Annularity

He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he'd think and decide to have some in his home one more last time. One last final time he'd search out someone new, someone he hadn't already told that he had to stop smoking dope and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. […] because each time he got some he knew this time had to be the last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever.

beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle […] or maybe occasionally a little Black Star, whenever there's a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again… this circular routine, if your basic wiring's OK to begin with, can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence and sometimes into one's like early twenties, before it starts to creep up on you.

The medical attaché, at their apartment, is still viewing the unlabelled cartridge, which he has rewound to the beginning several times and then configured for a recursive loop. He sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet both his pants and the special recliner.

where his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is commonly regarded as one of the big half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion and approximate energy-independence for the U.S. and its various allies and protectorates

(3) But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech—like from aural to video phoning—which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages—like people's stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance—are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors.

Over the screen's left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized Great Concavity's No-Time.

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy's hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet.

What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow.

she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages

Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was café with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue.

The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new 'Clean U.S. Party,' the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform's plank had been Let's Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, [n.150] […]

SEC. STATE: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny's C.U.S.P. platform necessitates—given the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since NASA hasn't put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and blow up and become more waste—that—given the amount of additional waste annular fusion's start-up is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up commences—that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites?

Gately notices the guy's got a jailhouse tatt of AA's weird little insignia of a triangle inside a circle on one big shoulder.

At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.

The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room's wooden floor with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere:

Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled this way for a long time as I watched over the edge of the comforter and mattress, holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the vacuum below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.

The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight. […] His brother Orin, during a late-night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human Attention. […] When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal's pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room's perimeter as Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist's desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette case.

U.H.I.D.'d say it's fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you're not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn't bother you at all, pretending you didn't care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.

[…] then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a way as to create like hellacious amounts of highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back down to Montpelier as raw matériel for the massive poisons needed for toxic lithiumization and waste-intenseness and annular fusion.' […] 'Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and -utilization. See?'

Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that's fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?' […] 'The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathematic just a couple decades back.

They would place a large mirror in the deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid impact; its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick.

They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and Fackelmann took a cotton and sopped up candy-dyed urine off the floor and cooked up with urine.

In the first scene I'm going through a revolving door. You know, around in this glass revolving door, and going around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven't seen for a long time […] And instead of going in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person is also still revolving in the door to follow me in, and we whirl in the door like that for several whirls.

That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory. And now if you want the thing—he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much.

The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C's grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Annular Fusion Is Our Friend. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Sunstrand Power & Light Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Public relations/advertorial production for New England's Sunstrand Power and Light utility, a nontechnical explanation of the processes of DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its applications in domestic energy production. CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO

two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the 'film' 's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen—the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow.

Infinite Jest (V?). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 'Madame Psychosis'; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. Incandenza's last film, Incandenza's death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used 'Psychosis,' thus list the film under Incandenza's output for Y.T.M.P.

'I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design.'

The years right around the millennium being a terrible U.S. time for waste, then, ozone-wise and landfill-wise and shoddily-disposed-of-dioxins-wise, w/ DT-cycle annular fusion at the stage where they had the generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste part down a lot more pat than the consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose-own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions part.

The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan […] The figurative object of the "Baisser" competition appears——according to Phelps and Phelps——to involve using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization

C.T. looks to me, his look horribly mild. I do the safe thing, relaxing every muscle in my face, emptying out all expression. I stare carefully into the Kekuléan knot of the middle Dean's necktie.

'Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden's rectangle […] 'God! Help! My son ate this! Help!' she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just inside the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her turns, inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying 'My son ate this! Help!' and lapping me twice before the memory recedes.

He'd had to buy a new bong at Bogart's in Porter Square, Cambridge because whenever he finished the last of the substances on hand he always threw out all his bongs and pipes, screens and tubes and rolling papers and roach clips, lighters and Visine and Pepto-Bismol and cookies and frosting, to eliminate all future temptation. He always felt a sense of optimism and firm resolve after he'd discarded the materials. […] He could not remember the color of this new last and final bong.

the medical attaché is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume surf and light rain on broad green leaves.

The medical attaché, in sum, feels tightly wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes are supposed to be embossed.

The complex is a ring with the pool and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the deck like fumes from fuel. There's that mirage thing where the extreme heat makes the dry deck look wet with fuel.

