Barry Wightman's Open Salon Blog

Seinfeld & Kramer meet Elmore Leonard & Herman Melville

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:05:51 -0400

A Naked Singularity

By Sergio De La Pava

University of Chicago Press, 678 pages, published May 2012

(This review was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books on May 16, 2012)

Crack open this fat novel with the zingy black and white moiré cover, retro-psychedelia in all its head-trip glory, and you are faced with an ominous epigraph, two verses from Psalms:

The Lord looks down from heaven

upon the children of men,

to see if there are any that act wisely

that seek after God.

They have all gone astray, they are all

alike corrupt:

there is none that does good,

no, not one.

Psalm 14: 2, 3

Uh oh. Not one?

I don’t remember that from Sunday School. Perhaps my mind was wandering that day.

But, really? Is that in Psalms?

Sure enough, it is. Maybe it wasn’t one of the Psalmist’s greatest hits—maybe he was having a bad day, things were running down. Pessimism reigned some dark day in ancient Israel.

And so it is with this ambitiously lunatic, hilarious, encyclopedic, maddening but entertaining novel of Everything, the tale of a precocious twenty-four year-old public defender named Casi in the New York City court system. It’s pessimistic. Or maybe it’s optimistically pessimistic. Or pessimistically optimistic. As De La Pava writes, late in the novel:

“We’re going to be all right,” he said.

“No,” I said. “But we’re going to live.”

A Naked Singularity, Sergio De La Pava’s first novel, fizzes like an overstuffed Roman candle launched over New York City’s downtown criminal court. It explodes. And for those with a taste for fiction that is the antithesis of economical writing—writing that speaks a lush language of the cosmic heart that frequently veers off-road from its central goofy two-public-defenders-pull-off-the-perfect-caper-ripping-off-high-end-drug-dealers plot into long dialogues about justice, cosmology, physics, mathematics, spirituality, entropy, boxing (I could go on, and De La Pava does go on)—it’s worth it.

Truly.

On the other hand, your mileage may vary.

A novel teaches its reader the rules of the road—how to read it. Some books are no-brainers, straight-forward with easy-to-follow instructions. A Naked Singularity, however, requires that the reader sit up straight and pay attention. For example, the novel begins:

“—noise background,

My getting out or what?!

Eleven hours and Thirty-Three minutes since meridian said the clock perched high atop a ledge on the wall and positioned to look down on us all meaning we were well into hour seven of this particular battle between Good and Evil and, oh yeah, that was Good taking a terrific beating with the poultry-shaped ref looking intently at its eyes and asking if it wanted to continue.”

Say what?

We read on.

After perceiving that we are indeed in the NYC court system, surrounded by the lowlife cast of a Richard Price police procedural, some pages later we circle back and the above reappears and begins to make sense:

“—noise background,

My getting out or what?!

My money’s on what, followed by a pause long enough to be uncomfortable.

Oh c’mon I didn’t do nothing man! This is bullshit you got to get me up out of here on the double yo, she’s lying on me!

Easy, hold on, let’s start at the top. Here’s my card. My name’s Casi, I’m going to be your attorney.”

Think a big-hearted, high IQ Seinfeld and Kramer meet Elmore Leonard and Herman Melville. With Cal Tech physics wizard Dr Richard Feynman down the hall, rooming with Ahab. And a wacky neighbor named David Foster Wallace. And Television. With a capital T.

Reader advisory: you must traverse long pages of mostly unattributed (funny, pitch perfect) dialogue without quotation marks. You will find yourself backtracking, you just will. Even when quotes mysteriously appear on page forty with more frequent attribution, the reader will struggle a bit. Why this editorial decision? No idea.

More advisory. The reader also needs to know that he or she will face instances of crazy ecstatic long sentences, such as Casi’s nightmare—an anatomy/surgery/medschool/physics class, peering into the human brain. Here’s a mere snippet:

“…So while normally at this point we begin to suggest the toxic, break down the healthy, and foster disorder, here an entropic chaos is already spreading virtually unchecked seeking its own heat death and this despite the fact that our own procedures are completely adiabatic and therefore blameless So why tamper? To tamper would be to excuse in a sense Closing I’ve seen enough After all, there are rules We’re not savages.”

