GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage

[malignd at aol.com]

I assume the correspondent is writing with tongue in cheek but, if not, this seems to me a cite-worthy example of a reader highjacking the text.  Think Charles Kinbote.



-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Dec 7, 2011 11:25 am
Subject: Re: GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage


the conspiracy reading:

> P4.1-10   —they go in under archways,

Huey Long was gunned down in an archway

> secret entrances of rotted
> concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass

triple overpass 1963 Dallas

> . . . certain
> trestles of blackened wood

wood that was found on the bullets found in Sirhan Sirhan's DeSoto

>have moved slowly by overhead, and the
> smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha
> winters,

Homestead Steel Strike; Ludlow Mining Strike, bloodily broken by Henry
Clay Frick and Rockefeller

>of Sundays when no traffic came through,

Martin Luther King's empty pulpit

> of the coral-like
> and mysteriously vital growth,

"It was the heavily leaded condition of the bore of Sirhan's gun which
posed a dilemma that opposing counsel, Vincent Bugliosi, was sure to
raise....they could not conduct their examination without first
cleaning it out...by firing two copper-jacketed "minimag" bullets
through it....The first bullet removed the excessive lead, they noted,
while the second cleaned out all traces...
[but the bullets that entered people in the Ambassador kitchen were
copper, and the police had supposedly test-fired this same gun before
this investigation -- how could there still be lead deposits?] "One of
the firearms experts later postulated that the leading might have
"grown" within the gun barrel (like algae) -- a theory completely
beyond the comprehension of scientists in the field of metallurgy, we
discovered." -- _The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy_, Turner &
Christian, p189
 around the blind curves

> and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence,

train tracks behind the grassy knoll

>of maturing rust,

freedom train rusting on a siding

> developing through those emptying days brilliant and
> deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows

Nixon's 5 O'Clock Shadow (the worst of the Hourly Shadows)

> to seal its passage, to
> try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . .
>

cold as Cocytus where Satan gnaws on Brutus and Cassius and Judas...


...or not...

 
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