MDMD(5): B O N K!

[no fun]

Raedek Bonk is a forward on the Ottawa Senators (an NHL team for those
living in darkness without hockey, which remains important despite, indeed
perhaps because of the horrors of the world).


----- Original Message -----
From: Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 2:38 PM
Subject: MDMD(5): B O N K!


> B O N K !
>
> Funny thing: I thought no such name existed or exists at the Cape.  Once
> again, me being wrong.  Bonk was, and continues to be an actual name
> indeed.
>
> The word 'bonk' as a substantive, even now, means in Dutch a physically
> strong person. Imagine Captain Haddock in the Tintin comics, he's a real
> 'bonk'.  A 'zeebonk' is a more or less normal expression for a seaman.
> (The word is also used to describe the noise a thing makes, when falling
> on the ground.)  It has none of the sexual connotations some slang might
> provide. (on the other hand: a gay friend of mine uses it when referring
> to attractive men).  Anyway, it expresses force.  And that is how Mason
> and Dixon get in touch with the V.O.C.: a brutal and rude man sets out
> the rules.
>
> Bonk says about Africa that the continent has as 'little mercy as the
> Sea to your backs' and, once lost, there's no 'hope of Salvation'.
> There is nothing left but to ply to the V.O.C.'s rules.  The System, or
> They, take over.
>
> In a frivolous kind of way, Mason explains why they are here.  He does
> this in exactly the wrong tone.  He will be put in a file at the Castle
> (the fortification built by slaves in 1666, the year of the London Great
> Fire by the way), as will be Dixon, however 'harmless' (59.33) he may be
> seem.  It is all, according to Bonk, 'English Whiggery'.
>
> Declaring 'the movements of Heav'ns which taken together form a cryptick
> message' is of course exactly the wrong thing to say.  It creates
> immediately a boundary (this chapter being full of boundaries, on which
> later more) between the system, whose ideology was a kind of religious
> fundamentalism, in order to live the strange kind of life the settlers
> lived.  It is all right to say such a thing among enlightened British
> scientists, and may be considered a definition of Deism --which I've
> always seen as a polite word for atheism-- but not the right expression
> to be used when at the Cape.
>
>
>