V2nd, some impertinent obs

[Michael Bailey]

a) Tolito, Jose and Kook - Kook yells "Maricon!" at the Playboys.  But
he's young enough and cute enough, apparently, that they don't enforce
respect...

(in some ways those were more innocent times)

b) the little buskers offer Benny the job..."Why don't you hunt
alligators, like my brother?" (34)

c) working back (but only so as to move forward!) page 11 -
"[Paola] taught them all a song.  Learned from a para on French leave
from the fighting in Algeria."
That folk music thing...  also, something satisfying about a Frenchman
on French leave
(it would've been a Frenchman, right, that's who was oppressing the Algerians?)

d) Paola was Benny's date for the New Year's Eve party.
Scaffold's a funny name for a ship.
Paola was waiting for Benny all that time.

e) dream algebra: the tiny girl in Flange's dump + MG x (gypsy blood
transmuted into Jewish heritage) = Rachel?

f) Esther's nose job: actually that was one of the many high points of
the book for me, visualizing the neat medical procedure.  I'm not a
huge fan of surgery but that is one of the best descriptions I've read
(of course, since I'm not a great fan, I haven't read that many...but
still, a nice piece of writing)

g) Stencil appears to have been wearing a waterproof suit in the sewer
(page 138 - "He'd stowed the waterproof suit....")
but I don't see a reference to Benny having one?

h) Epic sentence, also a list this time...: page 116 - [ A weird
collection it [the volunteers for alligator hunting] was: bums..mostly
bums. ]

"Up from the winter sunlight of Union Square and a few gibbering
pigeons for loneliness; up from the Chelsea district and down from the
hills of Harlem or a little sea-level warmth sneaking glances from
behind the concrete pillar of an overpass at the rusty Hudson and its
tugs and stonebarges (what in this city pass, perhaps, for dryads:
watch for them the next winter day you happen to be overpassed, gently
growing out of the concrete, trying to be part of it or at least safe
from the wind and the ugly feeling they - we? - have about where it is
that persistent river is really flowing); bums from across both rivers
(or just in from the Midwest, humped, cursed at, coupled and recoupled
beyond all remembrance to the slow easy boys they used to be or the
poor corpses they would make someday); one beggar - or the only one
who talked about it - who owned a closetful of Hickey-Freeman and
like-priced suits, who drove after working hours a shiny white
Lincoln, who had three or four wives staggered back along the private
Route 40 of his progress east; Mississippi, who came from Kielce in
Poland and whose name nobody could pronounce, who had had a woman
taken at the Oswiecim extermination camp, an eye taken by the bitter
end of a hoist cable on the freighter Mikolaj Rej, and fingerprints
taken by the San Diego cops when he tried to jump ship in '49; nomads
from the end of a bean-picking season somewhere exotic, so exotic it
might really have been last summer and east of Babylon, Long Island,
but they with only the season to remember had to have it just ended,
only just fading; wanderers uptown from the classic bums' keep of them
all - the Bowery, lower Third Avenue, used shirt bins, barber schools,
a curious loss of time."  (This was before most of the social safety
net had been spread, wasn't it?

Dream algebra: "something nasty in the woodshed" (Cold Comfort Farm
(saw the original TV movie, haven't seen the Hollywood one but the TV
one was quite good) - that is, the agitating root cause of the malaise
that Benny and his friends share, and the sense that there's a lower
stratum of society than the WSC: bums..

so the bums (they) and ourselves, stuck (overpassed - a clever way to
say preterite? or maybe, differently, "mba-kyere"?) share a disquiet
about where indeed the river is flowing

not to mention what's flowing into the river from those very sewers
where Profane meets up with the Sacred, or at least Father Fairing's
attempt to extend the Holy Communion to rats

(not from a surplus of benevolence, but out of despair at extending it
among humans)

and Stencil thinking "how did they get onto you?" (referring to
himself, this once, in the 2nd person!)

they encounter each other, but don't exactly meet, in the sewers

There's some lack of earnestness in both of them (as in all of
Zeitsuss's casual workers, who don't share in his vision, like the
rats who foil Father Fairing's fostering of faith; they don't get the
"sweetness of the time" Zeitsuss propounds)

which seems endemic among those who begin to question whither that
river is flowing


"was that not a curious minstrel?" (138)






-- 
"I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard your voice
singing through the gloom" - James Joyce