re. Re: read and going to read

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

.... All of sudden, he pulled out of his pocket a string
of firecrackers and asked: 'Where can we set these off?'/
'Why don't we blow up the statue of Queen Victoria?' I
replied./ 'O wow, man, have you read that book?' Pynchon 
said. He'd caught my allusion to Leonard Cohen's novel
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, recently released in paperback. Cohen's
hero actually does blow up a statue of Victoria, a typical
sixties symbolical gesture. I was pleased to finally get 
a response from Pynchon, yet still I felt like the overeager
grad student trying too hard to impress the prof./ There were
no Victorian monuments to explode in Berkeley, so we drove 
instead to the marina and set off the fireworks by the bay.
We walked by the water, past junkpiles, setting of cherry 
bombs and running like hell. A midnight ritual: four heavily
stoned people hearing the snap, crackle, and pop, watching 
the dazzle against the black mud and the midnight waters. 
At that moment, halfway around the world in Vietnam, equally
stoned soldiers were probably admiring in the same way the
rocket's red glare ....

Andrew Gordon: Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties
Memoir (pp. 167-178, here 173, in: The Vineland Papers)


KFL +





Schwitty schrieb:

> 
> Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen
>