Archives & Wikis?

[alice wellintown]

 AtD208 last paragraph, last sentnece: "Nothing that would belong to
the observable world."

This is a typical paragraph in this work. What does it mean? The last
sentence about "Nothing" reminds me of a poem by Wallace Stevens:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is a wonderful and difficult poem. I like to read it with that
Snowman scene in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (my favorite
novel), when there is fire and ice (another poem that fits) and the
kids make a black snowman from the earth and cover it with the snow
and then cross dress it up into a "perfect [her]maphordite.  Do I
digress? Do I dare? Yeah, here is an NPR comment on the poem.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5031535


On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Ian Livingston<igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank God the dogs can talk and thank God the author has a magic
> lantern to cast his images upon a screen even if the images never say
> exactly what he means.
>
> I think, Alice, you have loosed a bull's eye here.  Is this a
> definition of art?  Were OBA writing non-fiction it would be
> unacceptable that he lead us to where reason falters and words tremble
> and humbly bend as if to the shadows, wherein reside all the demons
> and gods.  Only the artist can take us to that precipice on the edge
> of "nowhere."
>
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:54 PM, alice
> wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I search the Pynchon-l archives and the Wiki / Against the Day I'm
>> very impressed with the discussion and the reseach.
>> Thank you for all your hard work.
>> I've noticed that there is excellent research and commantary in the
>> P-L archives that is not on the Wiki.
>> Is there a reason for this?
>>
>> For example,  a poem by Robert W. Service, "The Shooting of Dan
>> McGrew" is discussed in the P-L archives but is not included on the
>> Wiki.
>>
>> To what Kieth sz, Mark K, and Mikebaily wrote, I  would add, Service
>> was a Bank clerk. AtD constantly challanges us to re-read ironies.
>> How can one read a violent pornographic scene with unemotional
>> detachment? How can one avoid the trap of a grim and humorous voice?
>> A cool voice describing a hot scene? A heated voices describing
>> nothing to heated about? A spriritual and ritualistic voice that sails
>> and sails and lifts and lifts us nowhere. Pynchon does this
>> constantly. He plays with the conventional scenes and chapter starts
>> and endings. It reads like the end of a Dickens chapter except it's
>> not. This ironic voice speaks with praise while it blames.
>>
>> You took a fine time to leave me ...Traverse (pick one).
>>
>> Of course, what is meant is that "it is [now, after the above ironic
>> statement] impossible to say just what I mean" (Prufrock Hamlet said
>> that).
>>
>> Thank God the dogs can talk and thank God the author has a magic
>> lantern to cast his images upon a screen even if the images never say
>> exactly what he means.
>>
>> Thank God he tells us that much and of this we can be certain: it is
>> impossible to say just wehat he means.
>>
>