Hal supine, Pemulis wants to interface (p. 911)
these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit […] in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave—and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily, so that tears run down Heaven’s gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from view, glistening slightly, below the lectern’s frame of sight. Then this too began to seem familiar.
Context
The last five minutes of Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms…, cued up at Hal's request: a man weeping steadily inside a monotone nobody receives — grief in full production and full non-transmission at once, the exact condition Hal is entering. The closing line is the scene's own diagnosis: even this image of unwitnessed weeping "began to seem familiar." ("Genitaliadoodles" run together as written.)