Forget the punctuation thing. I don’t care. This is it. Key word: entropic, entropy—a central theme of the novel.

Thomas Pynchon, long thought to have an almost proprietary literary handle on this slippery concept, entropy—that of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a running down of the universe, dissipation, heat loss, chaos, wrote that entropy can be thought of as “that human one-way time we’re all stuck with locally here, and which terminates, it is said, in death.” Thermodynamical gloom. And Casi, our quick-witted hero who is convinced by his fellow attorney, alter ego and maybe evil twin Dane, to conceive and execute the perfect crime (think The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, swords, masks, a Melvillian, er, whale and a vast sum of dirty money) begins to dissipate, disappear. Not unlike Slothrop, Pynchon’s schlemiel hero of Gravity’s Rainbow.

During a climactic NYC power blackout in which all is dark and cold, Angus, Casi’s bizarrely erudite neighbor down the hall ruminates about the end of the universe and a naked singularity:

“A point of infinite density. A point where concepts such as space and time have no meaning, where the laws of science break down and the future lacks even the slightest predictability…Now fortunately until now singularities have only existed in black holes, locations that by definition prevented them from having any effect on our world since remember that no information can escape a black hole.”

“Until now?”

“…our universe is collapsing into a singularity…what theorists call a naked singularity. One not cloaked by the shadow of a surrounding black hole. One apparent and visible with effects we’re all feeling.”

Casi dreams again and De La Pava slips into a Ginsbergian howling passage, entropically spiraling into the complex moiré of the book’s cover and final endpaper:

“When I looked up from the floor I found I could see Everything. I saw the fundamentals of the universe; quarks and neutrinos in visible ubiquity, jittering and bouncing, off each other and onto me. I saw Time itself, the fourth dimension, naked and enormous in its full horror, neither flowing nor frozen, and beside it the relativistic Elsewhere, lifeless and defunct. I saw Music, not the notes or the sounds but what it verily was. I saw incomplete but beautiful Math, its integers and the rules the obeyed and I understood it all.”

So maybe the Psalmist was right—things were pretty rotten on that long ago BC day and the Fourteenth Psalm is a Biblical entropical nightmare. Just like this novel. On the other hand, maybe he and Casi were sometimes able to perceive beauty, seen and unseen, and somehow manage to be optimistic. In a pessimistic sort of way.

He do the desert in different voices...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:03:05 -0400

Astronaut David Bowman, after painfully decommissioning the charming rogue supercomputer HAL as they approach Jupiter’s moon Iapetus in the 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey, confronts a space oddity. To those of us who saw the epic movie by Stanley Kubrick eight or nine times back in the day, this is the psychedelic part—the trip, where Bowman whooshes through time, above and beyond, weaving his way through the star gate, a mysterious transition point between normal time, space and matter and who knows what. In the novel by Arthur C. Clark (from which the film was adapted), Bowman utters his last words to an uncomprehending Mission Control, “my God—it’s full of stars!”

And with those words as an epigraph, so begins British author Hari Kunzru’s marvelous time machine hall of mirrors, the intellectually voracious novel Gods Without Men. Think Close Encounters meets Voltaire meets reality TV—an entertaining battle between the Enlightenment of reason—just the facts, ma’am—and Romantic we’re-not-alone-in-the-universe mystery. It’s about knowing. And not knowing.

The novel is centered on the remote, high desert northeast of LA, the Mojave, a place of desolate mystery—a dusty motel and the Pinnacles, an immense, three-spired geologic stone formation where grizzled desert rats, misfits, UFOs and seekers have been drawn for centuries. Jaz and Lisa Matharu, he a young, brilliant financial engineer and mathematician of Sikh heritage having trouble coming to grips with the take-no-prisoners amoral ways of Wall Street in pre-crisis 2008, she a secular Jew with no use for superstition or mystical hoo-ha, are on a repair-the-marriage family vacation trip to the desert. An off-road attempt to rekindle marital magic. They turn their backs for a moment and their six year-old, autistic son Raj, the primary source of family stress, disappears. The marriage crumbles. National media attention ensues, headlines and, ultimately, suspicion. This is the core narrative thread—what happened to Raj?

It is Sam Shepard territory, or that of country rocker Gram Parsons (truckers, cowboy angels, crystal meth, overdose death, a seedy desert motel in Joshua Tree)—or as Balzac wrote, “In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing…It is God without men.” Unknowable. Fearful. Chaotic—completely against the cerebral grain of New York-rational Jaz or Lisa, though both begin to unravel and change. Besides the story of Raj’s disappearance—did he wander off, was he taken by coyotes or was he abducted by drug addicts or maybe even by aliens, the space people worshiped by the oddball Ashtar Galactic Command commune—Kunzru injects this waste land with echoing tales woven together over many years, all in this place. Tales of shape-shifting trickster Coyote, a lone, sun-addled Spanish friar of 1775, a Sixties hippie chick commune survivor, a British rocker of 2008 on the lam from reality and a World War I-damaged anthropologist of 1920 studying the tribes in the Land of the Dead, are all finely networked by a skein of luminous connections, littered with allusions and legend, Kabbalah reminiscent of Eliot, Pynchon or Gaddis.

Kunzru beautifully captures the voice, tone and melody of each time and place, from the diary of the Spanish friar to today’s Park Slope, Brooklyn to Nicky, the pale and scrawny British popstar. Like Coyote, Kunzru’s prose assumes many shapes—he do the desert in different voices. Here’s Nicky on the road to the motel California:

“LA faded away into a thankless dead landscape. You couldn’t call it desert, really. It was waste ground, the city’s backyard, a dump for all the ugly things it didn’t want to have to look at. Warehouses and processing plants. Pylon, pipelines. Broken things. Junk. There were whole junk towns, San this and San that, fuck all to them except concrete boxes to live in, concrete lots in front of concrete malls for all the little junk people to go and buy things.”

Then, in a haunting chapter set in 2008 Wall Street, Jaz is having qualms about his firm’s creation of a vast mathematical system of everything, a powerful computer model designed to scoop the global market. Like the mad 18^th century French philosophes, all can be known. Entropy can be tamed. The system, known as Walter, has already made big profits in trial runs, trashing one or two insignificant world markets. Jaz’s boss, Cy Bachmann, is gearing up for the big time, undaunted, though he too shows signs of the mystic. Cy says:

“‘We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes…we’re hunting for jokes…parapraxis. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’

‘Discover what?’

‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for.’”

In a Borgesian move, Cy then shows Jaz and Lisa, his 16^th century Antwerp copy of The Zohar, Luria’s Tree of Life, founding documents of the modern Kabbalah. Lisa is enthralled. Jaz is horrified. Cy says:

“For a Kabbalist, the world is made of signs. That’s not some postmodern metaphor—it’s meant literally. The Torah existed before the creation of the world and all creation emanates from its mystical letters.”

Echoing back to the Galactic Ashtar loons in the desert, their signs and portents, the high elect of Wall Street and the low preterite intersect. Everything is woven together.

Kunzru, however, does not allow the novel to descend into obscure arcana. The story clips along, bouncing from century to century, year to year. The cold reality of 21^st century life, however, always flows close beneath the rocks and stones, near the surface:

“Soon Coyote’s crystal was running all over the desert, into every trailer and jackrabbit homestead, turning the people into hungry ghosts: mouths the size of a needles’ eye, stomachs like mountains; nothing could ever fill them up. Meth soaked its way along highways and train tracks, through drains and power-lines and TV cables, into the very fabric of the houses where the tweakers lived. Meth in the air vents, in the furniture, caking the walls of the microwaves where they cooked their children’s food.”

Dave Bowman, that 2001 astronaut, ends up in a bizarre Louis XIV-style hotel room, baffling audiences—mystifying, unknowable. Similarly, Hari Kunzru’s cerebral and knowing novel, like all fine fiction, in the end, is about not knowing.

For those about to cook...

Tue, 3 Jan 2012 08:01:09 -0500

Safkhet Publishing, Cambridge, UK

Joey Ramone, on stage at the Rainbow in London on New Year’s Eve 1977, apparently recovering from a pre-gig chow-down at a local Indian restaurant, mournfully groaned into his mic, “After eating that Chicken Vindaloo, I wanna be well.” The Ramones then blasted into their next fast and furious tune, leaving us wondering—whoa, what was it about that nice, fiery vindaloo?

