pynchon-l-digest V1 #253

[Kermit Batrachian]

On Fri, 15 Nov 1996 22:19:10 -0600, Andrew Dinn wrote:

> 1) "TDY" (60.9) An acronym for To Dispatch Yourself (cf p 20)
>
...more officially, it's (Army) messagespeak for Temporary Duty.  In
USN and USMC it's TAD, Temporary Additional Duty, aka Travelling
Around Drunk.  Since individuals in this category are dispatched to
host commands or units for short ( < ?30 ?90 days) temporary
assignments, they rarely are subject to the full menu of disciplinary
sanctions that daily keep the canaille in line.  Given hospitable
messmates, you can go back to your parent command with your liver in a
sling.  TDY abreaction, indeed.
> 2) "Kenosha" (60.24) Kenosha [...] Orson Welles [...] take this up
>     either for or against?
>
Kenosha is also the small city just outside the north end of Grat
Lakes Naval Training Center, where a New Yorker would have gone for
basic training in the late Fifties (Bainbridge NTC was closed in, oh,
'55 or so.)  Particularly for urban Easterners, the people of Kenosha
(and Waukegan and Racine) displayed toward boot sailors that
paradoxical Midwesterner mix of innocence and coldness that was very
impressive. 
> 3) [...]
>    to lead into the subsequent Roseland ballroom scene just as the
>  [...]`dream logic' connecting the various
>    themes and scenes.
>
ayuh.  And, provides an opportunity to do a Catalog of towns and
jodies (aka cadence calls, as in"Jody was there when you left! You're
right!").
> 4) "Ascent" (61.24) Love that capital A!
>
resonates with RC Feast of the Ascenscion?
> 5) "Got a hard-on in my fist [. . .]" (61.30) Anyone know the song?
a classic Jody.  Scan ^---^-^.
>    And what the fuck is a ruptured duck (pardon my French).
>
...possibly an anachronism;  people who received Honorable Discharges
(??subsequent to  1945) got (??National Defense Service) medals and
the right to wear a lapel pin miniature of the device, an eagle or
passant dexter regardant in an olive wreath.  The twisted torso and
spread wings made the poor bird look very uncomfortable.  
> 6) "PISCES:" "Slothrop:" (62.4) Where do we suddenly get off 
>    [...] lo and behold, [...]. Is TRP making the rules up as he goes along here?
>
is it not to see that happen that we are here?
> 7) "Her eyes tell him in an instant what he is" (62.39) So what is
>    he then?
>
is he not [previous line] his own white face, reflected in those eyes?
> 9) [...] stone-white cervix [... Why the sexual imagery here? 
>
...enhancement, maybe, of the adolescent atmosphere, vomiting as
masturbation, shameful, solitary, "decoupling of procreation and sex"
down through love and sex, past intercourse and sex?
>    Anyone care to comment on "Munchkin voice" (63.36), 
>
close to an anachronism, here:  if it's Christmas '38,  we are a
couple of months earlier than the release of _The Wizard of Oz_;
if it's '39, why are there so few references to the war in Europe?  
>31) How did we suddenyl end up in the `Ardennes' (70.29)
>
...snow the connective.  For TRP, snow and war may well be
encapsulated in the vision of Ricardo Montalban's dead hand protruding
from beneath the jeep, caressing the wonder of it.
>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?
>
...perhaps a lost sequence on The Fenway, across the Charles?  ...But
that's on the other side of Cambridge from Roxbury.

///jeder tag, jeder nacht, jeder tag///