uskoks, who went down (heh-heh) in history as pirates.../// ATDTDA p 698-699.........

[Michael Bailey]

On 1/22/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> deliverance into light"....
> Cf. T. Monk, of course....and History is the history of light..(paraphrase)
>

I'm sure that is part of the reference-gestalt here.  Just trying
to pin down the specifics of the action within the passage.

Maybe the label neo-Uskok arose because of a
piracy/smuggling phenomenon that
Theign's organization was monitoring, and named,
as would good university men, aware of historical antecedents
in the area.

The context of the description is a dicotyledonous branching
from the "topic kernel" ("Cyprian monitored the docks"): on one hand,
a small shoot, barely mentioning the trips to the torpedo plant; on the
other hand, a larger leafier branch, lingering on the dramatic neo-uskoks,
romantic pirates, flaring candles, stern discipline,
and their very name (heh-heh, he said "Uskok")...
more overtones of homoerotic adventures for Cyprian, seems to me.
But again that verges into a non-realistic reading...

not that there's anything wrong with that

moving on...

698 - "mindless trolling" (for mindless pleasures?)

"what do you do?"
"As little as possible, one hopes."

Flaneur to the core.

"...what is your work?"
"Being agreeable.  And yours?"

What crosses my mind is that, though his family can
afford to support him (as a "remittance man"), apparently
he's been profiting from his proclivities, selling his wares;
or is he?

That question, and wondering what transpired between
seeing Yashmeen off at Liverpool Street Station (p503) and Vienna,
are the 2 pesky questions assailing me on page 698-699.

Eg: p699, "It had not occurred to Cyprian that this city
might, by now, have anything more to reveal to him beyond the promise
of unreflective obedience, day into night, to the leash-pulls of desire."
-- you could read that as if he's a moneyed exile, and it's _his_
desire that's pulling the leashes while the city performs...
or if he's a talented purveyor of love for sale, then it's the
(metonymous) _city's_ desire that moves it as he pulls the
leashes with his whatever...high-stepping strut, fluttering lashes...

-- but of course, it does have more to reveal than that!
(makes me think back to Freudian infancy breast-denial
scenes, in a way, perhaps)

698 - "The exquisite reflex of rectal fear passing through him then
could have been simple cringing before a threat, or a
betrayal of desir he was trying, but failing, to control."
It's probably sufficient to note that Cyprian relishes
rectal fear,  (the rectal nature of which
is noted in references to non-homosexual character Kit
as well), as being "exquisite"
and somehow he links it up with desire.  Which linkage's
fairly elaborately laid out in these pages...
as we have seen & shall see!

698 - "knout-fancier"
"The dreaded instrument became synonymous in Western European
languages with what was seen as the tyrannical cruelty of the
autocratic government of Russia, much as the sjambok brought to mind
the Apartheid government of South Africa or lynching was associated
with the period of Jim Crow laws in America."
(Wikipedia)

699 - "to find Vienna exhibiting behavior even a little more complex...
predictably sent his boredom coefficients swooning off the scale,
and any number of alarm-devices into alluring cry."

a) "boredom coefficients" - coefficient being a constant multiplier of
a quantity in an equation.  So as they "swoon" and fall toward the
ground (ie, zero) they reduce the quantity of boredom, nicht wahr?
(neuropathically this would be similar to MAO inhibitors)

b) "alarm-devices into alluring cry" - alluring, that is,
to Cyprian, drawn to rough trade?

699 - "For a moment a wing of desolate absence swept down
across the garden tables here at Eisvogel's, eclipsing any
describable future.  From somewhere in the direction of the
Giant-Wheel came the infernal lilt of yet another twittering waltz."

-- some kind of symmetry to the Ferris Wheel Yashmeen
rode in England?  "wing of absence" - an angelic transit?
A Rilkean angel? Yashmeen's absence?
Objective correlative, one of those moments when a cloud
goes across the sun?
Cyprian's heart and soul first feeling what his rectum
detected earlier?

"...there are not only landmarks, but also anti-landmarks - for every
beacon, an episode of intentional blindness." (Professor Svegli, p248)