GR translation: a beige summer spook at her roadside

[Michael Bailey]

This is impressionistic rather than rigorous - but doesn't it seem that we
are treated to a glimpse of Slothrop having a meeting of the minds with a
waitress in a diner, as they both groove to a jazz record on the jukebox,
but it doesn't lead to any kind of social connection or casual sex the way
his encounters during the blitz do!

So is this a prewar memory - I think so - and is a corresponding memory of
Slothrop (hers of him as he's had one of her) the beige ghost she *doesn't*
see, because she, like Jessica and Scorpia Mossmoon, belongs wholeheartedly
to Them, fits into society, and doesn't treasure groovy serendipitous
intimacies the way he does, nor remember them, and is certainly not haunted
by them?

The tone, then, is self-pitying on Slothrop's part, and buttresses his
Paranoia - "ah, they've all got it in for me!"
And I for one moment anyway (because otherwise i'm so well-adjusted) nod in
fellow-feeling:
as Kerouac said somewhere, "America's a lonely crockashit!"
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