ATDTDA (13): Reef's dead, 362-364

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

like the non-existent moonlight on the scrap heap
in Colorado, I really took off in the wrong direction on this...
got to get the meaning straight before starting to mess
with it!

of course the "not all on wanted posters" resounds
with "no matter what ignorance" - why didn't I see that?

synesthetically, doesn't one still hear a major chord in
a middle octave on the first clause, seguing into a bunch of
arpeggiated minor 6th chords for the rest of the sentence,
descending? ...but now that jibes with the sonorities in the
words and meaning.

and it still does seem like Reef's utterance, mostly,
rather than a narrator's

are these characters one can relate to?  sure.
flat/round maybe just begins a vocabulary of character, though

how about the prickly dimension? (for instance)

because talking about Reef's viewpoint doesn't make
much difference if one hasn't begun to care about Reef.

by this point, maybe Wood decided he didn't care;
why have I decided to?

I know some guys that are kind of like that...
have had friends over the years, couldn't always keep
up with their "rounder" style, but liked them.

truth be told, I like all the kids better than I like Webb.
When Webb learns about Reef literally playing with
dynamite as a teen, is I suppose where I first began to
form a picture of Reef, and like him.  (the scene with the "foxy grin"
and the sketch of the year that isn't too bad, and I suppose
during his protracted death, are the only places I actually kind of
like Webb - oh, and just a bit during the seance, but not so much)

Reef's a precursor of Zoyd, for one thing,
and of those activist kids in PR3 who took over the
campus but never really did any analysis.
  but his gambling sort of links him with Stencil from V....
  and I'd argue he's the one who's most bonded with
  Webb, or changed by the idea of revenge - so he shares
  a "quest for Father" thing with Stencil too

so for him to be ruminating about Wanted posters
might make some kind of weird sense

and maybe Wood's right about Pynchon 
making some kind of Barthesian point here - 

I have not got enough data about either Barthes 
or Wanted posters to catch that

but it does seem like Reef is embarking on something
like the social analysis that the xanthocroid students were
avoiding, and then managing to avoid it himself
by moving into aesthetic and psychological turf



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Morris [mailto:fqmorris at gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 01:02 PM
> To: 'Keith'
> Cc: 'Masochistic Devotees'
> Subject: Re: ATDTDA (13): Reef's dead, 362-364
>
> On 7/18/07, Keith <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:
> > "If Capital's own books showed a balance in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so were those who took care of their problems for them, in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of their faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style that was more about the kind of remembering, the unholy longing going on out here, than of any real-life badman likeness...." (362)
> >
> > "not all of their faces on the wanted bills" refers to the plute's "problems" which are being "taken care of" by hired hands who don't even know why they are killing folks (i.e., some of their faces aren't even on wanted bills). Some of these problems' faces *are* on wanted bills because they have been targeted by the "law," but even these images of the victims painted by the law are illusions of memory, distorted by an unholy longing shared by plutes and lawmen alike.
>
> Right.
> This was my take on it too, only you've fleshed out the nuances a bit more:
>
> "not all their faces on the wanted bills" follows "no matter what
> their ignorance of why." Those sent out to kill the plute's problems
> sometimes had official "whys," ie. wanted bills. But sometimes they
> were sent to kill those without their faces on wanted bills.
>