V-2 - Chapter 9 - Clockwork Eye

[Mark Kohut]

yeahp..North is the direction from which bad shit comes...

and it goes way back in literary tropes to before Shakespeare, I've learned.


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, October 16, 2010 2:48:38 PM
Subject: Re: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Clockwork Eye

On Oct 16, 2010, at 11:17 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

>> 
>> He's looking deep into the eastward view, to eventual wastes of the
>> Kalahari, "north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the
>> horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn. . ."
>> 
> 
> Milton echo, in PL, creation of Hell "rose like an exhalation"?

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Glenn Gould -- a man who often 
referred to himself as "The Last Puritan", made a trilogy of radio documentaries 
concerning the idea of people and their local cultures that managed some how to 
be isolated from the Zeitgeist. The first was called "Idea of the North". With 
this documentary, Glenn Gould created a form he called "Contrapuntal Radio," 
where elements of the documentary that are usually laid out in normal sequential 
order are laid out in a contrapuntal texture. In this case, Gould edited the 
introductory remarks by the participants into a Trio Sonata texture. This site 
offers up the audio opening of "Idea of the North."

http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/music/topics/320-1709/

There's a line you'll hear with the entrance of the second voice -- "I, I don't 
go for this Northmanship thing at all . . ." The notion of the Absolute North as 
some sort of spiritual magnate, inverted immediately by the second subject.

But I love that line, about "Northmanship" and Northmanship is a big theme in 
Pynchon, brought to some kind of climax in Against the Day, with a chunk of Pure 
North burning its way through a chunk of the Infected city.

More on the Solitude Trilogy:

http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/gould.html