IJ Book Club Ep. 03: To sleep, perchance to dream? — early season-1 panel on the Gately/DuPlessis burglary, JOI's biography, Kate Gompert, and a first tour of the filmography (pp. ~55–79 + endnote 24)
TL;DR
Third meeting of the book club (the actual first meeting went unrecorded), a video-call group of mostly rereaders plus at least one first-timer, working the opening-stretch reading: the Gately/DuPlessis burglary, the teleputer aside, Troeltsch sick in bed and the face-in-the-floor nightmare, the JOI-and-Avril biography paragraphs, Pemulis's drug talk and Hal's tennis-court dream, Kate Gompert's psych-ward interview, the medical attache's wife coming home — then a long unplanned tour of the filmography endnote. Recap-heavy by design (the host stops repeatedly to orient the first-timer), but genuinely theory-productive for an early episode: an Avril-as-possible-infiltrator reading of the conference meeting, the stolen-cartridge custody chain toward Sixties Bob and the Antitois, a Pemulis-tests-DMZ-dosages-on-marginal-players speculation, the Hamlet soliloquy read into Gompert's wanting out, and the filmography treated as the closest thing to confirmation the book offers. Also rich in dated 2022 first-read and reread reader-effect testimony. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.
Key claims
- Coverage: the session runs from the Gately burglary section through the attache's wife turning her head toward the cartridge viewer, plus the filmography endnote; heard page anchors are the reading target of 121 (page ref ASR-derived), the year-establishing paragraph at the bottom of 66 (page ref ASR-derived), Gompert's why-are-you-here exchange near 70 (page ref ASR-derived), and Poultry in Motion at 990 in the host's copy (page ref ASR-derived); the host also places the group about a hundred pages in. In print terms that is roughly the pp. 55–79 stretch plus endnote 24. They explicitly defer the next section — heard as the shit part, almost certainly the Schtitt section that follows in print — to the next meeting. [00:21, 01:16, 01:39–01:40, 01:47, 01:48–01:49, 02:07]
- Housekeeping that dates the tape: meeting three, first meeting unrecorded; scheduling talk about American Thanksgiving and a Sunday the 27th matches the feed date (Thu, 10 Nov 2022; 2:14:01). One member is in and out with a newborn; one member freezes on the call — a video-call session. [00:00, 00:15, 01:24, 02:12–02:13]
- Gately recap done carefully: the 90-day bit and cell-floor withdrawal, the toothbrush-photo revenge on the ADA (the novel rewording the Shakespearean revenge-served-cold maxim as chilled — noted on-air as another Shakespeare thread), the fake-botched-burglary MO, the gag and the accidental suffocation of the cold-sufferer, who the group first misremembers as Fortier before correcting to Guillaume DuPlessis, the liaison keeping the separatist factions from infighting. [00:02–00:13, 00:17–00:19]
- Panel affection for Gately runs high (a member says she had a crush on him; the group calls him top of the list of characters the book lets you forgive), balanced by one member noticing on reread that the gagging plan is more violent than the gentle-giant image she carries. [00:00–00:02, 00:11–00:12]
- The ADA recognizes Gately's MO immediately and bides his time — an A.D.A. "whose wife now needed Valium even just to floss" (p. 60); the group flags the turn-a-life-around phrasing as one they hear again in the AA material. [00:20–00:21]
- Noticing work on textures: the corpse carried out still seated with feet like purple loaves is offered as the book's first Lynchian moment (grotesque-funny you feel bad laughing at), and the same laugh-at-what -hurts effect is claimed for Orin's roach misery. [00:21–00:23, 01:17–01:18]
- Reader-effect data (dated 2022): the first-timer reports glazing over the Gately chapter and not knowing what Gately is for; another member describes the first read as drinking from a fire hose, enthralling but overwhelming, with the dots connecting only on read two; a fourth-time rereader reports feeling more confused, addicted, and obsessed each pass and never feeling he has got it; the host's brother finished his first read and texted bafflement; the host's standing advice is that not-making-sense is the design — keep reading. [00:23–00:24, 01:11– 01:12, 02:05–02:11]
- Troeltsch material: Pemulis's roommate-adjacent sick announcer who is ill again (the narrator's period-again-period rhythm noticed); the incrementally-promoted Tenuate stash in the Seldane bottle; rhinovirus appearing twice within five pages (DuPlessis's cold, Troeltsch's cold) read as deliberate repetition. [00:28–00:33]
- The daydreaming-sick paragraph's pronoun slide (a general you, then his pillow, then a first-person I in the nightmare paragraph) is worked as a deliberate narrative-style anomaly — graded down in an eighth-grade essay, assumed purposeful here. [00:34–00:36, 00:43]
- The nightmare's owner is debated: the I-pronoun-means-Hal working rule vs the section being Troeltsch's (age 17) while the dreamer lies awake and almost 12; the group leans Troeltsch for the room description but leaves it open, and connects the doughy-sneeze imagery to the man who just died of a stuffed nose. [00:36–00:39, 00:46–00:48]
