"Dance the Eagle to Sleep" / ciggies / questions I keep returning to / Mao II

[Michael Bailey]

...anyway, it was a pretty good book (for a tragedy)  at least it
wasn't a total tragedy in the Jacobean vein

FWIW I thought the ciggie coupon in the binding was a harmless bit of
nostalgia, but I've always liked the smell of burning tobacco, also
incense, and autumn leaves when people used to burn those, and other
controlled combustions, hence am loath to demonize the foul weed
(though pervasive advertising is rather deplorable in some of its
incarnations)

There's this chemical that some people totally cannot taste, probably
some similar genetic explanation for why some people like the smell of
burning tobacco and others find it irritating - for that matter, maybe
my preference for comedies over tragedies is genetic, but I think
that's much more common - in fact, I wonder if most writers who write
that unhappy stuff really would rather write happy stuff, but they
think tragedy is more serious, they need somebody like the Barbra
Streisand character in The Owl and the Pussycat:

"Dawn spat at the city?! What do you mean, dawn spat at the city?"

Questions I return to:
Why did Jack and Jill have to go up the hill to the well?  Wouldn't a
well on a hill involve a lot of extra digging?
Why did Texas need a school book depository for the whole state? 
Didn't they have closets in their schools?  Wouldn't that make a LOT
MORE SENSE?

Just past the midway mark of Mao II, it's shaping up rather nicely.  I
hadn't more than glanced at a Delillo book before, but it's not the
scary creepout that I was worried it would be.
I don't know why I was worried about that, but I was
--
"Acceptance, forgiveness, love - now that's a philosophy of life!"
-Woody Allen, as Broadway Danny Rose