de-lurking

[David Casseres]

Henry!  Yow!  Last I remember of you we were rolling through the Mojave 
desert at 12 mph in a van, following a recumbent bicycle into the sunset 
that blazed all around the hot heart of Twenty-Nine Palms....

Anyway, foax, pay attention to Henry here, he's no ordinary lurker.  
Henry (that's Kingman) sez
>...Do you guys ever talk about
>Pynchon's books, or is that just like, so passe?

Yeah, believe it or not we do, when we're not busy biting one another on 
the butt or complaining about how all we every do is bite one another on 
the butt or complaining about all the complaining.

>I am about 400 pages along on that Mason-Dixon thing, with progress
>mired alternately by the clouds of a wintry personal life and the usual
>exigencies of non-academic life (i.e., futile toilings), yet each time I
>turn the page I have an odd sensation to report. It feels as if
>homuncular umpires were stretching a yard-marker chain in which each
>gossamer link is, as, the tenuous connection between symbol and image,
>across the surface of my retinas just below the point at which the optic
>nerve attaches.

That's a nice characterization of the Pynchon Experience, I'd say.

>At times I feel I have my bearings straight and am "getting" it. Often
>my concentration lags and I must re-cover ground afresh. Once in a
>while, when the stars twinkle magically like small bubbles of soda pop
>clinging to the side of a curvaceous vessel (and especially when I am in
>the company of good fellows) I feel I might have stumbled upon one of
>those 'ley' lines of Cherrycoke's. Snort. Estoy leyendo demasiado?

I frequently go back and reread what I read a day or two earlier, and 
find that it *isn't* what I read before.  Or thought I did.  I read 
Gravity's Rainbow three separate times and each time I had brand-new 
flashes of "Oh, *that's* what he means."  Snort, indeed.  Tu leyes 
bastante bien, entre estas lineas.

(For the hispanic-deprived, I will mention that Henry, barrelling down 
the Line, has smoaked that "ley" is Spanish (as in Jesuitical) for the 
verb "read."  Not to mention "law," as in dharma.)




Cheers,
David