Question re IV: from epic to everyday

[Paul Mackin]

On 8/31/2011 11:33 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> The best modern NEW Shakespeare annotations [Arden editions] are 
> wonderful (if one has the time
> and inclination) for simply suggesting by quoted associations how a 
> notion in Plutarch might
> be buried in a Shakespeare couplet.....how even a phrase 
> from Plutarch,  or Montaigne--or contemporaries
> or ANYONE he is likely to have read might be reflected in 
> Shakespeare's lines.........
> this is of a different order than annotating a story from Ovid that S. 
> clearly uses (and invariably) changes for his genius use.
> In that spirit---that is loose annotation--- I want to offer the theme 
> of Life Against Death--which we are almost
> sure P read--see famous essay on----as (part of what) is contained in 
> the line
> about sexual desire from the epic to the 
> everyday......................................
> leading to, in Brown, what happens when it is thwarted as it always 
> has been in History....

Herbert Marcuse also was concerned about the thwarting (Eros and 
Civilization).  But later, as he lived to witness the radical 
unthwarting, on Madison Avenue and in the youth culture. he had to  
revise his opinion somewhat.


That is not what I meant at all:
That is not it, at all.

P
>
> *From:* alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, August 31, 2011 7:11 AM
> *Subject:* Re: Question re IV: from epic to everyday
>
> Janos,
> It always helps us when you provide a page number so that we can read
> the excerpt in context. Here, Pynchon slides into the local dialect so
> the words "everyday" and "epic" describe a range of sexual desire. The
> narrator or character, in what appears to be a typical Pynchonian
> paranoid reverie, wonders if the dark forces or dark crews,  who work
> for greed and fear, have been there all this time, even at every
> counter-revolutionary event, working to reclaim the power of the
> people for the forces of greed and fear.  Although a common enough
> theme in Pynchon's California trilogy, here the Oedipa-Complex
> paranoia that Pynchon works wonders with in CL49 as he drives the
> quest narrative with a protagonist who, to use Foucault's term, is "We
> Other Victorians," here we get the Van Meter and Zoyd and Oedipa's
> husband Mucho and Larry version that is subjected to the satire of
> drug induced hippie stupidity and paranoid grand delusions of
> surrender.
>
>
> 2011/8/31 János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com <mailto:miksaapja at gmail.com>>:
> > What I understand here is the emotion but not the exact meaning.
> > Please help me with the syntax:
> >
> > "Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally,
> > love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East,
> > wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the
> > music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
> > everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and
> > fear? "
> >
> > I mean, are both "from epic to everyday" and "for the ancient forces
> > of greed and fear" related directly to "reclaiming", or is "from epic
> > to everyday" an apposition to "sexual desire"?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > János
> >
>
>

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