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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