"Greedy clouds cascaded into the eyeballs of swedish doctors, glandular miasmas that turned into crystal lakes as their wives washed away dem say he got too good and on and on an on until you see bernie throwing baseballs at a train one day his face orange and stunted from the rust colored opium wash that made his hands do that crazy, stunted windmill that betrays the gloating languor of a casual barbituate addict, fists clenched against the ectoplasmic moorings of the spiraling dependents that even now gargled harmoniously a tune of expectation to the highest bidder"

"Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses. Into the interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St. Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru."