Loose Connections
Apr. 16th, 2011 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellow"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do...."
I'm currently being earwormed by that song, and it's Salman Rushdie's fault. I'm still reading Midnight's Children (or rather, again reading it; I detoured into Liaden for three books, but now I'm back), and just hit, for the second time, a reference to "Daisy, Daisy".
The problem is that "Daisy, Daisy" has jerk-me-out-of-the-book connections in my head. One, as any SF reader could guess, is 2001 - that horrifying scene toward the end, as Dave rips out HAL's memory chip by chip, like a fast-moving case of Alzheimer's, and HAL retrogresses to his first meetings with - was the name Dr. Chandra? The other is from Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, which is a series of interviews with baseball players from early in the 20th century. One of the interviewees - Sam Crawford, maybe? - talks about one of the early World Series, in which Honus Wagner was unmercifully ridden by the other team's fans with a parody of a then-popular song. The song wasn't "Daisy, Daisy", nor was it "Murgatroyd Darcy, the Belle of Canarsie", but either of those songs inevitably calls that story to mind. (Damned if I can remember what the song was. I should get myself a copy of the book; there was some good stuff in it.)
I suppose it's fitting. Rushdie is one of those kitchen-sink writers, like Neal Stephenson or Laurence Sterne, constantly spinning off into obscure digressions about noses or duffel bags or Cap'n Crunch. (I do that too, I guess. Last week, before my Differential Geometry class, I found myself talking to the students about elephants....) But it's distracting.
I'm currently being earwormed by that song, and it's Salman Rushdie's fault. I'm still reading Midnight's Children (or rather, again reading it; I detoured into Liaden for three books, but now I'm back), and just hit, for the second time, a reference to "Daisy, Daisy".
The problem is that "Daisy, Daisy" has jerk-me-out-of-the-book connections in my head. One, as any SF reader could guess, is 2001 - that horrifying scene toward the end, as Dave rips out HAL's memory chip by chip, like a fast-moving case of Alzheimer's, and HAL retrogresses to his first meetings with - was the name Dr. Chandra? The other is from Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, which is a series of interviews with baseball players from early in the 20th century. One of the interviewees - Sam Crawford, maybe? - talks about one of the early World Series, in which Honus Wagner was unmercifully ridden by the other team's fans with a parody of a then-popular song. The song wasn't "Daisy, Daisy", nor was it "Murgatroyd Darcy, the Belle of Canarsie", but either of those songs inevitably calls that story to mind. (Damned if I can remember what the song was. I should get myself a copy of the book; there was some good stuff in it.)
I suppose it's fitting. Rushdie is one of those kitchen-sink writers, like Neal Stephenson or Laurence Sterne, constantly spinning off into obscure digressions about noses or duffel bags or Cap'n Crunch. (I do that too, I guess. Last week, before my Differential Geometry class, I found myself talking to the students about elephants....) But it's distracting.
