IJ study archive

Mario's birth and defects — "a gaily wrapped package forwarded from…"

quote

a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza’s attorney revealed that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped and forwarded for Mario’s thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5 tri-lensed camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator’s helmet and supported by struts whose ends were the inverted tops of training-room crutches and curved nicely over Mario’s shoulders, so the Bolex H64 required no digital prehensility because it fit over Mario’s oversized face like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a sewing-machine-adapted foot treadle […] and Mario’s earliest pieces of digital juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, pointing-every-which-way quality of like home movies shot at a dead run.

Context

The willed Bolex: the book's one unambiguous bequest of love is a camera designed and built for exactly this body, arriving gaily wrapped from a dead man's attorney the first Christmas after the felo de se. Mario doesn't inherit his father's filmography so much as get built into it — the head-mount completes the optical instrument the birth-defects catalog began. "[T]hirteenth Xmas" cited as written; Carlisle's chronology makes it Mario's fifteenth (see Flags).

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