July 13, 2006

Reading 7-14-6

I've been reading some Vonnegut of late. Player Piano is the first of the Vonnegut I've found here.  An interesting read, as always, andapparently Vonnegut's first book, written in the early fifties.
I've started Another Vonnegut book, Jailbird, which has many illusions to Watergate, which wasthe subject of another book Irecently read.
And also been reading the The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Conner.

A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chicken and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo.  He has sunk as low as a human being can sink in the American social order, except for his final resting place in the potter's field. (84)

My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anthing was possible.
Nor did I have glamour to sell.  I was the oldest and least celebrated of the Watergate conspirators.  What made me so uninteresting I suppose was that I had so little power and wealth to lose.  Other coconspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak.  When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three legged stool in the bottom of a well.  All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool. (74)

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