Free Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis Page B

and the cold hard cash to be blindly torn from the black depths of the Northern mines.
    â€”Yes that’s exactly what I . . .
    â€”In more responsive hands, the characters of the two substitutes might have reflected the deeper opposing dualism of man’s nature, but Mister Kiester has no time for such subtleties. The Northern substitute is no more than a brutalized excrescence of blind industrial slavery, while the South is personified by Ziff Davis, acclaimed for his portrayal of the sadistic pederast in Sick City, who seems to have wandered into the wrong picture from some subdivision of God’s Little Acre in his depiction of sly depravity with all the . . .
    â€”Yes listen to that! you see? That’s exactly what he’s not, what William in the play is not, he’s a sensitive intelligent wait, Christina? Where have you been, listen . . .
    â€”Her name is Ilse, Oscar. She was down in the laundry, she . . .
    â€”Have you heard any of this? Listen you’ve got to find it, my play you have to find it, it’s . . .
    â€”In a black pebbled binder, I’ll look for it after lunch. She’s putting it on the table, now . . .
    â€”No but wait, that’s not all, Harry? Go on, that’s not all is it?
    â€”In the part of the father of the bride, as grossly overplayed by aging exstar Clint Westwood in his first role since A Hatful of Sh*t, the Confederate Major is the archetypal cigar chewing duplicitous Southern planter with a taste for drink and an unsavoury eye for the fatal charms of his own daughter, all of which blossoms in what will undoubtedly be the most widely discussed mass rape scene in screen history.
    â€”Well that’s just, of all the revolting nonsense there’s nothing like that anywhere, it’s . . .
    â€”Well my God Oscar what’s the problem then. You’re furious because they’ve stolen your play and then you’re furious because there’s nothing like it in the movie anywhere, how do you expect anybody to take you seriously if you . . .
    â€”Well ask Harry! What he’s just read to me that’s in the movie right down to the same battles and this scar on his cheek if he takes me seriously ask him, did you hear that? about the scar?
    â€”You’d hardly notice it, I told you that the minute I walked in didn’t I?
    â€”That’s not what we’re talking about! This is the movie, he comes home from the war with a raw scar on his cheek where he’s been wounded it’s right out of my play, and in the same battle, do you think that’s an accident? A detail like that, do you think that’s just a coincidence?
    â€”I think a lot of people to hear you carrying on about this little scaron your cheek from a play you wrote a hundred years ago would wonder about a coincidence, let’s go in to lunch.
    â€”No wait, stop. He’s not finished, are you Harry? Would anybody believe that’s just a coincidence?
    â€”As the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War, the battle of the Antietam was the ideal vehicle for the real stars of The Blood in the Red White and Blue, the special effects technicians whose grisly spectacles under Mister Kiester’s direction established his reputation at the box office with his original extravaganza Uruburu. Billed at the time as not for the squeamish, that epic of modern Africa broke all bounds not only for screen violence but, as in the notorious sledgehammer scene, good taste, obliging him to seek dubious refuge in the First Amendment, and perhaps as a result the more excruciating excesses of the earlier film are somewhat modified in his latest epic. This is not to say that those who thirst for blood and hunger for patriotic gore will go away unrewarded. From the massing of the Union troops of Hooker’s I Corps in the early morning mists for his opening attack on Jackson’s two