GR translation: coffee mess

[Mark Kohut]

In the wake of Laura's terrif example of a triple pun, I suggest from Google book stuff 
we found that 'coffee messs' may be too. Very tough to translate. 

From: Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
To: Pynchon Mailing List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:40 AM
Subject: Re: Re: GR translation: coffee mess

Oh, a definitive definition.  Thanks, Paul.

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
> -------- 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?
>>
>>
>
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