V-2nd - 2: Stencil

[Michael Bailey]

a) the clocks, all the clocks, I've seen one with a twisting pendulum
like that, somewhere...

b) continuing with my Ulysses-V. comparison, U of course tightens up
Aristotle's unities and all occurs in one day, whereas V. takes place
over, umm, a longer period of time...shoot, anybody aware of a
timeline for it somewhere - I know it starts on Christmas Eve...

c) nose job as a diaspora of the flesh (Esther getting away from an
ancestral profile)
Rachel on page 46: "The girl [Paola] lived proper nouns.  Persons,
places.  No things.  Had anyone told her about things?  It seemed
Rachel had had to do with nothing else.  The main one now being
Esther's nose."
Reification, thingification: rather than being part of Esther (she's
disowning it in its present form), it's become a thing.  (Profane
meanwhile is experiencing people's love of things as a secret as big
to him as V. to Stencil?)


d) Henry Adams was a scion of the famous Adams family, and I got up to
his time in Germany before losing my copy, his grandfather was huge in
Boston and national politics, his uncle (Fester) was also some kind of
bigwig, and his father (Gomez) was a diplomatic envoy to the Court of
St James (England) right during the outbreak of the Civil War, and I
guess was trying to pull England over to the North's side, right?  And
had some success, something to do with ships and blockades and actions
contemplated by Parliament in favor of the South that were not
consummated...
But the cool thing about Adams was how, although he served as his
father's private secretary during these negotiations, he like was NOT
fascinated by the Great Game but much more so by his own personal
emotions and impressions...so that he can register world events
faithfully, not as a cipher, but as someone who's just as interested -
actually more so - in a completely different, personal interpretation
("you are not what the Caesars say you are" (GR))
...in suchlike manner Stencil's dad was playing the Great Game, but
Stencil himself, although finding sustenance among the diplomatic
corps ("to whom family still meant something") also does NOT find
himself playing secret agent on any discernible team - but instead
pursues the Greater Game of drawing some personal meaning out of life
by combining a hint in his father's diary with a diverse set of
experiences...
-- some kind of a Goedelian quirk if we consider politics as Brigadier
Pudding's "Things that can happen", taking the place of Russel's
painstaking arithmetic, and Stencil's V. thesis as an unsolvable
proposition within it...


e) spoiler? probably not for anybody reading this, but still...




...at the end where Benny says he hasn't learned a goddam thing,
should we relate that to the Education theme?





-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")