The phrase

[Mark Kohut]

Laura,
 
I'm going to offer my quibble (again) for you and others to flame me for, since that is SO missed in these later times, it seems. 
Smile and get ready.
 
AtD does contain a lifetime of Pynchon's obs, opinions, ideas, etc.............BUT my quibble: they are not leftover.
 
I will repeat that I think TRP has been writing this book, literally not just conceptually,since he finished GR, at least. 
Too dense and long for "only"nine years, I suggest and some earlier books--M & D, for example--seem to allude forward, so to speak.  
 
I think there is evidence he was writing M & D and AtD simultaneously.......and somewhere in there came the notion
(and achievement) of "Vineland".....(although he may have been writing that simultaneously as well but wanted it out first---
as close to 1984 as possible, as maybe initially half-planned but not finished to his satisfaction until later 80s.
 
Circumstantial evidence from other than the books themselves come from some industry "insiders'---such as John Leonard
in his "Vineland" review---to whom it is a common belief, he wrote, that TRP had been working on a BIG BOOK for a long while. 
(TRP, or his agent-wife, did seem to appluy for grants and/or reveal something about work-in-progress to the MacArthur
Foundation, for example.)
 
When TRP was "on" the John Larraquette Show in the mid-90s, the work he was engaged on was called "Pandemonium of 
the Sun" then. (not a bad working title for AtD, yes?).....but I know this could have been a very ironic joke in more ways than one. 
 
There is that famous letter to his first agent/editor about his "idea" for three books that would.....................be unbelievable if he could do them. (paraphrase).
 
And it took almost 17 years from GR to the short "Vineland". Maybe 3 times longer than it took to write GR after Lot49 (if writing that one did not begin until after Lot 49 was published..,,longer than it took for V., Lot 49 and GR and he had a job for some of that writing.  
He could have had writer's block, or been reading and reading and travelling.....but that does not seem like him to me, does it to you?

Quibbles....Made by Kelbers, not Keeblers.
 (I am paying homage to your fine quibbling, not making fun. My quibbling shows that, I hope.)
 
"Yibble, Yibble, he said."---V.
Mark


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 1:08:24 PM
Subject: RE: The phrase

These various quotes from M&D underscore that (as being argues in the "Thomas Pynchon" thread) ATD is more than just the final entry in the V-GR-ATD trilogy, but, if anything, the final book of Pynchon's sexogy (sexilogy?).  On the other hand (and I'm very willing to believe this), ATD is merely the catch-all for everything that TRP, in his sixties and feeling very mortal, somehow couldn't find a place for in the earlier five books.  

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>


>OK -- my turn for a minor quibble: I do not have the book with me, but as I recall, the party is stuck in a sort of limbo (snow-bound?), teetering on the edge of wilderness and civilization, where they are partying it up like there's no tomorrow, knowing that they have to move forward to a day of reckoning in "the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia" (p. 687). I see the "Realm of the Penny-foolish and Pound-idiotick" as the limbo in which they stand. Reason would have them head east from the limbo and return to Philadelphia -- but "contrary to Reason" is the possibility that they contemplate of moving west, heading out of the limbo-land of the “Realm of the Penny-foolish” to return back into the wilderness. 
>
>Note that the phrase "against the Day" (p. 683) is followed by "they will belong again to the East, to Chesapeake,- to Lords for whom Interests less subjunctive must ever enjoy Priority." Equating eastern commerce with a lack of the subjunctive suggests that the wilderness is the embodiment of the subjunctive (if such a thing were possible) -- ideas, I think, borrowed as much from Turner's "Frontier Theory" as they are from religion. (I'm probably wrong here. I have not read Turner's thesis; I have only read about it -- and a bit of knowledge is....)
>
>For me, this opposition of the subjunctive and "the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia” ties back to the use of "against the Day" on p. 125, which is a more straightforward image: the fog against the daylight suggests oppositional forces and also the literal movement of the fog in the foreground against the daylight in the background (see, too, p. 683, "the Lanthorn against the low-lit Day"). The imagery on this page (p. 125) suggests an ephemeral ghostliness to the fog where anything might happen, against all reason--as opposed to the reasonable light of day.
>
>One last observation: the phrase "sober Day-Light of Philadelphia" (p. 687) rests in a beautiful Platonic-cave image: "Their task has shifted, from a direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain'd thro' twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the drafting table...." Lovely!
>
>
>
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