SLSL Intro (A Couple-Three Bozos

[Elainemmbell at aol.com]

My (almost truly humble) opinion on the numinous issue--why Nabokov, Beckett, 
Pynchon draw something from devoted writers that is difficult to explain 
(especially to non-devotees) relates most specifically to their senses of 
humor.  Reading these writers deeply and/or frequently feels to me like being 
invited to the Algonquin Round Table with an audit pass--it's thrilling to be 
there but you're never sure if you're laughing for the same reason as the 
other people, the people who are card-carrying Algonquinites.  Dorothy Parker 
says something referential to last weekend and YOU laugh because it seemed 
like a really clever sexual innuendo but later someone mentions that he 
didn't find her reference to Pirandello at all funny...in other words, you 
"get it" only so far as your own referents allow but your pleasure in getting 
it remains tinged with the intellectual paranoia that Other People are REALLY 
getting it.  In advanced paranoiac states you may even think They Know You 
Don't Get It And Never Will (peccata mundi)!  For example:

"But he was an indolent bourgeois poltroon, very talented up to a point, but 
not fitted for private life in the best and brightest sense, in the sense to 
which he referred when he bragged of how he furnished his mind and lived 
there, because it was the last ditch when all was said and done."  Beckett, 
"Yellow", More Pricks Than Kicks

also, a brief list of Becket words from above source: 
 antiphlogistic, suilline, phylloxera, saprophile, skelps, viticultural, 
sockdologer, and 
(my personal favorite) syzygy.

Elaine M.M. Bell, Writer
(860) 523-9225
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