Thought for the Day

[Dave Monroe]

"I warn you that what you're starting to read is full
of loose ends and unaswered questions.  It will not be
neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and
satifactorily explained.  Not by me it won't, anyway. 
Because I can't say I really know exactly what
happened, or why, or just how it began, how it ended,
or if it has ended; and I've been right in the thick
of it.  Now if you don't like that kind of story, I'm
sorry, and you'd better not read it.  All I can do is
tell what I know."

Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (1955), Ch. 1 

Sorry, can't find my 1st paperback ed. for pagination,
but the chapter numbers oughtta do if you have to find
something.  But I've been waiting for some time for a
forum in which to note that The Crying of Lot 49
shares with The Body Snatchers not only a California
setting, not only that Cold War et al. paranoid
zeitgeist, not only a certain pacing, a way of
development, but ... 

"Revelation is the word for a complex of thought
revealing itself instantaneously with the enormous
impact of absolute truth....

[...]

"But ... showers of small frogs, tiny fish, and
mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of
the skies.  Here and there, with no possible
explanation, men are burned to death inside their
clothes.  And once in a while, the orderly, immutable
sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifted and
altered.  You read these occasional queer little
stories, humorously written, tongue-in-cheek, most of
the time; or you have vague distorted rumors of them. 
And this much I know.  Some of them--some of them--are
true."  (Ch. 21)

Buncha stuff in the here excluded middle as well.  See
also ...

McCarthy, Kevin and Ed Gorman, eds.
   "They're Here...": Invasion of the Body
   Snatchers: A Tribute.  NY: Berkeley, 1999.

Siegel, Don.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
   Ed. Al LaValley.  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
   UP, 1989.

Okay, gotta run, so ...    



--- Richard Romeo <richardromeo at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the
> imminence
> of a revelation which does not in fact occur.’
> (Borges)
> 
> 
> 
>
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