Frederick Pollack wrote:
>
> I see Pynchon's point about the "width and tallness" of the wind along
> 14th St. But as a native and ever-homesick Chicagoan I must say that,
> for sheer intensity of Venturi effect, any east-west street in the
> Loop, between State St. and Michigan Avenue, beats 14th St. by a
> mile. Plus the tendency for that wind to change direction in an
> instant - off the prairie, then off the Lake - without losing speed.
> Carried me and my umbrella a block once when I was ten.
Xmas week 1973 I go to the MLA convention, held that year in Chicago.
They stuck us in great hotels: I was in the Palmer House. All the
graduate students are job-hunting, very taut and open to raucousness.
Male faculty, after a year in Binghamton, act like a bunch of miners
down the hills of Colorado. So do the females. We start drinking
Canadian Club at 9:00 AM. Parties, condolence sessions, bacchanalia all
the livelong day. I get to witness Leslie Fiedler groping two women at
once. The party is the Joyce Society or some such thing and it feels
like 100 people stuffed into a room the size of a wristwatch. Everyone
is smoking something and everyone is real drunk. Later, my roomie and I
kill another bottle at 2:00 AM. I leave him watching Lanza in The Great
Caruso and pass out. Oddly, I don't feel drunk. At 7:00 I get my
wake-up call from the desk. Immediately I am convinced I am going to
die. My fingernails hurt. Once I am able to get out of bed without
fear of a technicolor yawn all over the carpet, I discover the pain of
water in a shower. Years later I am reminded of this horror when I read
about a very ill Teresa of Avila confined to a Spanish sanatorium where
they tie dead chickens to her suppurating wounds, figuring one poison
drives out another. I slink into corners afraid someone will spot me.
This is hilarious since everyone is in the Parker House coffee shop
nursing independently-acquired hangovers.
The operator on the phone had cheerily announced that it was 35 degrees
in Chicago. That doesn't sound cold. Then I hit Michigan Avenue,
hangover and brains in hand, and discover a typhoon blowing up...and the
freaking SUN is out. Binghamton got cold too but the wind always died
down when the temperature approached laboratory absolute zero. THIS is
atrocious. "Windy City" they called it. I suppose they still call it that?
ken
--
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Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"
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