GR translation: There passes for Pirate and Katje a brief segment of a much longer chronicle

[Monte Davis]

Not a joke so much as an attitude of scorn. Pirate addresses the Firm's
ubiquitous agents; this catalog of one-to-one, literal, sexual "Loving The
People" is implicitly contrasted with with their endless, empty claims to
be Doing This For the People. But of course both he and Katje have served
the Firm, and can never be 100% sure they aren't still serving it -- so
this stance isn't quite convincing. They don't get to twirl light-footed
away from what they've been and done.

Cf. "the Rocket's own branch office in London" (251),  "PISCES' new branch
office in London (274)," and "the Man has a branch office in each of our
brains" (712)... possibly the HQ-and-branches parable of the nerve cells
(147-149)... maybe even the "branching" of the Sephiroth (753)?

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 9:38 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks, Monte.
>
> And immediately afterwards:
>
> V547.38-40  “Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches,” Pirate
> wants to strike a humorous note, but doesn’t. He is holding Katje now as
> if, in a moment, music will start, and they would dance.
>
> What joke is Pirate trying to make but falls flat?
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The denotation is "occurs" or "is seen by, " with a connotation of
>> passivity as if they were watching a movie (a 'March of Time' newsreel?), a
>> parade going by, or one of those 19th-century panorama paintings on long
>> canvases that scrolled between big rollers.
>>
>> That last genre, BTW, is brilliantly discussed by Justin St. Clair in an
>> essay in _AtD: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide_. Starting with the quasi-3D
>> "wraparound" panorama at the Museum der Monstrositaten, and noting that
>> several big scrolling panoramas were featured at the 1893 Chicago
>> exposition, he argues that "reading the novel 'panoramically' offers us
>> a new, wide-ranging model for understanding Pynchon’s method of
>> characterization throughout his oeuvre while also neatly synthesizing his
>> interests in immersive technologies, in drug-induced hallucinations and in
>> the remediation of outdated media forms." I thought St. Clair was on a
>> fruitful track when I read it, and was sold when I saw how well it works
>> for Bleeding Edge,
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 1:29 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> V547.6-37 “There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I’d been
>>> most of the day looking for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you all in
>>> here.” So they have wandered to a balcony, a graceful railing, no one can
>>> see them from inside or out: and below them in the streets, streets they
>>> have both lost now, are the People. There passes for Pirate and Katje a
>>> brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous How I Came to Love
>>> the People. “Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird under the
>>> protecting grin of the car in the rain that morning, she knelt and
>>> performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated on her breasts. . . . . . . Her
>>> name was—” well, all these and many more pass for our young couple here,
>>> enough to make them understand that horny Anonymous’s intentions are
>>> nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every
>>> individual one of the People in the World—and that when every one, somewhat
>>> miraculously, is accounted for at last, that will be a rough definition of
>>> “loving the People.”
>>>
>>> What is the meaning of the word "pass" in "There passes for Pirate and
>>> Katje a brief segment of . . . " and "well, all these and many more pass
>>> for our young couple here"?
>>>
>>
>>
>
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