Scene 062: notkin party joelle overdose

• p. 227: Joelle proceeds to the Back Bay-edge brownstone she once lived in with Orin and "performed in" with his father, now Notkin's; Notkin, A.B.D. as of yesterday, passed Orals dressed as Marx critiquing Marxist film theory as Marx.
• p. 228: What Notkin doesn't know: Joelle's been "in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B.," lives "hand-to-lung" on JOI's grossly generous trust, never slept with him, and has never seen the completed Entertainment — nor met anyone who has (n.80 unpacks the Avril/Volvo backstory and the testament burying the Master with him).
• pp. 228-229: Arrival ritual — Notkin's mock-surprise greeting, the double-cheek kiss through the lifted veil, British-Columbian apple juice; the purse with Pepsi bottle, cigar tube, lighter, glycine bags rests below her dangling clogs.
• pp. 229-230: Party panorama: Minimal Mambo dancers, the framed-frames "retroironic" wall, and the mirror JOI cut for "the scenes of that last ghastly thing he'd made her stand before"; Joelle's memory of JOI's "damaged grinning boy" Mario — whom she never got to know "because Orin had disliked him" — laughing off child-actor Smothergill's contortions (p. 229); the Ecstasy-flushed girl in the sailor top ("I was just looking at my tits… aren't they beautiful") whose artless sincerity moves Joelle almost to intervene — named Melinda at pp. 233/235.
• pp. 230-231: The cage/door meditation: was the lethally entertaining thing made of her face "a cage or really a door?"; the microwave logistics (how would you rig it to run with the door open?) and "Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?"
• pp. 231-234: Collage of overheard academic party-voices: the "technologically constituted space" Heideggerians; the Kennedy-jelly-doughnut film anecdote; Brady Bunch-revival outrage; the prosthetic scholar's Convexity/Concavity tirade ("Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back… You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue"); and the samizdat rumor itself — "an aesthetic pharmaceutical… Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues… a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone" (p. 233), countered by a skeptic calling it a recycled "cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor" (p. 234).
• p. 234: The pre-suicide's classic longing ("Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything"): name, Shiny Prize KY origins, "I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out."
• pp. 234-235: Into Notkin's bedroom and bathroom; the door's collage (Kinski as Paganini, Léaud as Doinel) includes the offprint of Joelle's own lone monograph (n.81); freebase history — "an afflated orgasm of the heart," Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' always at the spike's tip; the stuff "not just her encaging god but her lover."
• pp. 235-237: The cook, in procedural detail: counter swept clear ("everything eventually has to fall"), veil unpinned and used as oven-mitt, Lady Delphina's glycine baglets, soda and water in the cigar tube over wooden matches — "the most deliberate she's been able to be in at least a year"; outside, an E.W.D. waste-drum projectile arcs over the Enfield hill toward the Concavity.
• p. 237: The -plex memory: front-row movies in Paducah with her own personal Daddy, "she'd never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of" — until this lover; "Entertainment is blind."
• p. 238: The freebase "wiener" slides out; she chops ~20 hits onto the folded veil, melts the hole in the Pepsi bottle, shapes the foil screen; stray memories (Reeves Mainwaring's "life is essentially one long search for an ashtray"; 'The Face of the Deep' vs. the Hamlet skull-fragment title; JOI's frightened look her last memory of his face).
• pp. 238-239: "Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure"; the farewell inventory (Notkin, the U.H.I.D. brothers and sisters, the YYY engineer, Uncle Bud, stepmother in the Locked Ward, her Daddy) dismissed as "sentimental and banal"; facts vs. abstraction ("Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts").
• pp. 239-240: The hit: one enormous unbroken sentence slides her down the wall, "uprightly fetal," deveiled, "maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.)"; she reloads using the last load's ashes as filter; the post-New Formalist knocks ("amid rather a queer scent"); she is knelt vomiting over the tub as helicopters' "fat fingers of blue light from one sky" search.

Backward

• "Comstock" and "Duquette" of the p. 233 samizdat chatter are co-authors (with Posner) of the scholarly apparatus behind n.24's filmography (see the n024 file) — the book's own footnote-scholars walking around the party discussing the lethal entry in their filmography; Duquette's three silent Berkeley colleagues imply the 1-2 April Boston events (attaché serial) are replaying out west.