- The JOI biography paragraphs get a close recap: the father building a
junior athlete in the basement (Frankenstein invoked), the ONR-financed
optics doctorate, weapons-grade government work, the patent fortune,
the annular-fusion contribution, the avant-garde film turn, and the
gradual dipsomania; the group's takeaway is that the family is not
hurting for money and that the liquidation of assets five years before
the suicide is suggested — by layout at least — to have something to do
with the marriage (a
joi-suicide-motive-adjacent aside, not argued). [00:50–00:57, 01:07–01:10] - The untimely-suicide phrasing is savored (as if there were a timely one), the twice-delayed Quebec burial via hyperfloration recapped, the armbands linked by the host to the Tinker armband case (host names the state loosely; host factoid, unverified here), plus a Gatsby painted-stripe association. [01:12–01:15]
- Hal's huge-tennis-court dream (play that stays hypothetical, the we itself only a theory, the opponent never visible past the apparatus) is singled out as one of the book's great figurative-tennis passages and read by one member as Hal's relationship with Himself — the father as the never-quite-seen opponent (see the Hamlet block). [01:21–01:24]
- Kate Gompert section: Bell Jar comparison (with the Plath oven / novel microwave echo made explicit); the doctor's-perspective framing valued for its distance; her weed self-diagnosis met with clinical blankness read as a courage-punishing failure to listen; members testify the anxiety and suicidality descriptions are dead-on (one member speaks as a suicide-attempt survivor; explicitly relatable-for-women point about not being believed by doctors). [01:24–01:34]
- The connective tissue the panel builds around Gompert: her constructed not-quite-laugh beside Hal's constructed smile in the opening scene; her wanting out rather than wanting to hurt herself; her dread-spiral line (the feeling and the fear of it amplifying each other) paired with Orin's roach-heat misery; her quitting ritual (throwing everything out, telling the dealer this is the last time) beside Erdedy; her dealer traced to the trailer-with-snakes man from the Erdedy section, with Pemulis named nearby — the stories beginning to intersect. [01:33– 01:38, 01:44–01:46]
- The attache thread closes the reading: the wife arrives home, reads the ecstatic rictus, and naturally follows his line of sight to the viewer — a member describes the do-not-look dread of knowing what happens next. [01:45–01:47]
- Filmography-tour highlights called out on-air: Death in Scarsdale (the perspiration-doctor parody), The Widower (cocaine-addicted father immolating spiders, starring an actor the group ties to a fair-haired -boys line elsewhere; name garbled on tape), Fun with Teeth, Various Small Flames (read straight at the attache-Avril affair), the professional-conversationalist film as a near-direct plot rhyme, the color-silent/black-and-white-sound pattern, Latrodectus Mactans productions glossed as the black widow, the first-attempt-at-commercial -entertainment line on Infinite Jest I, and the sheer mass of unfinished/unreleased/unseen entries read as filmmaking done for himself. [01:49–01:58]
- Off-book color (not theory record material): the host's fraternity break-in story (clown wig as disguise), a moon-landing-billboard joke, a grad -school Hamlet-class anecdote about inversion (used to illustrate Gompert's not-being-heard), an A-B-testing joke about recording alone. [00:12–00:14, 00:28, 01:32–01:33, 02:12]
Theories & evidence
THEORY: Hamlet runs under the whole reading — the episode title, the chilled revenge, Gompert's soliloquy, and the father-ghost
- Crux:
hamlet-frame - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]The chilled-revenge rewording in the Gately section is flagged as continuing the line arc of Hamlet and Shakespeare the group has been tracking since the opening. [00:05–00:07][text]Gompert saying she did not want to hurt herself, only to stop being conscious — a really long coma if she could — is read by the host as an homage to the to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy, which he glosses as Hamlet on suicide: if sleep were dreamless and forever, he thinks he would do it, but he cannot know. [01:40–01:42][inference]Hal's tennis dream — hypothetical play, the we only a theory, the opponent never seen past the apparatus — read by one member as Hal and Himself, the father as the ghost-opponent in this context. [01:22–01:24][secondary]Host factoid: the one role Shakespeare is confirmed to have acted is the Ghost of Hamlet's father — offered, with an explicit for-what-it-is-worth shrug, against JOI's ghostliness in his own book. [02:04–02:05][inference]JOI as a ghost inside the text already: very few passages where he is alive or speaking, with the rich store of detail about him and his motives tucked away in the endnotes — a member finds this frustrating-then-thrilling. [02:03–02:04]
- Notes: The host self-identifies as Hamlet-obsessed (grad Hamlet class anecdote) and audits his own pattern-matching on-air (maybe I am just obsessed). The title-to-soliloquy link at Gompert is the episode's distinctive contribution; the Shakespeare-played-the-Ghost factoid is broadly attested in the scholarship but rides here as host testimony only.
