A Word To The Whys (was Re: on this date: "hush! caution! echoland!")

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down
to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen
roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that
sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny
red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried
tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household milk,
much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung
from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken
aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of
paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette
butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens,
stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get
heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's
Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother,
Naline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape,
string, chalk...above that a layer of forgotten memoranda,
empty buff rations books, phone numbers, unanswered letters,
tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele
notes...

				Pynchon, GR.18



My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting
walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts,
were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale
stories, stickback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers,
flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless
rasins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses,
imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes,
eyoldyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had
served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles
jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts,
Godforsaken scapulars, neverword breeches, cutthroat ties,
counterfeit franks, best intensions, curried notes, upset
lattern tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted
quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid
objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed
quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers,
seedy ejeculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt
ink....


				Joyce, [The Haunted Inkbottle]