re.Re: Monk's motto or: Is Against the Day in favour of the Night?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

>From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Monk's motto or: Is Against the Day in favour of the Night?
>Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:35:57 -0400


>What do we suppose Thelonius himself meant by the statement? Was he  being 
>mystical, as he was wont to be at times?  The Buddhist Monk.

>Or, more likely it was a hip, poetic way of expressing the fairly  ordinary 
>idea that the world is everlastingly in need of  enlightenment--or joy? 
>Which he was surely  attempting to supply with  his music.
>If such had been Pynchon's interpretation, the epigraph could have  
>expressed, among other things, the writer's intention to do with  science, 
>math, political theory, and other learned shit what Monk was  doing with 
>music.

Perhaps this is the most plausible assumption. In Vineland, however, the 
motto --- "Every dog has his day, and a good dog just might have two days" 
(Johnny Copeland) --- seems to tell a lot about the book's content itself. 
At least when one thinks that the novel is about conflicting efforts to 
reconstruct the 1960s as a cultural boundary object. But Vineland is in 
general, compared to Pynchon's other books, a pretty coherent novel.
Kai

>Third possibility, TM was just trying to confuse the squares? As was  also 
>his wont.
>
>Just dunno.
>
>P.
>