Low-Lands, M&D, AtD; middles

[Mark Kohut]

This could lead to a speculation---and vote by we all?---on how he writes. I.E. pretty much all planned out, outlined
like complex sentence diagramming?
 
Or not. 
 
I vote for the longer sentence as answer. 
 
 

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, July 6, 2013 3:16 PM
Subject: Re: Low-Lands, M&D, AtD; middles



Fascinating. 
Must be that engineering-trained mind, internally balancing naturally --if not planned. 
 

From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Saturday, July 6, 2013 1:36 PM
Subject: Low-Lands, M&D, AtD; middles



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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