The dead bird bobbed and barrel-rolled in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next, creating an illusion of continued flight.

And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth.

Not real bright—she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea.

Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.

at the height of which agony, hearing his head's pulse as receding thunder and watching his vision's circle shrink as a red aperture around his sight rotates steadily in from the edges, at the height of which he could think only, despite the pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die […] this Guillaume DuPlessis passed bluely from this life

probably not helped at all by the man’s very gradual spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his late father.

President J. Gentle (F.C.), acting on behalf of the U.S.D.D.'s O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.'s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation and conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza's burial in Québec's L'Islet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles.

Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I'm sorry to say, particularly 'drines before matches and then enkephaline [n.26] after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemistry

I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased

To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

And time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth; they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of a Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing circles.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. […] As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body.

I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a

And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now-appreciated advantages of good old Bell-era blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (62) pinholes. […] In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks […]

The engineer's graduate research specialty is the carbonated translithium particles created and destroyed billions of times a second in the core of a cold-fusion ring. Most of the lithioids can't be smashed or studied and exist mostly to explain gaps and incongruities in annulation equations.

The background music is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it's periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies.

Tonight the one caller she ends by taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider the fact that the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden and disclosed by our round shadow's rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns its face away.

Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston's built itself around, a two-k. square of shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass.

No more deciding to stop at 2300h. and then barely getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0130h. and smoking the Chore Boy's resins and not stopping after all. No more throwing the Material away and then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours scrutiny of the carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material to try to smoke.

Something about that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back home on the night's final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn't love it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn't stop or imagine stopping or living without it.

[…] the difference between suicide and homicide consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage's door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door?

Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion.

The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker–type blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill on the river's south shore, a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted with twine hurtling in a broad upward arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels […]

regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Québecois call les trebuchets noirs, spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great Concavity at a parabolic altitude exceeding 5 km. […])

‘You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Québec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.’

And though Tex Watson’s overall handle on Cold-Containment DT-annulation is shaky, his lay-physics survey of combustion and annulation has some sort of academic validity to it, especially because he some terms gets Pemulis to guest-lecture when he and Pemulis are in a period of détente.

and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

TINE: Gentlemen, we're going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the faute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories.

This catastatic feature of the puppet-film's plot—that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify neighbors in an insane pout over Canada's reluctance to take redemised title over O.N.A.N.'s very own vast dump—resonates powerfully with those members of the movie's E.T.A. audience who know that this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad scenario is actually a puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade.

It was then that it occurred to me that when I'd been supporting the bed's raised mattress with my chest and face preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle I'd imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact even been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a continuous plane.

The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L'Hôpital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But since here, on the bedroom's floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid's standard parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equations' trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential equations.

The chairs were arranged in NA's traditional huge circle, with no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee.

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore's desk in a kind of thick ellipse.

'He'll put her in the Show before menses, there'll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she'll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.' […] 'Clinkers,' he said instantly. 'From klinker low German and klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.'

It's always the Moms's left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril's invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act.

We didn't even lay him down, we got this idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came he'd be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead.

In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you're ashamed of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You're ashamed of your uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.'s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need to hide. […] U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.

The U.H.I.D. in me would say you're trapped in shame about the shame, in response, and that the shame-circle keeps you from really being present for your Staff job, Don.

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertilization and verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the annulated Shawshine River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks

Lenz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he'd feel, he shares, lost and disorientated, wandering in circles in blinding white frozen points due north of all domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking date it was, his breath an ice-beard

Fossil fuels all the way up to annular fusion/fission cycles, DT-lithiumization, so on and so forth. […] But Doucette's got himself convinced he's got this insurmagulate conceptual block that keeps him from grasping annulation, even superficially.

Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground, which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise didn't help the Booger a whole lot.

But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren't all that fucking hard if you don't paralyze your brain with career-with-wings brain-cartoons. The extra-hot breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.

this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.

Here things get abstractly furry and I'll just skim through the fact that the only kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction.

Which eradicates the overgrowth until the toxins are fused and utilized. The satellite scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3 goes from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially barren and the last week being like nothing on earth.

Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson tried to get the Boog to remember here is "Wasteland to lush: time's in no rush."

[…] spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see.

[…] long shiny trucks just all of a sudden appear in a ring at pond's rim […]

The pond has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in even-spaced clumps […]

The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways, möbiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling.