THEORY: Avril's meeting with JOI may have been spycraft — a separatist-sympathetic academic positioned to meet a weapons-optics man, with Orin as an anchor baby
- Crux:
avril-afr - Stance: entertains
- Evidence:
[text]What the text gives: Avril's demonstrably nonviolent involvement with the Quebecois separatist left in grad school put her on a bad list and made the marriage a bureaucratic ordeal; the birth of Orin is described as at least partly a legal maneuver. [00:59–01:01][inference]The host will not rule it out: Avril may have attended the reflective-vs-reflexive conference with the express purpose of meeting an up-and-comer in naval technology — analogized to intelligence services targeting scientists at conferences (his example: assassinated Iranian scientists). [01:01– 01:03][text]The narrator's detachment is exhibit A for the openness: nothing about attraction or feeling in either direction, no sign they even like each other — so nothing rules the reading in or out. [01:03–01:05][inference]A member's blunter version: poor James the victim, Avril the monster, the romance one-sided at best; another member reads an arranged-marriage-of-convenience texture and no crying where crying would be expected. [01:00–01:01, 01:06–01:09][text]Present-day Avril offered as consistent puzzle pieces: never seen off campus anymore, travels by the tunnels, hates secrets — listed as the knowns before conceding the rest is conjecture. [01:10–01:11]
- Notes: Explicitly held at conjecture level; the host twice reminds the group that the text says nothing either way, and the first-timer's confusion (suburban mom vs espionage) is answered with the keep-reading rule. The panel also connects James-the-naive-genius to the foils rule below (each spouse readable as the other's opposite). This is a different angle from the theory record's Luria-identity lane — conference-espionage plus anchor-baby, anchored entirely in the biography paragraphs.
THEORY: The unlabeled cartridges lifted in the DuPlessis burglary are how the Entertainment reached Sixties Bob and the Antitois
- Crux:
master-copy - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]The burglary recap: alarm un-shut-off-able, a rushed exit with a rifle and a small haul, and some unlabeled cartridges snagged on the way out. [00:07–00:09, 00:15–00:16][inference]The host calls it no huge leap that a cartridge from that haul ended up with Sixties Bob, who then trades the bag — cartridge included — onward to the Antitoi brothers; a member seconds the bag-with-the-cartridge detail from her own read. [00:15–00:17]
- Notes: Advanced as a we-will-see-as-we-keep-reading claim rather than argued from assembled citations — but it is the custody-trail reading, derived live at the source scene, in an episode recorded before the group has re-reached the Antitoi material. The host also files the cartridges as the one deep thing in an otherwise plot-level section. [00:25–00:26]
THEORY: Pemulis tests DMZ dosages on marginal players — and the face-in-the-floor nightmare reads like a dose
- Crux:
pemulis-test-dosing(proposed) - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[inference]The host's picture: Pemulis dosing more people than a sample hand at a marathon water table — specifically, wanting to work out the DMZ dosage without risking his buddies, so giving it to others to see how badly they flip out. [00:29–00:31][text]The setup detail, read with its punctuation spoken aloud: Troeltsch "has been taken ill. Again." (p. 60) — the narrator underlining the recurrence. [00:29][text]The nightmare paragraph's content as trip-report: the something-that-was-with-you-all-along revelation, cursive crawling the walls, a face in the floor that should not be there — a member says on reread this is all bad-trip material and the maybe-he-ingested-DMZ idea makes far more sense of it; the flashlight descriptions get more abstract with each repetition, and the punctuation degrades toward the end. [00:42–00:43][inference]The follow-on wondering: could this be one of the dreamer's first encounters with whatever drug he is using — raised against the group's admission that the text never states when Hal (if it is Hal) started using. [00:47–00:49]
- Notes: Hedged on-air in both directions: the host does not claim
this particular sick call is a dosing result, and the whose-dream
question stays unsettled (Troeltsch-17 vs almost-12; the group leans
Troeltsch for the room, notes the almost-12 reads younger). The host
