The ready little fellow scurried up the lines, as Randolph, preoccupied with the crisis and staggering across the deck, somehow tripped over Lindsay Noseworth attempting to extricate himself from beneath the squirming mass of Miles Blundell, and abruptly joined his horizontal shipmates.
* * * * * * * * * *
There's a time in everybody's life when they have that "A-ha!" moment about Shakespeare, when a professor points out that Shakespeare isn't just fancy words and teenage suicide but also full of bawdy jokes and vulgar humor. Of course, the professor has to point it all out explicitly because who can understand that shit? Well, that same thing happened for me with Thomas Pynchon. Except that nobody ever told me how funny he was (even I didn't tell myself after reading The Crying of Lot 49. Although I did think Mason & Dixon was funny but I wasn't sure I was supposed to be finding it funny. Clever, sure. But, I mean, is it funny when underage girls sit on the lap of an 18th century gentleman to tease him with their fannies because they enjoy seeing him walk around with a boner? That's funny, right? Or gross? I can't tell anymore); I had to figure it out myself by reading Gravity's Rainbow. But now that I know he can be silly and low brow and enjoys hiding phallic symbols in his imagery, I wasn't confused at all by this prolonged slapstick bit.
Not that it's really prolonged! I explained that in an earlier blog post! But it feels long when every sentence works at making the entanglements of the slapstick scene more chaotic. This is just more of that! Now Randolph has fallen on his ass in a pile of Lindsay arms and Miles chub ruffles (I'm using their names as descriptions of the body parts and not as the possessors of the body parts so stop frowning and squinting your eyes and judging me for a typo and/or grammar error that doesn't exist). If you picture it, you'll probably laugh pretty hard! Not out loud, of course. Nobody really laughs out loud while reading, do they? I mean except for that candy eating scene in Gravity's Rainbow. I made sure everybody seated around me at the coffee shop while I was reading it heard me chuckle appreciatively at the humor, ending every chuckle with a softly spoken (but loud enough to make sure everybody heard), "Oh, that Pynchon! Ha!"
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