The Pynchon reference is hilarious.
--- 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 atrocous
> atrocious. "Windy City" they called it. I suppose
> they still call it that? Sure. Loved the Leslie
"Fiedler anecdote", BTB. I've had to give up drinking
>
> ken
>
> --
> --------------------
> Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
due to due to because it >
> 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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