V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 461 - "Mene, mene tekel, upharsin"

[Mark Kohut]

LIKE as they say on Facebook...as solid speculation, imho.


----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, February 17, 2011 12:34:24 PM
Subject: Re: V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 461 - "Mene, mene tekel, upharsin"

at the risk of being told to put a sock in it...

before the series, there was a movie called the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The protagonist tells his counselor at college that he wants to take
the easiest classes possible and just concentrate on girls.  The
counselor helps him in this quest, with maybe just a very polite
expression of a possibility of other ideas...

Strictly idiosyncratic, rigorously non-serious interpretation:
young Pynchon, studious almost to a fault, of Anglo-French descent (a
Pynchon was on the beach in 1066) and lean...
fantasizes about being a very different person:
what's the most different he could be?  Italian-Jewish, portly, and a
non-intellectual chick magnet...blundering from one romance to
another...

but into the fantasy creeps Stencil, the slow return of the repressed,
threatening to make sense of the whole thing...