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PARTISAN REVIEW
no explanation for why the tower itself had to taper off at the base,
like a carpenter's pencil.) /
It
was pointless to ask the 3 visible
babylonian tower-builders : as soon as they noticed we were taking
pictures, they immediately started carrying on megalomaniacally
with their long white metal canister. (One of them even had the
nerve to approach the grid, and "warn" us : not to take pictures at the
moment; it was a matter of top-secret components ! Sundry warts,
living sociably together, on his cheek. And the two harelipped
spooky bastards across the way at once carted off their crap amid
such gesticulations and flapping of wings as if they were the invested
priests of TELEVISIUS. - "The fraud -" grumbled Ernst agreeably;
and clicked
&
shot away with vigor; he relished it when someone
took his job seriously. Not me : I only have to hear the word
"SECRET
.I",
and right away I always feel just like I did under the
late Hitler: The more bankrupt the government, the more "secret" it
has to be !).
"Well - : 2 meters; 2 twenty -"; the diameter of the tower that
is. (And it had to be very hollow: you could make out 2 damned
dungeony little doors in it, topped by semi-circle arches, heavily
riveted, in triple and quadruple rows. Nor had rivets been spared
generally. And the skinny, cocky-contorted ladders that climbed up
to those doors! Into that fiery red tube: Inside it !). / We looked at
one another, Ernst
&
I; (what the ladies were thinking we couldn't
say; of the well-yes, the "converse" perhaps? - Red-skinned
&
hol–
low : ought one not more correctly speak of a TELEVISIA ? Inside
doubtless the winding staircase, cunningly emaciated, wandering up
&
down the 350 meters, like at Piranesi's : whoever had a key could,
provided he were so inclined, walk right out onto one of the 4 cir–
cumferential pulpits, (it was too high for leaping off anyway), and,
in muezzin fashion, all ABU LAHAB, all "Father of the Flame," call
out to the federated folk:
"0
Come to the Quiz, ye faithful; hie ye to
the tube !"). / CHANNEL Two: "Do you know that tryptich by Eber–
hard Schlotter? With the text by Dr. Mac Intosh ?". "I don't know
names like that on principle.", was his initial retort, officious–
bigoted; then, however, inofficiously softer: "Sure I own the port–
folio." -
The craziest thing about it was the still undisturbed landscape!
("Crazy" in conjunction with this monster here.) When you had once
turned your back on it, sandy paths suddenly ran away from you; so
lonely, that should you "take to one," it's guaranteed you could still
