<html><head></head><body><div style="font-family: Verdana;font-size: 12.0px;"><div>He's correct: the sentence ends after "motel room."
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<div style="margin: 0 0 10.0px 0;"><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 6:15 AM<br/>
<b>From:</b> "John Bailey" <sundayjb@gmail.com><br/>
<b>To:</b> "Pynchon List" <pynchon-l@waste.org><br/>
<b>Subject:</b> Pynchon's sentence structure</div>
<div>I've been reading a recent essay by one of Australia's pre-eminent<br/>
novelists, Gerald Murnane, an extremely private man (the more common<br/>
description is 'reclusive') only two years younger than Thomas Pynchon<br/>
and whose work is characterised by obscenely long sentences that are<br/>
nonetheless grammatically correct. His great obsession is Proust and<br/>
most would say he is the Antipodean answer to Proust. The essay is on<br/>
the long sentence's profound potential to produce meaning - which he<br/>
associates with 'connections' - that short, descriptive, declarative<br/>
sentences can't access. But as an obsessive grammarian, he begins the<br/>
work decrying Kermode's review of Vineland, in which is quoted the<br/>
following loooong sentence. Murnane says it isn't a sentence, but a 66<br/>
word sentence followed by a bunch of unconnected clauses. He goes on<br/>
to call Pynchon and Kermode 'pretenders' as a result (did I mention<br/>
Murnane is a serious grammar freak?) but eventually produces quite an<br/>
interesting essay.<br/>
<br/>
My question is: I can see how he can't parse the following as a<br/>
classically correct sentence past "another motel room" but I can also<br/>
see how it does work. I don't know how to argue for it, however. A<br/>
puzzle fit for a P-list.<br/>
<br/>
The 'after a while her visits to Sasha' clause is where things get hairy.<br/>
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"By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone<br/>
through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of<br/>
a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and<br/>
Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and<br/>
frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in<br/>
another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and<br/>
when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen —<br/>
couldn't Sasha smell what was going on? — and his erect penis had<br/>
become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would<br/>
keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping<br/>
monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by<br/>
year, to stand before, once again out long after curfew, calls home<br/>
forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning over the bright display<br/>
among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players<br/>
silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing<br/>
but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her<br/>
initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer<br/>
the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that<br/>
could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless<br/>
perimeter."<br/>
-<br/>
Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l</a></div>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l