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In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf—so it seemed to those who from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids slowly granulate, spots and wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrating it toward old age—a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on—some students even read "transcended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond—where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!
god he is so funny
He'd been a remittance man too, back in the thirties, and the most maniacal, systemless chess player in Central Asia. His tastes ran low enough to include even blindfold chess, which Russian sensibilities find unutterably gross. Tchitcherine sat down at the board each time more upset than the last, trying to be amiable, to jolly the madman into some kind of rational play. Most often he'd lose. But it was either Mravenko or the Semirechie winter.
[...] She's been to bed with the solemn engineer a few times (though at first, back in B.A., she'd have sworn to you she couldn't have drunk him even with a silver straw), and she knows he's a gambler too. A good pair, wired front-to-front: she picked it up the first time he touched her. The man knows his odds, the shapes of risk are intimate to him as loved bodies. Each moment has its value, its probable success against other moments in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can't afford to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what's present, dealt him by something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake everything on this anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he'll go on to something else. But he won't hold back. She's glad of that. He's a source of strength. She doesn't know, if the moment came, how strong she'd be. Often at night she'll break through a fine membrane of alcohol and optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use, unsupported, she could ever be.
It wasn't always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat. ... It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who'd volunteered were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. ...
"The Row is a game too." Säure sits grinning with an ivory spoon, shoveling incredible piles of cocaine into his nose, going through his whole repertoire: arm straight out swinging in in a giant curve zoom precisely to the nostril he's aiming at, then flicking in the lot from two feet away without losing a crystal . . . then a whole bunch gets tossed up in the air like a piece of popcorn and nose-gobbled ngkok on target, inside where it's smooth as a Jo block, not a cilium in sight there since the Liebknecht funeral, if not before . . . hand-to-hand shifts of spoon two or three times, faster than ivory ever moved in air ... rails disappearing in a wink without benefit of a tube to guide them. "Sound is a game, if you're capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary. That's why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I'm choosing my game, one full of light and kindness. You're stuck with that stratosphere stuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it 'enlightenment.' You don't know what enlightenment is, Kerl, you're blinder than I am."
The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them. "The War" was the condition she needed for being with Roger. "Peace" allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. He has no words, no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver, not surprisingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they'll be together in romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it's been grand, a wartime fling, when we came it was utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as a Fortress's wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it's been dreamy. . . .
You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver's, and a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He's a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could tell!
i just love the fucking boldness ugh
Thanatz was really asking: when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?
And: "How can I love them?"
Coming in the door, first thing Bodine notices is this string quartet that's playing tonight. The second violin happens to be Gustav Schlabone, Säure Bummer's frequent unwelcome doping partner, "Captain Horror," as he is affectionately but not inaccurately known around Der Platz—and playing viola is Gustav's accomplice in suicidally depressing everybody inside 100 meters' radius wherever they drop in (who's that tapping and giggling at your door, Fred and Phyllis?), Andre Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach (which is becoming the "hep" thing lately: even back in the Zone of the Interior the American subdebs all think it's swoony). Gustav and Andre are the Inner Voices tonight. Which is especially odd because on the program is the suppressed quartet from the Haydn Op. 76, the so-called "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, which gets its name from the Largo, cantabik e mesto movement, in which the Inner Voices are called to play kazoos instead of their usual instruments, creating problems of dynamics for cello and first violin that are unique in the literature. "You actually need to shift in places from a spiccato to a détaché," Bodine rapidly talking a Corporate Wife of some sort across the room toward the free-lunch table piled with lobster hors d'oeuvres and capon sandwiches—"less bow, higher up you understand, soften it—then there's also about a thousand ppp-to-fff blasts, but only the one, the notorious One, going the other way. ..." Indeed, one reason for the work's suppression is this subversive use of sudden fff quieting to ppp. It's the touch of the wandering sound-shadow, the Brennschluss of the Sun. They don't want you listening to too much of that stuff—at least not the way Haydn presents it (a strange lapse in the revered composer's behavior): cello, violin, alto and treble kazoos all rollicking along in a tune sounds like a song from the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, "You Should See Me Dance the Polka," when suddenly in the middle of an odd bar the kazoos just stop completely, and the Outer Voices fall to plucking a non-melody that tradition sez represents two 18th-century Village Idiots vibrating their lower lips. At each other. It goes on for 20, 40 bars, this feeb's pizzicato, middle-line Kruppsters creak in the bowlegged velvet chairs, bibuhbuhbibuhbuh this does not sound like Haydn, Mutti! Reps from ICI and GE angle their heads trying to read in the candlelight the little programs lovingly hand-lettered by Utgarthaloki's partner in life, Frau Utgarthaloki, nobody is certain what her first name is (which is ever so much help to Stefan because it keeps them all on the defensive with her). She is a blonde image of your mother dead: if you have ever seen her travestied in beaten gold, the cheeks curving too far, deformed, the eyebrows too dark and whites too white, some zero indifference that in the end is truly evil in the way They've distorted her face, then you know the look: Nalline Slothrop just before her first martini is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest. So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now—early Virgo—he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell—stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained." Only feathers . . . redundant or regenerable organs, "which we would be tempted to classify under the 'Hydra-Phänomen' were it not for the complete absence of hostility. . . ."—Natasha Raum, "Regions of Indeterminacy in Albatross Anatomy," Proceedings of the International Society of Confessors to an Enthusiasm for Albatross Nosology, Winter 1936, great little magazine, they actually sent a correspondent to Spain that winter, to cover that, there are issues devoted entirely to analyses of world economics, all clearly relevant to problems of Albatross Nosology—does so-called "Night Worm" belong among the Pseudo-Goldstrassian Group, or is it properly considered—indications being almost identical—a more insidious form of Mopp's Hebdomeriasis?
christ
"The Small Rain" was my first published story. A friend who'd been away in the army the same two years I'd been in the navy supplied the details. The hurricane really happened, and my friend's Signal Corps detachment had the mission described in the story. Most of what I dislike about my writing is present here in embryo, as well as in more advanced forms. I failed to recognize, just for openers, that the main character's problem was real and interesting enough to generate a story on its own. Apparently I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay of rain images and references to "The Waste Land" and A Farewell to Arms. I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.
lol