V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before

[Michael Bailey]

...it's actually pretty good!
I think Kai may be onto something - any Nature-worship in V.?  not
sensing it; the ontology here is, what?
the City
the Street
the Armed Forces
the workplace
the home
History
the (Human) self

page 229 - another thing I never noticed, for some reason I always
thought BP was on a bus with the NY Times Classified section.  But
actually he's "on a bench in the little park behind the Public
Library"
which is Bryant Park? http://www.newyorkled.com/bryantpark.htm

(a link on that page
http://www.newyorkled.com/nyc_events_St_Gennaro.htm goes to the San
Gennaro Festival although it's in September - unlike Ercole dei
Rinoceronti in March - it's a street festival and they block off
Mulberry Street
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_Street_%28Manhattan%29 but
anyway...a-and it was in the Godfather...)

so he's swatting flies with the paper, and staying in a flophouse

"you're jobless, I'm jobless, here we both are out of work, let's screw"


Page 230 (Harper Perennial) -

"Let me call you sweetheart," they sang, all somehow on key. --
anarchist miracle

"It may have been like the bartender on upper Broadway who was nice to
the girls and their customers."
--- I was thinking this was page 138, but that isn't a bartender, it's
the Hungarian Coffee Shop on York Avenue.
Where is this bartender? Ah, here we go? page 158, "...Broadway in the
Eighties, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken
heart for every light on it.  Uptown was a bleak district with no
identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as
break: merely gets increased, tensile, compressive, shear loads piled
on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own
shudderings fatigue it....If they did have a customer along - usually
one of the small gangsters around the neighborhood - the bartender
would be as attentive and cordial as if they were young lovers, which
in a way they were."

(reaching back in order to move forward, of course: but the extended
description of hearts not breaking but succumbing to something like
metal fatigue, "tensile, compressive, shear loads" could apply to a
lot of things, Benny himself not least among them; and the closing
clause "which in a way they were" is an extension of the same
generosity practiced by the barkeep...things that stay in Benny's
mind, one presumes, those little acts of kindness, tiny inclusions of
"gemeinschaft" in a larger, less-caring society)


One gets that he's becalmed, has a little time to think, so he strings
together some impressions and even takes it a little further in the
following beautiful passage:

"There is a way we behave around young people excited with each other,
even if we haven't been getting any for a while and aren't likely to
very soon.  It is a little cynical, a little self-pitying, a little
withdrawn; but at the same time a genuine desire to see young people
get together.  Though it springs from a self-centered concern, it is
often as much as a young man like Profane ever does go out of himself
and take an interest in human strangers.  Which is better, one would
suppose, than nothing at all"


He's playing a cool blues refrain there in Bryant Park, and the
changes are something like
horny (4 bars)
jobless (4 bars)
shared plight (4 bars)

so the next paragraph modulates up chromatically and suggests (this is
as deep philosophically as I think the book gets, at least in terms of
breaking it down so even I can understand it) that the only valid
reason to strive is to get laid, and that Benny qua Benny doesn't even
crave anything besides the animate.  That is, he doesn't even think
(our omniscient narrator assures us) about how all this craving could
be sanely directed any other way.
"Make love, not war" is implicit in his biogram, and his logogram
doesn't extend to all that other stuff.

Wish I could say that better.  Glad I don't need to, 'cause it's all
right there!

So of course he gets an NRB!