BE: echoes in coastal waters

[alice wellintown]

Right. I get it. So you think P has fucked up or what? Is it just a little
joke? Titilating allusion don't you think?

Btw, in Trans-Atlantic, a novel I like ver much, though I dislike Douglass,
we hear run river run...and all manner of allusive stuff that springs up
from a choppy hoppy prose style. He is best on the Irish, on words and
meanings, weak when he has the lass in Manhattan.


On Thursday, August 22, 2013, wrote:

> The point is that the Passaic, under the best circumstance, would not
> provoke awe and wonder.  There are reasons it's not known as the Mighty
> Passaic.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com <javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'alicewellintown at gmail.com');>>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'pynchon-l at waste.org');>>
> Sent: Thu, Aug 22, 2013 7:38 am
> Subject: Re: BE: echoes in coastal waters
>
>  Seems to be the point, that it is almost impossible for us to imagine the
> Passaic as it once appeared to those first Europeans, just as it was nearly
> impossible for Carraway / Fitzgerald to imagine the LI Sound as it appeared
> to the early explorers. The Passaic was much wider, it's forests thick, and
> so on. See _History of the Passaic and its Environs_ Vol. 1
> William Winfield Scott. For a look at The Sound, see _A Fine piece of
> water, Andersen.
>
>  So what has happened to our capacity to wonder as the natural beauty of
> he Earth has been deminished?
>
>  Also see
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler_Antabanez
>
>
> On Wednesday, August 21, 2013, wrote:
>
>> As one who grew up in a town on the mighty river's bank, I can say he
>> certainly has the correct example of water polluted by industry.  But I
>> can't imagine anyone at any time feeling on the edge of possibilities
>> sailing up the Passaic River.  Now the Hackensack ...
>>
>> “and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free—at least at the edge of
>> possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic
>> River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and
>> corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and
>> unmourned acts of waste.”
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Wed, Aug 21, 2013 5:19 am
>> Subject: BE: echoes in coastal waters
>>
>>   We’ve so often quoted (and recognized in TRP) this from Fitzgerald:
>>
>> “…gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for
>> Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished
>> trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in
>> whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory
>> enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this
>> continent…”
>>
>> It’s dawn, and Maxine and companions are in a boat on the Arthur Kill
>> near Isle of Meadows, a huge NYC landfill site:
>>
>> “and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free—at least at the edge of
>> possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic
>> River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and
>> corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and
>> unmourned acts of waste.”
>>
>>
>
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