BtZ42. "I'm cold, I'm cold"---the first Snowden. Catch-22 in Pynchon.

[Mark Kohut]

p.23-24....Someone who was not responded to (yet) spoke of how these pages,
this section, reminded of Catch --22. I want to repeat that loud to
all--hoping for more comments--since maybe that book has been more read by
a lot of Plisters than some of the other books we think Pynchon has been
inspired by and used in his sea-changed way.

 I had read *Catch--22* three times before I ever first finished GR, a
wonderfully funny meaningful 'message' novel for me and many others of my
time. So, yes, Snowden's "I'm cold, I'm cold" was a takeaway I could not
forget from *CATCH-22 *and immediately felt the echoes of here.....Slothrop
"has given himself up to shivering"...'It's cold in here, but not that
cold"--sez Tantivy.

Cold = death in *Catch--22* and goes way back as a symbol for evil and bad
shit and death. Even in hell in Divine Comedy, Satan is frozen in ice,
right Monte?

Slothrop is feeling it but he isn't dying. But the rockets are bringing
death. His shivering comes after a paragraph about warmth, warmth in human
connection (as theme once again).---- 'a block of glass sunlight'. The
rockets bring death where he was warm.


PS. During a *V.* read in the way back, some of us or maybe just me,
thought he was reading a few allusions to *Catch-22 *even in that book,
which was not published complete----parts of it appeared very hyped in lit
mags, original title *Catch--18--*until *V.* would have been finished

BUT, P's agent was also Heller's and I'd give good odds that P got to read
*Catch--22 *
in manuscript. Whether that is true, GR shows he read it---and gave it a
hat tip. Nice.
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