M & D from Joseph's post

[Joseph Tracy]

Yes but the bible is itself a dry wind for a great many as any book will be, any literalism, any absolutism claiming to be contained in dry pages or a chosen few, especially when it is a message blown over the flames of hell. 
On Feb 13, 2015, at 11:47 AM, alice malice wrote:

> 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

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