V2nd, C3

[Michael Bailey]

kelber wrote:
> Great hosting/posting, Ian.  And thanks, Mike B. for all those pithy dissections.
>

seconded on the great hosting!
and as for me, hey, I've been feeling kinda pithy lately...

> It's interesting how little role V.(ictoria Wren) has in any of these vignettes, but particularly in this one.
>

so, yeah, they (the chapter heading lines) do say somethiing about
Stencil doing quick-changes
So Aieul is Stencil, and the others also...
which I blush to note is, like, news to me...

 toleja I never really "got" the Stencil chapters

but, well, my reading is such that y'know, it seems reasonable as a
development from the impressions I did take -- kinda like when you
hand somebody a jar you can't open and they pop it and either you or
they go, "you (or I) loosened it up, of course"


> This chapter is mostly about the (mostly absent) Stencil's exercise in immersing himself in a time and place to get a feel for V.'s origins, rather than in trying to imagine V.'s origins directly.  His method reminds me of a book that I've always enjoyed:  Time and Again, by Jack Finney (who also wrote Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Again_(novel)

article sez the movie Somewhere in Time has a Dr Finney; Marie and I
liked that movie (she's a big Christopher Reeves fan)


> Which underscores that Stencil's not so much interested in intrigue in 19th Century Egypt as he is in intrigue in Baedeker-land.  If V. is a "thing" as Stencil the elder's question implies, then Stencil needs to search for her origins in a place where inanimate people exist.  This section of the chapter has a particularly disturbing image of that sort of person - not just a flight of fancy about tourists treating the locals as inanimate props, but Bongo-Shaftsbury revealing himself - terrorizing a little girl in the process - as partially inanimate.  B-S (using his sidekick Goodfellow as the initial seducer)

but wait, if Bongo-Shaftsbury's sidekick is Goodfellow...I thought
Goodfellow was the fat guy from the cafe...


>



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