Sinister: We don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall

[P F]

Golly, but Joni Mitchell can make me sad. So much,
perhaps, is impacted in those grooves.


THERE'S A LEMON IN THE THE LOCKER

Mooro talked about being moved. And his last title, I
mean, 'subject heading', came close to moving *me*.


BURNING THE LETTERS

Some character talked about Sylvia Plath, and I knew
what he meant, pretty much, though Alan Bennett didn't
care for her, you know - no, not even for the diaries,
*especially* not for the diaries. He told us so in the
LRB. In *his* diary. How will, no, how do, AB's
diaries measure up to SP's? They measure pretty OK,
but he shouldn't overrate himself. I don't like his
clipped and abbreviated style, for one thing. Write
'prose', man. The cover price is £2.75.


ORTONARY WORLD

I wondered for a while whether the character who
talked about footy and the like (sorry, I forget his
name; he was eloquent enough) was yet another of
Welthorpe's guises. But would Welthorpe return under a
guise? No, no, she'd come as herself. I hear tell that
Kevan Cooke has not been wearing guises either. Cross
him off the list.


CARAMEL IN THE

Llaura Llew returned, more than once. She talked about
being inside eating (or was it drinking?) chocolate
while it snowed outside. The stray conjunction made me
think, Llaura, in your cardigan and with your
'roacking horse' and Irn-Bru, you ought to hear that
song "Chocolate Snow".

You have?

Oh.


BELCHERTOWN LIBRARY

LlLl talked also of children's fiction in the USA. I
remember that. It smelled nice. Even at the time, I
thought it smelled nice. Heaven dares think what I'd
dare think now.


IT'S DANGEROUS TO HAVE GENE HACKMAN DREAMS

I read a story tonight, while a bunch of Scousers were
scoring impressive goals: it was "Train" by Joy
Williams (1972). It features these lines:

"
Outside, the sky was lightening. Daylight was just
beginning to flourish on the city of Jacksonville. It
fell without prejudice on the slaughterhouses, Dairy
Queens and courthouses, on the car lots, sabal palms
and a billboard advertisement for pies.
"

I thought that was pretty good first time round, maybe
cos it looks like a Lloyd Cole prototype. Typing it
out, mind you, a catch a a surprisingly strong scent
of 'The Dead'.

Is it true, I wonder, that the train is the best way
to travel the US, for the skies belong to the rich and
the Greyhounds to the poor, but the rails to the broad
bands and waves of eccentrics, ironies and
contingencies?

Maybe it's for answers to questions of that ilk that
we must go to The American Short Story, or The English
Pub.


BEYOND METACULTURE

Thanks to those who responded re. Trilling. My
questions, by the way, were not meant to be marked
'urgent'. I don't think that either 'the self' or
'culture' are in the casualty ward, any more than they
were yesterday or will be tomorrow. I was merely
giving inadequate voice, out of interest, to a dead
man's thinking on these matters. He died of cancer, by
the way, and smoked ceaselessly. Dan Wakefield, his
former student, tells us in NEW YORK IN THE 50S
(Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992) that he waved those
ceaseless cigarettes like wands; and that the circles
under Trilling's eyes were the deepest and blackest
he'd ever seen, as though the indices of intellectual
brawls in the back-alleys of the ideal.



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+