BEg2 chapter 19 - (more just do a grab & back to the lab)

[Michael Bailey]

2) is better as band name or song title?

“After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for
their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only
stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flipflopped and
semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth
floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space
constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete,
state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a
number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak.”

Flipflopped and semiclad - Jimmy Buffett b-side? Or Beach Boys cover band?

3) intertextual up the ying-yang

“For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of
payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest
stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well
after any statute of limitations has run.”

- Outward and structural form - Pauline language to describe these perils.

Dishonest stewards - that’s from a parable, Luke 16:1-13
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Steward
One of those difficult parables from which it’s fun (if you like that sort
of thing) to hear the minister try to wring some ethics


“the deluge after them” -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Après_moi,_le_déluge
Louis the XV (probably spent as much on cologne as Shawn) & the equally
extravagant Madame Pompadour —

Erudite Louis, ardent amateur stargazer, downcast at a portrait sitting,
may have deigned to smile when Madame Pompadour tried to cheer him up (!?)
with the phrase. He was having a bad year, so she was like, “don’t be such
a gloomy Gus, we’re all fucked anyway!” but specifically she (and
presumably le Roi & his entourage relating the witticism) was referring to
the premature prediction of Halley’s Comet in 1757 (didn’t appear till
1759) and the floods feared from it because they also thought back then
that Halley’s Comet caused the Biblical Flood.

Karl Marx and Dostoevsky, those jolly beacons of good cheer, “apply the
phrase in their writings to describe the selfishness and apathy of certain
corrupting values,” quoth Wikipedia.