"He thinks he's hallucinating" m

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown wrote:

> extreme reader response, and I would say that ignoring the marks on
> the page, arranged by the author in a conventional way, is extreme
> reader response, has merit if if one's objective is to discover
> psychological patterns or complexes in individual readers.

right, and one could look that way and see a lot worth seeing
but that's looking away from the text

but, well, lit as communication person to person asynchronous
depends on acceptance of convention
and I'm not looking to ignore convention or what's written so much as
to comment on the idea that it's not inconceivable that within the
plenum of meaning in Shasta's simple words, there might be an intended
notion of some kind of listener

to quantify, maybe 95/5, simple convention like my spouse has talked
about me in my presence with nobody else there to good-natured comedic
effect, or sometimes to convey (to me) and vent (for her own
satisfaction) her frustration with where I'm at

I'm down with that meaning: that is a meaning I'm familiar with!  And
to see it in a Pynchon book is to be reminded of romantic and
quotidian concatenations; I don't see it in this sense as a virtuosic
turn at all on his part - only one of a great many familiar
associations to be had at every turn in the text, a part of a building
of a fictional world (or like Letterman's "Pyramid of Comedy" that he
used to do sometimes on the show back when I used to watch it
faithfully in the early 80s)

just another brick in the wall: like Nick Danger and Nancy remembering Pig Night

but like in Jazz, the variations can sometimes lead off the beaten
path; overtones can summon a completely different meaning to a phrase

sure, she's trying to keep it light, that's the one chord, but then
the way she does it - appealing to a reasonable third party is like
your minor seventh

a nonexistent third party (and that in itself is a bluesy kind of a
minor 7th, why come she can't be in Doc's world, isn't his trip groovy
enuf for her)

but then (and here's maybe a minor 10th, which on top of the triad and
minor 7th sounds kinda freaky and clashes with the natural 3rd) - hey,
*is* that 3rd party so completely non-existent

it's the 70s and Cointelpro and Doc f'reaven's sake is so paranoid
about smokin' herb that he buys $100 of kitchen utensils so the
*grocery clerk* won't suspect he's a hophead - why shouldn't be wonder
if she's wired?  I'm prepared to say the text (on rereading) has
places where I can impute such a notion to such a man.

He's someone who relishes weird thoughts: gives him a big ole frisson
to think about himself lying unconcho while the footage of the
guerilla action at Channel View Estates is being taken...
dreams about asking his mom when the murdered person is coming back...

and that weird thoughts are sometimes true is something I'd have to
defend even if Pynchon's text came out ag'in it, which I don't think
it does!