V-2 - chapter 9 - Not Dark Yet

[Robin Landseadel]

On Oct 17, 2010, at 1:01 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Thanks, short stuff!  You just saved me a lot of investigative  
> legwork!
> (But what about Betty Jo Bialoski?)

You must mean Nancy -- isn't there some sort of Wren in AtD as well?  
There are so many echos and collisions bumping off of Against the Day  
from "V.", the old boy's repair to his old haunts, obsessing in the  
stuff -- the "Thinginess" of that Day that the novel was up  
Against . . . .

		She had been amusing herself by waiting for Rodolfo to fall asleep and
	then  getting decked  out in  scarlet lustra-cellulose,  draping  on  
some  Am-
	broid  jewelry, and  joining the  girls who  loitered by  the end of   
the  tunnel,
	often finding herself  late  at  night on hands  and  knees up on   
Calvary Hill
	being penetrated by a small queue of tunnel hands, often two at a  
time, who
	cursed  her  in unknown  tongues-as she seemed  eager to  let  Reef   
know
	about the  first  chance  she got.  "Large, work-roughened hands,"   
she mur-	
	mured, "bruising me, scratching me, and I do try to keep my skin ever  
so soft
	and smooth, here, feel  here ... remember ... " Reef, who always   
knew  what
	she was up to-Ruperta after all was not  very  complicated  when  it   
came to
	fucking, one of her  major  advantages  if  you really wanted to know- 
obliged
	by seizing her with  careful brutality, pushing  her face  among  
some  pillows,
	and tearing some rather  high-priced  underlinen, and  despite the   
presence
	of young Rodolfo in a  nearby room, they  then doublejacked  their  
way  to a
	mutual explosion memorable only till the next time it  happened,   
which  was
	to  be   presently. . .
	AtD -- 657

		There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduc-
	tion. Because of the symmetry. . . . He's been led before, you know,
	down on the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results . . .   
in as-
	suming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image -- "irradiation,"
	for example, and "reciprocal induction" ... and who's ever said that
	either had to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it
	haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out
	in the Blitz, the sounds of V-1 and V-2, one the reverse of the other.
	GR -- P146

On Oct 17, 2010, at 1:01 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> now, she isn't necessarily Victoria Wren, although she could be,  
> maybe?


Well, that Stencil -- he is a bit of a grand, overarching and over- 
vocabularied fabulist, ain't he?

Like the good rev-d Wicks Cherrycoke or, perhaps the "Tony Wilson,"  
narrator of "24 Hour Party People"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bia0F-ihwiw&feature=related
-----------------------------------------------------