Verlaine's and Rimbaud

[Swing Hammerswing]

Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.

		--Dylan

As Stencil is summing up V's history/etiology, a bum suggests Rimbaud. Any 
ideas why Pynchon has the bum suggesting Rimbaud? Stencil wonders if she 
knew Rimbaud as a child, perhaps at age three or four.
That would be too late for the Paris Commune, but the other political 
activities of the young poet are quite suggestive. Here, Pynchon is not 
using his trust Baedeker but instead seems to be relying on his trust 
Remembrancer, they are in my old neighborhood, 3rd and 14thth and the bums 
gather round, but Stencil leads Benny up 3rd Ave. into the 70s and over to 
Park Ave. where they pull of the great teeth caper, then into Central Park 
at around two in the morning where the male officer poses as a homosexual to 
entrap Niel.  Why does Pynchon introduce this scene? Why does he also 
include the girl "built like a garbage truck driver and holding in one hand 
a sodden brassiere " trudging after a used contraceptive and a band of 
juvenile delinquents singing and  saying look at the moon? A clock somewhere 
chimes Seven and an old man, half asleep, presumably a bum, says it's 
Tuesday after another voice asks, what day is it, the narrator says its 
Saturday. Benny and Stencil left the Bar at "hurry up please it's Time" Mr. 
Eliot, so it's very late, close to midnight is suspect. Benny says it's 
quite, like the Shuttle at 5pm, but of course 5pm is when the Shuttle is 
most crowded, although Benny may be speaking for the bums who are silenced 
by the "tourists" on the their way home from work and the silence that is in 
fact often present when the trains are most crowded with commuters and all 
the residents, the bums are invisible. The moon shivers in the cold, but 
there is a warmth, a sense of population, it is in fact a reversal of the 
Shuttle time, high noon. Stencil says it's now 1913.

Here is the big question: Why is Paola holding the Church Key?



http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/glossary/rimbaud.html

http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/rimbaud/0.htm




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