Just a whiff of Pynchon but real Anniversaries

[Mark Kohut]

There are a marvelous few pages, the journal entry of October 30, 1967,
which are so
associative, so lyrical, with some Pynchon-like, almost generic theme
resonances maybe. The day entry moves thru
many impressions, one the tanks in East Germany "capable of operating in
areas contaminated by nuclear explosions" sez the Times.
..then Gisene writes of "the slapping of the elevator cables like chains
beating"....then, i'm still confused about this..
"a brightly colored bird gave off a swishing sound above Riverside
Park.....and said *aar-arr*....then described as your escaped electric
razor whose motor
has had just about enough of its casing"....???......an Aggregat 4, V-2
metaphoric echo?

Then the subway's "recessed roller friction" and "compressed air opening of
the doors" ..."desperate shrieking of rails" ......"all the sways and jolts
and braking processes"....and more that can remind of the destroyed steel
wreckage that opens GR, but alive here and kept so by "human exhalation"
[which opens the doors] ..."the doors will obey their valves and roll
aside, half into one wall, half into the other." ...
Then the car horns tuned to a single note---as the noise of NYC is
lyrically done...and when the air conditioners pause,,,"as though someone
would never breathe again....
"And again the machines contentedly gulping subway token after subway
token"....

Building to the story of highway traffic noise and then of a gas explosion
in Queens which blew up four blocks described by residents as "like
something from outer space, like a cataclysm, somehow inhuman"....which is
the sound she now hears from the apartment next door from the TV news, from
Vietnam. "Like something from outer space,
it is cataclysmic like flak shrapnel just before the sudden, dull,
earthshaking impact of the bombs, it is human. Sir."

!!!...that "it is human" is sublime, nicht war?



Very anticlimactic PS: the purest allusion to cubism, the art thing, I've
read: "in the bar the man behind the counter puts down your glass with an
uneven sound and the other half of the base of the glass follows quick as
an afterthought"..I guess it is in one sentence what my 6-year old grandson
told me about 'being drunk"--"everything gets blurry
so you shouldn't drive"..