mortality and mercy in vienna and elsewhere

[albert pulido]

Yeah I read this recently too, also liked it. I also saw the same party as 
in Entropy, complete with sailors.
Though this story included more college references (a roommate, campus life) 
and perhaps that helps explains why the eliot and conrad are there. Though I 
didn't find the ending so satisfying. It's too neat, having the Ojibwa kill 
everyone-- it kind of comically gets pynchon out of solving the problem of 
what these people are doing to Lepscu.

Albert

>From: "umberto rossi" <teacher at inwind.it>
>Reply-To: teacher at inwind.it
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: mortality and mercy in vienna and elsewhere
>Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 09:21:34 +0200
>
>
>I have read the Pynchon story I didn't know anything about and would
>like to know more (obviously there are question that shall remain
>unanswered such as why didn't he include it in Slow Learner, though I
>suppose that the party setting might make it a double of Entropy).
>Anyway what struck me was the references to Eliot, or better the
>quotation of texts by other writers quoted in the Waste Land, the
>"Mon semblable" phrase which is Baudelaire quoted at the end of The
>Burial of the Dead, the "Mistah Kurtz--he dead" epigraph (but that is
>in the Hollow Men) the Lupescu character which belongs to the WL (you
>might imagine him at the Metropole with Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna
>Merchant), then Eliot is overtly mentioned with Guaguin and Grossman
>as example of the Going-Native syndrome, no to mention the Kurtz
>passage at the end, of course it's Conrad but there's plenty of
>Conrad in the WL and there would be more hadn't Pound edited it out.
>
>Remarkable. But--how old was he when he wrote that?
>
>umberto rossi
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