MDDM 63 Thunder and Stogies

[Richard Romeo]

bless you monte

rich


>
>"The Wind has begun to shake the Tents. The Surveyors hear the stumbling of
>Rain-drops against the taut Duck. Their Candle-Flames are being torn to
>shining waxen wild-flowers. 'I am assuming that I may be confident of my
>safety here,' Dixon puffing, 'the entire issue of Lightning in America
>having been resolv'd by your Friend Dr. Franklin, who draws it off at will,
>easy as drawing Ale from a cask... Ah have got that correct, haven't Ah?
>'Tis certainly the right place for Lightning, eeh! Nothing like this in
>Staindrop! Lud Oafery did claim to've been hit once over by Low Dinsdale,
>but there were no other witnesses,--'
>    'Dixon, our, um, Lives? are in Danger?'
>    'Hardly enough to interrupt a perfectly good--' Here he is silenc'd by
>an immense Thunder-Bolt directly overhead, as their frail Prism is bleach'd
>in unholy light..."
>
>Honest to God, I don't know another written voice in this language who can
>jump so sprightly from
>
>The beauty of that candle-flame simile, to
>
>The warm silly dialogue veering into dialect with nods to Sterne and Monty
>Python, to
>
>The authentic Voice of Thunder, that ol' Joyce an' Eliot an' V2-warhead _da
>dayadhvam damyatta_, enlightened by yer basic American pyramid mysticism
>(cf the glowing eye over the "prism" on a $1 bill)...
>
>...AND MAKE EACH JUMP DEAD SOLID PERFECT, landing poised, in perfect pitch,
>taking off again, like Mozart or Ella Fitzgerald.
>
>This is a masterpiece, foax. We're lucky to be alive and reading it.
>


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