Outtakes from Against the Day

[Monte Davis]

I was thinking primarily of the thematic axis of light and time, the book's
most central and sustained. (Heck, I bet you could even find it in the
title!) Pynchon has been reminding us since Merle's introduction to
photography that as the century turned the process of capturing images was
getting rapidly faster and less cumbersome than it had been for Daguerre,
Matthew Brady, Brady & co: e.g. the advent of the Kodak "Brownie" on p. 72
and the use of the then-new term "snapshot" (e.g. 277). That difference
made a difference in the magic of "stopping time": here he notes explicitly
that the subjects eyes' would once have looked odd because of an exposure
of some minutes, but now because of... something else.

In the first photo, the drovers are making a joke of something that's
deadly earnest for Webb and the anarchists. (Lew's recreational consumption
of Cyclomite is a joke at another angle). In the second, I suspect, Deuce
and Sloat are frozen on their way out of history: the former to hell on
earth with Lake, the latter to Frank's bullet.





On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> As Markie on the plist is always sayin' , the book contains everything.
>
> Now, rereading this post, why do we think TRP wrote of/juxtaposed these
> two pictures ?
>
> One of eating fireworks,and, a "little clearer", the two " killers" caught
> as rigid as in an August Sander photo of two burghers.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Apr 27, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/04/the-view-from-a-pinhole.html#slide_ss_0=1
>
> p. 300, one of many quiet Big Bangs knotting explosions,light and time:
>
> From a drawer in a cabinet against the wall, Merle took more gelatin-silver
> prints. “Maybe these’ll be some help.” One showed a pair of what looked
> like drovers in town for the Fourth of July, one of them appearing to
> force the other to eat a giant firecracker, all lit and throwing bright sparks,
> flying, dying, filling the unmeasurable fragment of time the shutter was
> open, to the amusement of others in the background looking on from the
> porch of a saloon.
>
> “You’re not telling me—”
>
> “Here, this one’s a little clearer.”
>
> It was out in front of this exact same amalgamator’s office. This time
> Deuce and Sloat were not smiling, and the light was more proper to autumn,
> you could see dark clouds in the sky overhead, and nothing was casting
> shadows. The two men were posed as if for some ceremonial purpose. For the
> gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and you’d expect one at least
> to have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had stood rigid, almost
> defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of light, to record
> the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front of some slow
> emulsion of an earlier day, eyes, Frank, bending close, noticed now,
> rendered with that same curious crazed radiance which once was an artifact
> of having to blink a couple of hundred times during the exposure, but in
> this more modern form due to something authentically ghostly, for which
> these emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up
> till then could’ve.
>
>
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