Day 2: Pages 299- 302 : 6/11 - ATDTDA (11): 296 - 326 --The Deep Read:

[Mark Kohut]

Merle and Dally and Frank. 
  P. 299 Merle compares working in a mine with higher education "it's damn college"....comment on Pynchon's  "sympathetic understanding"---or lack of--- of the miners' life: bars in "the classroom", guns, drunkenness, sexual insanity, unsafe to be around....survive or not.
   
  Why can't Dally remember Frank's name correctly? 
   
  Paranoia, reality of life?: "Much easier if I knew how much I couldn't trust you." Frank to Merle.
   
  p. 299 Buck Wells, "troubled soul" who might kill himself, says Merle.  Why is this aggressive anti-union elite mine company manager troubled? Comment on Pynchon's 'sympathetic understanding" --or not--- of elite capitalists. Bulkeley Wells  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulkeley_Wells.  (seems Pynchon knows more about him than wikipedia does)
   
  p. 300 'Throw down". To begin an altercation. 
www.blackraptor.net/m7fic/contents/terms.htm - Definition in context
   
  p. 300 Frank, suspected by Merle of coming to town to get Buck Wells, says he is only interested in "the actual trigger operatives" hired to murder his Pa.  Frank focussed on revenge for his father's death, not in continuing his pa's assassination endeavors. What does this say about Frank, about the Traverses?   
   
   "Word is around, Frank"....Frank has been found out already.
  What does the line "Small Chinese children had also been known to look at Frank this way....altho not quite so troubled" mean?
   
  Why are Deuce and Sloat eating a firecracker in one unclear photo?    And that ceremonial pose in the hyperclear "crazed radiance" shot?.....
   
  "Emulsion of an earlier day"...."Something authentically ghostly" [with TRP we have to think of the line that "photography steals one's soul, as many natural societies believed when seeing a picture for the first time]......."emulsions acting as agents'.....why that description?....agents, double meanings, double "agents"  like Deuce and Sloat themselves? Like S. Vibe's agents?
   
  p. 301 Dally "like a small explosion" verbally pushes Frank to leave town. She and Merle want to help him escape, that is care about him, because his dad saved her life once or twice?   
   
  " circles of otherworld blindness up on tall poles along the road up to the ridgeline"....As in
  description of streetlights in Telluride, electric, non-natural light is "blindness" and reminds
  this reader of the greatest literary image involving poles----the heads on poles of Heart of Darkness.
   
  p. 301-302 Frank escapes with Dally thru a previously invisible trap door and secret underground tunnel swung them high over the valley and the lights of the town. "To Hell you ride!"
   
  p.302 "sensed yet hidden, like so much else in these mountains".  What all is hidden? 
  Then lotsa noise again..on a Saturday night.
   
  "Find me one face in here cares about who does what".--Dally. What a civil society, yes?
   
  Then Frank hears ragtime, unknowingly, and wants to dance. Pynchon and music; Pynchon and dancing. Compare.
   
   

       
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