You say you haven’t thought about the connection between rock ‘n roll and food? You say it’s probably only about the fancy contract rider backstage platters of lobster and God-knows-what-else big name bands demand on tour?

You’d be wrong. It’s much simpler and more humble than that. And longtime rock ‘n roll soundman, writer and self-proclaimed foodie Bruce Moore has cooked up a cheerfully goofy yet serious feast of road-worthy recipes, collected from hard-working bands around the world.

For Those About to Cook (a riff on AC/DC’s immortal anthem, For Those About to Rock: “We ain’t no legend, ain’t no cause/We’re just livin’ for today.” Heavy stuff, man.) is a rock ‘n roll stew of culinary contributions from fifty-five bands and musicians. Nicely presented and well laid out, each recipe is accompanied by Moore’s complimentary intro, a pic, a bit about the band. But here’s the thing, here’s what gives the book its off-kilter charm—nearly every band photo is a glowering, gonna kick your ass (or worse) collection of long-haired guys—you’ve seen these standard band pictures. We’ve got bands you might not have heard of, like Dusk Machine, Borganzur, Sasquatch Agnostic, Crimson Glory—we’re talking a heavy dose of the metal genre in all its grim incarnations—thrash metal, death metal, extreme Christian death metal, stoner sludge metal, Finnish folk metal. I kid you not. But then the reader, perhaps hesitantly, turns the page and the sepulchral power metal band Crimson Glory scary frontman, Todd La Torre, presents his charming preparation of stuffed artichokes—“The Art of the Choke.” Mom would be proud.

It goes on. We have the badass, guitar-slinging guy from Guns ‘n Roses kindly sharing his recipe for blueberry chocolate chip muffins.

Or metalcore singer Robert Meadows of the band A Life Once Lost humbly offering his Bobby’s Bacon Cheeseburger Explosion. Sounds great. Could also be a great song title. Or band name.

To be sure, though the book is heavy on meat and potatoes guy food, more sensitive, alt-indie-folkie and even one or two out-of-left-field classical music types do inexplicably find their way in. Vegan? Garbanzo beans? Got ‘em. And there’s even Jeremy Haffner of Oedipus, a smiling chef in rock ‘n roll disguise offering his lovely, ready for a nice place in Napa Valley steak pot pie with thyme and cream sauce. Let’s rock.

Overall though, we’re not talking high-end culinary artistry here, just simple, down to earth stuff the boys (or occasional girls) in the band could love. Here’s the first bit of the first concoction in the book, from New Jersey’s A Clever Con:

“Empty the entire box of cereal into a large bowl. I use a metal one, so it’s easier to clean later on. Crack open the cuddly honey bear’s skull, turn him upside down and mix in all of his sticky, gooey delicious insides.”

I’m good with that. And I bet Joey Ramone would be too. Let’s eat.

Will Hermes knows a lot about buildings and tunes

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:12:00 -0500

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire - Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, by Will Hermes

Music journalist Will Hermes, referring to rock ‘n’ roll critics back in the day, wrote, “… their sense that the entire world of art and culture and human emotion could be compressed into a vinyl recording, left a deep impression on me.” Me, too. And this book, a smart and savvy chronicle of the New York musical underground of the 1970s, aims to capture the magic of an ancient era, relate the secret history of a city when there was music in the cafés at night, revolution in the air, and most everything else was lousy.

On January 1, 1974, the august New York Times Op-Ed page brooded, “With 1973, an era died … an era of profligacy … an orgy of consumption, following the lean years of depression and World War II. This New Year’s Day, symbolized by dimmed lights, chilly rooms, and empty gas tanks, ushers in a new era …”

Man, oh man. Bad times, eh? Things had to get better, right?

Sorry. On January 1, 1975, one year later, the Times continued the gloomy riff, “To bid farewell to 1974 is in many ways a relief.”

Bummer.

And yet, New York, at that moment, was ablaze in one of those rare, radioactive bursts of new music that spark fleetingly in unexpected places—think ‘60s London or ‘90s Seattle. The ‘70s were New York’s time. Music was everywhere, kids flashed guitars and turntables like switchblades and the place was on fire. As Patti Smith said, “This is the era where everybody creates.”

