Inherent Voices

 

The manager, a drop-out named Miles, maybe sixteen with a Beatle haircut and a lapelless, cuffless, one-button mohair suit, carried her bags and sang to himself, possibly to her:

MILES'S SONG 

Too fat to Frag, 

That's what you tell me all the time,
When you really trying' to put me down, 

But I'm hip, 

So close your big fat lip, 

Yeah, baby, I may be too fat to frag, 

But at least I ain't too slim to Swim.

“It’s lovely” said Oedipa, “but why do you sing with an English accent when you don’t talk that way?”

"It's this group I'm in," Miles explained, "the Paranoids.”

- Thomas Pynchon, 1966