Page 451 line 22: There, he said it. Charles Tavis may be Mario’s father.
Page 453, bottom line: VAPS = Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin, an E.T.A. idiom. See also on p. 265, 13 lines from bottom.
Page 455 line 5: The tip I remembered for drinking water after a hard workout, except this involves Gatorade.
Page 455, 5 lines from bottom: nacreous, like mother-of-pearl, with the iridescent quality of mother-of-pearl.
Page 456 line 2: picric, probably referring to picric acid, a strong, toxic, yellow crystalline acid used in dyes, antiseptics, and high explosives. Picric clouds would be clouds that are yellow and toxic.
Page 461 line 10: revenant, a dead person believed to have come back as a ghost.
Page 461 line 15: morendo, growing continuously softer and sometimes slower.
Page 459-461: Schtitts’ motivational speech about the two worlds, the outer real world and the inner world of tennis. (Is the Entertainment its own world, too?)
Page 463 line 5: pace, [pronounced pay-see or pay-chay and used as a preposition] with all respect to, used in front of a name or title as a gesture of real or ironic respect to somebody who is mistaken and about to be corrected.
Page 465 line 6: misprision, the failure of somebody who knows of but is not involved in a felony or treason to report it to the authorities; a misunderstanding of something, especially a failure to appreciate the true worth of somebody or something.
Page 468 line 1: [like, the very first word on the page] Free, as in free from a cage.
Page 473, 7 lines from bottom: “or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?” Was this to take care of the damage after, or a way for someone to get into the cult without confronting the train?
Page 473: Larry Niven, in his Known Space series of science fiction stories, foresaw this kind of addiction and even gave it a name: wireheading.
Page 474 line 14: Happy Patch; see note 8.
Page 474, 2 lines from bottom: Another cage reference, but not of the kind I’ve been looking for. A figure of speech here.
Page 476, 4 lines from bottom: mysticetously, in the manner of a baleen whale.
Page 478 line 3: Cage reference
Page 479 line 18: propinquous, nearness in space, time, or relationship.
Page 481 line 7: see p. 59 …but it was an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap.
Page 481 line 11: “..quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic reflective glasswares…” i.e., mirrors.
Page 481 line 24 to bottom: That wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket would be Sixties Bob.
Page 481, 3 lines from bottom: …which Pemulis purchased.
Page 482 line 1: Part of Sixties Bob’s deal for the Lava Lamp was a trash bag full of old cartridges. Could one of them be the Entertainment? If it is, how did Sixties Bob get it?
Page 482 line 16: The squeak of the door hinge, like the squeak of a wheelchair’s wheels. Find out very soon that Antitoi isn’t really paranoid.
Page 486 line 2: transperçant, (french obviously) to pierce, to skewer, to impale (as far as I can determine).
Page 488, 10 lines from bottom: culcate, doesn’t appear to be a real word, but inculcate means to impress upon somebody’s mind; to fix something in somebody’s mind through frequent and forceful repetition. The latin root, inculcare, means literally “to stamp in”, from its root calcare, meaning “to step on or press in”. In this sense, culcate might mean to impress upon somebody’s mind but without the frequent and forceful repetition.
Page 488: This description of Lucien Antitoi’s dying seems a lot like the Entertainment and its effect on people.
Page 418 line 20: The collapse of network television seems a lot like the collapse of the American political party system (p. 382), and both resemble annular fusion.
Page 498 line 1: Dust that looks like mold, smells like mold, that James O. Incandenza is exposed to. Like Hal’s encounter with mold? Could this mold have had an effect on James O. Incandenza?
Page 502-503: James O. Incandenza’s first concept of annulation. I think DFW is identifying some deeper concept he has in mind, perhaps of something consuming itself to produce itself. This idea has appeared before. I recall myths about snakes consuming themselves eternally, their consumption feeding their growth, which they consume again.
Page 503, 7 lines from bottom: catalepsy, state resembling a trance; actual or apparent unconsciousness during which muscles become rigid and remain in an position in which they are placed. The condition occurs naturally in diseases such as schizophrenia or epilepsy and can be induced by hypnosis or drugs.
Page 506-507: Roy Tony, who seems like a real bad-ass (see pp. 37-39) seems to shock Ken Erdedy into getting with the NA program. Someone so bad actually accomplishing something good.
Page 509 line 27: Hal has had that tooth pulled.
Page 509 bottom: How Lateral Alice Moore got her name.
Page 510, 13 lines from bottom: felo de se, an act of committing suicide.
Page 524: 10 lines from bottom: didn’t Hal have a dry-mouth problem? (see p. 27) But, then again, after withdrawing from “Hope”, the book says one’s mouth starts to water after being dry for so long.
Page 527 line 5: Clenette mentioned again. Clenette’s cleaning cart is compared to Otis Lord’s gamemaster’s cart in the Eschaton Game. So, is Clenette like Lord, god (or goddess) over some sort of game?
Page 527 line 23: sallet, a light helmet protecting the head and the back of the neck, worn in the Middle Ages.
Page 1036 line 4 (note 222): obstreperous, noisy, unruly
Page 528: Steeply talks about a mythic oriental or Indonesian woman so beautiful to the men of that culture that they can't refuse her and are killed. Kinda fits in with the black widow spiders in the book.
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