Medical students

[Jasper Fidget]

Corpses, yeah.  There are lots of people here who know Eliot, so I'm sure
this must have been posted before, but check out the Waste Land: the Dog
digging up the corpse, the merging (er, mingling) of death and sex (I seem
to recall Faulkner doing lots of this too, but it's been too long since I've
read him), Mason going to the dog for this purpose.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout?  Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!'

I don't want to jump the gun either (so I'll refrain from speculating), but
I'm just fascinated by this Learned English Dog.  Can't find *when* they're
sailing on a cursory paging, but I'm thinking about Dog Days now, sailing
with Sirius obscured, then Venus and Sun together at last (sexual again?),
science joining the sex/death complex (oh, I remember the Faulkner thing:
sex as the war against death, or an act born of the fact of death, that kind
of thing).  Rambling.

Jasper Fidget

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kris Majer" <stonk at priv.onet.pl>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2001 4:18 PM
Subject: MDMD: Medical students


> Hello,
>
> Hope it's okay to post from chapters 2&3 already, (Dave?). This is partly
> ch1 & partly ch3:
>
> p.9 "had a riotous throng of medical students taken what they deem'd to be
> my Cadaver back beneath the somber groins of their College..."
>
> p.15 "Mason has been shov'd about and borne along in riots of sailors
> attempting to wrest from bands of Medical Students the bodies of Shipmates
> come to grief ashore, too far from the Safety of the Sea, ..."
>
> My my. Those medical students are a menace. The description here sounds
like
> that of body snatchers of some sort, lurking in the shadows, ready to take
> their prey to their hideouts and perform some nasty operations on them.
> Creepy people, no doubt. Excuse my ignorance of that particular time in
> history, but I suppose medical investigation was no easy task and hence
this
> strange practice of holding on to whatever one can find. It's interesting
to
> note that the narrator capitalizes them while the Rev'd doesn't - surely
not
> a slip in a novel where Capital Letters are so meticulously distributed. I
> also had a few things to say about capitalized vs non-capitalized in the
> exchanged letters of the protagonists, but I think Dave has already
> mentioned that he's going to delve into that part. So I won't interfere
> here.
>
> Kris
>
> PS. Reading M&D for the first time.
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> r e k l a m a
> Lista Plac [ http://listaplac.onet.pl ]
>
>