Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house — "It was only after Himself’s death…"
It was only after Himself’s death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal–Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself’s work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun.
Context
The academic-reception layer, dated to the death: JOI's shitty-editor-or-theorist question becomes tenure material only posthumously, and the après-garde's "central conundra" turn out to be the novel's own — ambitious-boring vs. shitty-fun, art vs. entertainment in the home-viewing age. Hal's kicker keeps the family's critical superiority intact: "The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference as a verb and pluralizing conundrum as conundra." (n.379 hangs here; its raw sits outside this theme's targets.)