JOI and Boston AA: the two sober attempts, and the disdain for clichés

texture · DISPUTED DATING (a B.S. mid-'90s stint; a final ~90-day sobriety, Xmas YTMP - 1 Apr YTSDB)

• When: DISPUTED (see Dating basis) — at least one early Boston-AA stint in the B.S. mid-'90s, and a final stretch of sobriety in the last months of his life
• What: JOI's relationship to AA is glossed identically across a present scene and the wraith's posthumous account (wraith=JOI a convergent-detail identification, left open — event 21). Scene 132: the film Blood Sister: One Tough Nun "germinated out of James O. Incandenza's one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-'90s... turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma." The wraith echoes it from the far side: "Boston AA had a humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. And he never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction... The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game in hell" (scene 162). Molly Notkin frames the final sobriety as the fatal variable: Madame Psychosis "had claimed in deluded hindsight" that the drinking "had been all that was keeping the man's tether ravelled," so that dry, "he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge" (scene 159). [Bears on the wraith and death-motive questions: whether sobriety, not despair, undid him is surfaced and left open.]