belated remarks on p. 751 ff

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          MK: anyone, anyone?

Hermione Granger and Lisa Simpson's hands immediately shoot to the 
roof of the schoolroom, find each other and then engage in foul-mouthed 
fisticuffs whilst rolling about on the tiles.

          MK: Kit with no "hand camera"

http://capefeare.com/mad76.jpg

          MK: .......people wanting him to have been a tourist 
          ala V.'s savaging of same.....more P's anti-photography 
          theme...

. . . .or possibly his anti-tourist theme. . . . 
Another possible direction, "the unexpressed term, as ever, remains 
Shambhala", a refuge, a haven a place where you go to get away 
from the quoditian affairs of property and title, to a realm where all 
are reaching for heaven. Dirtying the place up with "tourists" and the 
infrastructure of tourism [including the co-comittant "underground" 
industries that help feed the coffers of such enterprises] is a process
that our beloved author takes particular pleasure in demonstrating. 
This colonization of the soul is one of TRP's big themes, Gravity's 
Rainbow anyone?
 
          MK: I like the phrase lower on the page "like a parable" 
          and what that parable is...........telling for TRPs 
          worldview, I suggest.

With open, unaltered "Natural Land" on one side and regimented, 
gridded farmland on the other?

 
          MK: p. 752.....railroads "of the essence" of the 1905 revolution
          .....not putting that revolution in a positive light by Pynchon.....

. . . .I love the sound of breaking glass. . . .
Pynchco was big on Railways, power grids  and lightbulbs named 
after Babylonian dieties.

          MK: "and those 'groups of riders" in the distance???.......

. . . .a single, black, feather appears behind a tall cactus. A "real" indian 
would never expose himself that way, his soul lost forever wandering in 
the night. . . .

          MK: More than one appearance now in AtD, deeply thematic 
          (how?) and go back in my mind all the way to the story 
          of the Tristero....

I see lots of "The Crying of Lot 49" in Against the Day. Think about how the 
author spends so much time in Trieste and has such an importance given 
over to postal messages. Right on page 750, Yashmeen tells of Rinpunga 
and Kit and letters sent via alternate routes, some so alternate as to be 
utterly implausible. Look at our day [this day] against the heyday of Pynchco, 
wondering about his family's [and his own] karma as set against the 
depredations of the Gilded Age. How many of the characters in AtD are
residents of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century who wandered into 
the late nineteenth/early twentieth century?

Also would like to note how Yashmeen sees "the compassionate" as a group
of dedicated young people, seemingly more like anarchists. I can't help but 
think of the "Panic" movement---Fernando Arrabal was a co-founder of this 
politically charged co-joining of witchcraft and anarchy. Of course, 
witchcraft's 
pretty anarchaic anyway. . .