Jungian Glands in West Side Story & Jungleland & Greasy Lake

[M Choakumchild]

We are Sick
We are Sick

The Juvenile Delinquent & Rosie R. are tragic figures who fall when
the Boyz to Men return from WWII.

No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and
Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we
possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable
to Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware
of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the
Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the
children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of
distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic
dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at
once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging
sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress
suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a
drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over
the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a
house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one
cares.

Greasy Lake is a collection of short stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle.
The "Greasy Lake" characters, Digby, whose parents paid his tuition to
Cornell; Jeff, who had a dangerous personality; and the "wanna-be bad"
narrator relish their "Bad Boy" image. T. C. Boyle describes their
"Bad Boy" behavior: “we wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around
with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether [...]." [6] The
lake, much like the character's foolish desires, has turned into a
lagoon of refuse with broken bottles lining its banks. T.C. Boyle’s
reference to war is as vivid as the lake, “so stripped of vegetation
it looked as if the Air Force had strafed it.” [7] The mention of
General Westmoreland's tactical errors in Khe Sahn equates to the main
character's disastrous misguided offense of losing his car keys. A
moral dilemma occurs but is not directly exposed, since the characters
desire a 'Bad Boy' image, T.C. Boyle writes: "There was a time when
courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be
bad [...]." [8] However, an epiphany is reached when the "Bad Boys"
realize that what they desire is not always a good thing.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greasy_Lake_%26_Other_Stories

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvJ1A7EeJ7o&feature=related