V-2nd - Chapter 10, Part III: 20 days before the Dog Star ...

[alice wellintown]

kelber  wrote:
> An odd insert after the Profane-not-sleeping-with-Mafia scene (too much integrity?):
>
> "Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began.  The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate." (p. 316)
>
> Pynchon then lists various mass deaths around the world, drawing the data from an Almanac disasters list.  What I find odd about the list is the fact that he includes both human brushes with the man-made inanimate (train wrecks, building collapses) with deaths caused by Nature (tidal waves, tropical storms).  So here, Nature is inanimate.

More likely Puritan with an American Calvinistic strain that will,
after the Newtonian Clock-work Universe and the Natural Laws of a
Deistic God, surface as the ambiguous and scatterbrained genius, in
the Dark Romantics as, for example, the whale or Moby Dick. Although
the dark romantic element is present in Brockden Brown, and is evident
in the counter school to the Husdon River School Romantics, in
painters like Albert Pinkam Ryder (whose influence on Pynchon has been
overlooked), we tend to lump the Romantics into one gravy. That
Puritan strain, and Pynchon knows that the roots of it run to Job,
where the Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh, is quite important to
Pynchon's development.

see Ann Bradstreet's poem,  "Upon the Burning of Our House - July
10th, 1666" and, of course Wigglesworth's epic poem, The Day of Doom.