Fire Drill & The Orderly Fashions

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

Colson Whitehead's _The Intuitionist_ has been mentioned here, but has
anyone else read his brand-new _John Henry Days_?

V. good stuff, and there are serious Pynchon echoes in the prose ... esp.
near the end. Gaddis too. It's all "about" stamps, for one thing.

from page 322:

"She has been squeezing his hand for some time now, but he hadn't noticed.
Some time ago this became a silent movie. They are in the seats, shifting
thighs, as the outside world and those other people from the fair unspool on
the parabola screen of the tunnel mouth. The competition is about to begin,
all the characters have been set up. The bit players move through the fair,
staring past each other, waiting for cues; they have spent their whole lives
rehearsing. All that rehearsing is cutting-room floor discard, the outtakes
from the perfect American movie no one will ever se. In the middle rows are
J. and Pamela. If they did what the audience never does and turned in their
seats, they would see the light of the projector, the white flickering
projector that is the light at the other end of the tunnel. A dream
projecting itself from the west.
He says, sure.
Out of the mouth of the tunnel, it is time for the main event. They are all
there."

segue right into the next chapter, a Gaddis-esque party scene where the
milling crowd is trying to puzzle out the "Godfrey Frank's _A Chiropodist In
Pangea_, a fifteen-hundred page grimoire of mysterious content that would
debut in a few days on the New York Times best-seller list. There was some
question as to whether it would be categorized as fiction or non-fiction.
Someone had to finish it first."

each party goer, from "the eminently fuckable to the differently attractive"
has an opinion. Very Chavenet, to use a minted WG line. And then Godfrey
Frank himself takes the stage to sing with Fire Drill and The Orderly
Fashions, a band he "saved": "In a long and heavily footnoted article in a
popular music magazine, Godfrey Frank smeared away the muck to reveal the
bubblegum underneath. He situated them in a lineage of the Dionysian going
back centuries, he located their Thanatotic flourishes as a necessary guise
in the final days of a self-conscious century, he outed them as a canny pop
band just in time for the demise of the new sound and rescued them from the
bargain bins."

pass the Lotion please, now everybody...

etb