BDSL,1- Genetic Therapy for Inherent Vice

[Michael Bailey]

not that it isn't foggy.  my impressions of BDSL are foggy because I
haven't read it in a long while.
Foggy is also the impression we're left with at the end of IV.

But the shape of what I mean, somewhere in the fog, is that although
Gnossos in BDSL is pre-feminist -
heck, he's even pre-Vatican-II so at that point all non-Catholics were
going to Hell -

and therefore neither the character nor the book has, oh, what would it be
called, something like "conspicuous irony concerning the "dominant male" role",
or "certain redeeming touches that have become necessary in portraying a hero"

but there's enough sensitivity in the book to make reading it something like
reading V. - "cast my mem'ry back then/sometimes I'm overcome thinkin'
about it"
(as Van Morrison wrote in "Brown-eyed Girl")

and to know that this talent would've incorporated cultural seismic
changes in later books that
we do not have due to the accident of the author's mortality: and
that's the thing
that can't be cured and must be endured, and we all are aware of
various attempts
at cures for that - channeling, seances, belief in the Resurrection...
literarily, perhaps, simply reading, rereading, recommending, speculating on
influences ripping through it and out into, well, V. for one...IV for
another (that would be an interesting comparison...)



On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 6:27 AM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> I think it's still pretty foggy. How does "the text" take "that"
> into account, in either book? Needs some explaining. The
> desire to cure, and the evolving means to to effect a cure, are
> also inherited. A- and who's doing the enduring? And when
> the latest "cure" becomes available, who gets access?
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------
> but isn't it pretty clear the text takes that into account in both books?
>
> "what can't be cured, sure, must be endured, sure" (Joyce, in Portrait,
> right?)
>
> also that Sailing to Byzantium has something about that too, doesn't
> it? (not the famous part, the ragged cloak and so forth, but one of
> the lines nobody remembers...)
>
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 5:55 AM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think we've been sold a bag of shit regarding Original Sin.
>> Unfortunately, alpha male Gnossos, eventually to under-
>> go beta decay, is as much a part of the problem as he is
>> a cure. I've returned both IV and BDSL to the library- I no
>> longer buy books if I can avoid it- so this idea, as
>> developed in a comparison of the two, may take a little
>> while. More, whenever.
>