IVing to the last drop: 'we've got this President now..."

[alice wellintown]

What truth? That Nixon is the President? That Nixon is spending tons
of money at home and in South East Asia? That the money is, as the
cook in Moby-Dick describes it, feeding a shark- eat- shark world?
That one of the victims is the American GI, addicted to Heroine
produced and supplied with Nixon money, now (1970) spilled from a
hemorrhaging nation and flowing like blood from a white whale tethered
to the side of a doomed ship of state (the R.M.N.  Pequod), leaking
its joint-stock company oil? Larry learned this from Bigfoot? Better
to trust the bad guy cause he's closer to the source of evil? Larry is
kicked by Bigfoot from his cycle of lock-up by a Zen master who tries
to convert him, make him his disciple? Larry's brain skips from TV
land (Adam 12 and Mod Squad to Disney)  to some temptation of Hippie
Christ by the Dirty Detective Devil. Now, whan Larry imagines he has
seen the Light, he's converting souls to Bigfoot's Reality. But who is
gonna believe Larry? Not me. To believe him is to make him reliable.
Larry wants to believe in the touch. Touching on this or that topic is
showing concern or consideration. To consider, to touch on, to be
concerned with Bigfoot the person, married to a person, a father of
children, perhaps. Larry fears he's been kicked and may be murdered.
HIs touch, his concern, can disarm a corrupt killer, maybe even the
devil. But Bigfoot has no plans to kill Larry. He wants to recruit
him, to Turn him. But Larry isn't desperate enough. When he was turned
to skip tracing by the repo men, he was desperate, young, a poor
working class community college kid. He is, as Dylan sez, "younger
than that now."


Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish; this article provides excellent ideas fro
teaching Moby-Dick; how to get people into it and how to pose
questions for readers. Here, the author discusses Fleese, Stub, and
the Sermon to the Sharks.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200501/ai_n9520890/pg_7/


On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Alcie writes:
>> Thanks. Larry, here, is parroting
>> what Bigfoot said earlier when he
>> was trying to recruit Larry. pp. 32-33.
>
> I have reread pages 32-33 and what doc sez is NOT parroting. If there is an attitudinal echoing, I think it makes the case that Larry comes to see
> this "truth".
>
>  This undermines the argument that Larry is a mouthpiece for
>> Pynchon, a
>> reliable narrator (you can call him effaced but that term
>> us fairly
>> useless if you apply it as you have to every work P has
>> written).
>
> An effaced narrator, if that is the mode of narration is there or it is not, no matter how many of P's novels I have said it of. All of them could be. James gave us the technique fully articulated and almost all of his narrators are, aren't they?
>
> Anyway, I do not believe I have said it of M & D and given the someone behind the Chums explicitly telling their tales in AtD, the 'effaced narrator' is even trickier if it is there....I wasn't watching when I read it or listened to it but as I write this I can certainly "hear" that narrator in the latter section when the Chums go entrepreneurial. And, on reflection, with some of Lew Basnight's epiphanies.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Larry. Bigfoot is not in this chapter.
>> >
>> > p. 294 line 26ff. "Yeah, and what about when patriots
>> and tyrants turn out to be the same people?" said Doc, "like
>> we've got this President now...."
>> >
>> > --- On Sun, 12/6/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> >> Subject: Re: IVing to the last drop: 'we've got
>> this President now..."
>> >> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> >> Date: Sunday, December 6, 2009, 9:37 AM
>> >> Mark Kohut  wrote:
>> >> > Nixon. P's hatred of him--see GR--is put
>> right here
>> >> again, semi-autobigraphically?   Which, again,
>> means to me
>> >> that most of
>> >> > Doc's obs and remarks are 'reliable' in the
>> narrator
>> >> sense
>> >> > AND some kind of echo of an attitude of his
>> >> creator's?
>> >> >
>> >> > Or, do you believe, as I just read today by
>> >> draughtsman-artist Ad Reinhart:
>> >> > Art is art and everything else is everything
>> else?
>> >>
>> >> Is this quote from Larry or Bigfoot?
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
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