If you could open Stice's head you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place.

Also, an area of Steeply's left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger's annular pallor.

The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. '70s and '80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the U.N.'s action on Korea.

As a child, this is when it became impossible to ignore the odor of obsession about the whole thing. The secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy.

It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program "MAS*H" throughout the night, probably over and over again, using a crude white plastic earplug to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.

And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly.

'Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.' 'So why's that sandwich-meat moving?' 'Maggots?' 'Maggots!'

This M.S. is the nun who'd saved the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister's own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior's guilt accretes.

and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn't even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever.

[…] the guy wore a rat-colored suit and was shooting a suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease building and then going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around the arrow, and then another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what's the word.

Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES […]

Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly; the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south.

He scanned. ‘Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend? I haven’t even heard of half your Dad’s shit that’s here.’

[…] the apartment's upscale TP's viewer on a recursive slo-mo loop of some creepy thing Fackelmann liked that was just serial shots of flames from brass lighters, kitchen-matches, pilot lights, birthday candles, votive candles, pillar candles, birch shavings, Bunsen burners, etc.

They watched the pool of urine spread out against the hardwood floor, changing shape, growing curved arms, exploring the fine oak floor. […] The entertainment cartridge's myriad small flames were reflected in the spreading puddle, so that soon Gately could watch without taking his chin off his chest.

The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo.

In his stuporous recall over four years later in St. E.'s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that wouldn't end and wouldn't go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream, or is in a dream […]

That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it'd paralyze people.

I remember S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link's pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.'s orbit in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead.

As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner.

There was a kind of louvered screen or vent high on one side of the glass, but no air was coming out. In. The air inside the huge glass was pretty clearly limited, as well, because there was already CO2 steam on the sides. […] Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing.

The supported swoon spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the whole room in almost untakable focus.

Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections. B.S. Heliotrope Films/Sunstrand Power & Light Co. […] Second infomercial for Sunstrand Co., a nontechnical explanation of the applications of cooled-photon lasers in DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO

Infinite Jest (II). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath; 35/78 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Unfinished, unseen attempt at remake of Infinite Jest (I). UNRELEASED

Various Small Flames. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos.

Infinite Jest (III). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 16/35 mm.; color; sound. Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest (I), (II). UNRELEASED

the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Québec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper

Möbius Strips. Year of the Whopper. Lactrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. Rection,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109 minutes; black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist ('Rection'), who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath).

Infinite Jest (IV). Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis'(?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III). UNRELEASED

a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

'Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.'

'So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Québec Go […] to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways […] and dicky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven […]?'

'The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Québec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.'

'In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country.'

' "Help! My son ate this!" She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border […] she kept screaming, running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string

'… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.'

'The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt.'

The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways […] to have disrupted pipelines between processing points in the eastern Reconfiguration's annular fusion grid, have been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste Displacement's launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured intracontinental border

the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste displacement and ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the removal of all fission/waste/fusion annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the secession of Canada in toto from the Organization of North American Nations

I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone.

Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her […]

then will insert the recursive surf-and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it […]

The note from last night's Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle of darker violet dead-center where the subject's perfume-spritzer had hit it. The only interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single circle—o's, d's, p's, the #s 6 and 8—is darkened in, while the i's are dotted not with circles but with tiny little Valentine hearts, which are not darkened in.

and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with brutal speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right and then up, faster and faster, the machine's blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton's entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital stereo

On the engineering diagrams the Pump Room's maybe about twenty meters directly beneath the centermost courts in the middle row of courts, and looks like a kind of spider hanging upside-down—an unfenestrated oval chamber with six man-sized curved ducts radiating up and out to exit points on the grounds above. […] The intake fans pull ground-level winter air down into and around the room and through the three exhaust fans and up the outtake ducts into networks of pneumatic tubing in the Lung's sides and dome: it's the pressure of the moving air that keeps the fragile Lung inflated.

An interview with Incandenza was posthumously included in a book on the genesis of annulation.

The patient Ms. Gompert seemed both to be fighting for breath and to be breathing rapidly enough to induce hypocapnia; the doctor could not be expected not also to notice that she had fairly large breasts that rose and fell rapidly inside the circle of arms with which she hugged her knees.

Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Tortolitas' peaks and probed at the roof of the sky.

THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. 'VIDEOPHONY') ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY […] BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR 'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT […] AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING?

Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie.

did your mother tell you we're moving? That we're moving back to California finally this spring? We're moving, son, I'm harking one last attempted time to that celluloid siren's call, I'm giving it the one last total shot a man's obligation to his last waning talent deserves, Jim, we're headed for the big time again at last for the first time since she announced she was having you, Jim, hitting the road, celluloid-bound

This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station's EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal in all directions. […] The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a blurred ellipse—its rotary base is elliptical because that's the only shape the EM-wienies could rig a mold for.

a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves […] so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura

The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer star, now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the centrifugal whirl's speed making its tip's light trail color across the eyes. The light's oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads.

a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast, each sign talking with many Ø's about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone who digs or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the fireplace.

Marathe made small emphatic circles and cuts in the air while he spoke: 'These facts of situation, which speak so loudly of your Bureau's fear of this samizdat: now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one.'

Steeply removed with cool deliberation another Belgian cigarette and lit it, this time on the first match. Waving the match out with a circular flourish and snap.

A mint-green Ford sedan has passed through the gate's raised portcullis and is trying to parallel park between two dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion.

One warhead hits Ingersoll in the neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to limp around in small circles holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way little kids have when they're crying more at the fact of being hurt than at the hurt itself.

SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT MONTPELIER, VT—Scientific North American Header;

A bonfire of young persons was burning some k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a sphere.

Marathe made his rotary gesture of impatience, slowly.

also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes round stones, moving as if without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below.

Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: ‘From the A.D. 1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of the Happy Patch…’

and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can now see, in the carefully placed display mirrors’ angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating at a height about waist-level to a huge standing man w/ broom clutched to barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions.

Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying torches or fires.

I briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the room's daylight becoming staler and staler.

At the close of this Monday Beginners' Meeting everybody got up and held hands in a circle and recited the NA-Conference-Approved 'Just For Today,' then they all recited the Our Father, not exactly in unison.

Two of the room's six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn't really be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently as he waited […] The printout kept rotating in Pemulis's hands.

Lateral Alice Moore's desk's chair's wheels fit on a track with an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe's arc to the other—more or less laterally—at the touch of a cerise desktop button.

the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head

Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light's corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end.

a C.T. who's sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle

The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan.

[…] steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic's chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables […]

This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling [n.264] of newspapers.

'Like you really care.' Kate Gompert's voice is toneless and hard to hear because it issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs.

There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room's Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that's more generally ovoid than anything else.

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled trunks […] and, along the seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust—this comprising the bulk of the crud down here

It's utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because they've left the tunnels' strings of bare overhead bulbs off

An infestation of feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players.

Poutrincourt's right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue.

The Canadian prorector's hands moved in small circles out front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans' conversational hands sit like lumps of dough most of the time, Rémy Marathe had pointed out once.

The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn't weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she'd had a flashback of reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club's rink's 'Wee Blades' Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed […]

She used the last of the room’s Kleenex dusting all five bedside tables, wiping in careful rings around objects she wasn’t to touch.

The young girl of substitute authority made a curious circle with two of her fingers in the air of the doorway. Some kind of signal of the hand to the chief authority. Every finger of the hand of the girl wore a ring of different type.

20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Rooms’ vents were recessed, hallway-vents protrusive. E.T.A.’s annular heating system produced a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago.

Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms's eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them.

Cage. [*5] Dated only 'Before Subsidization.' Meniscus Films, Ltd. Uncredited cast; 16 mm.; .5 minutes; black and white; sound. Soliloquized parody of a broadcast-television advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress. UNRELEASED

The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./National Film Board of Canada. Narrator P. A. Heaven; 78 mm.; 35 minutes; color; sound. Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography. UNRELEASED DUE TO US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS

Parody of revenge/recidivism action genre, a formerly delinquent nun's (Hurley's) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge.

Hal's own odd match was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles.

'He never even got his stick up. Right in the left socket. It made a sound like a champagne cork. […] He was walking around in diminishing circles like he'd been hit with a mallet.'

'We're wearing a groove in the same track again, O.'

An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at the Headmaster's Table takes off the witch's hat and holds it by the brim and whips it around in an enthused circle three times over her head.

Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, […] could only go through a doorway if he'd felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway he'd just checked.