also jokes that the DMZ's thief might be the wraith, which would
explain the narrative's derangement — the joke doing double duty as narrator
material (next block). No existing slug covers testing-doses-on-marginal-players;
hal-dmzis Hal-routed andavril-dosed-halis reserved, so this is proposed rather than attached. [00:31, 00:48– 00:49]
THEORY: The narration itself is haunted — pronoun slides and voice anomalies that might be the wraith
- Crux:
ij-narrator - Stance: entertains
- Evidence:
[text]The daydreaming-sick paragraph slides from a generalized you to his circle-stained pillow inside one paragraph, then the next paragraph goes first-person — a slide the host says he would grade down in an eighth-grade essay and therefore assumes is deliberate; his live gloss: no explanation yet — possibly the wraith; the reading will tell. [00:34–00:36][text]The group's working convention that the first-person I in these ETA sections is Hal — held with the flashlight-and-bunk-beds room description argued both ways. [00:37–00:39][inference]The wraith-took-the-DMZ crack as an explanation for the section's formal derangement — jokey in register, but reaching for a wraith-shaped answer to a narration question. [00:48–00:49]
- Notes: A dated early sighting worth having: in November 2022, before this group's season-3 wraith-narrator set pieces (see ijbc-ep36), the same reading community is already reaching for the wraith when narration misbehaves — seeded, not argued. The machine-and-the-ghost filmography exchange (filmography block below) shows one member acquiring the JOI-is-the-wraith idea live, mid-episode. [01:51–01:52]
THEORY: Kate Gompert is Wallace writing his own hospitalizations — the depressed person given a woman's body
- Crux:
ij-autobiographical - Stance: endorses
- Evidence:
[inference]A member: reading the section as him — the feelings his own, the psych ward his own, the woman-character a deliberate, powerful displacement (linked by her to the depressed-person story as the same move). [01:26–01:27][inference]Another member, on reread after learning the biography: the section becomes all of his thoughts and feelings, right down to the electric-shock material and the not wanting to exist. [01:42–01:43][text]The section's clinical exactness offered as evidence of firsthand knowledge — suicide watch, the torment of hunting an outside cause for an internal collapse, anxiety descriptions called dead-on by members who have been there; one member speaks as a suicide-attempt survivor and validates the didn't-want-to-play phrasing as exactly right. [01:28–01:30, 01:43][inference]A speculative extension: the doctor-facing framing as something Wallace personally wanted to tell a doctor and maybe never worked up the courage to say. [01:29–01:30]
- Notes: The panel's endorsement is post-2008-knowledge reading, and one member marks the shift explicitly (first read: crazy fiction; reread after the biography: him everywhere). Registered as dated reader testimony for the autobiographical lane, Gompert-scoped.
THEORY: Gompert's interview is the book's communication failure in miniature — she is Hal's I-am-in-here, unheard
- Crux:
communication-solipsism - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]Her manufactured laugh-noise set beside Hal's opening-scene attempt at what he hoped would read as a smile — the constructed-expression rhyme called out directly. [01:35–01:36][inference]The whole exchange read as advocacy going nowhere: she offers her own inside information (the ECT that worked, the weed hypothesis) and is met with blank non-recognition, which the host plays out in a long sandwich-explaining bit and his own Hamlet-class anecdote about being made to feel the idiot for knowing something. [01:27–01:33][inference]Members generalize it: the very real, especially female experience of being vulnerable with a doctor, not being believed, and resolving never to be vulnerable again; shades of Hal from the first scene — I am in here, listen — named by several voices at once. [01:33–01:34][text]The panel's composite observation: Gompert personifies nearly everyone met so far — the Erdedy quitting ritual, Orin's feeling-makes-the-fear-worse, Hal's unheard interiority — a hub of the book's repetitions. [01:36–01:38]
- Notes: Advanced with unusual personal heat (multiple members testifying from their own medical and psychiatric experience), which is itself reader-effect data: this scene recruits identification in a way the Gately scene did not for the same group.
