V-2nd, C 5 "The Alligator was Pinto"

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah, I'm defending this chapter,.,,,,,I mean look at Swift.......look at Animal 
Farm............with animals it often seems
"heavy-handed' yet it is in the working out.............

I had a love-hate relationship with priests, with the concept of priests, yet I 
would have been offfended by what was
here if I didn't also think TRP had a right to ........say it this way.....



----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, August 18, 2010 8:00:25 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd, C 5 "The Alligator was Pinto"

I suppose it is completely over the top, which I had to admit I found laugh out 
loud funny. On the other hand, no matter how heavy handed any satirist has ever 
been  a goodly number of very real assholes have risen to the challenge and 
outdone them.
On Aug 17, 2010, at 8:38 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> There is also something heavy handed about the chapter; a priest
> eating and sodomizing his flock of rats who are neek saints enticed by
> and threatened by Jesus-Marxism. The dying animal motif fails and P's
> hobo and priest here are too cartoonish to carry that weight.  Could
> never pick up the vietnam echoes, read this chapter as another couple
> set pieces slapped together and wedged into the Adams themes. The
> shift to the depression and back to labor politics for hobo worker is
> too abrubt and thin. Dylan does it cleaner with a 3 minute song.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:20 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> Agree, one of the best English poems ever written, reminiscent of the best
>> Celtic nature poems. By contrast there is something immensely sad about this
>> tired pinto gator, blood all too predictably spilt  formless into the sewage
>> and the dark void.
>> 
>> I wonder if there is an intentional connection to the resistance of Ignatius
>> and the avid sacrificial compliance of Veronica and these seemingly
>> conflicted aspects of the alligator. Also is Pynchon working with and
>> twisting archetypal christian images of sacrifice, innocence and redemption?
>> On Aug 16, 2010, at 10:08 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>> 
>>> Pinto, to a Porto Rican circa 1960 means dick, as in moby. Also pied.
>>> 
>>> One of the most beautiful poems in the language is GMH's "Pied Beauty"
>>> 
>>> But P's coco dee yo is not sublime or mysterious or anything Rikean.
>>> 
>>> Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).
>>> 
>>> Pied Beauty
>>> 
>>> 
>>> GLORY be to God for dappled things—
>>>  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
>>>    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
>>> Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
>>>  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;        5
>>>    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
>>> 
>>> All things counter, original, spare, strange;
>>>  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
>>>    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
>>> He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:        10
>>>                  Praise him.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Josepth Tracy wrote:
>>>> "The alligator was Pinto"
>>>> 
>>>> I once had a job where a perk was membership in a workout club. While
>>>> there I
>>>> met a man who was un-mixed race. Black and white parents , but he was
>>>> pinto, all
>>>> over. Could such a one be president? What do you call such. He was
>>>> handsome and
>>>> had a remarkable sense of humor.
>>>> 
>>>> wow, what a question. A: No...
>>>> 
>>>> Misc. In As You Like It, the deer in the Arden forest are described as
>>>> "poor
>>>> dappled fools"....
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>>