Will Hermes (grew up in Queens, a real New Yorker, writes for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, NPR, the Village Voice—helluva resume) has written a crazy cab-with-no-brakes panoramic superhero musical ride through the pot-holed dirty streets of Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs. The title? Love Goes to Building on Fire (note singular building) was the first Talking Heads single, released in 1977 but written in early 1975, (note the level of detail here) a catchy paean to fearful times in the big city when buildings really were on fire. Music during a kind of wartime.

Let me just say that the book buzzes, rattles and hums like a beat-up Fender Jazzmaster guitar plugged into a hot, overdriven amp about to blow a fuse, its tubes glowing like the streetlights outside CBGB or the Mercer Arts Center. Amiably written in straight-ahead, three-chord, unornamented prose, it is at its best when Hermes throws in his own aching tales of teenage sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in Queens with the glittering Manhattan skyline in the distance.

The book is arranged chronologically by year—“1973: Wild Side Walking” or “1974: Invent Yourself.” Throughout, Hermes zooms in on a history-making musical event—say, the Ramones’ first gig at the dumpy CBGB on the Bowery. He tells us what happened in deliciously downtown graphic detail, tells us why it’s important, places it in social context, makes connections for the reader and then swoops away to some other gig happening uptown or around the block the following week—maybe Philip Glass’ performance at a loft just off Bleecker Street. The narrative moves fast across the grimy surface of the streets. Though expertly woven together to show the striking interrelationships among musicians, scenes shift and artists and genres mostly flash by like subway stops on a Lexington Avenue express. Deep musicological study à la Greil Marcus’ scholarly Lipstick Traces it’s not—there is no discussion of why all this happened, no illumination of its historical, political or musical origins. Another book awaits.

But I also must confess that I skipped and skimmed through maybe thirty percent of the book. Sorry, but I just don’t care about the salsa scene. I feel guilty. And the early days of rap and hip hop? Yes, it was instructive, and I have a new respect for Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc and 1520 Sedgwick Avenue and I admit it would be good for me to expand my universe, but I wanna get back to the good parts for me—the New York Dolls, Television, Talking Heads, Ramones, Springsteen, Philip Glass. If you are a potential reader of Love Goes…, and I believe you know who you are, you’ll skim too. Unless you’re an amazingly hip, culturally omnivorous, intense fan of every genre of music out there—rock, jazz, disco, salsa, hip-hop, classical (sorry, no country or blues here)—or somebody as passionate and well-informed as Will Hermes, you’ll skip around. But that’s okay—this is a book, it turns out, for dipping. Go ahead, whip through it and then return to it—open the book to any page and you’ll find something, a little trail to follow, a nugget from Hermes’ college of musical knowledge. And be prepared to fire up that iPod, or better yet, drag out your old turntable and dusty records—you’re gonna wanna hear what Will hears and you’ll learn a thing or two.

The central artistic pillars of Love Goes… turn out to be Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, two Jersey kids who rode the bus to the big city, played the dives before people cared. Both released their breakthrough LP’s in the autumn of ’75—Horses and Born to Run. (Ever notice how similar the covers are design-wise? Me neither. “Sans-serif comrades in arms,” says Will.) And I had no idea that Springsteen had such firm New York roots. On the book’s accompanying website (lovegoestobuildingsonfire.com, highly recommended itself), there’s a scratchy video from Max’s Kansas City, August 1972: Springsteen solo, acoustic guitar in hand, opening for the New York Dolls, of all people. He’s working through a tune that, in a year or so, will become Rosalita, an anthemic landmark, here caught in mid-creation. It’s an underground moment that underlines why these secret scenes are so important and still resonant today. Hermes’ book is full of them.

Patti Smith, now a National Book Award Winner and revered founding mother of punk, spoke to Hermes in 2005, recalling the captured fizzing magic recording Horses at Electric Lady Studios at 52 West 8^th Street, said, “I remember the exact moment where I peaked: there’s a line in it [Birdland], ‘Shoot ‘em up like light/like Muhammad boxer’—my little tribute to Muhammad Ali. That moment something happened. It was a moment where you shiver, y’know?”

Will knows. Now I know. Something happened. Shivers.

Think the Marvelettes meet Thomas De Quincey

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:12:07 -0500

“Please mister postman, look and see, if there’s a card in your bag for me.”

