V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[M Choakumchild]

snip

> 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
>
Can't recall where P alludes to _The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of
Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime_

America's best-selling novel in its time, "The Quaker City", published
in 1845, is a sensational expose of social corruption, personal
debauchery and the sexual exploitation of women in antebellum
Philadelphia.

Not Scarlet Letter, but certainly a good example of American Romantic
Escapism. To Frederick Jackson Turner---> Fitzgerlad's Gatsby. All
Romances.... Ah, for a Praire!  Trees! In the Woods!
Sucking the marrow out of life! But one needn't dig to find it,
although it has taken refuge under, outside, awy from, cities, itz
there ans wherever two hearts beat. sorry  ...jungleland....

 Beneath the city two hearts beat
Soul engines running through a night so tender in a bedroom locked
In whispers of soft refusal and then surrender in the tunnels uptown
The Rat's own dream guns him down as shots echo down them hallways in the night
No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0xoxM8jGY