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Thoughts on The Crying of Lot 49:

The endings of "Bartleby" & "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" seem crucial.

Esp. the latter, in light of that obscure Varo painting Cowart showed in class, with the horn-blower & strange companions. What the hell was the name of that.

Date: 2007-12-11 02:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] andalus.livejournal.com
wait. Bartleby?

Date: 2007-12-11 06:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com
Yet here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener’s decease. Upon what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

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