Party Party

This is the Thursday listicle, showing up on Friday because I'm lazy and because my car started leaking gas and I had to take it to the shop and then go to the gym or WHATEVER. In the future I hope to bring you more fun things on Thursdays. I have to report to you on the doings of the Mechanical Reproductionists, who are still at large and still about as much a book club as this thing, and we'll get to that Friday-proper-ish. But for today, this ersatz Thursday (and my mother's birthday!) here is a Thursday listicle, of the top parties in literature, which I would like to have attended. Bear in mind that these are the ones I would have wanted to attend, not necessarily the best or rock-out-ingest ones. Frankly, I probably would have just been resentful and sat in the corner at most of the rock-out-ingest ones, and I can do that in real life.

5. Pnin's Faculty Party -- just because I feel for the guy. I want to stay at his house once it's over, and at the very end of that chapter yell "your glass isn't broken!" before he has to suffer.

4. A Gatsby party of some sort -- you've got to have at least one of those. When I was little and my big ambition was to be a fiction writer instead of a blogger, I tried writing a story about one of the first Gatsby parties. You've got to figure they were lame, right? By the time Nick shows up, the man is a legend, who floats around looking out across the harbor and being Mysterious. In my story, Gatsby sits around talking himself up to no one but Klipspringer, and they eat an awful lot of citrus that he had meant to garnish a lot of drinks with. Those are the ones I want to be at -- get in on the ground floor.

3. The party at the lying-in hospital in the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses -- yeah, I made fun of that chapter the other day, but who cares. The main reason I'd want to go is that Buck Mulligan is there, being ridiculous, claiming as soon as he shows up (at a maternity ward, mind you) that "it grieved him plaguily to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its purest pledges" and that he will try to combat this by offering, free of charge, his services as a fertiliser and incubator. And, at the end of the party, when they head out into Dublin, we get this:"The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum." If that isn't a description of a night that makes you want to find the next party, I don't know what is.

2. The boat party at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- I can't decide whether it is more or less fun to remember that this would sort of be a boozy, hooker-y party with Jack Torrance, Frank Reynolds, and Grima Wormtongue. I'd go still, though.

1. The neverending floating party from Life, the Universe, and Everything (book three of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)-- this has been beau ideal of an event for me ever since getting together with a bunch of people stopped being called a playdate and started being called a party. This sealed it:

One night, long ago, a band of drunken astro-engineers of the first generation clambered around the building digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other, and when the sun rose the following morning it was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people that was now floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

That party, in the book, is on its third or fourth generation and shows no sign of stopping, so, you know, there may be time for me yet.