GR translation: demolition man

[Paul Mackin]

On 11/10/2012 3:51 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> PM >some generalized feature to the writing that makes it 
> unspecifically insinuating
>
> Mos def. And surely another aspect of the gift/skill that informs his 
> Baedeker-magpie technique, the one he cops to in Slow Learner. HE 
> knows how little he really knows about late-19th-century Alexandria, 
> mid-18^th -century Capetown, and so forth… but damned if the details 
> he selects don’t make those settings real while the magic lantern is 
> lit. As I’ve noted here before, my father – a Marine in London and 
> Londonderry in 1943-44 – was not a Pynchon fan in general, but was 
> blown away by the UK mise en scene, pop-culture details and military 
> slang in GR. He found it amazing that they’d been assembled by someone 
> who’d been a 7-year-old on Long Island at the time.
>
> Likewise, Pynchon can make a Savarin/Severin near-homonym here, a 
> Pudding of shit and mud there, add up to more than the sum of the 
> parts. What’s paranoia if not the ability to get infinity, or at any 
> rate far too much, from any such sum? LOTS of things go screaming 
> across the sky, but only Pynchon figured out what it would do to me to 
> juxtapose the V-2 and Woden’s Hunt 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_hunt>.
>
> John Darnielle’s (The Mountain  Goats) lyric for “The Autopsy Garland” 
> begins:
>
> One clear shot or else he gets away
> Red sun high in the sky tonight
> Look west from London down to old Hollywood
> Remember the first days in California
>
> (refrain)
>
> You don't wanna see these guys without their masks on
> You don't wanna see these guys without their masks on…
>
> That refrain is a choice example of “unspecific insinuation.” Is it 
> the crime-fiction trope that if criminals let you see their faces, 
> they don’t intend to let you live? Is there something intrinsically 
> awful behind the masks? Or are they perhaps god-masks in the 
> amphitheater, with banal human faces behind them? Darnielle isn’t 
> telling, any more than Pynchon would. I recently ran across the line 
> used as epigraph for /Buried on Avenue B/, a crime novel by Peter de 
> Jong, and all by itself it occasioned more of a shiver than anything 
> that followed.
>

Good examples, Monte.

P

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