Scene 017: ydau tech catalog
Themes
Connects to
Summary
A one-sentence interstitial defining the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment entirely as a parts-list of entertainment technology: InterLace TelEntertainment, R.I.S.C. power-TPs, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, "screens so high-def you might as well be there," Yushityu nanoprocessors, killer apps. The catalog's final clause pivots without transition from the technology to its somatic price: carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. The year is its consumption apparatus, and the apparatus is already deforming the bodies using it.
What to notice
A year rendered with no verb at all: pure apposition, the era equated with its product catalog in ad-copy syntax the sentence never steps outside of. The one semicolon is the whole event — brochure on one side, medical chart on the other — and after the attaché scenes the marketing phrase "killer apps" has quietly gone literal. Notice the list's single flight of rhetoric, "screens so high-def you might as well be there": a promise of presence sold by the very apparatus whose closing ailments show bodies fixed ever more immovably here.
Beats
- p. 60: Single colon-driven sentence: year-name → ~20 items of InterLace-era home-entertainment tech → semicolon → four medical conditions caused by sitting and viewing.
Themes in this scene
- Entertainment and the Self: the era's self-description is pure spectation infrastructure; the closing ailment-list (fat glutes, strained lumbars, migraines from screens) makes the passive-viewer body the year's true monument.
Connections
Backward
- The "Yushityu" nanoprocessors in the list are the product that bought a whole year its name — the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge... (YYTMRCYTPC, 2007). Under Subsidized Time the calendar itself is an ad, and here the gadget a year is named for turns up as just another item in the catalog.
- Carlisle reads the list front-end as infantile regression — "Virtual-capable media cards" and body-attachment accessories promising "all needs are met" — which chimes with the year-name's diaper and the attaché's end-state three scenes back (scene 014).
Forward
- Functions as a hinge: dropped between Gately/DuPlessis (YDPAH) and Troeltsch's 3-Nov-YDAU sickbed, it stamps the novel's present tense.
- The InterLace/teleputer ecosystem listed here is the delivery system whose vulnerability the A.F.R. means to exploit with the Entertainment (scene 029, and the Marathe/Steeply serial throughout; the "razzle-dazzle" arrived by physical mail precisely because it's not on InterLace pulse, p. 89).
- The locker-room quiz on TPs vs. broadcast TV (scene 032, pp. 96-97) is this list turned into E.T.A. curriculum ("History of Entertainment I and II").
- Videophonic conferencing's listed matter-of-factness sets up the great videophony-collapse essay (pp. 144-151, scene 047).
Notable passages
- p. 60: "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C...." — the whole scene; the swerve at "killer apps; carpal neuralgia" is the point. As printed: the text reads "InterLace Telentertainment" here (lowercase second element), against the book's usual "InterLace TelEntertainment" — quoted as printed.
What links here
- Scene 047: videophony rise fall
- Scene 075: liberty statue product
- Scene 121: afr snatches wyyy engineer
- Gately's DuPlessis burglary (pp. 59–60)
- Troeltsch sick in bed (pp. 60–61)
- Troeltsch taken ill: a ranked body taken ill
- Troeltsch taken ill: the top-64 body reduced to Kleenex and pill-bottles
- the Year-of-the-Depend technology catalog
- the deep-shit mess that turns a life around
- the pilfered-Tenuate economy