ATDTDA 671ff

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Good obs, MB.  I'd add:

p. 672-673:

"But then Lake sneaks off into town, lies about it, one of the boys throws me a look, some days that's all it needs is a look, and I'm screamin again, and they're that much further away, and I don't know how to call back any of it ..."

Spoken like the truly beleaguered parent of teenagers -- I identify completely.  ATD is written from the perspective of the mature TRP, TRP the father of a teenaged son, and it's no wonder that Profane and Slothrop are pretty much out of the picture.

Consider the bottom of p. 674, where Kit is agonizing about whether to avenge Webb's death:

"He had betrayed his father, that wouldn't change -- collaborated with his father's murderers, lived the rich-kid life they were paying him to live, and now that was over, he understood that whatever he might want to use for an excuse, it couldn't be his youth anymore, or what might be left of his compromised innocence."

The older TRP, living a comfortable family life on the Yuppie Upper West Side, feeling regret over his lost youthful revolutionary zeal?  Again, many of us oldsters can identify -- when young, the future looked like it was going to be one non-stop socialist-feminist-activist commune.  It certainly didn't end up that way.

Benny, Tyrone and Oedipa might have dreamed of some lefty-activist future, but young Kit, as the mouth-piece for aged TRP, sure can't.

Laura



-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jan 17, 2008 4:01 AM
>To: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: ATDTDA 671ff
>
>671 "Bozhe moi!" - Russian "my God"
>Bog = God, and softens to
>Bozhe in this usage (plural form?)
>
>672 "But I sold my anger too cheap, didn't understand how
>precious it was" --
>Never understood that - seems like
>an unpleasant emotion that one gets rid of asap,
>deep breathing or whatever.  Never something to base action on...
>
>673 poker solitaire - fitting that Webb in the afterlife
>would be reduced to playing solitaire
>having driven away his family (and is that the reunion from Vineland?)
>but as he says "sometimes you even need it" (loneliness)
>
>674 "meanest part of the US" - Yale?
>or more accurately, maybe, the moneyed set...
>a co-ordinate in a non-space - but nevertheless, a perceptible - dimension
>
>675   vector in 5-dimensions - thus echoing, or harmonizing with,
>the 5x5 matrix in the other dream.  Kit's analytical
>mind does a lot more interpreting here than Frank has with his dreams.
>But from my +1 dimensional vantage, what's plainest is he wants Webb
>to be responsible for the revenge... and he's feeling a little sorry
>for himself (o cursed spite)
>
>
>
>
>-- 
>"Smith Jones asked me if the halibut could fit inside the mailbox. I
>said I didn't think so" - Elizabeth Kolbert