stoutfellow: Joker (Joker)
[personal profile] 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.
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