the girl in the laughing man
Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Sun, 06 Jul 1997 23:57:08 -0700
>Has it ever occurred that perhaps we were being sarcastic as hell?
Sarcasm being the lowest form of humor and as such can be exquisitely
perfect if used with precision, but as a running joke is about as funny as
a drunk friend who just won't go away. I guess posting a JDS obituary to
the page could be considered sarcastic as hell, too. I guess it depends on
where your heart is at the time. When Sunny did it you just knew it wasn't
him, but you also wondered "well, how can i tell?" And when the diaspora
led to Halloween night and we're all putting on our Alice Walker masks...
I guess I wouldn't mind the joke so much if there were in fact more
"pretentious" posts on this list to surround it as a context and take the
wind out of the sails if we should ever get into the ether. I bet there ARE
some faulkners and pynchons and salingers on this list, but new ones and I
wish they'd just speak up more. Good luck you guys, too. Has anyone checked
out The Writer's Message Board yet?
http://users.ids.net/~rebecca/writing/wwwboard.html.
I mean, on the Joyce list there's this one guy who has this conspiracy
theory (and he won't quit with it) that stretches all the way back to
Shakespeare (that's SHKSPR...and JOyce's ulYsES and FiNNigaNs WAke) and his
true identity who is really Edward DeVere and all these great works of
literature all contain elements of a conspiracy blah blah blah and his
elaborate crosstics that go back hundreds of years has pretty much silenced
all the very educated people on the list who have incredibly insightful
things to offer, but are realizing that cranks with modems is the future of
the Net. Ah, moderation! Even moderation in moderation.
But anyway, get into any depth with JDS's stuff and you're immediately
aware of how much a priori knowledge you need to fully savor his stuff.
Maybe not to the extent of Joyce or Pynchon or whomever...but he sure as
hell isn't about to scold the same people he ended up communicating with
anyway. Ya know?
I apologize to myron. Especially since "In Dreams" is one of my favorite
Roy Orbison songs. I just think we should give the guy a little silence. To
think that when I was a kid I never knew anyone else who had read Salinger
(or so I assumed) and now to be on this list is kind of weird. I didn't
pick up the Esquire when it was on the newsstands and I just picked it up
in a library a couple of days ago...darted my eyes around trying to see if
it was worth reading. Who knows...maybe one day in his obit we'll find out
he learned how to use computers and in fact was on the list.
>I walk in a canyon everyday, live next to a creek, and think nature is a
lot >less fun than logging on or reading a book.
And for someone like myself who has been trying to build a business on the
net for the past two years and spends too much time tweaking my homepage
and looks too wistfully at the sky behind the trees way far away out the
window, I love computers. But I can see the tool overwhelming more parts of
life than is reasonable to be able to continue having the skills to be
able to live the life simply because the paradigm is of taking the
telephone and plugging it into a television with a steering wheel. Totally
cool. Don't get me wrong. And this is just the beginning. If we could all
be alive in a hundred years imagine what we'd see. And talk to your ninety
year old grandmother about what she's seen. And canyons encapsulate time.
And you're looking at a hundred years ago when you look into a canyon. And
longer.
What I want to know is why The Laughing Man keeps haunting me. What a
fascinating little story. I keep thinking about the girl, who is drawn in
such small and devastating sketches. Reminds me of this play (which I still
haven't found, if anyone can help) I heard about, these two Roman gentlemen
are sitting, and the midnight moon is on the riverside, they're drinking up
and talking, feeling very satisfied with their own particular stations and
situations in the empire they help rule. And it isn't until the very end of
the play that they discuss a crucifixion that occurred a few days ago, and
you realize that if it weren't for this person who isn't even a character
in the play, but is briefly mentioned as a detail to a normal days work way
back then, but has had more effect on not only the world they inhabited
(whose presence, or lack thereof morelike, would rally the empire into a
"holiness" not soon after and would have a historic breadth that stretched
for ages and epochs and eons and then some), but the world two thousand
years since they both shuffled off this mortal coil, yet whom they probably
never gave a passing thought to for all the rest of their days. Nor would
have needed to.
The girl in The Laughing Man. How do the girls on this list see her? Does
anyone have any kind of a mental image?
Malcs