TPPM _The Gift_: An interlude, crunching P-List posts

[Glenn Scheper]

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/gift.html

Because the waste.org search engine only produces
more and more hits when adding more search terms,
I fetched all the 742 posts mentioning "gift" by
a battery of my programs, batch files and manual
intervention, for culling out those of relevance.

This morning*, I awoke from my sleeping bag under
the desk at the "work and spurf motel" -- that's
the phrase I heard awakening. Dictionary.com was
no help, but Google did give 647 hits for spurf.
Perhaps accumulated microstrokes have impaired
even the pre-vocalization assembly of phonemes,
because "surf" would make a lot of sense here.

(*9/3 -- pretend Steve Maas had not explained Gift.)

Faced with the culling task, I heard that I must
first write an "ontology of body types". But I'm
not ready yet--That is probably the last task of
decoding most symbols in the Book of Revelation.

Curiously, few hits were about _The Gift_, but
they reveal this possibly truer longer title:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9705&msg=15388
_Re: Hall's Warlock_
n a new western town. In "A Gift of Books" TRP notes, "the c

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0005&msg=45582
_Re: Warlock_
rlock* was made in 1965 ('A Gift of Books', *Holiday* 38.6, 

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9603&msg=4306
_RE: Warlock_
ried an article entitled 'A Gift of Books', in which Pynchon
asily as a corpse can." ("A Gift of Books," _Holiday_, 38. v

> Skip Wolfe writes: In his introduction to a recent edition
> of Richard Farina's _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to
> Me_ TRP mentions their absorption with Oakley Hall's novel
> _Warlock_ during their Cornell days. 


So, feeling like the sheepish detective Columbo, "I don't
get it. What is this "gift of books" nowhere in evidence?"

This "of books" would exclude giftedness of the author.

Was Oakley's producing the book _Warlock_ the gift?

Did Oakley's use of many historical reference materials
make those materials the gift, possessed by Oakley?

Or perhaps, Oakley has a giftedness of going to books.

Was the book _Warlock_ somehow productive of a gift?

Aha! _Warlock_ produces in readers a Camelot-desire.

        Your opinions solicited.


Most worthy of mention amongst the non-_The Gift_ gifts:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0104&msg=54802
_Re: Sanders, "The Politics of Literary Reinscription_
auss's famous notion of the gift, which likewise "cements" m
 just this duplicity in the gift which is, as he stated on t
t on to note, "is that of a gift generously offered; but the
Taussig, citing Mauss, _The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exc
ot only is the logic of the gift implicated in friendship, b
ieve, likely to presume the gift or be itself a gift. For if
ume the gift or be itself a gift. For if we reflect upon it,
this sense, friendship is a gift that an otherwise indiffire
re the contradiction in the gift discharges itself. But over
, friendship is in itself a gift. All the more fascinating a
fore, the secret within the gift, and therefore withing frie

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.