"1984" and "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Campbel Morgan]

So, the other day my kids were telling me about one character in a
Cartoon, Swine Before Pearls, having a bad dream in which Captain
Crunch murdered the Rice Krispie guys. But the kids didn't know that
the Cartoon title is an allusion to Christ's famous Sermon. I didn't
bother to tell them; I did tell them to read some Kurt Vonnegut, not
necessarily God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. When I was a child I read
Hamlet; had no idea that it might be a play put together out of MS and
speeches written and never produced. I read it because I liked Ghost
Stories and classic fancy books that most people didn't read but
pretended to or lied and said they had. I teach Hamlet now. It's
great. It's a thrown together baggy mess of a play and that,
well...that one of the reasons it's so great. It was not always
admired. In fact, and Susam Willis has some stuff to say about it and
Disney too, it's modern attraction is owed, in aprt, to its being cut
down to film size or production siize. But I like it big and baggy
even if its absurd phiosophical windbagging speeches son't fit the
players who say them or the plot. The graveyard scene is better than
anything Beckett ever wrote. Sorry, Dave, but it is.