I think this has been touched on before, but I'm interested:

At some point in this section, DFW was writing about Orin and Joelle and said something like "before she was deformed." Obviously we still don't know what the deal is with Joelle's veil, but the way she described it bluntly to Don Gately was that she's so beautiful that people lose all interest in everything else and can never get over it.
This idea is recurring lately; everyone who has seen the Entertainment is incapacitated and can only mutter gibberish about it. Same thing with the rats with the pleasure-providing buttons, who forgot about all of their other needs. The rat thing was mentioned as explanation for the effects of the Entertainment, but I'm starting to suspect that the reason the Entertainment is so captivating is that Joelle is in it. Orin and Hal call Joelle the PGOAT, and obviously she couldn't have been so captivatingly beautiful when Orin dated her since his sanity is still intact...but could the "deformation" that Orin referred to have made her more beautiful?

On another note, I think Ennet House is becoming more and more interesting. I think it's interesting that DFW goes out of his way to make it such a motley crowd; you have a few people who are entirely dysfunctional and probably shouldn't assimilate into normal society (Randy Lenz & the fork-stabbing woman), and a few people who seem pretty high-achieving and normal disregarding their drug use (Erdedy, Kate Gompert, Joelle). You always hear the shtick about how drug abuse isn't confined to any particular group of people--case in point.