Comments on: Summer’s End Roundtable, Part II

By: redsock

redsock — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:49:04 +0000

Re Avril’s sexual affairs mentioned by Daryl:

In the book’s first meeting of Marathe and Steeply (bottom of 91 and top of 92), Steeply notes that “different agencies’ background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse. Particularly a Canadian pulse.”

By: Misopogon

Misopogon — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:27:19 +0000

Why would JOI be drawn to Gately?

I postulate that Himself was probably following Joelle. The wraith appears to Gately after Joelle’s thoughts have been on Don for awhile. If the Wraith had read those thoughts, having trusted Joelle in life, he might trust her judgment on men enough to enlist Gately as a strong man.

By: Bluzebird

Bluzebird — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:33:46 +0000

Weighing in late and don’t know if anyone’s still reading here but I just finished the book (did not start till the beginning of August). So here is my theory, or fantasy if you will, about Joelle’s disfigurement. I think only half of her face was disfigured by the acid leaving a Joker-like effect of half her face being grotesquely beautiful and the other half grotesquely disfigured. There were so many parallel characters and events in the book and this would parallel Pat M. who was half-disfigured as a result of a stroke and whom Gately also finds quite attractive.

Another thing that occurred to me after rereading the first chapter – which I’m now coming to recognize as the real ending of the book – is the mention of Hal, John Wayne and Gately digging up JOI’s head. I’m thinking Gately is there because he’s the only one who can understand Hal -– I agree it seems likely they wind up roommates in the hospital and because of the JOI wraith, Gately is able to understand Hal. I sure wish DFW was still around to ask – not that he would tell us . . . but I can’t help wondering what he intended.

By: Prolixian

Prolixian — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:43:05 +0000

Indeed – very astute observations.
I am doing a 2nd readthrough of the entire book (albeit, at a more
leisurly pace) and I am looking forward to the filmography endnote, which I expect to be even more interesting than on the first passthrough, now that I have better context for it. I’m wondering how much changed all of the MP parts will seem to me, now that my conviction of her disfigurement has flipped.

By: Rob Mientjes

Rob Mientjes — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:57:01 +0000

And again, as I wrote here earlier, :

“Madame Psychosis” features in many of JOI’s productions, and at a sudden point, MP appears in a film (Safe Boating Is No Accident, YTMP; unreleased: “(’Psychosis’’s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller” (see also ‘enigmatic fitness guru’ in that description)) as mangled and archivists quarrel about the year of completion, implying, perhaps, production issues following a change in script — a suddenly malformed beauty does that.

The filmography might not be the final word on JvD, but with your latest bit of logic — the thought about unveiling, which also occurred to me as pretty clear — it seems solid evidence that Joelle was well and truly disfigured.

By: Prolixian

Prolixian — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:13:08 +0000

I was convinced that Joelle was not disfigured for almost the entirety of the book. It wasn’t until she was interrogated on p940 that I started to think otherwise, when she says “When he talked about the thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling – it was always ironic – he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying that the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand … 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. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.”

What convinced me was the passage on page 958, when Joelle is walking back to Ennet House in the snow storm after being questioned, the thinks “She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway.”

I could see the logic of her having this thought only if she was actually horribly disfigured. If she was not disfigured, taking off the veil for Steeply would have undercut her assertion that she believed that the claimed perfection of The Entertainment was an ironic joke by JOI.

By: Karen

Karen — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:48:51 +0000

I’ve decided that Joelle is not disfigured, mostly because she doesn’t seem like the type of person who would cover her face because of a disfigurement — but she does seem like the type who would want to hide her extreme beauty. I think she got the idea of the veil from JOI.

By: Mary

Mary — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:41:22 +0000

DMZ is grown on the mold fitviavi (footnote 321), which google suggests you search as fit via vi, which can be translated ‘the way is forged by labor’. This less obvious than the fact that they also call it Madame Psychosis, but it still shows that DMZ is either basically the same thing as the entertainment (in which the way is forged by labor because the woman who gives birth to you is also the one who killed you), or it may be the anti entertainment (for instance, MP in the entertainment kills you, but MP the drug gives birth to you).

So, I think both things happened to Hal, and the DMZ was partially protective against the entertainment (because he is not dead).

As an interesting side note, the phrase fit via vi is from The Aenead, in a scene where Pyrrhus kills Priam, which is a scene performed at Hamlet’s request when he first talks to the players. No idea what that means, though.

By: Infinite Tasks

Infinite Tasks — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:28:27 +0000

My views on each of these questions are included in my last three posts: Orin's Fate: Endings I: Orin's Dread Concluded in which I suggest that Orin's fate is much like Winston Smith's; The Reality of the Wraith: Ghostwords and Lyle the Semi-Wraith, in which I claim that not believing in the wraith is like not believing in the airborne toxic event of White Noise. What Happens to Hal: Endings II: The Annulation-Text in which I describe the difference between IJ and Harry Potter. I do, really. Among other things.

By: Endings II: The Annulation-Text « Infinite Tasks, Infinite Summers, & Philosophy

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:22:23 +0000

[...] which connects page 981 and page 1, comprises about a year in the life of Hal and others; speculation about the contents of this semiotically complex space has been a mini-phenomenon in recent IS [...]