The class taxonomist: comparative-class journals, "Depressed Residential," and the outside view of his register

texture · ~Nov YDAU (11 Nov, 14 Nov, and after)

• When: across mid-November YDAU residency (11 Nov, 14 Nov, and unstamped meal-scenes)
• What: A cluster of texture that fixes Ewell's fastidious, classifying, class-marked register. Randy Lenz's discharge moves Ewell up into the 3-Man room with Geoffrey Day, "the one man here with whom a conversation of anything remotely approaching depth could be held"; like Day, Ewell "enters a certain amount of comparative-class data in his journal," and (with Day and Erdedy, unlike the other men) has not given his genitals a nickname — which Day floats as "a class thing" (scene 134). His diction leaks into the narration: the depressed triple-decker neighborhoods off Brainerd Rd. are "neighborhoods Tiny Ewell had described as Depressed Residential" (scene 116). Seen from outside, Hal Incandenza's later inventory of Ennet-House types names "the sort of guy like Ewell and Day... that knew how to long-divide and say whom but didn't even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages" (scene 158). Small manners persist: "Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal" (scene 095).