You never did the Kenosha Kid?

[Dave Monroe]

First off, some handy URLs ...

http://mysite.verizon.net/paul.mackin/kenosha/

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~redacid/kenoshakid.html

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/k.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/61.htm

http://users.ev1.net/~homeville/fictionmag/t1120.htm#A27106

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001288.html

And that "search inside this text" feature @
amazon.com is pretty damn helpful as well, as, of
course, is ...

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> http://kenoshakid.wikispaces.org/

.. though some sort of page flipping function'd be
even more helpful there.  Can that be done, Paul?  But
the effort's much appreciated as it is, thanks again
...

> I don't see much internal connection to the episode
> in GR. The Kenosha Kid character is a sort of Robin
> Hood-like anti-hero I guess, which would have
> appealed to Slothrop (and to Pynchon), and there's
> the term "pard" in the teaser to the story proper,
> but nothing else....

Well, I'm going to have to devote myself to that one
msyelf someday soon, but...

> I wonder, though, if there was a sequel or spin-off
> to this story, or whether the character reappears
> elsewhere in Forbes Parkhill's fiction, and how one 

> might go about finding that out....

Oh, Pauls ...?  No luck on this end yet, so ...
 
> I think I've mentioned this once before but I also
> see a connection between the start of Pynchon's
> scene with Slothrop in St Veronica's imagining a
> letter he might have written to (and the reply he
> received  from) the Kenosha Kid (in Wisconsin) and
> the opening of _Catch-22_ with Yossarian censoring
> (in increasingly subversive ways) letters home from 

> the troops while he's in the base hospital...

Yeah, that's a good call there.  Viz. ...

"To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all
modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every
letter that passed through his hands went every adverb
and every adjective. The next day he made war on
articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity
the following day when he blacked out everything in
the letters but a, an and the. That erected more
dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just
about every case left a message far more universal."
(Catch-22, p. 16 [curent ed.])

But ...

> After Slothrop is taken to the Abreaction Ward at
> St Veronica's we first see him deliberately trying
> to train his mind in his own prep for the next  
> Sodium Amytal injection ...

Okay, I'm looking at pps. 60-62 (reading offa amazon
right now, ditto Heller above), not quite sure where
that "deliberately trying to train his mind" is coming
from.  I gotta run, though, so let me know ...

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