Hal's TV-ad and InterLace history reverie
Hal happens to know the fall and rise of millennial U.S. advertising exceptionally well, because one of the only two academic things he’s ever written about anything even remotely filmic [n.161] was a mammoth research paper on the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry. This was the final and grade-determining project in Mr. U. Ogilvie’s year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies in May of Y.P.W.; and Hal, a seventh-grader and only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D., wrote about TV-advertising’s demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events had taken place at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts […]
Context
Interdependence Day gala, YDAU: Hal, stoned and four cannoli deep, recaps his old seventh-grade term paper. The theme beat is the aside: Hal's childhood runs on a dictionary odometer — at ten he's "not even up to J yet" (p. 30, above), by seventh grade "only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D." The alphabet as a growth chart is the lexical prodigy's biography in miniature.