V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[Mark Kohut]

Before we roll a seven, I wanted to just note couple-three things from Chap 6.

One, we did not comment on Benny Profane's tough guy alter ego, Benny Sfacim or 
Sfacimento...:who "could kncok her up higher" etc.....
..uh, intersting, yes?

Also, although i cannot find th epage, there is a moment on a paragraph where 
the narrator presents a kind of ..counterforce? Lot 49-like 

alternative perception......anyone notice and have a thot or two.

And, didjn't like p. 154 where Benny feels he can 'see the wind" and leaves 
before his meeting with Winsome?...very later Pynchon-like?



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, September 13, 2010 5:52:46 PM
Subject: V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

We're officially supposed to be talking about Chapter 7 starting today, but 
wanted to give a nod to this passage in Chapter 6, Part II, a wonderful antidote 
to Fina and her predilection for a good gang-banging:

p. 155 (Harper Perennial):

"... because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that 
as babies they'd been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and 
pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the 
world's Macy's.  And the soul's passage down into the toilet and into the 
underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time until they would 
have to return to being falsely animated kids' toys.  Of course they wouldn't 
like it.  Would want to go back to what they'd been; and the most perfect shape 
of that was dead -- what else? -- to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by 
rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, 
tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator's sepulchre so 
bright that night."

Aside from being a pre-reference to the Kenosha Kid sequence in GR (passage down 
the toilet), this is one of those mind-expanding Pynchon passages that seems to 
tie together genocide (pre-referencing the upcoming Herero massacre sequence in 
Chapter 9) and consumerism, foreshadowing his critique of the 
military-industrial complex, but reminding us as we read it that spirituality's 
hard to come by in modern brightly-lit consumer society.  One has to go dark and 
deep underground to find it - Under the cobblestones, the beach!

Laura