Marvelettes, 1961. Big hit. Also fourth song, side two, the Beatles’ Second Album, spring of 1964—a bouncy bit of Beatlemania. A sprig of middle of century sunshine, youthful optimism, teenagers in love. And we waited so patiently for that card, or just a letter. A million years ago. Gas was cheap and a first class stamp cost a nickel.

So what’s all this about closing post offices or maybe even eliminating the US Mail altogether?

Roll over Beethoven, say it ain’t so, Joe, and where you going with that gun in your hand?

Yes, I am an over-the-hill boomer, indulging in some faded as your jeans nostalgia trip. But hold the phone. May I offer a sort of literary perspective?

Two-way long haul communications—other than an expensive long distance telephone call, an innovation of the early Twentieth Century—has been paper-based since, well, forever. In the Marvelettes’ day, you’d write a letter, put a stamp on it, and a few days later, after being routed through unseen networks of central offices and invisible sorters and carriers, an agent of the Federal Government would personally hand deliver your sealed, private message to its proper destination. Mostly. That patient girlfriend or boyfriend would get the message—signed, sealed delivered like Stevie Wonder, or maybe she wrote upon it—return to sender, like poor Elvis.

Rewind two hundred years. Thomas De Quincey, early Nineteenth Century English opium junkie, writer and ahead-of-his-time founder of the romantic notion of the Artist as Strung-out Outsider, which came to be central to the ethos of Twentieth Century Beats, jazzcats and rockstars, loved the Royal Mail. So much so, that under the influence of his beloved daily opium-based tipple, a potent-sounding concoction called Kendal’s Black Drop (also favored by Byron and Coleridge), he wrote a long essay called The English Mail Coach – or the Glory of Motion. Over its fifty pages or so, it morphs and twists like a light show at the Fillmore, becomes increasingly psychedelic, almost proto-Gonzo, highlighted by a vision of a scarlet and gold-clad crocodile driving a four-in-hand mail coach (we Moderns might here see a Hunter Thompsonian riff straight out of 1970s Las Vegas and a crazy ink-splattered drawing by Ralph Steadman). But the point is, the piece, written in 1849, by which time the railroads had formed the basis for all mail service in the British Isles (De Quincey was not impressed with the railroads), The English Mail Coach nostalgically celebrated the romance, in De Quincey’s words, of the grandeur of communications, the nobility and necessity of the Mail, qualities, he felt, were lost by the mere speed of fifty mile-an-hour rail transport.

Here’s De Quincey describing the daily departure of the mail coaches from the central post office in London:

“Imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street…the absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, and the magnificence of the horses, were what might first have fixed the attention….every moment re shouted aloud by the Post-Office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years – Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow – expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions.”

In other words, he’s talking about person-to-person long-distance communications at the horse-based, natural speed of ten miles per hour.

A charming notion.

Much as I’d like to preserve the vintage village green aspect of all this, I fear in the long run that the future of paper-based mail seems doomed to go the same way—the way of the English Mail Coach—a comforting relic of a Currier & Ives autumnal nostalgia.

Today’s communications world is bit-based. After all—you're reading this. Digital, not paper, flesh and bones analog. I know it, my kids know it and perhaps the good people in line at the Elm Grove post office suspect it.

The world shifted underneath Thomas De Quincey and it is shifting under us. Our nostalgically clinging to hundred year-old post offices will seem as quaint and Masterpiece Theatre cozy to a future Thomas De Quincey as the fine steeds of Lombard Street do to us now.

You may ask yourself then, where is the beauty and grandeur in today’s communications? Is there any? Does it require a wee draft of Kendal’s Black Drop to see?

Wouldn’t hurt. But a little x-ray vision would be handy.

Today’s communications grandeur can be found in the vast arrays of monster electronic switches, clustered in digital clouds connected by many miles of flashing fiber optics found in the world’s humming core internet exchange points—where bit and bytes stream and flow ceaselessly, day and night at terabits per second and where our “cards and letters” are sorted and very precisely delivered nearly instantaneously anywhere in the world. Can you see it?—right next to the crocodile in all his scarlet and gold Royal Mail finery.

And the Beatles and Marvelettes can look and see and just check their email. For the umpteenth time today.