pynchon-l-digest V2 #1624

[Dave Monroe]

... which reminds me, in that tangential-to-oblique
way that things will, that I just knocked off Prosper
Merimee's "The Venus of Ille," which features not only
a seemingly sinister copper idol, which one character
refers initially to as "Some bronze Virgin plundered
from a convent," the eyes of which are a particularly
noted feature, not only an awful lot of seemingly
gratuitous (in a seemingly significant way) "P"s, inc.
a character named Monsiuer de P_____, but also no
small consternation over the possible origins and
significance of incomplete inscriptions.  Merimee is
best known as the author of "Carmen," as in not only
the opera but, among other things, Radley Metzger's
Carmen, Baby! (and see his Camille 2000 as well ...)
and Jean-Luc Godard's Prenom: Carmen.

Also picked up ...

MacAdams, Lewis.  Birth of the Cool:
   Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde.
   New York: The Free Press, 2001.

... which looks to offer a "thick description" ((c)
Clifford Geertz) of the time and place of V.'s
setting, writing, publication, reception Terrance has
been helpfully sketching for us here.  Just flipping
through, photos of Parker, Sartre, Warhol, Cage,
Rauschenberg, the Beats, et al.  Also ...

Connor, Steven.  Dumbstruck: A Cultural History
   of Ventriloquism.  New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

... again, given comments by Terrance about McClintic
Sphere's seeming "automatism" (my word ... and I think
Jody's problematization on "Keep cool, but care,"
clarify possible objections for me), and my subsequent
comments about the pneumatic (pneuma = air = wind =
spirit) operations of classical oracular automata, was
struck by the following ... 

"The oracle at Delphi became the point of contact and
distinction between the pagan and the Christian, the
irrational and the rational, the female and the male,
the bodily and the spiritual.  The hold that the idea
of the oracle took upon the Christian West was
determined as much by the parallel relations between
women, utterance, and the body to be found in both
pagan divination and the story of divine incarnation."
(p. 74)

... at the beginning of Chapter 3, "Origen,
Eustathius, and the Witch of Endor."  The previous
chapter is "Earth, Breath, Frenzy: Delphic Oracle" ...


--- Thomas Eckhardt <uzs7lz at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> Yes. But your family name (not to speak of the
> internet domain you post from)
> proves that you yourself are just a sinister
> embodiment of the history of the
> 20th century...
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
> 


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