• The party chatter (pp. 233-234) is the reader's first secondhand evidence the Entertainment is loose and lethal among civilians (Berkeley not answering phones) — converges with the medical attaché thread (scenes 007, 011, 014, 025, 028).

• Self-introduction echoes (Carlisle's pairings): "Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything" ↔ Orin's dawn call to Hal (p. 32, scene 006); "I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out" ↔ Hal's "I am in here" (p. 3, scene 001) — the book's three barest assertions of personhood.

• Hamlet scaffold: the rejected title 'The Face of the Deep' vs. the chosen skull-fragment title, JOI's frightened look, and the dive itself reading as an Ophelia plunge (Carlisle's pairing) — the family-hamlet machinery present even with no Incandenza in the room.

• Direct continuation of scenes 058/060: the kit (Pepsi bottle, cigar tube, glycine bags, Chore Boys) assembled on the 7 Nov walk; "the Chore Boys and panties" recur as foraging filters (p. 238).

• 'The Face of the Deep' vs. the Hamlet skull-fragment title (p. 238): the rejected title resurfaces as her radio sign-on ("And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep," scene 053, p. 184), and the chosen one names the Entertainment's Hamlet scaffolding ("Infinite Jest" = graveyard scene).

Forward

• n.80 is load-bearing: Avril's name-in-the-steamed-Volvo-window infidelity; JOI's testament ordering the cartridge buried in the brass casket with him and willing Joelle the "addiction-enabling" annuity — directly feeds the A.F.R./U.S.O.U.S. hunt for the Master and the grave-digging in scenes 003/Gately's final pages. The grave is in Avril's family plot in Québec, "Heart of the Concavity" (per n.234); and Carlisle poses the Master-copy problem at its first availability: if the cartridge went to the grave, how did a copy reach the attaché (scene 007)? — the question the whole plot machinery exists to answer.
• The microwave-rigging musings (p. 231) are answered almost verbatim two scenes later by Orin's identical question and Hal's forensic account (scene 064, pp. 248-251) — Wallace runs the same wound through two POVs back-to-back.
• Joelle survives this: Pat Montesian's intake gets her into Ennet House 8 Nov YDAU (per n.134; first seen there at the White Flag meeting, scene 074, p. 362, and in the Gately veil-doctrine interface, scene 104), where she becomes Madame Psychosis-in-recovery and eventually Gately's beloved. Notkin's garbled version of this whole party and of Joelle's history is delivered to U.S.O.U.S. at pp. 787-795 (scene 159); Joelle's own Q-format debriefing by Steeply is scene 178 (pp. 938-941) — this scene is the ground truth both interrogations distort.
• The traffic-helicopter stray thought ("Somebody at their Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an accident," p. 238) points at Lateral Alice Moore's accident-lore at E.T.A.
• The Ecstasy girl's "heartbreaking openness… either terribly stupid or terribly brave" (p. 230) prefigures the irony-vs-sincerity axis of the AA chapters Joelle is headed into.

• p. 230: "I was just looking at my tits… aren't they beautiful" — artless sincerity piercing an ironized room; Joelle's class-betraying diphthong analysis.
• p. 231: "the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages" — suicide, addiction, and the Entertainment fused in one clause.
• p. 233: "Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back" — the annular thesis in Québecois English.
• p. 234: "Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne…" — the pre-suicide's longing; the book's barest self-introduction.
• p. 235: Bernini's St. Teresa at the graph's spike — "not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love."
• p. 237: "It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she'd first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live." — the addiction-recovery anthology's definition of Too Much; "She is not stupid" right after.
• p. 237: "she'd never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of… Entertainment is blind." — the -plex memory.
• p. 238: "She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure." — the scene's named threshold; the Entertainment's lethality restated as a dosage.
• p. 235: "His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again." — JOI-as-addict in one breath; pairs with "done as they'd made Jim do near the end" (scene 058).
• pp. 239-240: the single overdose sentence ("…sent her sliding down along the wall…") — the prose enactment of the hit; "Prettiest G.O.A.T." decoded here.