Discussion opener for GRGR(5)

[Andrew Dinn]

Foax,

Discussion of GRGR(4) is hereby deprecated and we move on to discuss
GRGR(5) and read GRGR(6) both of which activities will continue from
today until 29th November.

As usual, I have some questions and comments which I will present
below.  I'm still interested in contributions of text, graphics or
audio clips which I will install below

    http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~andrew/pynchon-group-read.html

Before I provide some opening comments on section 5, I'll remind you
that section 6 is on pp 72 - 92 of the Viking/Penguin edition of GR.
The opening words are

    In Germany, as the end draws upon us [. . .]

and the closing words are

    [. . .] and a little later were taken out to sea.

I will also remind everyone that I am going to be on holiday from 29
November through all of December until 8 Jan. So, I will not be here
to start the next reading session or the one session which I have
scheduled for December (we get 4 weeks since most people will likely
be off for Xmas). I will be back to run the session in early January.

I will be canvassing for deputies to play Whappo to my Crutchfield
(little rascals know who they are) over the next week but I will also
announce now that anyone who wants to take one of the remaining
sections and make it their own is more than welcome. Alternatively, a
joint effort would be possible by way of compromise. Not because I am
fed up with running things, to the contrary, but rather because I
suspect that someone else's opinions, paricularly on a section they
know and love would be more interesting as a starting than my stale
observations. Think about it and mail me in the next week or two if
you are interested.

The WWW address given above contains full details of the group reading
tour, instructions for passengers and a full trip itinerary indicating
all major ports of call. So, if you are feeling adventurous look up
the page numbers now and pick a section which you would like to host.

Before posting my openers I will remind you that I have produced
myself a little line counter to help pinpoint GRGR references. The
Viking/ Penguin edition has 40 or 41 lines per page (that's logical
lines - i.e. including the blank ones between paragraphs - rather than
actual printed lines). I have a piece of card with 41 ticks down the
side and I am using it to identify the line number for each
citation. So, if I write pp.ll after a reference (where pp and ll are
numbers) that means page pp, line ll.

Now here are the questions for GRGR(5):

 1) "TDY" (60.9) An acronym for To Dispatch Yourself (cf p 20)

 2) "Kenosha" (60.24) Kenosha is the birth place of Orson Welles. Some
     have suspected that Welles is intended as `The Kid', citing the
     mimicking of Wellesian film techniques in the text as the reason
     for mentioning his birth-place. Anyone want to take this up
     either for or against?

 3) What about these dancers old and young then (60.35-41) This seems
    to lead into the subsequent Roseland ballroom scene just as the
    song Cherokee seems to inspire the Crutchfield Wetern
    scenes. i.e. the dream has a `dream logic' connecting the various
    themes and scenes.

 4) "Ascent" (61.24) Love that capital A!

 5) "Got a hard-on in my fist [. . .]" (61.30) Anyone know the song?
    And what the fuck is a ruptured duck (pardon my French).

 6) "PISCES:" "Slothrop:" (62.4) Where do we suddenly get off with these
    attributions for the dialogue - like suddenly we are not at the
    movies but in a theatre? And look how we started in medias res
    again with the dream and then at 62.26/7 we step out onto the
    stage again and, lo and behold, we get `That was "sho nuf",
    Slothrop?' etc. by way of meta-narrative on the staged
    interrogation. Is TRP making the rules up as he goes along here?

 7) "Her eyes tell him in an instant what he is" (62.39) So what is
    he then?

 8) "The mouth harp in his pocket reverting to brass inertia" (62.40)
    So, is Slothrop a latter-day Orpheus? And that "brass", not to
    mention "jive" and "packs" in the next two sentences.

 9) "these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp's descent
    towards stone-white cervix and into lower night . . ." (63.10) Why
    the sexual imagery here? Lovely phrasing by the way, also "low
    reeds singing" (63.16) and "silver chances of song" (63.20)

10) Cherokee and Charlie Parker? (63.22-64.7) Ok, anyone want to go
    into Charlie Parker's history and the development of bebop? Ditto
    for how bebop takes an existing song and transforms it (I have
    been told that it is something to do with transposing but changing
    the harmonic relations at the same time - does this mean it
    actually falls into line as a transform along the lines of thsoe
    used by the serial composers i.e. a perm of the scale?). A bebop
    buff of my acquaintance (who has been a jazz freak since the days
    of Berlin's US forces radio in the 50s) tells me that Cherokee is
    a classic example of a bebop anthem. Parker had to use well-known
    tunes like Cherokee since what he did was so wild that the band
    could only follow if they knew how to play the number blindfold.
    It also fits this scene because it invokes cowboy and indian
    memories for Slothrop.

    There are all sorts of keywords or phrases in this section which
    one could expound on. Anyone care to comment on "wasted Roxbury"
    (63.23), "wailing" (63.24), "floundered in the channel" (63.28),
    "Indian spirit plot" (63.30), "*have* mercy what is it a fucking
    machine-gun or something" (63.34), "32nd notes demisemiqauvers"
    (63.35), "Munchkin voice" (63.36), "honks" (63.39), "old Mister
    fucking Death he self" (63.40), "seeps" (64.1), "his bird's
    singing" (64.2), "prophecy [. . .] is beginning these days to work
    itself out in 'Cherokee'" (64.4) Amen!

11) "That's just what a fellow doesn't want" (64.10) What an
    under-over-statement and how freudian thsi trip is turning out to
    be - hardly surprising since it is an Amytal trip conducted by a
    bunch of psychos^H^H^H^H psychiatrists. And while we are here how
    much of this whole scene is deliberately playing with Freud,
    dreams and psychoanalysis?

12) "jiving the way they do" (64.18) isn't that  a lovely piece of
    patronising racism.

