Saturday, March 22, 2014

Analysis



Wallace creates, “The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy piamater pink except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled; from the roof’s fire door it’s an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late A.Y. (‘V.F.’) Rickey’s summum opus, is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the second floor’s optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front rame2, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus – a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura) - which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum’s edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform3, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducentr to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero” (186).1

1This is one gigantic sentence that goes on and on yet somehow remaining fluidity like a cellular membrane with lots of cholesterol, as if one can go on and on using technical language but still manage to create an interesting atmosphere for all readers to partake in regardless of science knowledge2. 1    I get a really eerie mental image when I try to piece together this recording studio for Madame Psychosis.
            1Polybutylene is a pretty cool name for a polymer though – it pretty much destroys polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride, at least in my opinion.
            2 This passage made me really consider going back and finding my anatomy and physiology textbook just so I could look through and learn about the nervous system. 

2 As someone who rides a scooter I really wonder how I would feel going up that ramp.1 I would not have an alternate choice and would have to just go along the ramp and see the eyes hanging from blue cords. Talk about oppression. Only disabled people get to be weirded out by the hanging eyes, apparently. Maybe I would eventually learn to just deal with it.
            1 On another note, Americans with Disabilities Act only was written into law in 1990 and this book was 1996. Some buildings must have been built recently, allowing them to actually comply. In general, no one builds a ramp unless there’s a complaint or the building was actually built after the enactment of ADA. I should guess that this ramp was built along with the building recently. Unless I’m mistaken. 

3 A few meters never hurt anyone, so feel free to walk around up there.

r Wallace throws many terms that are unfamiliar to the layperson but he successfully creates an enigmatic, figuratively twisting passage. Each segment of a sentence is a battle of sorts but the passage in its entirety flows and creates a surreal background for the recording of Madame Psychosis’ show.

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