Tiny Ewell rides to Ennet House (pp. 86–87)
The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell’s roommate at St. Mel’s Hospital’s detoxification unit sits in a blue plastic straight-back chair in front of his and Ewell’s room’s window’s air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents.
Context
Spectation abstracted until the content disappears entirely. The detoxing roommate has found something to watch that isn't a screen at all — an air conditioner, whose grille the prose insists on calling "its screen of horizontal vents" — and he gazes into it raptly, works the dial through its settings the way a viewer works channels, and produces "the little smiles and grimaces of a person who's being thoroughly entertained." It's the whole appetite laid bare: the posture of the enraptured viewer requires no actual entertainment, only a rectangle to aim the face at. If the culture can make a man ecstatic in front of a gushing appliance, the samizdat is merely the same posture perfected — the difference is degree, not kind, and the vent-watcher shows you the kind.