Word: pavements
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...fairytales where the supernatural of flying carpets or seven-league boots is inserted in an otherwise normal world. In Vian, on the other hand, the symbolic "pianocktail," which allows one to get literally drunk on jazz, is placed in a universe that continually surprises with flowers growing from the pavement, or with neckties that struggle against being tied. But Mood Indigo is not an anarchic collection of magic notions; what disturbs us from the beginning is a sense of the fantasy's internal coherence: We can't know that laws which govern it, but we're convinced not only...
...running as fast as he could go, and, as he looked, people toppled slowly and fell like ninepins, full length on the pavement, like big cardboard boxes being dropped. . . . The acute angle of the horizon, squeezed between the houses, hurtled toward him. Beneath his feet it was night. A night of black cotton wool, shapeless and inorganic, while the sky was colorless, a ceiling, one more acute angle...
Adaptation. The Skid Rower's steady collision with the law-mostly involving repeated arrests for drunkenness or vagrancy-is misleading. He is peaceful to the point of passivity. Most of Skid Row's crime statistics are due either to zealous police sweeping public drunks off the pavement, or to "hawks"-the area's name for predators who come in from the outside, frequently to relieve a drunkard of his freshly cashed welfare check. His lengthy arrest record, says Sociologist Wallace, can actually be construed as "a fairly stable adaptation [to] a society that is willing to support...
...consider this scenario: The people are thrown together against their wills, trapped in colossal, modernistic buildings on a landscape devoid of trees. The lights are always lit. Pavement stretches everywhere. Cars and buses and trains and aircraft are useless; there is no way out. No darkness. No silence. No beds. No escape from an endless series of broadcast announcements, no avoiding the silly, circular games of other people's children. There are queues for food, queues for asking questions, queues for liquor-and finally queues for nothing, because there is nothing left. Then there is only boredom...
...elevations of 3,300 ft. or more. Bone-chilling winds gusted to 70 m.p.h., and the snowmobilers became more concerned with survival than speed. Worse yet, the winds screaming down from the Matanuska Glacier swept the snow cover off long stretches of the road ways, and the gravelly pavement destroyed many of the steel skis. Repairs were all but impossible in the sub-zero weather, since the flesh of the snowmobilers' hands tended to freeze to the metal of their machines. Several snow mobiles were blown off the road and down steep embankments. One competitor suffered a broken pelvis...