You never did the Kenosha Kid? Down the toilet

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 08/09/2005, at 8:24 AM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> On 07/09/2005, at 7:19 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> But eventually Slothrop does takes the plunge, unleashing deep-seated 
>> xenophobic, homophobic and racist ("Some of it too must of course be 
>> Negro shit, but that all looks alike." p. 65) impulses.
>
> Cf. also the way that Slothrop in his imagination conjures up "the 
> sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into 
> the white men's room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving 
> around the way they do singing, 'Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!' 
> [...]" on p. 64.
>
>> Interestingly, the Roseland Ballroom episode is taking place in 1939, 
>> if we can date it from Bird's improvisations on 'Cherokee' in New 
>> York. But when, upon arrival at his destination, Slothrop perceives 
>> that "something else has been terribly *at* this country", and it 
>> feels to him as if "there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing 
>> invisibly from the sky" (67), we've jumped into a post-1941 
>> timeframe.
>>
>> With Slothrop's decision to go with the flow, so to speak, the "real" 
>> memory induced by the Sodium Amytal has been usurped by a fantasy 
>> originating from within Slothrop's present-time imagination.
>>

And then, everything "is moving up and down [...] as if at the mercy of 
some deep, regular wave." (67) The 11/12 beat signature matches the 
metre of the couplet about "Red Malcolm", and the insinuation certainly 
is that Slothrop's relief that he had escaped with "his virgin asshole 
preserved" (65) was premature.

Then we move into the surrrealised pulp Western territory proper, and 
the scene (four pages) which follows about "Crutchfield or Crouchfield, 
the westwardman" (67), is perhaps the most obscure and least well 
understood of any in the novel.

Note that the lubricant applied to Slothrop "comes sliding down the 
crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo 
lines up a river valley" (64). This image preempts the "Red River 
Valley" setting of the scene; the implication here might be that what 
we are getting, with "Red Malcolm" along as our tour guide, is a look 
deep *inside* Slothrop's "virgin" territory, a look into what makes him 
tick.

best