Don't put the bananas in the camera bag

[Smoke Teff]

I think that's really well said, Ish. You do sort of get the feeling that anywhere in Pynchon could be/is sacred/profane space, with equally resonant threshold totemry. We get lots of interpersonal and even inter...locationary membranes in BtZ. Everywhere. Membranes/thresholds of all kinds. 

I don't suggest it's directly relevant, but your reading made me think of the skulls in Heart of Darkness (trace the bone/sand parallels if you want). Pasting someone else's transcription:

Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber

> On Apr 3, 2016, at 3:11 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Bloat has the magic bananas in his kangaroo pouch, but he doesn't
> understand the magic. His use of them, to soften the blow (G-load) to
> his camera and to snuff out the sound that might expose him is
> countered by the amazing power of the fruit. He fears the aroma will
> hang in the cubicle and he thinks to counter it with a fag.
> 
> Not sure, but I suspect that the building, not on any guidebook, the
> Germans, Japanese tourists might consult, is a Pynchon profane/sacred
> space. So the pyramids seem a threshold (Eliade) and Teddy Bloat
> unaware of the struggle within. At the Chemical level the bananas are
> allied with Slothrop and girls; the make love not war idea (Hite,
> Counterculture, subversive fun, Marcuse) and the fag and its smoke are
> allied with the men and their aura.
> 
> In August 1945, shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Kodak
> Company observed spottingand fogging on their film, which was at that
> time usually packaged in cardboard containers. Dr. J. H. Webb, a Kodak
> employee, studied the matter and concluded that the contamination must
> have come from a nuclear explosion somewhere in the United States. He
> discounted the possibility that the Hiroshima bomb was responsible due
> to the timing of the events. A hot spot of fallout contaminated the
> river water that the paper mill in Indiana used to manufacture the
> cardboard pulp from corn husks. Aware of the gravity of his discovery,
> Dr. Webb kept this secret until 1949.
> 
> This incident along with the next continental US tests in 1951 set a
> precedent. In subsequent atmospheric nuclear tests at the Nevada test
> site, United States Atomic Energy Commission officials gave the
> photographic industry maps and forecasts of potential contamination,
> as well as expected fallout distributions, which enabled them to
> purchase uncontaminated materials and take other protective measures.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)
> 
> A banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal expression of ionizing
> radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to
> indicate the potential dose due to naturally occurring radioactive
> isotopes by eating one average-sized banana.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
> 
> Tobacco and its smoke contain lead-210(210Pb) and polonium-210
> (210Po), radioactive carcinogens.
> 
> http://imgur.com/gallery/wegKg
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