V. help and disscusion

[Dave Monroe]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Jordan
Hunnicutt<antipusrises at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm new to Pynchon as well as the list.  Right now I'm reading V. and loving
> it.  I'm enamored by the black comedy that's throughout the book.  I would
> say that I am doing pretty good so far at navigating the dense prose (I
> equate some chapters as the literary equivalent of being waterboarded) but
> this passage has me beat.  In my edition it starts on pg. 168 and goes
> though 169.  It's in chapter 7, part 6 where Godolphin is running from the
> police and starts with "He turned right and headed toward the Duomo..."
> That entire paragraph is really intense and I'm having a very hard time
> following the characters line of thought as to what exactly is going on.
>
> Is there anyone that would care to elaborate or explain this.  Any tips
> would be greatly apreciated.

Wilkommen!  Embarrassingly, I don't have the text @ hand, but thanks
to the magic of the Internet, here's what's immediately available ...

   "He turned right and headed toward the Duomo. Tourists sauntered
by, cabs clattered in the street. He felt isolated from a human
community--even a common humanity--which he had regarded until
recently as little more than a cant concept which liberals were apt to
use in making speeches.
   "He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched
dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment. He
wondered at this phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to
Thomas Cook & Son in ever-increasing flocks every year to let
themselves in for the Campagna’s fevers, the Levant’s squalor, the
septic foods of Greece? To return to Ludgate Circus at the desolate
end of every season having caressed the skin of each alien place, a
peregrine or Don Juan of cities but no more able to talk of any
mistress’s heart than to cease keeping that interminable Catalogue,
that non picciol’ libro.
   "Did he not owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell them
about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that
below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard
dead-point of truth and that in all cases, it is the same kind of
truth, can be phrased in identical words?"

http://www.art-damage.com/nostyle/archives/000121.html

The person who kindly even if albeit unknowingly posted that for us
glosses this thus:"This bit takes place around 1905--a retired,
well-traveled British agent is suddenly outcast and hunted, and tries
to find a way to get out of Florence and disappear in the Italian
countryside."

I couldn't get either Google Books or amazon.com to cough up anything
further there ...

http://books.google.com/books?id=jqS2pmUIfOAC

http://www.amazon.com/V-Perennial-Classics-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/0060930217

"Page Not Available.  Some pages are not included in this book sample"

... so I hope that's enough to go on for anyone casually listening in.
Otherwise ....

http://fortunaty.net/text/textz/textz/pynchon_thomas_v.txt

I'm catching up after a week or so of institutionalization, so I'll
have to come back to this for my own two cents worth, but these might
help at least with sorting a few things out, even if only the factual
and/or otherwise mundane, at least ...

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/alpha/a.html
http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=A
http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_7

I'm not finding anything  immediately applicable, at least, in the
List archives ...

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

... but might I suggest, at least in part, that what we have here is
"The Old Baedeker Trick Again" ...

http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Baedeker
http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/extra/sources.html
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72939
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=64888
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72946
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0801&msg=123940

Oh, hey, speaking of Eric Bulson ...

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0110&msg=61694

And then there's Vheissu ...

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/extra/vheissu.html
http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/extra/eti.html#vheissu
http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Vheissu

Hope something there is at least of some help, somehow ...