Offlist: RE: NP- BECAUSE I MUST.......

[Michael Bailey]

On 4/4/06, Keith McMullen <schwitterz11 at netscape.net> wrote:
> If you really loved your pooches you wouldn't keep them tied up.
>

...if dogs run free (2nd best Dylan song after Freight Train Blues)


Sympathies to those who have lost their pets recently.  My dog has the
run of the backyard, and a garage with a space heater, and after 6
years has won a place in my heart (I'm more of a cat person, really,
but she's a wonderful bitch) -- my wife keeps accidentally letting her
in the house, getting annoyed with her, and letting her out the front
door to run wild in the neighborhood --- I'm worried she may turn up
pregnant...we may have some part-Lab pups to give away soon

--------- thoughts on IJ (mild spoiler)

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the opening scene is like you perceive a rolled up red carpet...
Then you keep reading and you are directed back to a different red
carpet, which rolls out and seems to be moving toward the original red
carpet...it unrolls and unrolls and at the end you realize that the
book is never going to explicitly link up to the original carpet
bundle
so you have to unroll it yourself

the way I see it:
the kid is messed up but it's a year later and the world hasn't come
to an end.  Somehow maybe Himself's wraith communicated with Gately
and revealed an antidote to the IJ video

the kid must have met up with Pemulis and they did the DMZ ("call it
something I ate") and since he has given up the mellowing influence of
weed he stays totally spazzed out...

his uncle is going to get him out of the emergency room somehow,
because even though he's spazzed out, he can still play righteous
tennis enough to justify his seed...and probably Pemulis will find in
all his library poring some kind of anti-DMZ to hook him up with
eventually...all of this is implicit, I think, but the guy can write
and if he'd chosen to lay it out in a "System of the World" type
trilogy, I'd have read the whole thing...

emboldened by my enjoyment of IJ, I've started reading Vollman's
"Europe Central" - he seems to be using the Hebrew alphabet heavily
and metaphorically
Interesting concept, paired stories...dictator lore...Nazis and
commies and artists, oh my
--
"Acceptance, forgiveness, love - now that's a philosophy of life!"
-Woody Allen, as Broadway Danny Rose