<div dir="ltr">t seems that this long post, full of great questions and notions is<div>sufficient mostly unto itself. </div><div><br></div><div>After the opening "I agree with this" line, I, in my sometimes superficial reading,</div><div>read it as lots of rhetorical questions that challenge my post, mostly for superficiality josh-jostlingly as it goes. Besides, for me, P's "singling up all lines", ambiguously rich as he always is, this trope seems more negative than positive to me and therefore the wrong process to answer to. But, so intelligently fine, Greaat! (as Tony is always saying), this is what the Plist is for, in'nin'it,-- <b>not too late for all as we keep the thread alive!? </b></div><div> </div><div>I was doing my thing, which is trying to find nest of associations, thematic hints,</div><div>half-buried allusions yet "it's all right there"--TP [paraphrase] linked to P's great themes. </div><div>Working principle, EVERYTHING CONNECTS and theme bits everywhere in this great polyphonic novel. Akin to how we see encodings of meaning in "steel' 'crystal' 'railroads' etc. and in the tradition</div>of ye tropes older than railroads; Cold North, warm South, ice, rain, etc. Seems this long, josh-jostlingly pointed and pointing-out post may be sufficient unto itself for now. <div><br></div><div>........... Or like Stephen Booth on Shakey's language.....even when not thematically immediate cause and effect, Shakey creates atmosphere with every association if you learn about it.......<div><br></div><div>if GR can be described as a surreal, hysterical Gothic,so to speak, feeling every real association matters, just as knowing every timeline of events matters. </div><div><br></div><div>So I lightly 'retort', as promised. </div><div><div><div><br></div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Monte Davis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:montedavis49@gmail.com" target="_blank">montedavis49@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><span class=""><div style="font-size:small">> <span style="font-size:12.8px">The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian tradition in GR</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div></span><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">I don't disagree with that  -- certainly not with the linkage of "that stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds" (27 Viking/Penguin), "the great bright hand" (29) and Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam". Pynchon will certainly be getting around to  (and more) on his way to "There is a Hand to turn the time" on p. 760.</span><br></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">But single up the lines and heave again, draw them tighter. How does the book *get* from a GI out of the Berkshires to </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">"the Western Christian tradition"? What's the technique of blasphemy and subversion, taking </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">the first V-2 hammercrack as a starting point?</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Within three lines, </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">"God... God... revealed in the sky... a *hardon*". Is Tyrone shocked? Is the narrator shocked? Are we shocked? Bananas, rockets, now penises...where's he going with this? </span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">The imagery Laura celebrates goes straight for the specifically American jugular, </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">via the Pilgrim-Thanksgiving-"city on a hill" fetish. These pages hit every Calvinist -> Puritan -> Congregationalist -> transcendentalist mark</span><span style="font-size:12.8px"> all the way down the Slothrop slide:</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Nine or ten generations of ancestors "in a long gradient of rot," their molecules assimilated like Osbie Feel's alkaloids (wherever their souls might have flown)</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Gravestone poetry dwindling from "straight-on and foursquare" to "sarcasm and guile"</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">"shit, money, and the Word" -- profane, secular and sacred in jolting juxtaposition. rather than decently segregated</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">Instead of prosperity as proof of Protestant grace, the Slothrops' "flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides," the Harrimans' and Whitneys' country retreats abandoned</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px">And maybe a hint, in the pairing of the northern lights with the skyglow and sparks of the Aspinwall Hotel fire, that with WWII coming up, we wouldn't have to depend on God (or Nature) for our light shows much longer</span></div><div style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:small"><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">By Tyrone's time, there wasn't much more than soothing nostalgia. </span><span style="font-size:12.8px"> "White steeples" on "autumn hillsides"... "rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the [ministers']' faces above the pulpits defining grace"... aaaah yes, we are a Godly people in a Norman Rockwell devotional image.... </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">So why are those white steeples turning into blasphemous, subversive banana-penis-*rockets*? </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">When Ted Cruz slides from "Let us revitalize our shared faith and values" to "Let us make the sand glow" in ISIS territory, I remember why GR is still so amazingly alive.</span></div></div></div><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mark.kohut@gmail.com" target="_blank">mark.kohut@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">p.27, that bright hand reaching out of the cloud has to remind of the most famous hand reaching out of a cloud in art, right? <div><span style="color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:22px">"The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become iconic of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human" title="Human" style="text-decoration:none;color:rgb(11,0,128);background-image:none;font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:22px" target="_blank">humanity.</a>" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam</a></div><div>Once again, I will narrow the annotation to one of my hobbyhorses--the inversion of the Great Chain of Being here, as elsewhere.</div><div>The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian tradition in GR. The relentless naturalism, humanism, of the vision, (despite spiritual concerns up the kazoo (sic) all over the book) as one strain of interpretation has it. Weisenburger points out that there is heresy in Constant's epitaph since a Puritan knew that a death was owed to God, not nature, another in-our-face piece of vision.[ p 27 "Death is a debt to nature due, /Which I have paid, and so must you."]</div><div><br></div><div>I also love the edges of the tombstone eroded by "season's fire and ice chisels' associatively linking to me with </div><div>'the impasto of the seasons' line and another compressedly-envisioned embrace of nature and all its life as our life. Dear Reader, just wait until I write Against the Day, you want fully-envisioned, Tom's thinking here. </div><div><br></div><div>p. 28, Miller edition: "Mark Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,".....more and more allusions to what the rockets bring </div><div>in GR....and not the music of the spheres from Shakespeare's (and earlier) time.</div><div><br></div><div>Doncha just love the joke---Morris you love the jokes!---of Constant, very wittily Puritanic even in heresy and of course, his son</div><div>Variable, another simple joke on heredity but also, maybe, a joke on the descent of Puritanism, on the entropic decline--'the money seeping its way out"--of the Slothrop family. 'Ruin is formal, devil's work,/Consecutive and slow---[notice the em dash, reader and remember the book's end]/ Fail in an instant no man did,/Slipping is crash's law, </div><div><br></div><div>Such compression of prose, another of my current hobbyhorses during this reading. Why it is a 700 page poem. The compressed history of the Slothrop line is a kind of New England set Hawthorne- like story, The Decline and Fall of the House of the Seven Gables, so to joke. A shortcut US version of Buddenbrooks, so to so loosely speak. And I now see a kinship to</div><div>the Traverse family, sea-changed (as well as land-and-meaning changed) from AtD. But I would and</div><div><br></div><div>you all can reel me in. </div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><span>On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:43 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kelber@mindspring.com" target="_blank">kelber@mindspring.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></span><div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">Just pausing to savor this sequence (one of my many favorites):<br>
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Starting from: "On the old schist of a tombstone …" to the end of the section (italicized in the book): this is how it does happen - yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud …<br>
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There are so many Pynchon passages that send us scurrying to Google (or whatever the hell we used to do) an obscure reference. This one, though, sends the brain a-sparkling with associations - death from the sky - hand of God - V-2 rocket - differences, similarities - religion - terror - inevitability - resignation - quaint acceptance - death from the sky has always been with us, does it really matter what form it takes - take comfort from treating it as old family history … etc. etc. No Googling required!<br>
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Laura<br>
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Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l</a><br>
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