V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before

[Joseph Tracy]

  On 9/28/2010 9:43 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
> ...it's actually pretty good!
> I think Kai may be onto something - any Nature-worship in V.?  not
> sensing it; the ontology here is, what?
> the City
> the Street
> the Armed Forces
> the workplace
> the home
> History
> the (Human) self
I think the desert is part of the cosmos of V. and estuaries suggested 
by Venice, New York and its sewers, the NIie delta. and Vhiesshu which 
is a kind of underground estuary of states of consciousness so vivid 
that  we can't  handle them and must  flee for what remains of sanity. I 
do agree though that nature is not the same living presence of later works.
> page 229 - another thing I never noticed, for some reason I always
> thought BP was on a bus with the NY Times Classified section.  But
> actually he's "on a bench in the little park behind the Public
> Library"
> which is Bryant Park? http://www.newyorkled.com/bryantpark.htm
>
> (a link on that page
> http://www.newyorkled.com/nyc_events_St_Gennaro.htm goes to the San
> Gennaro Festival although it's in September - unlike Ercole dei
> Rinoceronti in March - it's a street festival and they block off
> Mulberry Street
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_Street_%28Manhattan%29 but
> anyway...a-and it was in the Godfather...)
>
> so he's swatting flies with the paper, and staying in a flophouse
>
> "you're jobless, I'm jobless, here we both are out of work, let's screw"
>
>
> Page 230 (Harper Perennial) -
>
> "Let me call you sweetheart," they sang, all somehow on key. --
> anarchist miracle
>
> "It may have been like the bartender on upper Broadway who was nice to
> the girls and their customers."
> --- I was thinking this was page 138, but that isn't a bartender, it's
> the Hungarian Coffee Shop on York Avenue.
> Where is this bartender? Ah, here we go? page 158, "...Broadway in the
> Eighties, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken
> heart for every light on it.  Uptown was a bleak district with no
> identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as
> break: merely gets increased, tensile, compressive, shear loads piled
> on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own
> shudderings fatigue it....If they did have a customer along - usually
> one of the small gangsters around the neighborhood - the bartender
> would be as attentive and cordial as if they were young lovers, which
> in a way they were."
>
> (reaching back in order to move forward, of course: but the extended
> description of hearts not breaking but succumbing to something like
> metal fatigue, "tensile, compressive, shear loads" could apply to a
> lot of things, Benny himself not least among them; and the closing
> clause "which in a way they were" is an extension of the same
> generosity practiced by the barkeep...things that stay in Benny's
> mind, one presumes, those little acts of kindness, tiny inclusions of
> "gemeinschaft" in a larger, less-caring society)
>
>
> One gets that he's becalmed, has a little time to think, so he strings
> together some impressions and even takes it a little further in the
> following beautiful passage:
>
> "There is a way we behave around young people excited with each other,
> even if we haven't been getting any for a while and aren't likely to
> very soon.  It is a little cynical, a little self-pitying, a little
> withdrawn; but at the same time a genuine desire to see young people
> get together.  Though it springs from a self-centered concern, it is
> often as much as a young man like Profane ever does go out of himself
> and take an interest in human strangers.  Which is better, one would
> suppose, than nothing at all"
>
>
> He's playing a cool blues refrain there in Bryant Park, and the
> changes are something like
> horny (4 bars)
> jobless (4 bars)
> shared plight (4 bars)
>
> so the next paragraph modulates up chromatically and suggests (this is
> as deep philosophically as I think the book gets, at least in terms of
> breaking it down so even I can understand it) that the only valid
> reason to strive is to get laid, and that Benny qua Benny doesn't even
> crave anything besides the animate.  That is, he doesn't even think
> (our omniscient narrator assures us) about how all this craving could
> be sanely directed any other way.
> "Make love, not war" is implicit in his biogram, and his logogram
> doesn't extend to all that other stuff.
>
> Wish I could say that better.  Glad I don't need to, 'cause it's all
> right there!
>
> So of course he gets an NRB!
>
>
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 9.0.856 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3164 - Release Date: 09/28/10 02:34:00
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20100929/cfab77f7/attachment.html>