TRP's houses as faces

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Interesting that Pynchon writes his so called loss of
innocence story, "The Secret Integration," introducing the
Slothrops and that Mingeborough Mass, mocking the faces of
the house of the seven gables, with nod and a wink to Twain. 

The other day as I sat in a bus outside NYC's Port Authority
waiting for the traffic to snake towards the tunnel and over
to the Jersey side, I looked out the window at a building of
40 maybe 60 stories. It was brown with two rows of small
square windows, cut into the flat slab set close together in
the middle of the dreary façade.  As the bus rolled a bit,
another building, a mirror image of the other was visible.
Had the  camera -the mechanical copying on paper led to
similar artifices in actual buildings? I know that this
happened, but I am not sure if these two buildings had
anything to do with the camera. In any event, here are some
of Pynchon's more poetic descriptions of buildings from Part
II of GR:  


They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a
Victorian paraphrase of what was long ago, resulted in
Gothic cathedrals-but which, in its own time, arose from not
any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable
confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement
of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some,
as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensual
moments that could not be transcended and so bent the
intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to
fright, to simple escape, to whatever direction, from what
the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens,
shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and
patient shadow states of the rats and files, were saying
about the chances for mercy that year. The grimed brick
sprawl is known as the Hospital of St. Veronica of the True
Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases



Overhead, on the molded plaster ceiling, Methodist versions
of Christ's kingdom swarm: lions cuddle with lambs, fruit
spills lushly and without pause into the arms and about the
feet of gentlemen and ladies, swains and milkmaids. No one's
expression is quite right. The wee creatures leer, the
fiercer beasts have a drugged and sedated look, and none of
the humans have any eye-contact at all. The ceilings of "The
White Visitation" aren't the only erratic thing about the
place, either. It is a classic "folly," all right. The
buttery was designed as an Arabian harem in miniatures, for
reasons we can only guess at today, full of silks, fret-work
and peepholes. One of the libraries served, for a time, as a
wallow, the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud
up to the thresholds for giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to
frolic, oink, and cool their summers in, to stare at the
shelves of buckram books and wonder if they'd be good
eating. Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most
unhealthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical,
walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic
curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The
W,C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants stomping
the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the
head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth),
floor mosaics in which are tessellated together different
versions of Homo Monstosus, an interesting preoccupation of
the time-Cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all
directions. Everywhere are archways, grottoes, plaster
floral arrangements, walls hang in threadbare velvet or
brocade. Balconies give out unlikely places, overhung with
gargoyles whose fangs have fetched not a few newcomers nasty
cuts on the head. Even in the worst rains, the monsters only
just manage to drool-the drainpipes feeding them are
centuries out of repair, running crazed over slates and
beneath eaves, past cracked plasters, dangling Cupids,
terracotta facing on every floor, along with belvederes,
rusticated joints, pseudo-Italian columns, looming minarets,
leaning crooked chimneys-from a distance no two observers,
no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building
in that orgy of self expression, added to by each suceeding
owner, until the present War's requisitioning
.



  

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/anatomy-architecture.html