SLSL Get Back

[William Zantzinger]

"Sometimes I almost wish I was back at City. And
that's bad." 
"Why bad?" Picnic said. "I'd rather be back at the
Academy any day than doing this crap." 
"No," Levine said frowning, "you don't go back. I only
went back once that I can remember and that was to a
broad. And that was bad too." 
"Yeah," Picnic said. "You told me. You should have
gone back. I wish I could. Back to the barracks, even,
and go to sleep."
"You can sleep anywhere," Levine said. "I can." 

Page 35 SL/TSR

Does this make sense to anyone? 

Why does Picnic say, "You should have gone back"?

At the end of the story Levine is heading back to
Roach. He doesn't seem to realize that he is "going
back." When the PFC driving his back says, 
"Damn, it'll almost be a relief to get back." 

"Back?" Levine said. "oh, yeah, I guess so." 

Is this the identity of place theme, Levine's version
of the Wandering Jew? 

Reminds me most of Benny. Levine yo-yoing? 

At the campus he gets a job, it's sort of a volunteer
job like Benny's sewer job because without being
ordered he carelessly goes down to the pier gets on a
tug and joins the men in the recovery. One difference
is that Levine, after thoughtlessly collecting the
dead, gets laid. Sex and death. Levine and his pals
think that they should get laid because they are now
surrounded by death. War/Death & Love/Sex. Levine has
to go do some hard labor, the plowboy, after 
harvesting the dead, gets the moon goddess Buttercup
in the swamp bed. 

In V., Pynchon continues to work with this theme of
War/Death & Love/Sex. He draws on Denis De Rougemont's
_Love in the Western World_ and Freud. And so on. 

In TSR is it Hemingway's _A Farewell to Arms_ that P
draws on most. In that novel, the soldiers talk about
sex all the time. They talk about whores, bringing new
fresh beautiful young whores to the front. There is a
priest and  one of the men teases him about his vow of
chastity. What is a priest doing in a war if he can't
have sex? He must be having sex. And so on. In the
tale, there is a lot made of the difference between
women who are whores and women who are ladies. But the
war seems to blur any difference. At least in the mids
of some of the soldiers. In fact, the men associate
war with whores to such an extent that when they leave
the front they can't quite rid themselves of this view
of women as war whores. In any event, I think it's
interesting that Levine makes reference to Buttercup's
 being a cute St. Bernard (SL.TSR.42). Does anyone
else think this is an interesting "compliment"? And
how about here response? Anyway, getting back to Yoko
Ono and Paul, in AFA Cathrine says, 

"Say, 'I've come back to Catherine in the night.'"
Henry say it. She asks him to say he loves her and so
he does. It's a gambit. A chess game, a card game, and
Henry would rather play with Catherine than the whores
he's been laying with. 

Septuagesima: 

The laborers work collecting the grapes that are
swollen like balloons inflated to bursting under the
hot sun. A storm is approaching so the boss hires more
and more labor to harvest the fruit before it hits. By
evening the harvest has been gathered. The boss is
especially grateful to the late-comers, who have saved
the situation, and he pays them as much as those that
labored all day. 

"So the last shall be first, and the first last: for
many are called, but few chosen." 
   --Jesus






 



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