!!! !!! !!! !!! !!!

(in the microphone, the breathless voice of the blurb writer: “. . . with his brilliant style, which reflects reality in a thousand facets, a style oscillating between crystalline hardness and rubbery flexibility, ironical, often even parodistic, then again as simple as biblical prose, yet utterly precise, always superbly precise, this panchaotic synoptist grasps the panorama of the present day as Bismarck once grabbed his king by the scabbard, virtually clutching, as it were, the reader’s sense of human responsibility by the moral balls . . .”)

and
SILENCE

so that you can hear a pin drop: the one with which the President of the Republic of VIELLE FRANCE is about to stick the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on the brilliant publisher’s breast (the pin has slipped against the hard-currency-filled wallet in the pocket of his philistine lounge suit: M. Malraux hands him another)—

while the honorary members of the Comédie Française playing the roles of the latest Nobel Prize laureates (Ghana, Lapland, Monaco, San Salvador, Central Vietnam, Honduras, German Democratic Republic, Holland, Tibet, Indonesia, Panama, Switzerland) spray a triple salvo of ink with their Parker fountain pens

in honor of the first

STATELESS MAN

ever to be accepted into the Olympus of moralistically vitaminrich, socially redeeming, full-calorie literature (whispering in the audience: “Mais qu’est-ce-que c’est qu’un apatride?”—“Quoi? Tu connais pas ta mythologie? Ce que tu peux être con! Ce sont eux qui bouffent leurs enfants. Tu n’en as pas entendu parler?”)

but then

a bard’s mane swings:

SIR JOHN LENNON

of the

BEATLES

and the eardrum-splitting whistling of bats originates with the sulfur-yellow hell of epoch-making puberty—

and while it is filled with thrills from the first zap of an electric guitar

the white elephant comes swaying along on pneumatically pounding rubber soles

his name is

BALLYHOO

and the question mark of his trunk carries a board on which is written:

QUO VADIS WESTERN WORLD?

and he rolls along in the guitar’s sweet vibes (which are followed by the shrill voices of a hundred thousand bats) and he is fantastically beautiful:

In each of his rubber joints, stamped into his bark-skin-like thumb prints of titan gangsters, ten times a hundred Negro boxers roll their shoulders;

in each of his steps, shuffling with the sole-pressure of ten times a thousand atmospheres, ten thousand Puerto Rican boogie-woogie dancers swing their chicks so hard that they petrify into body-halos like the divine whores of Angkor Wat;

in the swaying of his fullness, directed by the Cuban cigars of five times fifty-five Wall Street tycoons, the opulent hips of ten times a thousand batter-battened Aunt Jemimas—

we now all sing:

bigbig is BALLYHOO and beautiful:

his toenails, elegantly clipped like the gateway arches of Kairoan and as red as the flesh of the Persian Revlon Melon, are the shields behind which thousands of wishful fantasies feel safe; his forehead, wisdom-buckling up to the bare skull, like that of Socrates, but flat, narrow, and domineering beneath it, like a Florentine coat of arms, is, like the southern firmament, strewn with myriads of pearls of the HONDA breed; from the meager wreath of his white eyelashes, TWIGGY’S peacock eyes peer, gold dust–powdered; of his mighty tusks (their ivory is milky like DAUM glass, they are curved into lunar sickles like the papyrus barks in which the pharaohs had themselves rowed through the indigo velvet of nights in the Valley of the Nile), the left one is encrusted with amaranths and is known as LIBERTY, the right one inlaid with an ivy tangle of green copper and known as TIFFANY: they carry us through the fragrances of NEWMOWNHAY; the gentle palm-frond fanning of his ears blows ten times ten million posters into the pagoda of the sails of the fully rigged ship VOGUE; on his back, as tremendous as the snowy flanks of the Himalayas, tassled like a cardinal’s hat in the red braid of the fashion fiber COCO CHANEL, sways the all-purpose object