ATDTDA (3) The way it happens, 91-96

[Dave Monroe]

On 3/5/07, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >A-and how about such character names as Mike Fallopian and
> > Stanley Koteks?
>
> I'm running ahead again, can't help it. I had a good laugh when there
> appeared a sort of 'namesake' of Stanley Koteks in AtD, the hilarious
> colonel Prokladka.

Prokladka
The name is a common Russian word with two meanings: construction and
gasket. Female hygienic pads (with or without wings) are also referred
to as prokladkas.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_748-767#Page_754

>From Dana Medoro, The Bleeding of America: Menstruation as Symbolic
Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner, and Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2002), "Introduction," pp. 1-14 ...

If American literature has inherited from the Puritan jeremiads a
fascination with the American project of beginning again in the New
World, it also has taken on, without quite being able to admit it, the
unspoken anxiety that accompanies this fantasy of rebirth. This
"coming face to face with original sin" ... involves an ambivalence
about facing the mark of that sin: menstrual blood.... a tropology of
menstruation accompanies the myth of America, its vision of promise
and its sense of doom.  The future of the second Jerusalem or Eden
remains haunted by the "curse of Eve"; the cyclical ideal of shedding
the past and starting over conjures up the imagery or language
surrounding menstruation.... reemerges in the novels of ... Thomas
Pynchon, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison.  As these authors
position their work within and against the myth of America, they draw
upon the jeremiads' rhetoric and focus it through complex
representations of menstruating females.  Their novels reveal the
extent to which the foundation of American literature has been
bleeding from the start. (p. 7)

   This study is deconstructionist in approach; it works from the
concept of Eve's curse and deconstructs the difference between curse
and cure.... (p. 8 ff.)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73217

http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GM2059

And from Dana Medoro, "Traces of Blood and the Matter of a Paraclete's
Coming: The Menstrual Economy of Pynchon's V."  Pynchon Notes 44-45
(Spring-Fall 1999), pp. 14-34 ...

What cuts across each representation of female sexuality is
menstruation; it is the link among women scattered throughout a world
divided by violent masculine givernance.... proliferating allusions to
menstruation and menstrual blood ....  Like V. herself, menstrual
blood materializes in veiled, ambivalent forms, provoking male dread
and fascination.  As an aspect of V., it equivocated her alignment
with either maternity or death; she embraces each.  Menstruation is
both a positive and a negative power, the blood simultaneously an
announcement of fertility and its negation. (pp. 23-4)

The blood spilled by twentieth-century hostilitites, the blood which
appears to usher in V., potentially signifies its opposing terms:
renewal, synchrony, even a refusal to reproduce the systems of
violence.  As Pynchon himself is rumored to insist, the title of the
book is not V but V. [V-period] .... (p. 24)

V. is a threshold figure, bridging sacred and profane, presence and
absence, past and present.  She displaces either/or oppositions,
marking the limits of order and containing it. (p. 28)

In V., the Old World father leaves a legacy to his (metaphorically)
New World son, cryptically encoded as V.  Perhaps the legacy is
America, the Virgin Land, where the promise of cyclical regeneration
for a fallen world lies latent.  Here, the promise and the warning
materialize in V., a figure who embraces oppositions.  Her womb is
both threatening and fertile -- like America, according to the imagery
of the old
sermons. (p. 31)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65844

http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/backissu.html

Hm.  "Backissu."  Vheissu.  V. issue ...

Meanwhile ...

Manifestations of Venus

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7404

GRGR: Red = Blood. Period.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9905&msg=38150

Dana Medoro

http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/english/faculty/fake_faculty_page.php?id=4849387762&PHPSESSID=f28384ae84821d02534fe4d064c7c3af

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&keywords=medoro&page=1