Anniversaries and office doors.

[Mike Jing]

Funny you mentioned *Something Happened*. I'll probably get to translate
that next.


On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 5:14 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> From a recent McSweeney's bit o' wit entitled *New Erotica for Feminists*
> there is this LOL-joke:
> He calls me into his office and closes the door… to promote me. He promotes
> me again and again. I am wild with ecstasy.
>
> https://twitter.com/levistahl/status/1079539275925016576
>
> This comes from late in the book and is an unreadable (to some) picture of
> a page of *Anniversaries.  *
> Johnson soars here in every sentence and it begins with a remark on offices
> and their doors."The only place where one can be alone
> in NYC". Remember it is 1967-68.
>
> Earlier in the novel there is a situation where the protagonist, Gisene,
> gets a promotion. Told in the words of
> her co-workers we hear of "how long she was in the boss's office".....There
> is not an overt
> hint of sexual innuendo or harassment in *Anniversaries* so far, and Gisene
> is a moralist able to be outraged. (She walks away form a rental when she
> needs it
> when the landlord jokes about keeping the colored away")---which is why we
> have to notice this, I suggest, yet.......
> ah, wonderful suggestive ambiguity.
>
>
> Joseph Heller's second, and to some, greater novel than *Catch-22* is
> *Something
> Happened. *There's this:   "Closed doors give me the willies" [I think this
> is the line. Close anyway. Not looking anything up]. It repeats this trope
> by the protagonist who
> works in NYC. with riffs and reflections on why such anxiety and a killer
> payoff. Heller worked in advertising around such doors while Johnson was
> noticing them, too. Artists, yes.
>
> By the way, the protagonist of *SH* is Bob Slocum, which can't help making
> you think of T. Slothrop, right? Heller worked on this novel for more than
> a decade, pubbed in 1974, and as we think we've learned in a
> little comparative publishing re* Catch-22* and *V*, it seems pretty clear
> that TRP got to read some of *Catch-22, *at least, before it was published
> because of Candida Donadio, their shared agent. So, some of *Something
> Happened* read too? Just speculatin'.
> --
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>