Thursday, April 20, 2017

Book Excerpt for the Day


    Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt.  All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived.  What stories they could tell!

    What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practiced jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

    (from Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon)

     8*/10.  The full review is here.
.

No comments: