Discussion opener for GRGR(9)

[Paul Mackin]

> 16) `machines of black metal and glass gingerbread' (147.10). Anyone
>      have a clue as to what the gingerbread machine is? (presumably it
>      is in there to raise an echo of the witch's house?).
>>>>>Gingerbread probably refers to useless ornament--various knobs
and dials that don't actually do anything.

> 18) `sooner or later everyone out here has to go Epidermal. No
>      exceptions.' Heh heh. I can just hear Vincent Price doing the
>      cameo role.
> >>>The epidermis is the very out layer of the skin--nonvascular and
essentially dead. It drops off. Going epidermal is (among other things) dying.
(Any possible connection with "going ballistic"--self-contained, free falling,
cut off from control?????)

> 19) `Our history is an aggregate of lost moments' (149.1). Now that's
>      what I call an epigram.
> >>>>Make that "last". Nice play on words. The "last moment"
as FINALLY vs. the REALLY last moment. Deliverance arriving
JUST IN TIME vs. the moment of DEATH.

> 20) `All the radii of the room are hers' (149.28). Again just had to
>      mention this lovely description.
> >>>>Radii as in radiations and emanations. The things Cherrycoke
is so good at picking up.
> 
> 28) `That's a complicated social set-up' (153.30). Too right it is.
>      But is ther not also a veiled hint that this is true for all of
>      us? We are as much (if not more so) what we are seen to be as
>      what we see ourselves to be or the eye/I that does the seeing. `a
>      Christian, a Western European' is conditioned toward the view
>      that we are the eye/I doing the seeing but there is so much truth
>      in the (more) Eastern notion that we are a thing perceived rather
>      than a thing perceiving and along with this view goes a
>      diminution of the role of self perception (the notion of the
>      thing perceived perceiving itself is at yet one more remove, is a
>      concept anterior to, or better perhaps to say parasitic on, that
>      of the notion of the I as a thing perceived).
>>>>All true and more.  The "complicated social set-up" includes
the structure of the novel.  Nice of Eventyr to sacrifice his Western
individualily to the higher good of linking time, space, and
and a cast of thousands.

					P.