Thanks, Ken, for the hilarious bit. I esp guffawed at the shower-water pain and dead chickens tied to pore Teresa.
Chicago's called "The Windy City" bcuz of its politicians' speeches. Easy to forget that fact when you're running for the El in a 16-below zero gale.
a never-homesick (sorry, Fred) Chicagoan
---- Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> --------------------
> 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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