pynchon-l-digest V2 #4585

[Cometman]

Glenn Scheper wrote:
>In Gerontion T.S. Eliot repeats what I said about
>merely saying Come versus impossible saying Fuck:

"come let us reason together" - isn't that how they convene the Senate?
but it comes from the Book of Isaiah, doesn't it?

"Come now, let us reason together", says the Lord. (Isaiah 1:18)
http://my.execpc.com/~ihni/reasontogether.htm

(then Joyce ("let us excheck a few strong verbs weak each oather"))

> It was a giant Adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul's

St Paul had an adenoid condition?

>I take this to be a reference to the well-known apostle.
>What was it that caused him his blindness? An adenoid?

Interesting sidelight, wasn't St Paul's designed by Christopher Wren? 
Wren as well the car the T.I. section chief arrived in - whoops, no,
that was a '37 Wolseley Wasp (Penguin, p 20, ln 16)
http://www.autogallery.org.ru/k/w/wolwaspsg.jpg
notes indicate only made in 1935 and 1936 - Umphrey's Law states: the
author knows what he is doing, and he is always doing it.  (Dr Robert
Umphrey: Gifted English Literature professor.)  
37 is a prime number, for one thing.  Also, may be a TRP reminder that
this is a work of fiction. Or maybe my source is incomplete.
This one agrees, though:
http://www.motorbase.com/vehicle/by-id/-133319240

> This lymphatic monster had once blocked the
> distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo,

>I see Lord, a reference to maleness with some more
>specific tantric implications, t.b.d. I see blatherer,
>which is to speak nonsense profusely. Of all things
>surely incommunicable, is the opposite sex's orgasm.
>I see osmosis, suggesting transfer across a membrane.

Also, does not a robot character named Osmo appear later in the book,
something of a tour guide somewhere?  Who chews gum, made of plastic,
impregnated with electrical something or other?

> Though he was able to develop a pidgin by which he
> and the Adenoid could communicate, unfortunately he
> wasn't nasally equipped to make the sounds too well,
> and it got to be an awful chore.

>This resembles that same lament of Eliot in Gerontion,
>a sense that for all I do, this just ain't "gettin it".

I've reread it a couple times, blurrily thinking '"estaminet" - what a
cool word!'

Mindward capers a reply to the poem: Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, yet
that makes me think of "Beggar to Beggar Cried" and wondering if John
Lennon (quoted on some collector card I read in grade school: "I hope
to still be a creaking old Beatle when I'm eighty") was thinking of the
3rd beggar, "giddy with his hundredth year" something something
something
(http://homeoint.org/morrell/poems/index.htm#The%20Three%20Hermits)
when he took that interview

> the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace,
>In Homeopathy, one administers a poison that would cause
>the same symptoms as caused by the illness to be treated.
>So, this peace, a poison, keeps up Pirate's defenses.
>Sounds like my times of turpor, desiring stimulation.

not always poison; outcroppings of homeopathy include the well-known
Bach flower remedies (active ingredient being the dew off a rose eg) as
well as gem, flower, mineral, planetary, stellar, gas (etc) elixirs at
(for instance) www.pegasusproducts.com, www.alaskanessences.com, and
many other fine purveyors.  Channeled explanatory material is available
(requiring a suspension of disbelief in Lemuria eg) on the Pegasus site

Vision, or idea, morphing a rainbow: with the semicircle of the 'bow, a
beautiful pair of hands appears (or, it just happens, as a meditation
it seems to work "mit or mitout") cups the rainbow, opens, having
Rotated it through and through to produce a beautiful shimmering
Rainbow Sphere

For this to work properly, I try to leave out thoughts of rainbow
defoliants, which seem to diminish the glow, but rather concentrate on
light itself.