GR translation: coffee mess

[Keith Davis]

I thought it was my kitchen counter?

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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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