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

[Henry Musikar]

A-& wasn't there a great poem by Bill Carlos Williams listing a "dross" of 
items on his desk? I may have mentioned this back in the original cast (see 
SNL) days of the list. Speaking of early listers, where have they gone 
(share a little joke with the world...)?


>From: Lycidas at worldnet.att.net
>Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:37:32 -0600
>
>
>
>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]
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