hillbilly, please

Since DarkoV has gone and acquired a copy of the book, I thought I should put more effort into finding those sentences that I mentioned had made me laugh out loud.

No such luck, of course, but I did find this, which I greatly admire:

“In Fisher’s mind the country of Ireland was not so much a country with the usual accouterments (people, handbills, factories, cars, magazines, sheep, sauces) as it was a great unitary biomass, a brown and green tufted nodosity softy breathing in and out, a mole on the face of the globe, its process of photosynthesis and excrescence culminating solely in the production of Guinness Extra Stout. He dotted its contours with loamy fields sprouting proud rows of barley and with leafy glades where hop vines clung lovingly to delicate strings twined in inventive cats cradles by a happy peasantry. On the banks of twinkling blue rivers singing farmers sacked grain morning till night. On the brows of gentle hills in Fisher’s Eire gay windmills sailed powering cogged wooden machinery within which did something or other. Steam locomotives painted turquoise pink and gold called at Victorian country platforms, loads of barley and hops flung into open cars by the adoring serfs. The trains chuffed slowly through shimmering dales to a Dublin fashioned after the Emerald City of Oz. Singing midgets unloaded the sacks with glee and trundled them into the maltings and storerooms of the great brewery of St. James Gate. Plump pink men, each at one with the worn handles and whistling steam jets of the antique machinery he tended, worked in high rooms under arched windows of sunlight, stirring live things in mighty vats with dedication and giant wooden spoons. The slumbering brew foamed delicately in its tubs, passed in copper pipes from kyrie to sanctus to agnus dei and finally dropped sensually to the racking room where each open mouthed soldier in an army of kegs and brown bottles thirstily awaited his turn at the gushing pipe of ecstasy. And this hearty river of life which began as the pollen streaming though the Irish mornings to the hop flowers and became the barley cars flying along the little railways and the wort coursing through the arteries of St. James Gate and the bottle barges on the Liffey and the kegs in liners in the Gulf Stream found its way to the Boston docks and up Massachusetts Avenue through the tap and into the watering mouth of William Fisher.”