First Couple-Three Pages: 6/11 - ATDTDA (11): 296 - 326 --The Deep Read:

[bekah]

At 5:04 AM -0700 6/13/07, Mark Kohut wrote:
>Here's the big essay question of the day:  "the wide-open promise of 
>desire unleashed"...
>What does this mean in TRP's vision?....oxymoronic?.......'desire 
>unleashed' might be
>taken in other books, in our usual conversation, as a bad. 
>destructive thing.....why does it hold "wide-open promise"?......
>


Thanks Mark,

First thing I thought of regarding "the wide-open promise of desire 
unleashed"  was that  "Desire Unleashed"  could be the title of a 
trashy flashy  pulp romance with a lot of "wide open promises" in it. 
(omg, the cover!)

"Master of Desire" is close enough:
<http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/kinley-macgregor/master-of-desire.htm>



So we have to look at the whole sentence for that line:
(pg 297 - 13)
Even Frank, who was not what you'd call one of these spiritualists, could tell
that it was haunted up here. Despite the day-and-night commercial bustling
down below, the wide-open promise of desire unleashed, you only had to
climb the hillside for less than an hour to find the brown, slumped skeletons
of cabins nobody would occupy again, the abandoned bedspring from miners'
dormitories left out to rust two and a half miles up into the dark 
daytime sky . . .
the presences that moved quickly as marmots at the edges of the visible. The
cold that was not all a function of altitude.


That "day-and-night commercial bustling" down the hills probably 
includes some promises of the female variety - either that or poker. 

<http://www.telluridetoday.com/pictures.htm>
<http://photoswest.org/exhib/faves/sal1.htm>

Bekah



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070613/8be1fdc3/attachment.html>