VL-IV p258 Mexico, little wordplay?

[Michael Bailey]

Bekah wrote:
> The phrase  "a llover" means "to rain"  in Spanish.   In the book, the owner
> is pointing to the sky and indicating that it looks like it's going "to
> rain"  and idiomatically short for "it's going to rain."
>

well, true.  I just meant, this is sort of where's it is all over for
Frenesi and DL and what they represent.  Even though DL presents
herself right during Frenesi's dream of the Gentle Flood, right as she
is hearing the "...wonderful song, the kind you heard stoned over at
some stranger's place one night and never found again, telling of the
divers, who would come, not now but soon, and descend into the Flood
and bring back up for us 'whatever has been taken,' the voice
promised, 'whatever has been lost....", (256) even though she could
have taken DL as one of the divers and fallen into some kind of
retrieval mode...

I tend to think of the book as a comedy, but there are some earnestly
touching moments in it.
 This is one of them.
If you think back to successful revolutions or social movements, like
Castro in Cuba, or St Paul in prison, the leader returns to the fray
after imprisonment.
that's not what happens here.

a two-stage distancing of Frenesi from what she was, a sea change:

a) "...it was mercy she'd have to plead for, reduced to playing
helpless, blaming external drug molecules for each of her failures,
complicities, and surrenders - as indeed national governments were
even then learning to do, with an already devastating impact on any
humans who happened to be in their way." 260
---- okay, it's easy to misread that one.  My tireless Pynchon-fiendly
eyes seized upon it and I said behold, I have caught Pynchon in a
fucked-up sentence.  The gist that I wanted to arrive at (something
like, nat'l gov'ts were learning to use psycho-drugs on their
subjects, which is of course true) is not supported by the syntax.
Nat'l gov'ts in fact, sez the syntax, are "playing helpless, blaming
external drug molecules for their failures" -- which is the opposite
of a concise way to say 'a war on drugs' - a euphemized confusion of
levels that muddies the issue; violent assertions of social control,
repression, being justified by something that can be spun as
assistance, and described by something patently ridiculous (war on
drugs indeed)

But lo, that actually makes a sense of its own...though I'd argue for
my original intuitive gist being a not unintentional byplay (like all
over/a llover) because her description of the "Thorazine curtain" is
where he goes next...

2) but the real sea change is actually laid down earlier, in keeping
with the multidirectional flow of time in the chapter: page 259 - "So
what difference did we make?  Who'd we save?" echoing Hector's
question to Zoyd way back in the bowling alley.
Not just that she stopped believing, but also has begun referring to
them in the past tense, like she's got something else going on now.
As she does...


- "B groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff