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Intellectual and erudite, though adeventurous too, Mosby Scribner, a mildly neurotic beach-reading bibliophile, plans and picks what he will read on his care-free trip to the cool Carribean. Booze and beer used to dull him, so now he interpolates written words between his nervous hand and drowsing brain. He has done this before-- so much so, he has mastered Proust time and again, though sometimes falling flat on his rollercoasting sentences; and Jimmy Joyce, though technically brilliant, has left him encyclopedically dizzy even on the most relaxing trips. Both prove discordant to the slumbering sun and hypnotic surf (aside from the intoxicating effects of the chapters "Proteus" and "Lotus Eaters" in "Ulysses"), which he feels are required on holiday in such places as Antigua or the Bahamas; Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" is lush and evocative, but read too often, leaves one shizophrenic and lost. He is finishing Borges now--"Fictions" and "Artifices"-- though the steely prose--laconic, terse, and sometimes banal-- seems too edged for the rounded surf, soft sand, and rolling sea; and though Whitman and Stevens are always rooted in the blazing sun and in the ebb and flow under the yawning moon, this microcosmic man searches ever more. For just three symmetric and well-researched days before his big trip-- as if waiting for Godot-- he feels his life is scripted like an understated and very, very short story-- a Hemingway novel, a tolling bell. Like the macho master, he imagines a shotgun in his mouth, his finger on the trigger, until he thumbs through Italo Calvino (brand new for him), finding his whimsically introspective Palomar strutting along the strand, recording impressions and vicissitudes of the sun, beach, and cloying clouds-- an antithesis to Joyce's Daedalus rumbling with an ashplant along the angry Irish coast. No, these are sultry shores, and this peaceful Palomar muses metaphysically on chance encounters with nude bathers and their bare-breasted bosoms!-- their proper place in the Italian landscape of light, shadow, and moonlit shore. Yes, an epistemolgy of nipples in the sky! Mr. Scribner feels something new, brazen, creative and clean, exclaiming "Yes, yes"-- a Molly Bloom "Yes" to being Palomar, and-- still at home, before his trip-- he tosses his book, squeezes into a blazing red speedo while arranging two pithy umbrellas in a tall mojito, and finds a place to doze along the rolling sea.
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