BtZ42, p.17: sandbagged

[Monte Davis]

It shouldn't be forgotten that Vidal was producing his own brilliant big
linked novels of deeply satiric "historical fiction," covering long
stretches of American and global history and embodying his own critique of
modernity and post-. So there's that.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:21 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> As Ish recalls and I had forgotten, Gore Vidal flagged these in his
> infamously brilliant "American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction" (NYRB 15 Jul
> 1974, collected in his _Matters of Fact and of Fiction_:
>
> "England. Germany. Past. Present. War. Science. Telltale images of
> approaching . . . deity? Two characters with hangovers 'are wasted gods
> urging on a tardy glacier.' Of sandbags at a door, 'provisional pyramids
> erected to gratify curious gods' offspring.' And 'slicks of nighttime
> vomit, pale yellow, clear as the fluids of gods.'[p. 50] "
>
> This appears in a context in which Vidal elegantly trashed and
> condescended to Barthelme, Paley, Gass, Barth, and Pynchon , as well as
> Roland Barthes, the "New Novel" of Robbe-Grillet et al, and everything
> beloved by professors as post-modern and redolent of Theory. "I suspect
> that the energy expended in reading Gravity's Rainbow is, for anyone,
> rather greater than that expended by Pynchon in the actual writing. This is
> entropy with a vengeance. The writer's text is ablaze with the heat/energy
> that his readers have lost to him. Yet the result of this exchange is
> neither a readerly nor a writerly text but an uneasy combination of both.
> Energy and intelligence are not in balance, and the writer fails in his
> ambition to be a god of creation."
>
> The implication was that these one-liners about "gods" are eye-catching
> but tossed-off; that they're trying to be portentous in the good sense but
> achieve only the bad; that they neither tell us enough in themselves nor
> connect widely andimportantly enough to pay their way.
>
> I asked about the "pyramids" passage because I'm a fanboy and inclined to
> give P. the benefit of the doubt (I'm here, after all). But Vidal's jibes
> were rarely stupid, and his doubts almost always worth taking seriously.
>
> So keep digging...
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>>
>>
>>
>
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