sloppy-blotto: intoxication as JOI's creative medium
Himself emerged from the sauna and came to Lyle all sloppy-blotto and depressed over the fact that even the bastards in the avant-garde journals were complaining that even in his commercially entertaining stuff Incandenza’s fatal Achilles’ heel was plot
Context
The single a-r datum in an otherwise film-optics scene: JOI's whole late aesthetic is born of a drunk. Two entire phases of his career — Found Drama and anticonfluentialism — issue from one "sloppy-blotto" night of Wild-Turkey despair, which quietly makes alcohol the medium of his art, not merely its accompaniment. The inheritable-disease thread runs through the father's genius as much as his ruin: the bottle is where Himself does his opening-up and, per the surrounding lore, where the theory-benders end in detox. (The Found Drama hoax, the critics, and the film theory are film-optics's / irony-sincerity's — routed.)