GR translation: demolition man

[Markekohut]

Some fine glossing and riffing on GR going down. feels like a verbal jam session. I'm staying until last call. 

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 11, 2012, at 3:01 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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-18th-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.
>>  
>> 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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