BtZ42, p.17: sandbagged

[Mark Kohut]

If Monte hears even a faint echo, the karmic bet is to suppose there is a
connection. This is Pynchon after all, here at the beginning which he wrote
and musta rewritten and copyedited a few times so...........
any prose accidents at all? *Two uses of 'gods' within a few pages.
Everything connects--or not?*

So, to the "wasted gods": DeCoverly and Jacquin are hungover. Wasted.
..."wasted gods" which might be read straight with them as the gods. With
all "Gods/gods" missing from this Wasteland of War, these preterite human
wastes are gods. Hungover whole sick crew kind of gods. The ones left if
they survive.
 The strain of an Absent/Never Been God that flows in GR, the strain that
says that the Von Braun remark is ironic and more--almost viciously
satiric, as blurbs say; almost sarcastic as my grandson says, (as do those
critics who say sarcasm is one extreme end of irony),  I think we might
find as we keep reading.

With this reading, perhaps the pyramids are simply geometric shapes and
those who go into the sandbagged entrance might survive, have offspring.
Can this amateur say most 'gods' in anthropological, historical, history
are fertility gods? I can say it fer sure about the gods  of The Wasteland
as T.(ough) S. (shit) Eliot has said so. Literally fingering *From Ritual
to Romance *by Jessie [Yes, named Jessica after her dad's first wife ]
Weston.  The humans are curious about going in, even having offspring,
except that Bloat isn't. Not a tulip in a dead land is he.


PS Misc. The only other google book citation of 'wasted gods" refers to
"the wasted gods of Greece" in a poem by a poet unknown to me [Hay] in a
copy of the Strand Magazine from 1907. This line is two lines away from a
Christine Rossetti mention!, as this bomb shelter is near the Rossetti
place, it seems, but this does not seem a viable real allusion of Pynchon's
(except inevitably conceptual).




On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 9:58 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the way into ACHTUNG:
>
> "... a certain  desperate aura here. But Bloat, going in the sandbagged
> entrance (provisional pyramids erected to gratify curious gods’ offspring
> indeed), can’t feel a bit of it..."
>
>
>
> http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/men-resting-on-top-of-piles-of-sandbags-wwii-london-4-september-1939-picture-id102729664
>
>
> Help me out with that parenthetical description. "Provisional," sure --
> these aren't for the ages, just for the V-weapon Blitz 2.0. But what's
> Egyptian about it? Who are the curious (and is that 'peculiar' or
> 'inquisitive'?) gods... let alone their offspring? What desire is being
> gratified? And why that "indeed," as if this were reinforcement or
> confirmation of something stated or questioned earlier?
>
>
> I get an echo of p. 9, where the men crushing ice against the concrete
> Jungfrau were "wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier." But it's a faint
> echo, and doesn't help me understand this.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160404/876ddbc6/attachment.html>