Re. Vineland, page 3

[Robert Mahnke]

I'm not sure that I've ever lingered on the sunlight portion of that sentence, though I agree that the usage is a little odd.  It suggests that the light is not just a noun but its own verb, and if I'd ever taken high school physics I might be able to connect the grammar to something more substantive and profound.

I always trip over the squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.  I'm not the birding expert my father is, but I thought of jays as relatively solitary, not social animals. Apropos of this, Wikipedia says jays form monogomous pairs for life, and that they may band together to mob potential predators.  Wikipedia also suggests that the blue jay's range doesn't usually extend as far west as California, but for the occasional stray (a point lacking a citation, ominously, so take that for what it's worth).  When I lived in California, I loved to watch Steller's Jays, which are blue jays but not Blue Jays.  (Photos here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_Jay (scroll down).)  (Echoes of COL49: Steller's Jays are named after Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German naturalist who spent most of his career in Russia and Siberia, and who joined Bering on a 1741 trip to Alaska.)  I read that first sentence and want to see Steller's Jays.  But then, Pynchon didn't capitalize "blue jay," and it's not like Zoyd can even see them if they're on the roof....

I look forward to revisiting this point during Vi-IV, Vi-V, Vi-VI, etc.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
>Sent: Dec 2, 2008 8:35 AM
>To: 
>Cc: landseadelrobinlandseadel at comcast.net
>Subject: Re. Vineland, page 3
>
>
>Worth noting (once again) how this book begins, as does Gravity's Rainbow, with a protagonist waking from a portentious dream, and with light percolating in.
> 
>I take the points raised by Kai Frederik, about the eternal return of every link, post, and annotation that can ever be posted, given that this is (at least) the 3rd VL Group Read . But I disagree that complete p-list silence ought to be maintained. Anyway, if you strogly agree that only original posts are worthwhile, stop reading this one now, coz it's a reheat of a retread....
> 
>Ok, I posted this before, not during a Group read, just as it occurred to me on one of my many solo reads of Vineland. I got no response whatsoever, so I put it on the Vineland wiki, where it got - you guessed it - no response whatsoever. So here it is again, I promise this wil be its last outing:
>
>I love Vineland passionately, and utterly refute any suggestions that it's Pynchon Ordinaire. But, that very first sentence....
> 
>"Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof."
> 
>...has always struck me as odd. That '...in sunlight through a creeping fig...' is a strange, slightly awkward construction, is it not? And we know how much care P takes with his opening lines, so it's even stranger that he opens the book with this, dare I say it, vaguely ungrammatical turn of phrase? Of course, this being Pynchon, the mind recoils from such thoughts, which just leads to more pondering.....
> 
>Well, is it? Ungrammatical? Probably not. Awkward? Jarring? It seems so to me. You'd expect something in between 'sunlight' and 'through', no? Maybe "...in sunlight which streamed through a creeping fig..."?
> 
>Oddly enough, the same phrasing is used in the exceprt from Inherent Vice:
> 
>"They stood in the  there'd never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town."
> 
>The "streetlight through the kitchen window" is exactly the same construction, yes? So Pynchon certainly seems to think it's ok.
> 
>Am I the only one who finds this odd?  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>_________________________________________________________________
>Send e-mail anywhere. No map, no compass.
>http://windowslive.com/Explore/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_acq_anywhere_122008