M & D from Joseph's post

[alice malice]

Why are the pages dry? Because the book is dry reading? It is not
sensual but puritanical. Hardly. This is the common kick at the Bible
by those who've obviously never read it.

Because the holy book, all holy books, sacred texts, European, Asian
...indeed all the books they have there, will dry from the winds and
the heat, so they must be cared for, as the skin, but the book is
neglected and dries while the skin is oiled against the parching
clime.

So why does the narrator put the emphasis on the Bible's dry leaves?
Contrast them with the oiled skin? If the narrator here is the Rev,
then we should look to the audience he is addressing. There is, at the
chapter's conclusion, a joak, or more than a joke, a derisive quip on
Christ and his Death and Resurrection, connecting these events with
all the blood that floods time in His wake. The pornographic episodes
and the moralizing, the sermonizing, the tale of bad girls and the
parents who compete with them, these may be targeted at the young in
the room, the Uncle, the cousins, and who can know how they may be
inspired by them. Some may be repulsed, others aroused, erotically,
others politically...

An old Pynchon theme, the books that young people read, are influenced
by, from "The Secret Integration" to _Against the Day_, and how the
imagination is free, is entirely free to reject the intended moral or
immoral lesson, to find Grace and take flight, even from the parched
papers of the Bible.

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> "One metaphor of this juxtaposition that I found telling was the girls
> oiling Joanna's skin so that it won't be as the dry pages of the
> Bible."
>
> I also saw this as a metaphor for the sensual, the paganish embrace of
> the body vs. the way the Bible has created repression from its pages.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l