THEORY: The filmography endnote is the closest the book comes to confirmation — giveaways deliberately parked where readers skip
- Crux:
filmography-coded-message - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]The host, who calls the filmography the section he has reread most: the filmography comes nearer to confirming a range of things than anything else the book supplies — with the archivist preamble read out as the built-in caveat that the list may not be reliable. [01:48– 01:49, 01:58–01:59][text]The worked example: Infinite Jest VI — Madame Psychosis, no other definitive data, unfinished/unseen per most authorities — yet praised as extraordinary in Cartridge Quarterly East by an E. Duquette, whom the host matches to the locker-room Duquette losing his grip and singing show tunes, symptoms the group associates with Entertainment exposure: near-confirmation someone viewed it. [01:59–02:02][text]Various Small Flames read straight at the attache-Avril affair; the professional-conversationalist film and It Was a Great Marvel as barely-disguised Hal-and-JOI material (the mute-son / drawing-the-boy-out premise); Death in Scarsdale as the obsession -becomes-symptom template; The Widower's spider-immolating cocaine-addicted father. [01:49–01:51, 01:53–01:58][inference]A member's live connection: the machine-and-the-ghost film title as a ghost-in-the-machine inversion pointing at James being the wraith — she reports having just learned the wraith idea that day, and the host affirms the allusion reading. [01:51–01:52][text]Pattern-noticing offered as method: color films silent, black-and-white with sound; production-company renamings as trackable signals; the absurdist entries (a 0.5-minute film, a sign-language interpreter box) as jokes with weight. [01:49–01:50, 02:02–02:03]
- Notes: Variant framing vs the theory record crux: the theory record carries
endnote 24 as JOI's coded autobiography aimed at his family
(gc-ep007's argued sighting); this panel's version is reader-facing —
Wallace parked near-confirmations in an apparatus he engineered
readers to skip. Same crux question (what the filmography is doing
and how much it settles), different addressee — flagged for the
folding pass rather than silently merged. Adjacent claim ridden here:
the endnote system's flow-breaking is intentional (the host: the
flow-disruption is real and, he suggests, by design) — a
endnotes-functionsighting in passing. [02:03– 02:04]
THEORY: The medical attache might be Hal's father — recalled from an earlier meeting, kept alive as deliberate ambiguity
- Crux:
incandenza-parentage - Stance: mentions
- Evidence:
[inference]A member recalls the host's earlier-meeting theory that the attache was James — or was it Hal's father? The host, correcting and hedging: he does not necessarily subscribe, but Wallace definitely threw material in to make you wonder whether the attache is Hal's father or whether Himself actually is. [01:52– 01:53][text]Anchoring fact offered in the same exchange: the attache was having an affair with Avril for sure (and Various Small Flames is read as JOI knowing it). [01:53–01:54]
- Notes: Hal-paternity phrasing, not the Mario-paternity question the theory record's lane mostly carries; a light, dated sighting of paternity-doubt as a live club topic in 2022, kept at mentions.
THEORY: The book is the Entertainment — endless rereading is the design working
- Crux:
book-as-entertainment - Stance: endorses
- Evidence:
[inference]A member, after the host admits that many reads in he feels more confused, more addicted, more obsessed, and needs to read it again: the book is the entertainment — that is what he wanted; the host's flat agreement: it is. [02:05–02:06][text]Supporting testimony scattered through the close: hearing something new every listen, checking old notes to see whether a connection is new, the fire-hose first read, the brother finishing baffled and immediately wanting to talk — compulsive-return behavior narrated as lived experience. [02:05–02:11]
- Notes: Endorsed in the casual register of a group that has organized its social life around rereading the book — which is the claim performing itself. The host's twin caveat rides alongside: the book may also simply be too long to hold all connections at once. [02:06–02:07]
THEORY: The repetitions are structural — the Sierpinski gasket as the book's spun geometry
- Crux:
annular-structure(theory record mapssierpinski-structurehere) - Stance: entertains
- Evidence:
[secondary]The host recalls the claim that Wallace shaped the book on a Sierpinski gasket (the Pemulis-poster identification finally surfacing late in the session) and admits he does not understand the object well enough to extrapolate. [02:07–02:08][inference]His born-of-nothing guess: imagine the narrative laid out in perfect order and then given a good spin, everything landing in scattered spots — so the close repetitions the group keeps finding (rhinovirus twice in five pages across two characters; the all-ribs-and-elbows / all-feet-and-teeth epithets; the quitting-ritual scenes recurring across characters) are the joints where the book's separated parts were built to meet. [00:32–00:33, 00:46, 02:07–02:09][text]His own governing caveat, read out as a rule for the club: an argument can be valid and still false — he promises to open and close every meeting with I-do-not-know. [02:09–02:10]
- Notes: Explicitly a guess about a mechanism, not a worked theory; registered for the popularity axis (the gasket claim circulating in reader spaces in 2022) and for the repetition inventory, which is concrete and checkable.
