BtZ42, p.17: sandbagged

Mon Apr 4 15:13:39 CDT 2016

works for me

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 4:10 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's really just a joke.  Sandbags are for physical protection.
> Protection is often requested by men of the gods.  These look like
> pyramids, ergo might they be works invoking the god's protection?
>
> Explaining jokes usually ruins them...
>
> David Morris
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I did write above that the sandbags are just 'sandbags' calling them only
>> geometric shapes and I think, matching
>> your judgment David? Amirite?
>>
>> and I now see 'gods',  as I wrote, as simply human beings, all mythic
>> connections gone, gone in the war. I think
>> Vidal fell into an analogous self-created trap if he, small 'gods',
>> thought them failed Portentous.
>>
>> When he sums up GR as a kindergartner's efforts vs a real artist's, well,
>> I have made my judgment and for this book it extends to all these kinds of
>> novels
>> which he never got in my opinion.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 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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