V--2nd, Chap 9..thoughts requested

[Mark Kohut]

Maybe older meanings of "owned' are dominant? We know TRP
likes ancient roots in many words:

Own:
To grant; to acknowledge; to admit to be true; to confess; to recognize in a 
particular character; as, we own that we have forfeited your love. 



Mark Kohut  wrote:
> How do you, I mean YOU and Robin, understand these lines inside
> the Sarah story?:
>
> p. 289 "But on the foggy, sweating, sterile coast there were no owners,
> nothing owned. Community may have been the only solution possible
> against such an assertion of the Inanimate."
>

tough question.

the little riff I did on the breakwater was maybe a difficulty factor 3
(I've been looking at gymnastics a little bit, they just had the
Worlds someplace, and judging posts as if they were gymnastic
routines)

- I thought I would have carried it off pretty well except that whole
"dentist" thing came to me while I was waiting for some updates to
load on the computer, a whole wonderful
dentist-irredentist-redeemer-confessor string of insights, though it
may be awhile before the Pynchon community embraces it (something
about state changes in the liquid infrastructure of the underworld?) -
anyway, that was like not sticking the landing and going off the
mat...

- but to say anything about that "community" statement must be a 7 or
8 at least.  Maybe rather than a gymnastics routine, It's more like a
slalom, and I'm going to knock over all kinds of flags, fail to
express stuff succinctly and proportionately, and take too long to
finish.

Since you asked the "YOU" at large, though...

Here's what I think:
a) Foppl is so full of crap!  "no owners, nothing owned" - hah!
   1) offensive as male chauvinism: relationship as ownership
    2)  "gemeinschaft" vs "gesellschaft" - community in that sense, holding
    in common - but that right there contradicts the "no owners, nothing owned"
    3) Sarah and her cohorts are so beneath consideration that it
doesn't occur to him that joint ownership of them is still ownership
   4) her point of view is completely excluded

b)  "convivial platoon" - he really does see them that way even after!

c) what on earth could somebody be thinking who did those things?
  1) how to imagine oneself in the situation?
2) also how could an author interest people in this reconstruction?
  3) solution: connect up, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, I definitely know
somebody or am somebody a bit like Benny Profane, so he meets up with
Stencil, and Stencil with Mondaugen, and Mondaugen (articulate enough
to understand and not quite despicable enough to ignore) connects us
to Weissmann and Foppl
4) race to the bottom: it's all too easy to imagine oneself doing those things
   and this is what's especially ironic about invoking "community"


craptastic answer, but hey, it was a tough question!