SLSL "assembly line"

[William Zantzinger]

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:

 I'm  coming around to seeing it as either fantasy or
> fairytale (not science 
> fiction). Buttercup is either a fairy princess or a
> witch. She's not a 
> normal cute blond college girl of the 50s, as I
> think Doug pointed out. 
> I'm not really expecting anyone to take the
> fairytale idea totally at 
> face value. It's admittedly such a diluted sort of
> fairytale and I can't 
> believe Pynchon conceived it as such. Not
> consciously. But as fairytale 
> it needs to be, to coin a term, FORCE READ.

I can read  Little Blonde Buttercup and  Little blond
Baxter as doubles. Benny Picnic and Nathan Levine are
buddies. Picnic adnires Levine. Baxter, a real farm
kid, doesn't think much of Levine. I think that the
fantasy ("Swamp Wench") can be read as a homoerotic
one. 

Pasiphaë, Frogs, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, these things
may have meant something to young Tom but we can't
even begin to guess what. Thank goodness they are just
force fed on us and are not important to the tale. 

Pasiphaë? We are all well read smartasses on this list
and we have n o idea why Tom tossed this in to the
tale. We can specualte until the cows come home and
that's fun to do but we have no clue what the hell it
has to do with TSR. It was a popular subject of art at
the time so P could have picked it up in a magazine or
at a museum, abstract expressionism for example. Who
knows? 

Frogs? OK, now we have two Greek allusions. Frogs is
mentioned in G&S. Buttercup? What? We have no clue
again. 

Take the "T.S. Eliot likes rain"  allusion. 

Dig deep and you only get into trouble. 
Eliot like rain because that's what the Wasteland
needs to bring life.  That's it. Hemingway hates rain
because it kills people in FWA.  That's it. 

The more Eliot we know the less sens the allusion
makes. Eliot doesn't like rain. Even if he said
Chaucer likes rain it would be  ambivalent. Levine
comments about dull roots lets us know that Rizzo and
Tom are talking about Eliot's famous poem, The
Wasteland. The poem opens with an ironic allusion to
Chaucer. 

Eliot: April is the cruelest month...
Chaucer: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote....

By the time we get to GR, Pychon has mastered this
kind of stuff. He plays irony on top of irony. His use
of Eliot's Preludes in GR is masterful. In GR he
recognizes another ironic allusion of Eliot's. There
it is an ironic allusion to Dante. Tom, invents a
bogus passage from a gnostic text. He alludes to
Eliot's ironic allusion to Dante. He puts a few people
in hell too. Pynchon, even here in TSR, keeps turning
christianity, specifically Catholicism, upside down.
Hell, the boy was a slow learner, but by GR he moving
so fast we can't even hear him coming and going. 


god made satan
satan made sin
god made a hot place
to put satan in
satan didn't like
said it wouldn't stay
so he acted like zantziner ever since that say


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