THEORY: The teleputer pages are fulfilled prophecy — killer apps, filters, and advertising creep
- Crux:
media-prescience - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]The killer-apps coinage noticed as still-current Silicon Valley language; a member recalls the filter material reading like present-day app description and being blown away that it was written when the internet was in its infancy. [00:26–00:27][inference]The proliferation argument: subsidized-time-style ad saturation read as arriving — Netflix getting ads next, NBA jersey ads, sky advertising — with the host predicting time will make more of it real (Purdue Wonder Chicken excepted, mostly). [00:27–00:28]
- Notes: The Netflix-ads-next aside is itself a dating aid (the ad tier launched around the feed date). Standard fulfilled-prescience lane, argued from the teleputer section specifically.
THEORY: Read it like an AA meeting — stop analyzing and just listen
- Crux:
reading-as-rehab - Stance: advances
- Evidence:
[text]The host's set-piece advice for baffled readers, sourced to a later AA chapter: the newcomer hearing trite cliches and asking how this could possibly work is told to stop thinking about it and just listen — and reading the book is the same: you are not reading it wrong, it is in the book in that order, keep reading and let it soak in rather than trying to solve every page. [02:11– 02:12][inference]Applied twice earlier as live pedagogy: to the first-timer's Avril confusion (if it does not make sense, it is not supposed to yet) and to his own grad-school reading habits. [01:11–01:12]
- Notes: The AA-epistemology-as-reading-protocol move made explicitly and cited to the text's own AA material — a clean sighting for this lane from an amateur venue.
Themes
Addiction-and-recovery (withdrawal on the cell floor, Gompert's pot reckoning, quitting rituals repeating, AA reading-advice); depression-anhedonia (the whole Gompert stretch, the wanting-out/soliloquy link); communication-and-solipsism (unheard Gompert beside unheard Hal, the doctor's blankness); family-Hamlet (father-ghost, chilled revenge, the title); fathers-sons (JOI built in the basement, Pemulis's fathers-and-differences, Hal's dream opponent); entertainment-and-the-self (the attache's rictus, the filmography, the book-as-Entertainment close); structure (Sierpinski, repetition, endnotes-as-design); dreams (the face-in-the-floor nightmare, Hal's tennis dream, the title again).
Cross-references
- ijbc-ep14 — the season-1 sibling register note (host/roster continuity; the sierpinski and hamlet threads recur there).
- ijbc-ep36 — the same club's season-3 wraith set piece; this episode holds the 2022 embryo of that wraith-narrator reflex.
- ijbc-ep48 — where the theory record's
avril-afrlane was last fed; this episode's conference-espionage variant sits beside it. - ij-lecture-01-to-be-or-not-to-be — the lecture series works the same soliloquy-suicide frame this episode reaches at Gompert.
- ij-lecture-03-the-map-is-not-the-territory
— the theory record's advancing source for the
master-copycustody trail this panel independently sketches. - gc-ep007-chris-ayers-incandenza-posters — the argued filmography-as-coded-message sighting this episode's reader-facing variant should be weighed against.
- general online discussion — the worked-out version of the gasket claim the host gestures at.
- themes/depression-anhedonia — theme home for the Gompert material.
- themes/structure-and-hamlet — the title/soliloquy/ghost cluster.
- slate-audio-book-club-infinite-jest — the other multi-reader round-table register in the archive.
Advances
- Avril's separatist involvements
- Hamlet as organizing intertext
- Mario's (and Hal's) paternity
- Pemulis calibrates DMZ on marginal players (Troeltsch's illnesses as candidate evidence) — distinct from hal-dmz's route-to-Hal
- communication-solipsism
- endnote 24 as JOI's coded autobiography
- ij-autobiographical
- media-prescience
- reading-as-rehab
- the Master's custody trail (DuPlessis's safe? Gately's hands? where it went)
- the macro-shape: ring, gasket, thematic chapters, dead-center design
- whether IJ itself is the samizdat / performs its logic (or is its antidote)
- who narrates IJ (wraith-JOI, Hal, plural)