V-2nd C4 Alignment with the Inanimate

[Dave Monroe]

    "If alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad guy,
Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning." (V., Ch. 4, p.
103)


"This mineral period"

"The phrase renders almost explicit a connection between Schoenmaker
and Fausto Maijstral III, whose affinity with the inanimate rubble of
his bombed island home arises out of a similar wartime strategy."
(Grant, Companion, p. 63)


"unnatural and traitorous Halidoms"

... for "favoring allografts" (p. 102) ...


Decatur, Illinois

"In 1854, Colonel Dan Conklin started a whiskey distillery, racetrack
and a whorehouse on the outskirts of Decatur and the city earned the
first of its unflattering nicknames -- 'Hell's Half Acre'. It would go
on to earn others, including the 'Second Most Corrupt City in
Illinois' in the 1920s, and would gain infamy as a place where murder,
bootlegging, prostitution, kidnapping, gambling, corruption in city
government and, of course, ghosts were commonplace ..."

http://www.haunteddecatur.com/

Cf.. ATD p. 473 ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0709&msg=121436


"a sympathetic beginning"

"Schoemnaker's rage at Halidom's misguided enthusiasm for the
inanimate does indeed mark him, in the novel's terms, as one of the
Good Guys.  The 'demarcation of purpose' [p. 102], which has rendered
him vulnerable to Rachel's attack, is part of the novel's overall
depiction of the 'used-upness' of all kinds of human energies and of
that 'falling-away from what is human' that Itague offers as the
definition of decadence [p. 437]." (Grant, Companion, pp. 63-4)


"his vocation"

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html