Chasing ... Cutting

[Dave Monroe]

Well, what I thought was unusual was that I had never read it that way, and
I've been primed for it since subscribing to this list (might never have been
an issue to me otherwise).  Hardly a scientific sample (as if there could be
one in such matters), but it was an educated, literate selection of people,
none of whom were set up for such a reading, and none of whom were
particularly interested in the Holocaust.  I certainly did not intend to
"prove" a reading, but the comments of others did convince me it was not an
invalid reading of that passage, which makes it to me a reading worth
pursuing.  But it's not as if Thomas Pynchon himself were unaware of the
Holocaust and details thereof, is it?  Again, that notion of the palimpsest,
texts "built on several levels," wor(l)ds laid on other wor(l)ds ...

Terrance Flaherty wrote:

> ever read a poem in class and have 25 or even 50 students all agree that
> the poem is about something the poet (not prophet) had no knowledge of?