<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>This is where Pynchon's Brenda was born....not Goodbye, Columbus, nice guess Mark,,,,I have almost no doubt. </div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><br><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Erik T. Burns <eburns@gmail.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> pynchon-l@waste.org<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Mon, March 21, 2011 7:16:02 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Brenda's Inside Saneside<br></font><br>
<font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif">This is probably a great way to scare everyone away from _The Recognitions_ but fear thee not, it is simply part of a great drunken ramble, in no way representative of Gaddis' prose over the other 900+ pages.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif">But I did hear an echo with the end of _V._ here: </font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>_V._</font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif">He'd not come: she came to herself - or at least to the inviolable Puritan she'd show up as come marriage and the Good Life, someday soon now - in a bar's parking lot near a canal, filled with a hundred black bicycles: her junkyard, her own locust season. Skeletons, carapaces, no matter: <b>her inside too was her outside </b>and on she went, streak-blond, far-from-frail Brenda, along the Rhine, up and down the soft slopes of the wine districts, into the Tyrol and out into Tuscany, all in a rented Morris whose fuel pump clicked random and loud in times of stress; as did her camera, as did her heart.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif">_The Recognitions_ p.399</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="verdana, sans-serif">Above, another blue day, (up</font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">stairs) the room papered with green capped pink-faced dogs, and the button drawer, only apparitions move to perfection, there! Pray the Lord to keep you from lying, there, O spectral stabat mater may I go out and play the violin outside to the town wearing its sinside inside and not a soul in sight. Church bells inspissated the air, dropping it in sharp fragments. He sat down in his place at table, excused by the falling weights of the bells, and motionless when they had done. There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the <b>saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insanside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the
same game</b>, and gone down Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee.</span><div>
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