Fw: V-2nd. Contraceptives on every door

[Ian Livingston]

Well, yeah, but.... One needn't be either Catholic or
pro-overpopulation to resist the use of condoms. I mean, one can argue
quite successfully that condoms encourage sexual profligacy and
irresponsibility. Pynchon was raised Catholic, but a few years in the
Navy can really bust a bubble. Just sayin'....

Could be he's pointing out something more. Somewhat to do with orderly
herd-behavior. As the Angel (many resonances already with Rilke at
this point) Benny might be emblematic of the Great Random, the Fertile
Idea of Anarchy, or something to do with the significance of the
Individual in the Group....

Maybe.

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 5:54 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Michael courageously writes:
> like the soldiers gambling for Jesus's clothes, only these guys are
> gambling for jimmy hats...
>
> it's possible that young Catholic Pynchon was anti-condom (aren't they
> anti all forms of bc?)
> ("the pity is, he'll never use them..." not, maybe, 'cos he ain't
> gettin' any, but because it's against
> his religion?)
>
> and was making Benny the angel of death to all those unconceived
> babies ("what of all the God-possibled souls we nightly impossibilize"
> sez Stephen in _Ulysses_)
> although you could almost as easily make it out as he is hanging
> mezuzahs against the angel of unwanted conceptions (which is how I
> read it originally, but pretty sure that isn't what the text said...)
>
> now if it's "the more the merrier" I can't help but semi-agree, but if
> it's "every little sperm is holy and the heck with what the lady
> wants" then I gotta dissent a bit...
>
> sensitive topics
>
> A non-Catholic Jew like Norman Mailer very famously argued
> against contraception.............TRP was influenced by Norman
> in other things, it seems.....
>
> If Pig's lust is ......profane, what is sacred?
>
> TRP perhaps moving his Catholic beliefs to some some similar bases
> in Nature? Catholics and Natural Law are synonomous----Nature w/o
> Catholic dogma can still lead to a belief in a kind of natural law?
>
>
>
> --
> Yippy dippy dippy,
> Flippy zippy zippy,
> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."