Coffee in TRP

[Lemuel Underwing]

I've been thinking a lot about this lately too... Is it just more of that
white Noise P. is famous for obscuring the darker interests with?

Coffee and Food especially have interestingly prominent places in M&D,
where P. describes the pastry of the coffee-house, the Christmastide Meal
at the LeSpark residence and on the Line, Dixon's Perpetual Motion Watch is
eventually morphed into a Vegetable in the perceptions of R.C. who eats it,
the Munchies Mrs. Washington prescribes for her Stoned husband, and of
course Vaucanson's Duck (?)...
it would seem that the Gastronomic has a peculiar place in Pynchon's
foreground...


On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I still get self-struck with TRP finding this real thing trope within
> Western History and
> using it so subtlely in his resonant "ambiguous" way.
> This week was Coffee Week or something close and the media did features
> and history.
> Evidently Jerry Seinfeld said on NPR (about it): "We all need something to
> get us started."
> Is the increased speeding up coffeee gives us another early example of
> incipient modernity in TRP's vision?
> Is it a symbolic trope for moving Western Culture to the coffeehouse, i.e.
> street?
>
> And I found this. In a book about finding meaning in a secular age called
> All Things Shining (I think),
> the authors devote four pages to coffee as THE SECULAR ritual of a secular
> age:
>
> "They argue for the calmer joys of craftsmanship. They take us through
> five pages on the sacred craft of the wheelwright and then through four
> pages of the “revered domain” of making the proper cup of coffee—the sacred
> beans, the sacred cup lovingly tended, the company worthy to share this
> holy communion. The liturgy takes patient experiment and rapt devotion:
>
> If it is the warmth of the coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then
> drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by a fire with a
> blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might well help
> to bring out the best in this ritual. If it is the striking black color of
> the coffee that attracts your eye and enhances the aroma, then perhaps a
> cup with a shiny white ceramic interior will bring this out. But there is
> no single answer to the question of what makes the ritual appealing, and it
> takes experimentation and observation, with its risks and rewards, to
> discover the meaningful distinctions yourself.
>
>  This experimentation with and observation of the coffee ultimately
> develops in you the skill for seeing the relevant features of the ritual
> and ultimately develops the skills for bringing them out at their best.
> These skills are manifold: the skill for knowing how to pick exactly the
> right coffee, exactly the right cup, exactly the right place to drink it,
> and to cultivate exactly the right companions to drink it with. When one
> has learned these skills and cultivated one’s environment so that it is
> precisely suited to them, then one has a ritual rather than a routine, a
> meaningful celebration of oneself and of one’s environment rather than a
> generic and meaningless performance of a function. "
>
> The reviewer, Garry Wills in the NYR of Books cannot take this, nor the
> book therefore, seriously.
>
>
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