From The Egghead Republic (a Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes), translated by Michael Horovitz, 1979:
22.6.2008: On cankerstilts of light the straitlaced sunbelly
hovering over the landscape.
Late afternoon in the car : checking around again -- ? -- Yeah:
notebook, telescope, green specs; passports and ID. / And the
road rattled: sun & cactus blended. My mess of fingers lazed in
front of me. The captain smoked alongside (and sang; always
on the 'oon' tune: moon and noon and June and racoon --
perhaps there are new tribes whose vocabulary is toned down
to certain vowel formations?).
"Bad road!" -- But he shrugged one shoulder: Hm -- getting
close to the wall. / We'd left Prescott, Arizona, at 1600 hours,
and sat in the heat as in amber; (People in synthetic resin
blocks: that's been going on for years. To pass on fashions and
the like to posterity. No. 238 in the Detroit Museum was my
great love once, when I was a boy (tho today it's all, of course,
ridiculously old-fashioned; I used to save all my youthful
erections for her. Not seen her in eleven years now: the reverie
cantered away.)).
That strip of dust on the horizon?: "Yes. It's the wall." (And
slowed down; the engine even quieter. We drove straight
towards it.)
Then turning Northward; staying in line with it: "No no: 24 feet
high!" / And that's no joke, come to think of it: twice 4,000
miles of concrete wall to shut off our American atomic
corridor from both sides! (I'm dying to know what things will
look like inside the zone: they say troupes of centaurs were
spotted in Nevada! Quite apart from other wild rumours. But
then I was the first to have gotten a travel permit in eleven
years!).
. . .
22.6.2008: On cankerstilts of light the straitlaced sunbelly
hovering over the landscape.
Late afternoon in the car : checking around again -- ? -- Yeah:
notebook, telescope, green specs; passports and ID. / And the
road rattled: sun & cactus blended. My mess of fingers lazed in
front of me. The captain smoked alongside (and sang; always
on the 'oon' tune: moon and noon and June and racoon --
perhaps there are new tribes whose vocabulary is toned down
to certain vowel formations?).
"Bad road!" -- But he shrugged one shoulder: Hm -- getting
close to the wall. / We'd left Prescott, Arizona, at 1600 hours,
and sat in the heat as in amber; (People in synthetic resin
blocks: that's been going on for years. To pass on fashions and
the like to posterity. No. 238 in the Detroit Museum was my
great love once, when I was a boy (tho today it's all, of course,
ridiculously old-fashioned; I used to save all my youthful
erections for her. Not seen her in eleven years now: the reverie
cantered away.)).
That strip of dust on the horizon?: "Yes. It's the wall." (And
slowed down; the engine even quieter. We drove straight
towards it.)
Then turning Northward; staying in line with it: "No no: 24 feet
high!" / And that's no joke, come to think of it: twice 4,000
miles of concrete wall to shut off our American atomic
corridor from both sides! (I'm dying to know what things will
look like inside the zone: they say troupes of centaurs were
spotted in Nevada! Quite apart from other wild rumours. But
then I was the first to have gotten a travel permit in eleven
years!).
. . .
