GR translation: night-dusted

[alice wellintown]

I merely pointing out that you attributed your reading to Pynchon's
poetic license and, while we should keep the text open to several
possible readings, some are better than others because they can be
supported by a reading of what is in the text not in the reader's
poetic mappings onto it. This episode is especially tricky; good
exercise, as several readers have noted, in reading the rest of GR.
Although I've not offered my own reading of it, I did agree with Paul
on the details of the process of ambrotype. I do find it fascinating
the the translators are stumbling on the photo/film language here as
these words and the themes they develope are some of the more
difficult and most playful and beautiful in the book. Pynchon is
playing his harp here with the full throated ease of Keat's
Nightingale. There are reasons why his prose has been compared with
Melville's and Hawthorne's.

Just read that Netherland and that Middlesex, both called Melville and
Fitzgerald narratives. Horse shit! More Hemingway copy catz out of
writing schools. They read like Putz Lickers.


On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 6:08 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> With an author like Pynchon, and especially in GR where is poetic
> flares come streaming across the eyes and give proof and rages against
> the Angels of the night, we should be careful delimiting, setting
> margins too narrow, but here, it would be the reader's license that
> maps onto the landscape a road not taken by the author. I have to
> agree with Old Paul, the ambrotype is the process the author is, in
> the tradition of Hawthorne's book about his family, wherein the plates
> in the sunshine produce, as if by magic, images, portraits, not quite
> photographs. Here, of course, the scene Slothrop has walked into is
> not real, but reel. So...
>
> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 3:36 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 1:20 PM, alice wellintown
>> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> P117.39-40  ..., glassy ambrotypes of her late husband Austin night-duste inside gilded frames up on the mantel ...
>>>>>
>>>>> What is "night-dusted"?
>>
>> Poetic liscense allows for many interpretations.  "Portrait of late
>> husband night-dusted" may refer to the transformative effect of death,
>> what the Greeks called "Shades."  A person having  become a faded
>> memory, espcially in contrast to the bright guilded shade.
>>
>