E.T.A.'s entertainment-and-optics teacher: the courses, the tunnels, "Seminal"

texture · YDAU standing (attested 22 Oct - 17 Nov YDAU)

• When: standing role across the YDAU fall; dated attestations run 22 Oct (scene 053) through 17 Nov (scene 160), plus undated tunnel expositions
• What: In the novel's present Leith is the whole film-and-optics wing of E.T.A.'s academics. "Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.’s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst. to get into." — plus the Quadrivial colloquium 'Reflections on Refraction,' for which Axhandle crams "a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s Angle" outside the Headmaster's office. His classrooms are the founder's ghost-plant: Incandenza's "old optics and editing facilities" in the tunnels "get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials" (scene 129), the same subterranean rooms scene 013 calls "the former optical and film-development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased)". Student texture: Hal reads for "Mr. Leith’s class" before supper (053); the locker-room pop quiz preps for "Leith tomorrow" while the players mock his verbal tic ("‘ “Seminal.” He keeps saying it. “Seminal, seminal.” ’") and Pemulis vouches for his method — "‘The Diz’ll say use your own judgment,’ Pemulis says." He wants an argument made, "He’ll skewer you if you treat it like there’s an obvious answer." Hal ranks him among the teachers who "tell you on the very first day of class what they want from you" (064); and his History-of-Entertainment screenings echo in Pemulis's imagination as "the sort of sounds Leith’s historical b/w J. Gleason made when in pain" (n.324).