13) "Pass the talcum to me Malcolm" (64.19) So we finally get our main
    hint that Red Malcolm is that Malcolm X. Along with "popping that
    rag" and "extravagantly conked" this is a dead giveaway to anyone
    who has read the Autobiography. I only came to it after reading GR
    so I got the flash of recognition as I read the original. Can
    anyone here claim to have recognised the Autobiography when they
    read Pynchon's rehash? If so how is he doing? To me, it's awesome
    the transformation he has effected on the source material.

14) "Good golly he sure is *all* asshole ain't he?" (64.31) Check out Mr
    Snoid's comments in Crumb's Angelfood cartoon available via the
    resources section of the group read page, "You're all assholes".

15) "Now some folks might say [. . .] but Slothrop [. . .]" (65.1) Who
    is telling us this about Slothrop? Like someone is narrating
    Slothrop's dream on his behalf?

16) "iron" (65.7) and not just any old iron but iron that was
    previously ceramic!

17) "Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks
    alike" (65.14) Just sneaks in under your stomach and induces a
    gut-boggling belly laugh. Note that it is the 'too of course'
    which is instrumental in making this joke so funny - Slothrop
    acknowledging that of which he knows zero other than that it must
    exist. The racism of presumption.

18) "Jack Kennedy" (65.53 and following) The man who *seemed* as if he
    could save harps from gravity and who was daffy about
    history. This is as much looking back at Jack from the 60s/70s as
    it is looking up to him in the 30s. The use of aseem here is very
    telling, though. So if Jack is the saviour what does the harp
    represent, the one that you can bend those illegal frequencies
    (66.1) out of? And is the mention of history a way of reminding
    you (a la Steely) that without a historical perspective you will
    reiterate known errors or is it saying that knowledge of history
    won't save you from `old Mister fucking death he self', just as it
    failed to save Jack Kennedy?

19) "Down the toilet [. . .]" (66.6) Reminescent of V's sewers?

20) "contacts" (66.32) Wha? Is this meant to give a sort of
    underground or spy feel to things?

21) "something vaguely religious" (66.38) Like an underground
    religious movement? or maybe a political credo? or is the
    intention jsut to suggest ritual games?

22) "Down to the last ignored blue bead [. . .] (66.40) This sounds
    more like an acid trip with its heightened sense of colour,
    texture, detail etc.

23) "It is a place of sheltering from disaster" (67.1) What? the sort
    of place one could go to enjoy those ols `mindless pleasures'? In
    which case we really are plumbing the depths of the mind (ho ho).
    n.b. Slothrop has only mentally gone down the toilet in two
    senses. First this is a dream brought on by an amytol trip not
    actual experience. secondly, at 63.21 it says either he has to let
    the harp go or he has to follow. Then it considers his following
    but does not actually say he follows. We have entered a dream
    within the dream (that in itself within the dream which is GR)
    where Slothrop on his knees dreams he is Slothrop down the
    toilet. So, we are recursively nested inside the minds of Slothrop
    after Slothrop and lo and behold we find that tranquility which we
    son't want to wake up from yet we cannot stop ourselves slipping
    away from.

24) "but something else has been terribly *at* this country" (67.4)
    Well, since the country is the mind what could have been at it?
    Freud? Adverts? Pornography? TV? Pynchon, the bastard, dodges the
    issue by jumping back for a physical gross out with `that booger'.

25) "He stands outside all the communal rooms and spaces [. . .]"
    (67.12 and onwards) What is Slothrop outside of? His generation?
    The wealthy set his family no longer belong to? Them? The
    Counterforce? Or is he exiled from the spirituality of the
    community of believers who seem to inhabit this strange
    inner-world hideaway? And is this Slothrop only or are we also
    seeing TRP's neurosis?

26) "drumming" (67.75) Is this 11 beats then a rest Cherokee
    (i.e. pale face's pale imitation of Indian drumming)

27) "Crutchfield [. . .] the Westwardman" Ok, I know it's some bizarre
    shit but . . . West is the setting sun, annihilationn and death.
    Is the cowboy element here because of Cherokee? And that
    Crutchfield sounds mighty like Marlboro man. In which case as his
    relation to his `pards' develops we see that Pynchon has `queered'
    Marlboro man and the wild West! (not to mention that Whappo is a
    mulatto - and you thought Blazing Saddles introduced this joke).

28) "this wandering" (69.9) So why is Crutchfield `itinerant'?

29) "magenta and green" (6.14) Pynchon's favourite colours appear
    elsewhere (e.g. Isaiah 2-3 in Vineland has his Mohawk dyed in
    these two colours only it is specifically acid-green he
    uses). Does anyone have any knowedge of the colour-coding and
    pocket-placement schemes adopted by San Francisco gays for the
    selection and location of their bandanas in that city's gay
    heyday? Do these colours encode something? n.b. acid green and
    magenta are mentioned somewhere (Weisenburger) as some of the
    first man-made colours.

30) The dead dog and pineapples at 69.41 may recall TRP's time in
    Mexico. Although I seem to remember a market scene in Lawrence's
    `Plumed Serpent' with a dead dog and rotting pineapples. Can
    anyone confirm if this is a borrowing from Lawrence?

31) How did we suddenyl end up in the `Ardennes' (70.29)

32) "segway" (70.36) Now that's what I call a non-segway? Have we
    perhaps left something behind on the cutting room floor here?

33) "Hush. [. . .] (72.6) Note that we are listening to a drawing
    talking here, foax.

34) "He has no recourse, no appeal" (72.23) This recalls `a judgement
    from which [. . .]' in the opening section.

35) "Why?" (72.31) As in why does Pirate get these orders? or why from
    Them? or what?


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.