Low-Lands, M&D, AtD; middles

[jochen stremmel]

You are right, Monte, that is beautiful, nearly too beautiful (and I am a
fool for beauty). Can the double ripple be coincidence? What does a word
count hint at?

I'm in France at the moment, without any Pynchon, but I know that the cover
of the first German edition of V. was designed by one of the best of his
time, Hannes Jähn. And that at least the right match was spent.


2013/7/6 Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>

> Long long ago in Pynchon Notes 7, Thomas Schaub spotted an intriguing
> symmetry in “Low-Lands: “…the two halves of the story mirror one another as
> the story slips through the neck of time into its own (and Flange’s)
> Doppelganger… The dump is at once the zero point of the story’s geography
> and the dead center of the story, coming exactly midway in its 22-plus
> pages…”****
>
> ** **
>
> During the ATDATD, in discussing the book’s many mirrors and doublings,
> Robin Landseadel noted this passage at the text-page-count center of the
> hardcover,  just below the midpoint of p. 542 in the hardcover. ****
>
> ** **
>
> Next evening Kit, having against his better judgment accompanied Pléiade
> to her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some point in the
> deep malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a moment
> before, it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised
> against the uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne
> to produce a strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible passage of time,
> the rooms were resonant with absence. Next to the cheval-glass, Kit noticed
> a pale dressing-gown, of all-but-insubstantial chiffon, not draped over a
> chair but *standing erect*,* *now and then rippling from otherwise
> unsensed passages of air, as if someone were inside of it, perhaps stirred
> by invisible forces less nameable, its movements, disquietingly, not always
> matched by those of its tall image in the mirror.****
>
> ** **
>
> Recently I noticed the following at the text-page-count center of Mason &
> Dixon, halfway down p. 387, Mitzi Redzinger visiting Dimdown in his room:*
> ***
>
> ** **
>
> The Goose. She is untying her Cap, then taking it slowly off, unbinding
> and shaking out her Hair. She is making it ripple for him. She is getting
> it to catch the winter Light thro’ the Window. She is so flabbergasting
> this Macaroni with it that he seems to fall into a contemplative Daze
> before the deep Undulations, a Dreamer at the Edge of the Sea. Outdoors,
> the Snow is upon the Glide yet again, and soon ’twill be Night.****
>
> ** **
>
> I don’t find anything like this at the dead center of V. or GR or Vineland
> or IV, but even if it’s only coincidence between ATD and M&D it’s a beaut.
> I’m also reminded, irrelevantly, of the cover for the 1964 Bantam paperback
> of V, the first Pynchon book I ever saw: the title as a giant stone carving
> on a vanishing-point di Chirico plain, dark clouds overhead, with a
> Botticelli-Venus woman in the foreground, her hair and her blue gown
> rippling in the wind.****
>
> ** **
>
> http://www.thomaspynchon.com/covers/v_cvr.html****
>
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