Slight connection to Chapter 9: diabolus avocado, Temperance, GD, BD

[Michael Bailey]

> You could find more foolish ways to waste your time.
>

but if the Marquis de Sod had stayed with his Brechtian studies, maybe
somebody would mount a production in a theatre near me?

> I realize that by the imagined rules of the game -- we can't talk about the
> author's personal reaction to the events pondered in the books because there
> isn't any evidence of him saying much of anything that you could bring to a
> court of law on daytime television -- that it's an "imponderable." But by
> virtue of the tiny window that the paper trail of Bomarc left, among other
> bits of personal history scattered hither and yon, we know that Pynchon knew
> early on in his life altogether too much about the suicidal drift of
> Technology.
>

true, that is textual evidence.  My temptation is to go beyond
textual, and impute a possible meeting, on friendly terms, with one of
those friendly ex-NSDAPers in the avionics field and an insightful
development of historical fiction inspired by contact with this
primary source, seeing Mondaugen with his little antennas (gets kinda
Kafkaesque, the more I repeat that phrase) as by far not the worst
person in Sudwest.  And a search for ways and means for engineers not
to end up working for Scheiss-, er, Weissmann.   But not a complete
rejection of the individuals involved (like Holden Caulfield thought
that Jesus wouldn't actually send Judas to Hell) - that would be
evident to his interviewee and he wouldn't have gotten nearly the
detail.

>> - But you can wade in the water
>> and never get wet
>> if you keep on doin' that rag (Grateful Dead, "Doin' That Rag")
>
>        Got nothin' for you, I had nothin' before
>        Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
>        Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
>        Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around


wading in the water and never getting wet was connected in my mind to
the Temperance card, she's wading in the water, and there was this
lecture series I went to back in the 90s where the guy, Jack, who said
his mother's family were Strega in Sicily, covered herbs and alchemy
and Norse biomagnetic fields and "clades" in evolution, and some Tarot
as well.  I taped these but unfortunately lost the tapes.  But I can
just see him up in front of about a dozen and a half people in this
cool little store (which he later bought and ran for awhile as Herne's
Hollow), going into depth on the Temperance card and gesticulating
like he's pouring water back and forth and talking about how the angel
or being or whatever could be interchanging its (her, his) stance with
one foot in the water, now the other foot, now the first foot again,
and I think he actually worked up to the notion that if it were done
quickly enough in the right rhythm the whole dance could take place *a
bit above* the water...
wish I had the tape still.  But he did imply this was an unusual interpretation.

Anyway, because Mondaugen was deemed by Nature and Nature's God worthy
to survive those events, maybe there was some part of him that was
untouched by them, that waded in the water and didn't get wet.  That
curiosity of his that got him into radio...
It's interesting that former enemies English Stencil and German
Mondaugen can meet and peaceably converse in the Rusty Spoon,  Stencil
having transcended partisanship and Mondaugen never having been very
political.  (and the Rusty Spoon being a kind of refuge)


Dylan toured with the Dead, one time (in band camp)

At the time of V.'s publication, recorded Dylan was eponymous and
doing stuff like:
"got the freight train blues,
got 'em in the bottom of my ramblin' shoes..."

and, perhaps even more wonderful:
"keep your hand on that plow, hold on -
O Lord, O Lord, keep your hand on that plow hold on"




- "May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung;
may you stay forever young"