I looked into six eyes which sat at a desk.
In ‘The Enormous Room’, an account of his weird Kafkaesque Orwellian three months spent in a wretched French prison at the end of World War One, e practices playing about with words.
“This court hereby finds you guilty as charged. You’re free to go, of course, but do try somehow to stop your constant robbing of things.”
One smart camper knew the correct answer. Yes, L. Frank Baum sent every word he wrote about Oz to Enrico Caruso for approval before daring to deliver a completed manuscript to his publisher, The Reilly & Lee Company of Chicago.
L. Frank Baum:
a. wrote all of his Oz books with a pencil dipped in honey.
b. wrote all of his Oz books blindfolded and balanced on a high wire.
c. wrote all of his Oz books in a combination of Sanskrit and Inuit before working them out in Spanish, Finnish and finally, English.
d. wrote all of his Oz books under the watchful eye of the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso.
Study this intently for a minimum of 20 seconds and feel refreshed.
1. Rotundity, Wherefore Art Thou?
2. The Singing Roman
3. A Fistful of Scandinavia
4. Jelly: A Saga of the Kitchen
5. Which of This is to be All True in the Harvest of Many Quills
Mr. and Mrs. America, hold on to your hats. Here come
Ernest Hemingway and Ginger Rogers
starring in a gender-bending rags to riches tale of the depression
set in pre-industrial meso-America.
Watch Ernie dance and sing his way into your heart.
See Ginger outrun, outfight, and outspit legions of Aztec warriors.
Never before has there been a motion picture so bitter, biting, or beautiful.
See, nay, experience
A FAREWELL TO ARMS AND HELLO, BROADWAY, HELLO
They always commenced bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.
Whitening hem. Good one. Writers of fiction throughout the ages have had to deal with dawn. Somebody, not me, should compile a whole sheaf of breaking dawn prose and nail it to the door of the post office in Turlock, California.
“It’s time for us, the shy two, To say a fond good-bye to, You and hope you liked the sho-oh-oh, Good night.”
The loon trudges up The Hill to visit the ghostly remains of his past. Yellow buses, innards churning, once challenged The Hill, and so, too, sometimes, did a 1954 blue and white Chevrolet BelAir containing the young loon.
Having gained the summit, the loon looks across to where those houses weren’t and once upon a time the yellow buses entered a turnout and spewed out their well-dressed scholarly contents. The loon himself was often guilty of sweater vests in that almost forgotten time.
The loon pauses to take note of the vanished parking lot where he once parked the 1954 blue and white Chevy. Well, all right, tennis courts. Better tennis courts than more of them big old houses.
The loon wonders what would happen if he walked up to that door, knocked, and asked the resident for a custard-filled maple bar. He could have gotten one in 1961, for lo, this is where the cafeteria multi-purpose room dwelt in times of yore.
The loon tentatively identifies that corner kick place as the spot where he ruptured his hamstring while scoring an all important run during a third period P.E. softball game in 1962.
There’s the boys’ locker room, but not anymore.
What ho! The hill at the end of the upper field. It exists! The upper field doesn’t, though.
The loon often lunched here. It’s not a mirage. It’s concrete.
No track, no goal posts, but nonetheless a familiar view.
The loon rests his walking stick and notes that it’s still pretty wild on the west side.
The hub courtyard, gym on the left, radiating spokes of learning here, there, and on the right.
The loon, in search of a burrito, descends.
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Doc's Lunacy
5 of 5 stars to The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton goodreads.com/review/show/55…
