IV (10) page 154

[alice wellintown]

It's too cute and it slides on its ass. It certainly does read like
TV--Cops and Pimps 1960s Starsky &  Hutch and the Cartoonish pranks
like the ice cream slides are from the  vaudeville banana routine
where the silly-sounding phallic bananas, here covered with chocolate
and sucked appeals less to the funny bone than to the gross and
grotesque taste buds. The play on the top and bottom or second
"banana" (Jade and sidekick) can be traced to Harry Steppe; but the
girls subvert the phallic pimping with licking cold mounds of organic
ice cream. Of course the turn-of-the-century banana peel, tossed by
banana consumers on a city street where clowns parade, is also
lampooned. and so on.


> The fire alarm seems like an overt parody of the Joseph Campbell - Hero of a Thousand Faces "Hero's Call to Adventure."  You can't get any louder or more overt than that. The whole book, but particularly this short chapter, strikes me as heavy parody (a la Minstrel's Island)rather than deeper meaning.  This chapter reads like the transcript of a painfully bad sit-com.  You can almost hear the canned laughter and whoooos.
>
> Laura