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

[alice wellintown]

It's romance; we'll have to live with deliberate ambiguities and
subjunctives, competing narratives, perspectivism. I'll defend these
chapters as romance. Ugly my ass. It's not neo-classical beauty; it's
revolutionary horror and sublime.

In another famous letter young P talks about where his art is heading.
 He doesn't know, exactly, but he's a romantic, now called
meta-historical romance or whatever. Pynchon's sublime, like the art
of one of his favorite artists, Albert Pinkham Ryder (see his Flying
Dutchman), or like the early, self-taught romantics of france, is
never ugly. Rough and obscure, but hitting on a truth of the human
heart that only romance can swing at.

http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art216sumfall/romanticism%20and%20revolution.html


The painting was inspired by a poetic drama by (Lord) George Byron,
Sardanapalus (1821), the story of an Assyrian king whose lifestyle led
to the rebellion of the people he ruled.  Rather than let the rebels
succeed, he ordered the destruction of his palace, servants,
concubines, animals, every treasure he possessed.  Sardanapalus had
outlawed violence and war, imposing pleasure and peace in their place.
 But his sense of peace is a primal peace which consists of orgies and
indulgence.  The indulgence of the senses eventually culminates in the
indulgence of masochistic and sadistic fantasies




On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 5:51 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> ok, hmm, are we sure the priest sodomized his flock?
>
> the phrase was "after sext", not after sex! (124)
>
> and it's Benny who thinks the priest committed sodomy - and that
> sentence on 128 ends with "depending on whose story you believed"
>