GR translation: For all Slothrop knows he's an agronomist

[Paul Mackin]

On 7/6/2012 4:31 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
> >From Norman Douglas' _South Wind_ (1917), about gossipy expatriates on a
> Capri- or Corfu-like resort island:
>
> "It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because he
> was wanted by the London police for something that happened in Richmond
> Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels-the notorious
> Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club scandal, that
> he was the local representative of an international gang of white-slave
> traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of the world, that he
> was not a man at all but an old boarding-house keeper who had very good
> reasons for assuming the male disguise, that he was a morphinomaniac, a
> disfrocked Baptist minister, a pawnbroker out of work, a fire-worshipper, a
> Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had had a fall, a decayed jockey who
> disgraced himself at a subsequent period in connection with some East-End
> mission for reforming the boys of Bermondsey and then, after pawning his
> mother's jewelry, writing anonymous threatening letters to society ladies
> about their husbands and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet
> Ministers and tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by
> the sale of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus,
> after an exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he
> had been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.
>
> "All these things, and a good many more, had been said. Eames knew it. Kind
> friends had seen to that."

Good example, Monte.

Yes, we learn a great deal about Mr. Eames as the why he was NOT on the 
island.

The reason he IS there must be quite unspeakable.

P


>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
> Of Paul Mackin
> Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 12:00 PM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: GR translation: For all Slothrop knows he's an agronomist
>
> On 7/5/2012 11:19 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>> Correct: "For all X knows,  the world may be flat or tubular or pyramidal"
>> means "X has no information that would help him choose among these
>> possibilities."
>
> It may be too obvious to note (but I'll do it anyway) that, apart from the
> strangeness of the stopwatch and notetaking, Slothrop himself--as far as we
> are told--doesn't have a thought in the world about any of it?  The
> paragraph is 90 percent about what S would NOT be able to fathom about Sir
> Stephen, even if he were to try.
>
> P
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>> Behalf Of Mike Jing
>> Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 9:28 AM
>> To: Pynchon Mailing List
>> Subject: GR translation: For all Slothrop knows he's an agronomist
>>
>> P214.8-21  During the lessons he will often look over and catch Sir
>> Stephen Dodson-Truck consulting a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers.
>> He wonders what that's all about. Never occurs to him it might have to
>> do with these mysterious erections. The man's personality was chosen-
>> or designed-to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather
> speed.
>> Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs
>> out of press, wet and sandy because he's up every morning at six to
>> walk along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his
>> disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop
>> knows he's an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist-in that
>> London you saw all levels of command seething with these
>> multidimensional geniuses. But as with Katje, there hangs about
>> Dodson-Truck's well-informed zeal an unmistakable aura of the employee and
> loser. . . .
>> The part: "For all Slothrop knows he's an agronomist, a brain surgeon,
>> a concert oboist", this is just speculation, Slothrop does not know it
>> as a fact, is that correct?
>>
>> I am fairly certain the published translation is wrong again, but I
>> just want to be absolutely sure.
>>
>>
>
>