BtZ42: p. 27-30

Fri Apr 8 16:43:56 CDT 2016

Hey All Plisters---

Here is all the kinds of GR textual detail and observation and ideas we
hoped to tackle--and are, so far---on this Group Read. Don't flag; don't
let all of this stuff become we three or two going-back-and-forth please.
Three evenings and a weekend coming up.

It is too much for me to handle alone and I hope, despite the addressees,
this opens up a lot of rivulets (of texts, of notions) others might want to
comment on, as those who have added the full Dickinson poems have piled on
helpfully in the simple fleshing out of some depths.

Later for me, miles to post before I retort, as Robert Frost is always
saying, sorta.

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian
> tradition in GR
>
> I don't disagree with that  -- certainly not with the linkage of "that
> stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds" (27 Viking/Penguin), "the
> great bright hand" (29) and Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam". Pynchon will
> certainly be getting around to  (and more) on his way to "There is a Hand
> to turn the time" on p. 760.
>
> But single up the lines and heave again, draw them tighter. How does the
> book *get* from a GI out of the Berkshires to "the Western Christian
> tradition"? What's the technique of blasphemy and subversion, taking the
> first V-2 hammercrack as a starting point?
>
> Within three lines, "God... God... revealed in the sky... a *hardon*". Is
> Tyrone shocked? Is the narrator shocked? Are we shocked? Bananas, rockets,
> now penises...where's he going with this?
>
> The imagery Laura celebrates goes straight for the specifically American
> jugular, via the Pilgrim-Thanksgiving-"city on a hill" fetish. These
> pages hit every Calvinist -> Puritan -> Congregationalist ->
> transcendentalist mark all the way down the Slothrop slide:
>
> Nine or ten generations of ancestors "in a long gradient of rot," their
> molecules assimilated like Osbie Feel's alkaloids (wherever their souls
> might have flown)
>
> Gravestone poetry dwindling from "straight-on and foursquare" to "sarcasm
> and guile"
>
> "shit, money, and the Word" -- profane, secular and sacred in jolting
> juxtaposition. rather than decently segregated
>
> Instead of prosperity as proof of Protestant grace, the Slothrops'
> "flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides," the Harrimans' and Whitneys'
> country retreats abandoned
>
> And maybe a hint, in the pairing of the northern lights with the skyglow
> and sparks of the Aspinwall Hotel fire, that with WWII coming up, we
> wouldn't have to depend on God (or Nature) for our light shows much longer
>
> By Tyrone's time, there wasn't much more than soothing nostalgia.  "White
> steeples" on "autumn hillsides"... "rose windows taking in Sunday light,
> elevating and washing the [ministers']' faces above the pulpits defining
> grace"... aaaah yes, we are a Godly people in a Norman Rockwell devotional
> image....
>
> So why are those white steeples turning into blasphemous, subversive
> banana-penis-*rockets*?
>
> When Ted Cruz slides from "Let us revitalize our shared faith and values"
> to "Let us make the sand glow" in ISIS territory, I remember why GR is
> still so amazingly alive.
>
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> p.27, that bright hand reaching out of the cloud has to remind of the
>> most famous hand reaching out of a cloud in art, right?
>> "The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become iconic
>> of humanity. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human>"
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam
>> Once again, I will narrow the annotation to one of my hobbyhorses--the
>> inversion of the Great Chain of Being here, as elsewhere.
>> The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian
>> tradition in GR. The relentless naturalism, humanism, of the vision,
>> (despite spiritual concerns up the kazoo (sic) all over the book) as one
>> strain of interpretation has it. Weisenburger points out that there is
>> heresy in Constant's epitaph since a Puritan knew that a death was owed to
>> God, not nature, another in-our-face piece of vision.[ p 27 "Death is a
>> debt to nature due, /Which I have paid, and so must you."]
>>
>> I also love the edges of the tombstone eroded by "season's fire and ice
>> chisels' associatively linking to me with
>> 'the impasto of the seasons' line and another compressedly-envisioned
>> embrace of nature and all its life as our life. Dear Reader, just wait
>> until I write Against the Day, you want fully-envisioned, Tom's thinking
>> here.
>>
>> p. 28, Miller edition: "Mark Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the
>> Sky,".....more and more allusions to what the rockets bring
>> in GR....and not the music of the spheres from Shakespeare's (and
>> earlier) time.
>>
>> Doncha just love the joke---Morris you love the jokes!---of Constant,
>> very wittily Puritanic even in heresy and of course, his son
>> Variable, another simple joke on heredity but also, maybe, a joke on the
>> descent of Puritanism, on the entropic decline--'the money seeping its way
>> out"--of the Slothrop family. 'Ruin is formal, devil's work,/Consecutive
>> and slow---[notice the em dash, reader and remember the book's end]/ Fail
>> in an instant no man did,/Slipping is crash's law,
>>
>> Such compression of prose, another of my current hobbyhorses during this
>> reading. Why it is a 700 page poem. The compressed history of the Slothrop
>> line is a kind of New England set Hawthorne- like story, The Decline and
>> Fall of the House of the Seven Gables, so to joke. A shortcut US version of
>> Buddenbrooks, so to so loosely speak. And I now see a kinship to
>> the Traverse family, sea-changed (as well as land-and-meaning changed)
>> from AtD. But I would and
>>
>> you all can reel me in.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:43 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Just pausing to savor this sequence (one of my many favorites):
>>>
>>> Starting from: "On the old schist of a tombstone …" to the end of the
>>> section (italicized in the book): this is how it does happen - yes the
>>> great bright hand reaching out of the cloud …
>>>
>>> There are so many Pynchon passages that send us scurrying to Google (or
>>> whatever the hell we used to do) an obscure reference. This one, though,
>>> sends the brain a-sparkling with associations - death from the sky - hand
>>> of God - V-2 rocket - differences, similarities - religion - terror -
>>> inevitability - resignation - quaint acceptance - death from the sky has
>>> always been with us, does it really matter what form it takes - take
>>> comfort from treating it as old family history … etc. etc. No Googling
>>> required!
>>>
>>> Laura
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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