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October 11, 2007

Upstate

In the first few pages of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, our protagonist Oedipa Maas receives some unwelcome news and consequently tries "to feel as drunk as possible." In the ensuing moments, she thinks of disparate things, including a hotel room in Mazatlan, a Bartok concerto, a bust of Jay Gould, and of "sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody on it had seen because the slope faces west." The professor of the course for which I first read Lot 49, Stephen Fix, did his graduate work at Cornell, and drew our attention to the mention of the library slope, which is called Libe Slope, and which, until yesterday, I had never seen.

Yesterday I saw the slope at night and today I saw it in bright daylight.

The occasion was a visit to Ithaca to visit my good friend Ilya Garger, who spent most of his formative years there. Ilya has been spending his time in Asia for the past five years or so, and so I have not seen him in some time. If you are set on sending him flowers, he now lives in Bangkok, though I warn you, he hates it when people send him flowers.

Here is Ilya.

I met Ilya sophomore year of college. He lived on the same floor of the same dorm, and the first time I saw him, he was carrying a banjo, an instrument that had recently captured my imagination. I think the banjo was the key to our friendship, because we did not, on surface seem to have a lot in common. Since that first day with the banjo, we have discovered a vast number of shared affinities, such as: pizzas with mushrooms, sausage, and black olives; running on hills at night; and discussing esoteric postmodern essays that neither of us really understand. These are the makings of a lasting friendship.

Last night we walked around the Cornell campus, which is really quite lovely. We saw the famed Libe slope, ate some pizza with mushrooms, black olives, and sausage, and walked across some bridges strung across the massive gorges for which the Cornell campus is known.

Here is a rather unsatisfying photo of the distance between the bridge and the bottom of the gorge. One must travel to Ithaca to really appreciate the gorges.

The Cornell art museum, designed by I.M. Pei, is supposed to look like a sewing machine. I can see it.

While standing on Libe slope, I tried calling Thomas Pynchon to talk about old times.

Alas, he did not pick up. Probably has caller ID.

Ilya and I then decided that it would be fun to ski, sled, or slide down the slope. Seeing this sign, we were quickly disabused of the notion, though we learned that the slope might be misused in a way that we had not previously considered.

Left without many options, I decided to try my best to look east yet not see the sun rise over Libe.

It worked.


Posted by bogenamp at October 11, 2007 10:54 AM