BtZ42, p.17: sandbagged

[David Morris]

I've been watching you all try to make a big deal about the sandbag
pyramids, and keeping silent, not wanting to be the killjoy.  But Monte now
invites me to say this quicky metaphor isn't a deep one.  It is a funny
toss-off.  There are many deep metaphors in GR, but many are just pain fun,
like this one.  Watching you all belabor it prove Vidal half-right.

David Morris

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 2:21 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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