VV(11): This Side of the Rail

[Dave Monroe]

"She was not, however, an applicant: she belonged on the other side of the 
rail."  (V., Ch. 8, sec. 1, p. 216)

This can't help but strike me not only as a railway (be it steam engine or 
subway) allusion, esp. given those "clickety-clacks," but also as making the 
Space/Time Employment Agency seem a sort of amusement park, a Disneyland, in 
which we, on our, on this side, watch the performing automata on "the other 
side of the rail."  The Great Electric Parade, The Hall of Presidents, The 
Country Bear Jamboree, whatever.  Again, see ...

Fjelmman, Stephen M.  Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World
   and America.  Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.

... which like many theme parks, is encicled by a train ride, perhaps even a 
monorail.  Indeed, this is a characteristic of many such utopian spaces, 
from Expositions to "Garden Cities" to World Fairs to amusment parks ...

Sorkin, Michael.  "See You in Disneyland."
   Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City
   and the End of Public Space.  Ed. Michael Sorkin.
   New York; Hill and Wang, 1992.  203-32.

... which do indeed employ (use, hire) both space and time, not to mention 
"Space/d time" (Bester), "the spatialization of the temporal" (Jameson).  
See here as well ...

Jameson, Fredric.  "Of Islands and Trenches:
   Neutralization and the Production of Utopian
   Discourse."  The Ideologies of Theory, Essays
   1971-1986, Vol. 2: The Syntax of History.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.  75-101.

Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of
   Textual Spaces. Tr. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic
   Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984.

But what of this side of the rail?

"The waiting area was crowded when he got there.  A quick check revealed no 
girls worth looking at, nobody in fact but a family who might have stepped 
through time's hanging arras directly out of the Great Depression; journeyed 
to this city in an old plymouth pickup from their land of dust: husband, 
wife and one mother-in-law, all yelling at each other, none but the old lady 
really caring about a job, so that she stood, legs braced, out in the middle 
of the waiting area, telling them both how to make out their applications, a 
cigarette dangling from and about to burn her lipstick." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, 
pp. 215-6).

... note the traditional American (?) mother-in-law gag, of course.  But, 
also, on "the other side," girls, jobs 'n' order; on this side, entropy 
(dust, ash), poverty 'n' wives, mothers, mothers-in-law (and note 
nonetheless the slight polysemic, prosthetic, cybernetic waver about 
"braced" there as well) ...
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