11/18/2023 0 Comments Ragtime by el doctorow special quotes![]() ![]() ![]() A burned-out head drifts by, barefoot with his feet red and swollen. On the big dirt hill in the centre of the park, a kid and a dog roll over each other. The old dogs of the men lie under the stone tables with their tongues hanging. The old ladies have small yapping dogs on leashes. In the benches of the park sit old Ukrainian ladies with babushkas. Dogs jump for the ball in the handball courts. Men and girls playing handball in the fenced-in handball courts. There is a dog phenomenon- there are dogs in the dog run taking craps, dogs on the leash, dogs roaming free in packs. There is a music phenomenon coming out of hundreds of transistor radios. This is not 14th street, this is the community. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.” ![]() They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. ![]()
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