covers

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

On Thu, 22 May 1997 LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU wrote:
> V.is more in the line of Di Chirico:  Woman with windblown hair and dress in
> front of monolithic V. (period included).  Lines recede to vanishing point
> in distant horizon.  Stones on plain, rocky hills in background.  It's all
> very blue--and her shadow forms a V (no period).  
> Actually, it's all more like Magritte meets Di Chirico!

Yes!  Great description.  Both of those, but esp. di Chirico, are fave
Surrealists of mine.

As I think about it, Pynchon often evokes the quiet menace, the
dark-shadows-at-noon, empty-courtyard, unseen-evil kind of feeling that di
Chirico does.  There's an amazing passage in _M&D_ (don't know where, but
it's not a plot spoiler to talk about it in passing here) about a closed
carriage disgorging its passenger (Mason, I think--he's imagining this
scene) at the edge of a vast, ominous, empty prairie.  And then there are
the mysterious rural waste spaces of Dixon's youth, of which he is so
terrified, and indeed the mysterious rural spaces of W.A.S.T.E., in which
black riders attack passing mail coaches. 

Wow, I'm seeing something here:

Our Tom may be agoraphobic!

He certainly writes like he knows the feeling.  It would also explain the
"reclusiveness"...

Max

M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | The silence of those
         http://www.afn.org/~traveler | infinite spaces
                "Surrealist-At-Large" | frightens me.
                     traveler at afn.org | --Pascal