AtD Q: any thoughts on Lew Basnight's time at the Hotel Esthonia? Anyone?

[Joseph Tracy]

I am listening to ATD on my ipod while I finish  a large church  
window. I am well into the Lew Basnight history . He is currently  
talking with Renfrew. I feel that His split with his wife Troth, who  
seems, in her very name to personify marriage, is really a break into  
fiction. For Lew as for most of us , that fictional rearrangement can  
be illuminating, therapeutic, and dangerous. ATD has a layered  
gradation from the real historical( mining wars,WW1,Chicago world's  
fair, Michelson Morley, Tesla) through the credible fictional 
( Traverses, Yashmeen, Vibes, Cyprian)   to the mythic/fantastic 
( Chums, Vormance story, time travel, Shambala) . I think Lew  
Basnight occupies a nether world between the credible fictional and  
the fantastic/mythic. But he leans toward the fantastic, slightly  
more at home in the world of the Chums, cyclomite revelations, the  
twits , the time traveling photography of Merle than in the world of  
Pinkertons or revolutionary unionists.  The Esthonia is also a step  
toward the  Big Rock Candy side of socialism though with a Kafkaesque  
tinge. You know, the funny side of Kafka.

The fact that Pynchon also connects Lew's overall movement as a  
movement toward grace  is puzzling and intriguing to me. Is he  
mocking the idea of a world at right angles ? the gates of Shambala?  
Mineral sentience?  Alein invaders?  I rather think not. I think he  
is more inclined to mock those who think the the world fully  
explicable along some vector called "reality".



On Feb 23, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> pp. 37 ff....to p.41?
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