V---2nd, still Chapter 13 'two bums"/: Rimbaud

[alice wellintown]

Itz kinda heavy with technique and ideas, themes, the dialogue is a
bit tangled and the allusions for a blue note crowd bop about but I
think the shadows, shades, doubles, clock time and natural time above
and below, like missing rhyme important (I posted that article on
Milton's Missing Rhymes and it can be applied to V.).  Have to re-read
as I suspect that I misread the narrative as Benny's interjection or
his "carol"  when the bums laughed with him when Stencil is yarning
his way up 3rd Ave, though the idea, that "there was no difference"
(Harper 419) does not seem to apply to Benny's affair with
Rachel/Paola as I first surmised, but to Stencil's quest for V., to
his Education (Adams), Benny seems to think it does as he defends
himself against Stencil's argument that he (Benny) is not a member of
the crew and that he needs to act as buffer on the trip to Malta.  In
any event, that little bit about the war in the cradle of civilization
and the NY Times suggests that Stencil has linked his Education to
current events and that Malta is, a temple of Mars.His linking
Rimbaud's biography with V.s, what a wild life Rimbaud lived, running
guns, a real street kid, suggests, to the bums, that poets & bums
often hang from the same scaffold or in the same position on Fortune's
wheel. Of course, like G&R, these young poet bums are no match for the
wits of Stencil. Is any one? Maybe only a man of infinite jest? That
would be Tom Foolerwe.