Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me – Richard Fariña

* All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wildmaned winter’s chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophomores in their new junior blazers like Saturday’s magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straightrazor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetrapacks of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer’s yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg’s Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Bosco, onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more sholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.

* But breathes there a soul

with man so dead

who never to his head has said

“Is there anything happening, Fitzgore?”

   “What do you mean?”

   “Is there any shit around?”

^

   In a whisper, the red head dropping down into its overcoat like a turtle’s, eyes searching up and down the crowded avenue, windows and doorways, any one of which might enclose some ovarian doom waiting to be fertilized:

^

“You mean narcotics?”

Notes From Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The point is to understand everything, to realize everything, every impossibility, every stone wall; not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you; to arrive by way of the strictest logical syllogisms at the most repulsive conclusions on the eternal theme of how you are somehow to blame for the stone wall itself, even though once again it is abundantly clear that you are not to blame at all, and in consequence of all this to sink voluptuously into inertia, silently and impotently gnashing your teeth and reflecting that there isn’t even anybody for you to be angry with, that an object for your anger can’t even be found, and perhaps never will be, that this is all a fake, a conjuring trick, a piece of sharp practice, and there is nothing there but a morass; nobody knows what, nobody knows who, but in spite of all the mysteries and illusions, you ache with it all, and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.

********

When workmen have finished work, they at least receive their money, they go and spend it in the pub, they get hauled off to the police-station – that’s enough to occupy them for a week.

********

You thirst for life and try to settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how persistent, how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them. You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may, perhaps, have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering. You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace! Lies, lies, lies!”

Of course I have myself made up all the things you say..

That, too, is from underground.

Something Happened – Joseph Heller

 

* there is one typist in our department who is going crazy slowly and has all of us afraid of her.

* My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.

* I was searching for action, tragedy, the high drama of detective work and courtroom suspense, but it was no use. They were dead.

*Unmarried men are not wanted in the Sales Department, not even widowers, for the company has learned from experience that it is difficult and dangerous for unmarried salesmen to mix socially with prominent executives and their wives or participate with them in responsible civic affairs. (Too many of the wives of these prominent and very successful men are no more satisfied with their marital situation than are their husbands.) If a salesman’s wife dies and he is not ready to remarry, he is usually moved into an administrative position after several months of mourning. Bachelors are never hired for the sales force, and salesmen who get divorced, or whose wives die, know they had better remarry or begin looking ahead toward a different job.

(Red Parker has been a widower too long and is getting into trouble for that and for his excessive drinking. He is having too good a time.)

Down Under – Bill Bryson

“.. we went to Len Vodic Vehicle Hire to pick up a four-wheel-drive for a two-day jaunt into the baking wilderness. The eponymous Len was a very wiry old guy, energetic and friendly, who looked as if he had spent every day of his life doing tough stuff in the out-of-doors. He jumped behind the wheel and gave us the kind of swift, thorough rundown that people give when they assume they are dealing with intelligent and capable listeners. The interior presented a bewildering assortment of dials, levers, knobs, gauges, and toggles.

‘Now, say you get stuck in sand and need to increase your offside differential,’ Lend was saying on one of the intermittent occasions I dipped into the lecture. ‘You move this handle forward like so, select a hyperdrive ratio of between 12 and 27, elevate the ailerons, and engage both thrust motors–but not the left-hand one. That’s very important. And whatever you do, watch your gauges and don’t go over 180 degrees on the combustulator, or the whole thing’ll blow and you’ll be stuck out there.’

He jumped out and handed us the keys. ‘There’s twenty-five liters of spare diesel in the back. That should be more than enough if you go wrong.’ He looked at each of us in turn, more carefully. ‘I’ll get you some more diesel,’ he decided.

‘Did you understand any of that:’I whispered to Trevor when he had gone.

‘Not past the putting-the-key-in-the-ignition part.’

Fillets Of Plaice – Gerald Durrell

The Birth of a Title

 

THE day was one of those breathless, clear, blue days that only Greece, of all countries in the world, can provide. The cicadas were zithering in the olive trees and the sea was a deeper blue, moving reflection of the sky. We had just finished a large and leisurely lunch under the twisted, pitted olives that grew almost down to the edge of the sea on one of the most beautiful beaches in Corfu. The female members of the party had gone down to bathe and left Larry and myself alone. We slouched there indolently, ferrying a giant, wicker-covered bottle of turpentine-like retsina between us. We drank and mused in silence. Anyone who thinks that when authors meet they indulge in witty exchanges and saucy badinage is sadly mistaken.

“This is a nice retsina,” said Larry at last, thoughtfully filling his glass. “Where did you get it?”

“From a little man who has a shop in one of those alleyways leading off St Spiridion Square. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Larry, holding the glass up to the light so that it glowed a pale old gold. “The last bottle I got from town tasted and looked like a urine sample from a mule. It probably was.”

“I’m coming this way to-morrow,” I said. “I’ll bring you a flagon if you like.”

“Hmmm,” said Larry. “Bring me a couple.”

Exhausted by the intellectual exchange, we filled our glasses and lapsed into silence again. The ants were foraging over the remains of our food. Tiny, black, busy ones, large, leggy, red ones, with their behinds cocked up like anti-aircraft guns. On the bark of the olive against which I was leaning there were flocks of curious larvae moving. Minute, fluffy creatures that looked like misshapen and rather dirty polar bears.

Player One – Douglas Coupland

[Having figured all of this out] Luke remained unsure what to do. Cultural irrelevance be damned, he hadn’t had a date in over a year. A date: he cursed himself for his self-censorship; Luke hadn’t gotten laid in years. 

He smiled back at the blonde, who actually seemed a bit awkward. With his head, he motioned her over to the bar. She froze, and Luke thought, Oh crap, too forward. But then she stood up and walked over to Luke with a strangely mechanical gait. He wondered if she was a model, and if that was how models were walking these days. She’s so beautiful, Luke thought. Cartoon beautiful. She’s a Barbie doll.

She approached Luke, touched the stool beside him, and said, “I am going to sit here.”

“Please do.”

She sat on the stool, but her body language made it seem as if she’d never sat on a bar stool before and it had a learning curve, like learning how to ice skate or juggle. She stabilized and stared at the bottles against the bar’s mirrored wall. Luke looked at her, and she seemed unconcerned about being stared at. He said, “A guy walks into a bar, and the bartender looks at him and says, ‘Hey, what is this — a joke?’”

If Luke wanted a reaction, he didn’t get it. “My name is Luke.”

There was a pause. “My name is . . .” There was another pause. “. . . Rachel.”

“Nice to meet you, Rachel.”

“Yes.”

Luke felt way out of his league, and awkward as all get-out. He needed to order more drinks, and maybe some snacks, but what do you feed a woman like this — hamburgers made of panther meat? Peacock livers on Ritz crackers? Do beautiful women even eat food?

“Can I order you a drink?”