A red frisbee almost brained him

My last post, "Dinoco, here we come!" brought up the Al Jolson song "California, Here I Come," with its repeated line, "Open up that golden gate." At the same time, I have been reading Karen Russell's novel Swamplandia! about a family that owns a gator-wrestling theme park with 98 alligators, all of which are named Seth. These two things together made me think of The Golden Gate, the 1986 novelty novel by Vikram Seth, which is written entirely (even the table of contents!) in Onegin stanzas, the verse form invented by Pushkin for his verse novel of that name. Here’s the first stanza of the novel proper:

To make a start more swift than weighty,

Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon

A time, say, circa 1980,

There lived a man. His name was John.

Successful in his field though only

Twenty-six, respected, lonely,

One evening as he walked across

Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss

Of a red frisbee almost brained him.

He thought, "If I died, who'd be sad?

Who'd weep? Who'd gloat? Who would be glad?

Would anybody?" As it pained him,

He turned from this dispiriting theme

To ruminations less extreme.

In my Dinoco post, I linked to William Wright's post about Dinoco, which latter post also happens to feature this image:

There's the name John, together with an image that is certainly suggestive of someone getting brained by a red frisbee.