April

Terrance lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 7 06:25:32 CST 2001


April 15th, P notes the date here twice. Why?  It's not as
if he has been giving us a chronological detective story
with times and dates. Or has he? Those calendars are all
mixed up David, not sure what P is up to just yet
but...Jewish and Catholic and the NY Times. Benny has the NY
Times and he's sitting outside the NYPL. Now as I noted, the
details here are all quite accurate, across the street there
is a branch of that library and there are branches all over
the city, Science, Industry, Business a good walk over to
Madison and 34th to read those IG Farben books no doubt, 
but he's at the Library that P must have spent some time in,
looking at the NY Times and Almanacs and so on. P gets the
weather from the paper and the moons, even the ships were in
the paper in those days and you know the Employment section
had separate listings for Men and Women,  and all sorts of
factual details. Dave, Vietnam is in the NY Times a lot in
these years-- Brief articles about talks and visits. Five
million rat houses of history indeed and why would P, with
all these colonial stories not told,  not include American
Colonial history unless he was just hinting about a novel
still to be written. There is something about the reaction
to the 1920s I suspect, that white empire state going up and
the world come crashing down on Fitzgerald and
Company--Catholics.  That Hayes book wasn't P's source true,
but that  Depression how great indeed,  how the Giants
managed to make profits, even during those thin dime days
everyone went to the movies and IG Farben managed to stay in
the black on exports and a little help from their Mutual
Friends in New Jersey even if they couldn't pass those
reichmark onto stockholders.   April 19th was a big day,
Grace Kelly got married (Love) that day, well actually she
got married the day before but on the 19th she got married
before God in a church ceremony, sold the rights to the film
version, big contract disputes and all, and everyone in the
worlds watched the newsreels. And we are picking up more
pieces of that rocket over Suez (Death). Yes this Chapter I
think owes a huge debt to Eros and Civilization, see Chapter
Four where Marcuse picks up on Freud's disdain for
labor--"The Dialectic of Civilization." Those traumatic
bursts in VL, in that VL essay well Marcuce has it or Walter
B. Oh, Today's Eve? Nothing I like better, when the
machinery of Hard Times has got be down while I've reading
about the re-forging of that business mentality into a
ideology of Death than a Catholic Imagination, preferably
one that's mingling spiritualism with al little sympathetic
magic to fight the waves of mechanical materialism.
Translate this please: Aufheben. Dialectic and sex,
Leibestod, parodies of that ancient Celtic story. 


Benny takes the Lex down to Fulton, this is all very
accurate.  One catches that line directly under the Library.
But first you walk up the stairs where the Lions are, this
is
not considered a "branch" library. One goes there
for periodicals and to look up the dissertations
that have Pynchon in the title. So you go into a room and
you look up the article on a computer, write down the title
and author and so forth and then if the article is bound
(three years old)
you take an elevator upstairs and give the information to a
clerk. The clerk time stamps it and puts it into
a cylinder and up a vacuum tube to the stacks. She gives you
a number just like a number you get at the bakery on Sunday
after church. 
You go round to a large room and wait for your number to
appear on a
computer board, back in 1950 maybe it may have been a flip
board or chalk board or maybe they didn't use a board I
don't know.  When your number lights up you can
pick up the article. You can't take it out of the room. You
can either read it and return it or make  photocopies in an
adjacent room. This is how it works in many of your BFLs.
Just across the street and up half a block is a branch where
you will find all books on Pynchon and all Pynchon's novels.
To get Sasuly you need to go over to the Science, Industry
and Business library on Madison and 34th. Anyway, the subway
king is on a long yo-yo string, he goes down town and over
or under and over to Brooklyn, Flatbush area and then back
to Manhattan and all the way up town and to the Bronx where
there are some very big parks including Van Cortlandt where
I used to go when I was a kid (I'm still a kid actually).
We didn't get six feet of snow, so gotta go to class now. 

Is it true, or just a paranoid history, that one's SS#
indicates race? 
A student want to know and I don't know. 


http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Eparasha/yomatz/spi.html



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