Serendipitous V. annotation/allusion found

[Dave Monroe]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> ah, umm....this is from the third chapter of Miss Lonelyhearts,
> he sez like a forgetful fool...............
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, April 24, 2011 1:42:01 PM
> Subject: Serendipitious V. annotation/allusion found
>
> "On that day all the inanimate things over which he had tried to obtain
> control took the field against him. When he touched something, it spilled or
> rolled to the floor" .....[more sentences showing the ganging up]...until
>
> "He fled to the street, but there chaos was multiple. Broken groups of people
> hurried past....[more].....until
>
> .with....'the harsh clanging sound of street cars and the raw shouts of
> hucksters. No repeated groups of words would fit their and no scale
> could give them meaning."

"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other.
Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for
disorder, entropy.  Man against Nature ... the battle of the
centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out
of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction.  All order
is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.
   "A trumpet, marked to sell for $2.49, gave the call to battle ..." (pp. 30-1)

--Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608851h.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=coM3vzpyV54C&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAw#v

"... the novel is a black comedy, characterized by a dark sense of
humor and irony. Justus Neiland, among others, has pointed out the use
of Bergsonian laughter, in which 'the attitudes, gestures, and
movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that
body reminds us of a machine.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Lonelyhearts#Major_themes

"Miss Lonelyhearts plays an important role, as it is not just
mentioned, but discussed by two of the characters of Philip K. Dick's
The Man in the High Castle, Paul Kasoura and Robert Childan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Lonelyhearts#In_other_literary_works