And, the legend’s story goes, Eric Clipperton never henceforth loses. No one is willing to beat him and risk going through life with the sight of the Clock going off on his conscience. Nobody ever knows where Clipperton comes from, to play. Never seen at airports or Interstate exit ramps or ever even spotted carb-loading at any Denny’s between matches. He just starts materializing, always alone, at increasingly high-level junior tournaments, appears on draw-sheets with ‘Ind.’ by his name, plays competitive tennis with a Clock at his left temple;[159] and his opponents, unwilling to sacrifice Clipperton’s hostage (Clipperton même), barely even try, or else they go for impossible angles and spins, or else talk on mobile phones while they play or try to hit every ball between their legs or behind their backs; and the matches’ galleries tend to boo Clipperton just as much as they dare; and Clipperton sits and hefts his 17-shot clip and takes the brass-jacketed 9-mm. cartridges out sometimes and clicks a few together ruminatively in his hand in the sideline chair at all the odd-game breaks, and sometimes he tries little Western-gunslinger triggerguard-spins during the breaks; but when play resumes Clipperton’s deadly serious once more and has the Clock 17 at his temple, playing, and mows through the lackadaisical Clipperton Brigade round by round, and wins the whole tournament by what is essentially psychic default, and then right after collecting his trophy vanishes like the ground itself inhaled him. His only even remote friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza, whom Clipperton meets because, even though Disney Leith and an early prorector named Cantrell are shepherding the male tournament contingent (including a solid but sort of plateau-stuck and no longer much improving seventeen-year-old Orin Incandenza) that summer, E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. J. O. Incandenza shows up at quite a few of the events on the domestic circuit, doing under ostensible U.S.T.A. auspices a two-part documentary on jr. competitive tennis, stress, and light, and so Mario’s tottering around with lens-cases and Tuffy tripods etc. at most of that late summer’s meaningful events, and meets Clipperton, and finds Clipperton intriguing and in ways he can’t be very articulate about hilarious, and is kind to him and seeks out his company, Clipperton’s, or at any rate at least treats Clipperton like he exists, whereas by late July everybody else’s attitude toward Clipperton resembled that kind of stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition that e.g. accompanies farts at formal functions. One of Himself’s short test-cartridges — shot to check out transverse aberration at various sun-angles, the case’s little adhesive sticker says — contains the only available footage of the late Eric Clipperton[160] — from the preponderance of salt-tablet dispensers and littered Pledge husks and Dade County ambulances it was pretty likely shot at the hideous Sunkist Jr. Inv. cramp-fest in August in Miami — just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let slip.
Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions — twice w/ others — on this continental day of rest, plus still in a kind of guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the afternoon’s Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene or even get up out of his patio-chair, Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of his fourth chocolate cannoli in half an hour, and is feeling the icy electric keening of some sort of incipient carie in the left-molar range, and also now as usual, after swinishness with sugar, finds himself sinking, emotionally, into a kind of distracted funk. The puppet-film is reminiscent enough of the late Himself that just about the only more depressing thing to pay attention to or think about would be advertising and the repercussions of O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry. Mario’s film executes some rather over-arty flash-cuts between the erections of Lucite fortifications and ATHSCME and E.W.D. displacement installations along the new U.S. border, on the one hand, and the shadowily implied Rodney-Tine-disastrous-love-interest element with the voluptuous puppet representing the infamous and enigmatic Québecois fatale known publicly only as ‘Luria P-----,’ on the other.
Tine’s puppet’s tiny brown felt hand is on Luria’s voluptuously padded little Popsicle-stick knee in the famous Vienna, Virginia Szechuan steakhouse where, according to dark legend, Subsidized Time was conceived on the back of a chintzy Chinese-zodiac paper placemat, by R. Tine. Hal happens to know the fall and rise of millennial U.S. advertising exceptionally well, because one of the only two academic things he’s ever written about anything even remotely filmic[161] was a mammoth research paper on the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry. This was the final and grade-determining project in Mr. U. Ogilvie’s year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies in May of Y.P.W.; and Hal, a seventh-grader and only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D., wrote about TV-advertising’s demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events had taken place at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts instead of just four years prior, more or less overlapping with the waxing of the Gentle Era and Experialist Reconfiguration Mario’s puppet-show makes fun of.
There’s no question that the Network television industry — meaning, since PBS is a whole different kettle, the Big Three plus the fast-starting but low-endurance Fox — had already been in serious trouble. Between the exponential proliferation of cable channels, the rise of the total-viewer-control hand-held remotes known historically as zappers, and VCR-recording advances that used subtle volume- and hysterical-pitch-sensors to edit most commercials out of any program taped (here a rather chatty digression on legal battles between Networks and VCR-manufacturers over the Edit-function that Mr. O. drew a big red yawning skull next to, in the margin, out of impatience), the Networks were having problems drawing the kind of audiences they needed to justify the ad-rates their huge overhead’s slavering maw demanded. The Big Four’s arch-foe was America’s 100-plus regional and national cable networks, which, in the pre-millennial Limbaugh Era of extraordinarily generous Justice Dept. interpretation of the Sherman statutes, had coalesced into a fractious but potent Trade Association under the stewardship of TCI’s Malone, TBS’s Turner, and a shadowy Albertan figure who owned the View-Out-the-Simulated-Window-of-Various-Lavish-Homes-in-Exotic-Locales Channel, the Yuletide-Fireplace Channel, CBC–Cable’s Educational Programming Matrix, and four of Le Groupe Video-iron’s five big Canadian Shop-at-Home networks. Mounting an aggressive hearts-and-minds campaign that derided the ‘passivity’ of hundreds of millions of viewers forced to choose nightly between only four statistically pussified Network broadcasters, then extolled the ‘empoweringly American choice’ of 500-plus esoteric cable options, the American Council of Disseminators of Cable was attacking the Four right at the ideological root, the psychic matrix where viewers had been conditioned (conditioned, rather deliciously, by the Big Four Networks and their advertisers themselves, Hal notes) to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.