GR translation: and faces of great administrators engraved and run off to signify

[Monte Davis]

Chambers' Universal Learners Dictionary : Run off 1 vt sep, to print: I want
500 copies run off at once

 

>From a technology PoV, the addicts' Need has remarkable function as well as
physical properties. Typically, you wouldn't use the same metal for coins
(which are stamped or "struck" in dies of harder metal) and for engraving
plates (from which paper currency is run off. And it's not just any coins,
but sovereigns. The drug feeds Wimpe's supply chain, and in the Opium Wars
was a prop of British empire (ruler=sovereign) as well as commerce.

 

US version, an old conceit of mine: we here are taught as schoolchildren
that the Massachusetts colonists (Plymouth Brethren, "pilgrims")  were
taught how to grow local crops by friendly Native Americans, and gathered
with them for the first Thanksgiving meal. For most of the first 200 years,
though, the tobacco-growing colonies farther south were more populous and
prosperous, arguably more "representative" of British America than New
England was. So my proposed Real Thanksgiving Archetype shows a Virginia
Tidewater planter and his family, and their prayer is:

 

"Dear Lord, thank you for an addictive crop and slaves to grow it."

 

Sadly, I could never get my children's public schools to revise their
holiday pageant accordingly. 

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mike Jing
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 12:45 AM
To: Pynchon Mailing List
Subject: GR translation: and faces of great administrators engraved and run
off to signify

 

P351.30-352.6   Chu Piang being a monument to all this, nowadays whole
tourist caravans come through to look at him, usually while he's Under The
Influence . . . "Here ladies and gentlemen, as you may have observed, the
characteristic sooty-gray complexion. . . ." They all stand peering into his
dreamstruck facies, attentive men with mutton-chop sideburns, holding
pearl-gray morning hats in their hands, the women lifting their skirts away
from where horrid Asian critters are seething microscopically across the old
floorboards, while their tour leader indicates items of interest with his
metal pointer, an instrument remarkably thin, thinner than a rapier in fact,
often flashing along much faster than eyes can really follow-"His Need, you
will notice, retains its shape under all manner of stresses. No bodily
illness, no scarcity of supply seems to affect it a whit . . ." all their
mild, their shallow eyes following gently as piano chords from a suburban
parlor . . . the inelastic Need turns luminous this stagnant air: it is an
ingot beyond price, from which sovereigns yet may be struck, and faces of
great administrators engraved and run off to signify.

What is the meaning of "run off" here?

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