C of L49: 91 times 91

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 9, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> as even Robin didn't hop on the gematria bandwagon

Did a while ago,

http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=7_x_7

. . . but not this moment in this go-round. Soon enough we'll take a  
stroll into San Francisco late at night and see what sort of  
"underground" emerges. It's 'odd', but  due to the directions this  
list has pointed me, many of my ideas concerning CoL49 altered from  
what they once were. At the very least, the emphasis shifted. What I  
now see are those things Oedipa didn't see until that night-ride on  
that bus—just how far the Triestero, that zeitgeist of sadness, has  
wormed its way into "The American Way of Life", how it became became  
the ground or backdrop to all those revelations withheld in CoL49:

	She walked down a stretch of railroad track next the highway.
	Spurs ran off here and there into factory property. Pierce may
	have owned these factories too. But did it matter now if he'd
	owned all of San Narciso? San Narciso was a name; an
	incident among our climatic records of dreams and what
	dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's
	squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more
	continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and
	need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true
	continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet
	how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to
	making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never
	suspecting that the legacy was America.
	CoL49, PC 147

Thanks to Dave Monroe's directions, I've picked up the valuable  
collection "New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49, Patrick O'Donnell ed.:

	The Tristero underground has so far been implied to be a
	motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian drop-outs, an
	archipelago of "isolatoes" having "withdrawn" from the
	Republic, a lunatic fringe in tatters. But suddenly, in this last
	rhetorical leap, the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
	grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of American
	history. One could agree (and this might be what Poirier finds
	questionable) that Pynchon, through his rhetoric, is trying to
	achieve in fiction what, he regrets, failed to happen in
	contemporaneous political life: the conjunction between "the
	Movement" (as represented by Students for a Democratic
	Society) and the "people." By the end of the novel the Tristero,
	shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a ghostly underground
	(perhaps entirely phantasmatic) but a reaL "embattled"
	underground about to come out of the shadows.  No longer
	hovering on the edge as a cryptic plot, the "Other" that the
	Tristero has thus far represented is almost revealed as a
	version of "the other America" that Michael Harrington
	described in a major book of the sixties whose "ghost" is very
	much felt in The Crying of Lot 49. This America is "the America
	of poverty," "hidden today in a way it never was before,"
	"dispossessed," "living on the fringes, the margin," as "internal
	exiles."
	Pierre-Yves Petillon: "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the  
Wilderness"