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

[Joseph Tracy]

I don't know if I am following your argument but  you are saying some  
things that I agree with and getting me interested in having another  
go at Melville.
On Dec 6, 2009, at 1:30 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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
  I don't follow that at all. How is he converting souls to Bigfoot's  
reality while refusing to be recruited as you say below?
> . But who is
> gonna believe Larry? Not me. To believe him is to make him reliable.

> Larry wants to believe in the touch.
This is interesting to me but  don't know where you are drawing this  
inference from, ; could you give a bit more to go on? He wants to get  
close to the evidence, to check it out personally. Is that what you  
mean?
> 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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