V2nd, C3

[Michael Bailey]

 Ian Livingston wrote:
> Sorry to be sketchy the last couple days. A series of impediments
> arose which required my full attention and all the time in the
> world....
>

you're doing well!


> So, to P. Aieul (oil, anyone?)....

thanks to alice

>


sorry to be pedestrian, but in simple terms, what *is* the action in
this chapter?

Trying to get it straight.  Honestly, I never have.  Especially the
Stencil chapters.  I read it with great enjoyment and it awakens
thoughts in me anyway, but if you allow me the luxury of pretending to
care about what is actually on the pages...

Stencil's staying in Bongo-Shaftsbury's apartment (besides the
initials being BS, Bongo Shaftsbury connotes nothing to me so much as
burying the shaft in the bongo drum, which could be extremely vigorous
drumming.)
and reminiscing.  So his dad was in some exotic place and wrote him a
postcard, I surmise.

And he felt bad because he never wrote back, being 18 and so forth.

So anyway, in his own way, he's turning swords into plowshares:
page 60: somehow in his hands the traditional tools and attitutdes
were always employed toward mean ends: cloak for a laundry sack,
dagger to peel potatoes; dossiers to fill up dead Sunday afternoons;
worst of all, diguise itself not out of any professional necessity but
only as a trick, simply to involve him less in the chase...

ok, so although this to me is a good thing, ratcheting down the
dreadful wartime tensions, he is lamenting it.  But is his lamentation
sincere?  I guess it's a moment of Adamic self-doubt and he is more to
be pitied for it

so, like, old Sidney Stencil - he was in Malta and sent the postcard from there.

But where do old Porpentine and the rest of the geezers come in?

Ok, look, "Had Porpentine gone to Egypt like old Stencil to Malta"

so his buddy's dad killed the Porpentine guy
and rather than automatically takin' sides, old Stencil gets his mind
wrapped around the murderEE

and may have written to his own son, so from these vague similarities

My dad was off on a mission and got killed
This Porpentine dude was off on a mission for the "other side" and got
killed - hey, maybe HE had a kid...

shit, I've got more in common with him...

anyway, that is how far I've got in el chapitero so far  (more to come)
-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")