AtDTDA: (8) 225 Uckenfay!!!

[Bryan Snyder]

"...light falling seemingly without a destination across the wind attended
squares and haunted remnants of something older..."

It's snippets of sentences like this that make me love TRP!!

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 12:45 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: AtDTDA: (8) 225 Uckenfay!!!

Yashmeen was about to:

          . . . .go up to University, to Girton College, 
          Cambridge, to study maths." 225. 1/2

          . . . .It was dawning on him [Lew] that Yashmeen 
          might be more than what others were claiming 
          on her behalf. 225. 7/8

          Evening drew on, the vast jangling thronged 
          somehow monumental London evening, light 
          falling seemingly without a destination across 
          the wind attended squares and haunted 
          remnants of something older, and they went 
          to eat at Molinaris in Old Compton Street, also 
          known as the Hotel d'Italie, reputed to be one 
          of the haunts of Mr. Arthur Edward Waite, though 
          tonight the place was only full of visitors from 
          the suburbs. 225. 9/14

Scroll down for citation:

http://tinyurl.com/284dp8

Probably my favorite passage in Gravity's Rainbow, the one on 748 in my
edition 
that begins: "It's a bridge over a stream. Very seldom will traffic come by 
overhead. . . .", where Geli is literally casting a spell on
Tchitcherine---the spell is 
from A.E.Waite's [grey] book of black magic. Note as well that the name of
A.E. 
Waite comes up in Against the Day, but not Perdurabo's name.

Lew dependance on "traditional" readings of the deck (while there are cards
used 
for divination throughout western European history, it really a little early
for 
a tradition to have risen out of the Rider/Waite deck, seeing as [assuming
it's 
1900-ish, instead of 1909-ish] they've just been cooked up [or haven't even
come 
into being yet, really. . . .]) but soon is disabused of any notion of
stability 
within the "the Icosadyad, or Company of Twenty-two. . . ." 225. 19

Readings and asignations of cards within the 
relativly stable Pamela Coleman Smith deck 
are turned inside-out here:
 
          "As if testing a new policeman on the beat, 
          the twenty-two lost little time in demonstrating 
          to Lew the nomenclatural flexibility. Temperance 
          (number XIV) proved to be an entire family, the 
          Uckenfays, living in a disagreeable western 
          suburb, each of who specialized in a different 
          pathological impulse he or she was unable to 
          control. . . ."

Note that the Temperance card got a major make-over from Crowley 
in his "Thoth" deck. The first is "Pixie" Smith's card, the second
is the Crowley/Harris version:

http://tinyurl.com/yqmp7b

http://www.energyenhancement.org/vitriol%20art.jpg

The various pathgological impulses these artful twits indulge in include:

          "litigiousness, choral addiction, public masturbating, 
          unexpected discharges of firearms, and in the case 
          of the baby, Des, scarely a year old and already 
          four stone. . . . 225. 30/32

>From another AtD blog:

          Literature and Cinema
          A number of segments in the narrative arc use 
          literary styles, authors, and books to afford 
          Pynchon a variety of voices and scenes. There 
          are Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing 
          (Merle Rideout), Lewis Carroll's Alice in 
          Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass 
          (Lew Basknight, the TWIT Tarot episode), 
          Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (Kit as Frodo or 
          Bilbo?), William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, Proust, 
          and comics, including Little Nemo, Tintin, 
          V for Vendetta, and others. A similar narrative 
          doubling occurs with his use of film. There are 
          Monty Python's Holy Grail and Life of Brian, 
          Fawlty Towers, Star Wars, the Matrix, 
          Fritz Lang, Fellini, John Woo, and numerous 
          Terry Gilliamesque animations.

          Lewis Carroll, represented perhaps as Lew 
          Basknight (Bas = Car, transposition)/(Knight = 
          Through the looking glass) seems to me to 
          have inspired the style of our first important 
          encounter with the T.W.I.T.s., pages 220 - 227, 
          including numerous references to strange 
          physical laws, a pig of a baby ("scarcely a 
          year old and already four stone, that form of 
          gluttony known to students of the condition 
         known as gaver du visage" - 225).

http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/?page_id=30

Other cards---The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, are given similarly "Looking

Glass" Readings in their all-too human aspects.