BtZ42, Vp.41 (the real thing)

[Monte Davis]

I added a note to the wiki: during the 1940-41 Blitz, towns under the
German bombers' southern and eastern approaches to London were evacuated
because when RAF fighters attacked, the bombers would sometimes dump their
payloads at once, on any target handy, to gain speed and maneuverability.

That rationale didn't apply 3+ years later for the V-weapons, but I assume
PR and bureaucratic inertia and caution played a part.

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 3:29 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Good question. I assumed the “more” was about risk to personal safety,
> that the town is evacuated because it is a target, and/or  damaged and
> without the safeguards of a well maintained infrastructure: gas, water,
> police???
>
> > On Apr 24, 2016, at 10:02 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > [Please excuse the previous version, sent prematurely]
> >
> > Roger & Jessica's life in the evacuated town "is marginal, hungry,
> chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire— but it’s something
> they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than
> propaganda has ever asked them for."
> >
> > What propaganda "asks them for" is outlined a paragraph earlier: "it’s
> better to-gether, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki,
> steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a
> fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert
> love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death."
> >
> > Restated later, p. 177: "Damned Beaver/Jeremy *is* the War, he is every
> assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and
> government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams,
> the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found
> among the idle and mindless hours of the day . . "
> >
> > Question: what exactly is the "more" that R&J will take on to keep what
> they have? What do they do to themselves that is somehow *like* and
> *beyond* what the collective psychosis of "total war" is demanding?
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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