C of L49 host finishes with a glass of dandelion wine on Sunday morning

[Mark Kohut]

Yur Welcome.............

Yea, it does seem so: John Zuck classified it as "spiritual fiction," paying particular attention to the religious theme of holding on to ephemeral beauty (i.e. the short-lived summer).[3]



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2009 11:17:21 AM
Subject: Re: C of L49 host finishes with a glass of dandelion wine on Sunday morning

Thanks for an intense, thought-provoking hosting, Mark.

I've never read DW by Bradbury, but it certainly seems like a reference.


>From wikipedia, Dandelion Wine:

"Dandelions are a potent symbol of summer in the novel. While dandelions are only common growths in backyards and viewed by some as weeds, the Spaulding's treat them as valuable possessions, converting them from simple plants into a medicine for winter. The making of dandelion wine thus reflects the pattern of Douglas' summer; events and things that would be seen as mundane by grown-ups gain magic and appreciation through his unbound imagination and thirst for adventure."

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jun 14, 2009 9:59 AM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: C of L49 host finishes with a glass of dandelion wine on Sunday morning
>
>
>What a beautiful ending to Chapter 4: 
>"No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetary in some way did still exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead do persist, even in a bottle of wine."
>
>What a sense of loss. What....nostalgia, is it?, for a time when the land was not made for cars? Where (some kind) of immortality persists---even just the ongoing memory of a community? 
>
>[Earlier remark]:Cohen, in an infinite regress, badly dressed, serves dandelion wine...grown in a cemetary. "Dandelion Wine" is, we know, a novel by Ray Bradbury about childhood innocence....one in which the protagonist lives in his third floor cupola which he calls the 'stonethrower's tower"....it is a magical world....the hero can exhale and make the stars disappear (in his fantasies)....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandelion_Wine
>
>I think the intense Catholic TRP was, supposedly attending Mass regularly into-through?---college would lead one to associate dandelion wine from the dead with the Eucharist at one level? Again, with the anthropological/comp religious
>fact that almost all cultures' religions honor their dead, their very bones. 
>
>And, like Shakespeare, like Paul Newman, like Ray Bradbury, are TRPs memories of growing up in Nature, in what I will presume from his age, were the open natural spaces, land and trees and water nearby of Long Island an ideal that
>he knows is lost now. Lost to most. Lost to Tower Americans?.
>
>That's AAALLL Folks...Next UP!
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