re.Re: Monk's motto or: Is Against the Day in favour of the Night?
Kai Frederik Lorentzen
lorentzen at hotmail.de
Mon Jul 30 05:35:38 CDT 2007
>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.
>
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