rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:13 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> I prefer long not so sweet and I'm not even sure what relavent means
> or how to spell it but if it's possible I'll tax it to my sins against
> grammar and pass the lumpy gravy.

Relevant. Pertaining to the plot and the style and tone, time and  
place of any given novelistic enterprise, journalistically noting all  
the low-level details, like "Pink's" and KRLA. "Why spring of 1970 in  
Manhattan Beach?" --- why this surf, why this sky? ---, why all the  
funny movie outfits, why all the Raymond Chandler references, why all  
this weed? why "Slothrop", or all these low-level details of the  
design of "The Bomb," or explicit, knowing references to the Tarot,  
usually described with some direct pointer either parodied or absent,  
maintaining some level of plausible deniability, exaggerate if  
possible, always more plausible to say it's just fiction . . .

	Two of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two
	station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and
	passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to
	put this part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies. That's why
	you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is
	really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal,
	is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why
	should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a
	splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the
	touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it's mortal sin they're
	carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be
	taken in by all the cells. Your officially defined "mortal sin," that
	is. A sin against you. A section of your penal code, that's all.
	[The true sin was yours: to interdict that union. To draw that line.
	To keep us worse than enemies, who are after all caught in the
	same fields of shit-to keep us strangers.

	We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends,
	we cherished.] *

"Well, it's just fiction, man"—always fulfilling our pre-expectations  
of Stoner Noir—a subject best rendered in "Farewell My Lovely", which  
if you think about it, ties into the whole Shasta story quite nicely.  
Meanwhile, in the background, our future is being designed. And it  
looks like Something bigger than the CIA is doing the designing !   
[organ stab] . . .

	The great prince issues commands,
	Founds states, vests families with fiefs.
	Inferior people should not be employed.

*Previously, on page 755 of the Penguin edition,

	"There never was a Dr. Jamf," opines world-renowned analyst
	Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry—"Jamf was only a fiction, to help him
	explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for
	those rockets each time exploding in the sky ... to help him deny
	what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in
	sexual love, with his, and his race's, death.

	"These early Americans, in their way, were a fascinating
	combination of crude poet and psychic cripple .... "

	"We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop," a
	spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recendy in an
	interview with the Wall Street Journal.

	INTERVIEWER: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-
	point.

	SPOKESMAN: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was
	divided. It was one of our fatal weaknesses. [I'm sure you want
	to hear about fatal weaknesses.] Some called him a "pretext."
	Others felt that he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm.
	The Microcosmists, as you must know from the standard
	histories, leaped off to an early start. We—it was a very odd form
	of heretic-chasing, really. . .

After William Pynchon of Springfield Massachusetts became an official  
literary heretic . . .

. . . one might say that it took a good long time for William to haul  
his ass back to Wraysbury on the Thames, near Windsor, spending the  
last ten years of his life living off an ample fortune, indulging in  
theological writing, and outwardly appearing to be in entire  
conformity with the Church of England. But that's enough heretic  
chasing for one day. I'd say family history is the real motivator for  
Pynchon's constant—rather magical realist—portrayal of the occult.

	 ". . .it was a very odd form
	of heretic-chasing, really. . ."