VL-IV p30, 31, 32, 47

[Robin Landseadel]

And another Great Feghoot [perhaps even more "plotty" than "For  
DeMille. . ."] is in Vineland, coming up on page 47. It's one of my  
favorite Feghoots and it's one of the most connected passages in  
Pynchon, so I'll allow the author to speak at his own pace. I  
recommend Charlie Parker as background music:

	Prairie wouldn't be off work for a couple of hours. Zoyd needed
	cash and also some advice about a quick change of
	appearance, and both were available from the landscape
	contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs,
	a former actor who'd begun as a company logo and ended up
	as majority owner of what'd been a modest enough lawn-care
	service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named
	The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to
	be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in
	which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks,
	buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse, and platinum wig, all
	borrowed from his wife, Blodwen. "Crabgrass won't be'ave?" he
	inquired in a species of French accent. "Haw, haw! No problem!
	Zhust call- The Marquis de Sod .... 'E'll wheep your lawn into
	shepp!" Pretty soon the business was booming, expanding into
	pool and tree service, and so much profit rolling in that Millard
	one time thought to take a few points instead of the fee up front.
	People out in the non-Tubal world began mistaking him for the
	real owner, by then usually off on vacation someplace, and
	Millard, being an actor, started believing them. Little by little he
	kept buying in and learning the business, as well as elaborating
	the scripts of his commercials from old split 30'S during the
	vampire shift to what were now five-minute prime-time
	micromovies, with music and special effects increasingly
	subbed out to artisans as far away as Marin, in which the
	Marquis, his wardrobe now upgraded into an authentic
	eighteenth-century costume, might carry on a dialogue with
	some substandard lawn while lashing away at it with his
	bullwhip, each grass blade in extreme close-up being seen to
	have a face and little mouth, out of which, in thousandfold-
	echoplexed chorus, would come piping, "More, more! We love
	eet!" The Marquis, leaning down playfully, "Ah cahn't 'ear you!"
	Presently the grass would start to sing the company jingle, to a,
	by then, postdisco arangement of the Marseillaise -


	A lawn savant, who'll lop a tree-ee-uh,

	Nobody beats MarQuis de Sod!

There's so many things here that are completed in Against the Day.  
Remember the incident in the mayonnaise factory? Lodged in all the  
books as a single work is an alternate history of the left as told by  
Borges.

	How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?" she inquired.

	He shrugged. "Maybe up to the part that goes 'Aux armes,
	citoyens'—"!
	AtD 544

The check's in the Mayo.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_525-556

	"Does Pynchon care if anyone reads it? Who does he want to
	read it? Why all the exhaustive obfuscation - just for the point of
	it, an inside joke shared by none, a tree laughing in an empty
	forest?"

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/againstTheDay.htm

Or is AtD the obsessive-compulsive footnote to Vineland?

The part that gets me is where these arrows point: "For DeMille"  
points to William Pynchon and fur-trading in pre-colonial Springfield,  
Massachusetts. And that points to heresy.  "Marseillaise" (and note  
that's a pun in French) points to "real revolution" but not the one  
Hector's talkin' about.



On Dec 20, 2008, at 7:08 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> but anyway, back on page 32,
>> "Check's in the mayo" indicating that at least he hasn't lost his
>> sense of humor.
>
> p. 32 "Check's in the mayo"  A brilliant throw-away Feghoot. In the
> fifties, a science fiction writer
> named Grendel Briarton wrote a series of short, funny pieces for
> Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine titled, "Through Time and Space
> With Ferdinand Feghoot." They all worked the same way: establishing a
> silly and complicated story line for the sole purpose of setting up a
> painfully outrageous pun. Pynchon is addicted to the form; one of the
> best Feghoots ever written is the "Forty million Frenchmen" gag ("for
> DeMille young Frenchmen ...") on page 559 of Gravity's
> Rainbow.