all sloppy-blotto" to Lyle — the sweat-fed weight-room guru of pp. 127–28 — despairing over what the critics kept saying about his films. It reads like a footnote to nothing; in fact it's a trapdoor, and nearly all of its content hangs below the line in endnotes 144 and 145. Budget real time for the flip.
Terms, in order of appearance
- The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass (p. 375) — a JOI film; his filmography lives back in endnote 24.
- anticonfluentialism (p. 376) — JOI's genre of story-lines that pointedly never converge; named here at its birthplace.
- Found Drama (p. 376) — on the model of real "found art" (objets trouvés); endnote 145 explains the form in full.
- McLean (n.145) — real psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Mass.; by then "almost his own private reserved room."
- après-garde (n.145) — coinage after avant-garde: the behind-guard; JOI's deliberate atavism.
After you read: three things
1. The scene is mostly underground. Up top: one sentence. Below: endnote 145 is a long interview transcript — Orin, on the record, dated 3 November YDAU, the questioner a "Helen Steeply" of Moment magazine. That's the soft-profiler Orin complained about on pp. 242–58 and the new cover you watched get assigned on p. 375, now operating in real time, five days before the Interdependence Day you just left. The endnote is doing plot the text won't admit to.
2. Weigh the wound against what you already know. The despair that started it all: even friendly critics said "Incandenza's fatal Achilles' heel was plot... no movement that sucked you in and drew you along" (p. 375). You've spent a whole night on a Tucson ledge listening to two agents describe what his alleged last work does to viewers. The book never draws the line between the complaint and the overcorrection; it just hands you both ends.
3. Found Drama itself is worth the flip on its own. A phone-book page, a dart, and the name it hits stars in a ninety-minute drama with no camera, audience, director, or stage — "in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama" (n.145) — a hoax that landed real grants and lecture tours. Orin adds that Himself especially liked that the star "might have already moved away or recently died." And note who the main text says keeps this secret: Mario and Ms. Joelle van Dyne — a quiet ranking of the man's true intimates.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.