Outtakes from Against the Day

[Mark Kohut]

I also offer my believed-by-few stretccchhh of a gloss ( on top of yours as TRP layers and progressively knots) 

A few writing about photography have criticized it ( humanly and culturally) for stopping that time
Of which we speak. Many say that since time is our human medium, a deep theme of TRP's I suggest, we should just live in it NOT try to stop it. That that kills. Walter Benjamin maybe, Heidegger for all I know, others have stated something like that. I got it from Ms Sontag on photography, wherein she also--or again, someone---Remarked on how we " shoot" pictures, etc.....

I suggest TRP gives us here another brilliant compacted metaphor ( how many types of ambiguity? )with the photo of an explosion to happen around two faces and then a killer shot of two killers, whose eyes maybe look odd as they are caught in stopped time as, forever, in essence, killers soon dead as the photo makes them. 

Look at some of Sander's photos. He caught them as if rigor mortis had just begun. Portraits were like that then. He chose his subjects and shot them the best. 
Sent from my iPad

On Apr 27, 2014, at 3:24 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. 
> 
> 
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> 
> 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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