Hal vs. Stice, the bleacher talk

To the people in the bleachers who never knew him, JOI exists only as a cloud of secondhand epithets. Steeply, working the interview, can only reach the dead father through periphrasis — "the Founder," "the punter Incandenza's father, who also I am being told dabbled in filming," "the punter's father, who dabbled in films," and from Poutrincourt "a student of types of sight," "a student of… this relation between oneself and what one sees." The man who made the Entertainment killing people across the country is, on his own academy's bleachers, a bundle of vague tags relayed by a Québecois prorector who "came after" and a spy who never met him. This is the absence pole at its coldest: not a father lost to his sons but a father who has become unknowable to the world, present only as hearsay drifting over the courts he built.