Free? What's free?

[Doc Sportello]

Right on thanks. Folks are not wrong about this book, it's excellent, glad
I'm finally getting around to reading it.
On May 27, 2014 3:15 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good reading, good questions. Yes, you are intended to be in doubt:
>
> 1: whether Slothrop has really escaped the control of the White Visitation
> group, or pinballed on to the next phase of their plan
> 2: WTF "free" even means, given all he's learned at the Casino about his
> own past and its intertwining with the agendas of the Zone.
>
> That moment in the Rue Rossini is the starting point of Herman &
> Weisenburger's excellent _GR, Domination, and Freedom_, and that question
> its epigraph. As you keep the moment in mind, keep also that moment three
> pages earlier:
>
> "Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to
> Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the
> sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the
> first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction
> at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till
> now."
>
> Maybe that's just a glimmer of Jiminy Cricket optimism, dopey Tyrone
> setting himself up for another pratfall. Maybe.
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Doc Sportello <coolwithdoc at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> "It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade,
>> that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn't have
>> to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before
>> noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the
>> papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling."
>>
>> Plot question (I know right?). Am I supposed to assume Waxwing etc. are
>> with PISCES etc. or in opposition? Or am I supposed to be confused as I am?
>>
>> Side note. That paragraph reminded me a lot of Bleeding Edge especially
>> when I read this on the next page:
>>
>> "The War has been reconfiguring time and space into it's own image. The
>> track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is
>> really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can
>> only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges
>> of..."
>>
>> On one hand Slothrop is free from "The White Visitation" but is now
>> vulnerable to some other, greater, might-as-well-be cosmic threat. His
>> freedom is a paradox since it seems to tend him toward another structuring.
>> The War, like the Internet, is not just destruction and chaos, it's being
>> kneaded, potentially to create whatever They want. Indeed "What is free?"
>>
>
>
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