Atd (37) p. 1041. Erie Line, 'home', Lincolnwood, fascism and a pink tab

[Mark Kohut]

Gould and Pierce V. and all the old railroad money in AtD....
VERY NICE......................

everything connects. 


--- On Sun, 7/20/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Atd (37) p. 1041. Erie Line, 'home', Lincolnwood, fascism and a pink tab
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, July 20, 2008, 2:34 PM
> Page 1041 got a pink tab. . . .
> 
>           He knew the other lawfolk of his day, those who
> worked both 
>           sides till they forgot which they were on,
> who'd came to rank, 
>           some of them,among the baddest of the bad, now,
> their gray 
>           mustaches long shaved away, at peace on this
> western shore, 
>           were getting rich off of real-estate deals only
> slightly more legit 
>           than the the train robberies they used to depend
> on for revenue. . . .
>           p. 1041
> 
>           She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose
> door had just 
>           been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two
> hundred birds 
>           down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library
> slope at Cornell 
>           University that nobody out on it had seen because
> the slope faces 
>           west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth
> movement of the Bartok 
>           Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay
> Gould that Pierce 
>           kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it
> she'd always had the 
>           hovering fear it would someday topple on them.
> Was that how he'd 
>           died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the
> only ikon in the 
>           house? That only made her laugh, out loud and
> helpless: You're so 
>           sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room,
> which knew. . . .
>           CoL 49, first page
> 
> Jay Gould ran the Erie Line, cited at the top of the page.
> Pynchon's technique 
> frequently is based on associative relation---not logical
> or sequential but more 
> like a parallel port, interleaving information and not
> always setting it 
> down straight on the page. 
> 
> There is a conscious resonance with the Crying of Lot 49
> here, a whiff of the 
> eau de Robber Baron hybridized with the stank of train
> robbers, the two 
> classes regarded as moral equals save for vast differences
> in the scale
> of their respective enterprises.
> 
> I'm sure that out author is aware of his family
> history--one doesn't spend that 
> much time checking out old newspapers* without allowing the
> eyes to catch 
> whenever one finds their none-to-common family name in the
> New York Times 
> or the Times of London. And OBA's moral ambiguity as
> regards these distant 
> ancestors is all over Against the Day, the author showing
> us time and again 
> how projects funded by the George M./Pynchon & Co.
> juggernaut both 
> enhanced and damaged the world, Electric Lights, Radio and
> Rail Lines 
> getting extra attention.
> 
> *"Indeed, when annotating Gravity's Rainbow, one
> of my greatest surprises 
> came with the discovery that details of story reveal a
> narrative 
> chronometrics that can be concisely plotted. I mean detail
> of the most 
> unobtrusive sort: images of the moon, remarks about
> weather, movies 
> playing at London theaters, a song playing over the radio,
> references to 
> BBC programs and newspaper headlines and saints' days.
> Many of 
> these were available to Pynchon through one of his main
> sources, the 
> Times of London. . . ." 
> Steven C. Weisenburger: "A Gravity's Rainbow
> Companion, page 9.