Fwd: Re: GR translation: coffee mess

[Paul Mackin]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: GR translation: coffee mess
Date: Tue, 08 May 2012 11:24:08 -0400
From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: mackin.paul at verizon.net

thanks Alice--coffee mess seems to be officially defined by the United
States Navy

> http://www.brooksidepress.org/Products/OperationalMedicine/DATA/operationalmed/Manuals/food/manual/section6/1-50.htm



On 5/7/2012 9:35 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> I agree with Paul, the coffee mess is in the White Visitation, and
> specifically, the place where the Psi Section freaks meet to eat,
> drink coffeee, and talk about the job and the workers. In the excerpt
> provided the coffee mess is a paranoid flash in the imagination of the
> character, Roger, whose paranoid and rambling thoughts, driven by his
> exhaustion, his obsessions, his isolation but also his lack of
> privacy...while still in the latrine, flash to the office and at the
> coffee mess he sees, ironically, after he consciously decides not to
> use the mirror to see what the men are up to over his shoulder....then
> his mind skips to Controlling-Agency and the paranoid Roger would be
> he and he Roger. Roger is losing his mind. Now that's a glance at an
> office mess of another kind. All these men, what a mess. The
> preposition makes me question this reading, however, because if the
> coffeee mess is a place to congrate, talk shop, gossip, and scheme,
> one wold glance in or into the mess and not at it. So a pun? An
> ambiguity? Deliberate? The passage is, in poetic terms, compressed,
> and compression is one of the chief causes of ambiguity, the kind that
> I.A. Richards applauds as resourcefullness of language or what Empson
> may have called plurisignation(?). Young Tom seems dipped in LSD here
> or in James Joyce perhaos.
>
>
>> P127.2-10   . . . oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed
>> in his brain, and here it is. What if they are all, all these Psi
>> Section freaks here, ganged up on him in secret? O.K.? Yes: suppose
>> they can see into your mind! a-and how about—what if it’s hypnotism?
>> Eh? Jesus: then a whole number of other occult things such as: astral
>> projection, brain control (nothing occult about that), secret curses
>> for impotence, boils, madness, yaaahhh—potions! (as he straightens at
>> last and back in his mind’s eyes to his office now glances, very
>> gingerly, at the coffee mess, oh God . . . ), ...
>>
>> What is "the coffee mess"?  Specifically, what is the meaning of
>> "mess" here?  Does he make coffee in his office using the water boiled
>> in the Erlenmeyer flask mentioned earlier?  Does he make a mess of it?
>>   Or is it something else?
>