Help, please

[Natália Maranca]

Wow. Thanks everyone, there was a wonderfully massive response I didn't
expect. I'm enlightened, really.

Bekah asked:


> Could the furrow possibly be the underpass of the highway?  Are they kind
> of like furrows in the city's topography?  - -(I know that's a stretch
> considering the context of the whole few paragraphs but it occurred to me as
> a rather poetic idea.


That was my first interpretation of it, actually.

David Payne said:

That sentence is so screwy that I cannot determine the object of each phrase
> ... does this seem close to correct?
>
> * "Cammed each night out of that safe furrow" -- i.e., the old man is
> cammed out (pushed out by his own energies which are redirected vertically)
> of that safe furrow (i.e., the straight & narrow path of life) each night?
>
> * as opposed to (camming requires oppositive forces): "the bulk of this
> city's waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing" -- i.e., most of
> the people in the city wake up each morning to dutifully plow along the
> straight and narrow life ("the bulk" have sufficient mass to overcome the
> counter pressure of the old man, so he is cammed out of the safe furrow)
>
> * and back to the old man: "what rich soils had he turned, what concentric
> planets uncovered?" -- i.e., "she" (Oedipa) is wondering what the old man
> turned up during his evening plowing, which was conducted along a different
> furrow than the safe furrow that the bulk of the city woke to do? (i.e.,
> what poetic truths have been unearthed by this old man's shadowy,
> counter-culture living)
>
> The old man is against the day, so to speak, but one against the bulk is
> beaten down?


I was thinking (sort of like Glenn pointed out) that it was "the bulk of
this city's waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing" that was
"cammed each night out of that safe furrow", but this makes the second part
of the sentence kind of misplaced ("what rich soils had he turned, what
concentric planets uncovered?"). So that, ok, now I prefer your explanation.

Robin said:

20 responses to "Help, please."
> Maybe we want to sneak in a group read of CoL49
> before TRP's newest goes out next August?


Depends on how much time we will spend on Vineland or V., if we read one of
them. I'm up for anything.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20081111/67bcc1eb/attachment-0001.html>