VLVL The picnic

[jbor]

on 24/4/04 8:55 AM, jbor wrote:

> The family members listening
> to Jess's revenge sermon are described by Pynchon as follows: "choker
> setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and street-corner
> spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new" (369).

Cf. also that earlier job list when Zoyd first arrives in Vineland: the
Traverses and Beckers are "spool tenders, zooglers, water bucks, and bull
punchers" (320).

spool tender: operates the lines and winches on a logging skid (or barge)

zoogler: assists in loading logging sleds

water bucks: packs water, either for a logging crew or for a donkey engine

bull puncher: (or bull whacker, bull skinner) prods and drives the oxen (or
donkey engine) hauling the logs on skid roads through the forest

http://home.att.net/~lassen.logger/terms.htm

NB also how in Vineland "the massed and breathing redwoods" were "alive
forever" in the days before white men came and desecrated these "territories
of the spirit" which the Native Americans once knew (317).

best

> I don't think
> it's that glowing a family portrait at all -- they're cheats and shysters
> and career-loggers, and recall that Jess's work was "trying to organize
> loggers in Vineland, Humboldt and Del Norte" (75), so, quite ironically, and
> deliberately so imo, there's a very real sense in which that redwood that
> fell on him at the baseball match (75) was in fact one of these "[s]ecret
> retributions" he preaches about.