The IV rush: Blog teaser....

[Robert Mahnke]

This is evocative of a long sentence in Vineland, maybe on pp 266-67,
that begins "So the bad Ninjamobile" and ends the chapter that it's
in.  It's one of my favorite sentences.  I don't have a copy handy,
but this (from the interwebs) looks like it:

"So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among
Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway
system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up,
screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several
office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring
boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find
Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully
and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and
pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of
TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out,
bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath
the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface
streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant
fireworks, the spilled, the broken world."


On 7/20/09, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "Doc took the freeway out. The
> > eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys,
> > primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn
> > pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists
> > to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen
> > dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of
> > country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along
> > together down into these great horizonless fields of
> > housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s
> > radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky
> > like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun
> > smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light
> > you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic
> > could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had
> > really been going on up north."
> >
>
> Nothing confusing about this excerpt. Nothing, I say.
>
> I learned a new intransitive verb: LASE: INTRANSITIVE VERB: To function as a laser; emit coherent radiation by the action of a laser.
> Who else would use it so perfectly?
>
> Don't like the list? meaninglessly excessive? (As was said of some of Henry James' fiction: he sometimes chews a lot more than he bites off...)...First, all of a piece, not the forced yoking of the unrelated. Second, it is an intro slice of the society and times, in shorthand, so to speak. Third, it is comically, typically Pynchonian........
>
> "jittering paisleys"....nice word here, jittering....the image is MOVING, because the scene is.....
>
> "sun smogged into only a smear of probability".......only TRP and some
> who have been influenced by him, couldda written this line..........and it is a metaphoric image that works---and resonates with TRPs oeuvre........
>
> And, I've already partially glossed TRPs mind in this sentence as tropes and theme bits.....
>
> a---And there's "wheeling" again, which is sometimes just wheels even in TRP but there are: the great casino wheel in AtD, and the ferris wheels and the mandala motif and, of course, all resonating with the wheel of fate throughout..............
>
> Carry on.
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