IVIV (11) p. 163-164

[John Bailey]

Shasta really is hinting that Doc should go check the location where
the Golden Fang HQ has been built, isn't she? I think the apparent
melancholy edge to her note made me miss that.

The picture on the postcard is pretty obviously meant to suggest
Lemuria by this point, too. So she's writing from Lemuria or whatever
that represents in the novel.

I also think her opener, "I wish you could see these waves", is
enormously suggestive. Waves have a kind of mythical power in IV (and
are important in AtD too). I don't know much 'bout science but I think
waves are pretty right-now, yeah? Anyone want to help out there? Waves
as opposed to discrete particles, planes, euclidean geometry or
something?

Shasta's in a (fantasy) place where the waves are crazy. Maybe she's
just onto that new Google Wave thing.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Great Research Clement, Ya gotta love the sounds of polynesian languages,
> pronounceable or not.
>
> On Oct 21, 2009, at 8:55 PM, Clément Lévy wrote:
>>
>>
>> - Shasta's message sounds very melancholy but she gives Doc a clue,
>> seemingly unintentionally.
>
> My sense is that it was deliberate, If she is in captivity and being watched
> the message would have to seem innocuous. The trip to the Hole in the black
> clouded rainstorm doesn't seem very romantic, not really a tender memory.
> Had she been to the new Fang building while in captivity and recognized the
> location? I kinda feel like Pynchon is using the Ouija board as an opening
> to the duality of a certain kind of a greedy use of the spirit world. It is
> preceded by some nasty desperate-stoner imagery(  anybody ready for visine
> as a way to cleanse the doors of perception?) and seems to open the door to,
> well, hell,  or at least  a local franchise.  Some of Doc's bad karma seems
> to converge here, Japonica, the dart, cocaine(a drug Pynchon connects to
> self destruction) the paranoid Blatnoyd.
>>
>> - Ouija board. We've seen one already in Gravity's Rainbow, at Snoxall's
>> (GR, BB20thC p. 32).
>
> Can someone translate this to the Penguin page #
>>
>> - "his city dump memory": here again, the waste motif.
>>
>>
>>
>> - "the problem about Ouija boards—" indeed! this one gives an address
>> valid (in a way that must be discussed) only months later. Months? this the
>> time-line problem. We talked about this sooner on the list but I cannot find
>> when it was.
>
> NIce alternate take to the one I offered above with the directions from
> another time zone. Would definitely fit with other Pynchon time distortions,
> especially ATD.
>>
>> - TV cop shows: also a motif in VL, p. 83, and elsewhere too.
>>
>> Today has been a long day! I'll write later tomorrow (thursday)
>> Clément
>>
>>
>
>
>