TRTR(I.4) Bitch Slapped Moon

[Mark Kohut]

Man, that whole last page of Chap 4....indicting the whole
New World with the "sun moving down toward the sea..in a hurry
to be gone.moving as though pursued.".....where the boat leaves
garbage in its wake and Otto sees himself in a glass darkly covered
with cigarette smoke that clung and the moon has already been
 bitch-slapped by that now-descending sun..............

Worse than Eliot's London in The Waste Land......?




 


----- Original Message ----
From: Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, May 9, 2011 11:17:46 PM
Subject: TRTR(I.4) Bitch Slapped Moon

The final words of Chapter 4:

"[...] as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky
with effortless guile, unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face
she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of
Brazil, where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved
her brother the sun; and the sun, suspicious, trapped her in her evil
passion by drawing a blackened hand across her face, leaving the marks
which betrayed her, and betray her still."

are taken from 'Custom and Myth,' by Andrew Lang (1884)

"Among the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel
brother, the sun, because he disfigured her face.  Elsewhere the sun
is the girl, beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her
face to avert his affection.  On the Rio Branco, and among the
Tomunda, the moon is a girl who loved her brother and visited him in
the dark.  He detected her wicked passion by drawing his blackened
hand over her face.  The marks betrayed her, and, as the spots on the
moon, remain to this day."