Log24

Hell to Heaven

From Hotel Point:

On a novel, Dow Mossman's
The Stones of Summer —

Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.”…

“The first time he had noticed it, language, was in the fourth grade when Miss Norma Jean Thompson, his teacher, turned against the whole class and said:

‘All Americans eventually go to heaven.’

‘By sweet Jesus,’ Ronnie Crown had said that afternoon, sitting on Dunchee’s wall, waiting for Dawes Williams to come tell him about it, ‘that’s about the God Damn dumbest thing I ever heard.’

Dawes Williams had agreed immediately that the message was insipid, but he thought for years that the syntax was inspired. In fact, the first time Norma Jean Thompson had said, ALL AMERICANS EVENTUALLY GO TO HEAVEN, was also the first time Dawes Williams had ever noticed the English sentence."

From Norma Jean Thompson:

"… the Town House Restaurant on Central and Morningside [in Albuquerque]:  'It's like going backwards in time to the late 1950s; you'd think you'd meet Frank Sinatra in there.  You can drown in the big red leather booths, and if you're lucky, they'll take out their private family stock of brandy.  Wonderful Greek salads, steaks and potatoes for lunch or dinner.  Time stops in there, right off Route 66.' "

From wcities.com:

On the Town House Lounge & Restaurant in Albuquerque:

"Try the three-inch Baklava and feel like you have died and gone to heaven…"

AMEN.

See, too, the film "Stone Reader"
and the previous Log24 entry.