BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

Fri Mar 25 21:33:31 CDT 2016

Already on 19, teddy Bloat thinks "Perhaps the girls are not even real."

270-271, Speed & perdue (the SEZ WHO team) can't verify stars, including
[whet we thought was] Mrs. Quoad's daughter Darlene... 272, “And what if
many—even if most—of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to
refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly
invalidate our approach"

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 7:28 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great post Monte.
> Where is the section, quite late in the book if I recall, where someone
> stumbles on Slothrop's map again and it's pretty explicitly stated that the
> markers don't (or don't all) refer to real encounters?
>
> And fair reading that the message is from Katje. Have there been other
> possibilities mooted? Seems a lot of plot and detail early in the novel for
> that loose end to remain so.
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 9:53 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> According to my trusty source, Wikipedia, Ontology is a branch of
>> metaphysics that often deals in Being and Becoming, Existence and Reality.
>>
>> AND
>>
>> In what may be said to Exist
>>
>> And
>>
>> In what may be said to be Real.
>>
>> According to smart critics like J Kerry Grant, P has made it his business
>> to call into question the expectations of readers, who are, conservative in
>> these expectations, and to question the epistemological expectations that
>> inform such expectations.
>>
>> Way back in 1987 when Brian McHale took a stab at Postmodernist Fiction,
>> he jumped into a giant cognitive soup of questions that he has since, with
>> Constructing Postmodernism (1992) and with several brilliant studies of
>> Pynchon and lots of others who write this kind of fiction, mastered.
>>
>> Who is to be master.
>>
>> Humpty or Pynchon.
>>
>> Don't say both/and please.
>>
>> Holding my nose for the deep dive into the book again and hoping I'm made
>> a fool of once more.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:43 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> You say: "rather than of Pirate taking part in an ongoing Osmotic
>>> fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context."
>>>
>>> My first inclination is to agree with that.
>>>
>>> Also re Gogol's Nose there is that line on 14: "not even an Arab With A
>>> Big Greasy Nose to perform on"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yes -- and I hadn't known until reading that Wikipedia entry that an
>>>> early version of The Nose did frame the story as Kovalyov's dream.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks to Mark Kohut for helping me think through the timeline and the
>>>> status of the Adenoid. GR has so many dreams, fantasies, and more or less
>>>> explicit hallucinations that the question "Did X 'really happen' or did
>>>> character Y imagine it?" doesn't carry the binary implications it does for
>>>> most fiction. Still, Pynchon puts so much into the fine shading and grading
>>>> among them that it seems worth tracing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b> Virus-free.
>>>> www.avast.com
>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b>
>>>> <#m_9018099678184381413_m_4229685569858493824_m_2943774785951760415_m_3705780438457579400_DDB4FAA8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>>>>> >
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Critics note that the story's title in Russian (Нос, "Nos") is the
>>>>> reverse of the Russian word for "dream" (Сон, "Son").
>>>>>
>>>>> > On Mar 25, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > After the banana breakfast, Pirate sets out for the V-2 impact site
>>>>> on p. 11, but won't get there and collect his mail until p. 20. In between,
>>>>> we get mostly -- but not entirely -- flashbacks:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (11) Rumanian royalist's fantasy: Wartime London was home to Eastern
>>>>> European governments-in-exile from the Baltic states south to the Balkans,
>>>>> and it was not clear in late 1944 which might be re-installed after the
>>>>> war, or at least used as bargaining chips with the Soviets who were
>>>>> overrunning that territory. This seems to be more or less "real time"
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (13) memory (date indeterminate) of the tramp, Girl Guides, and
>>>>> "sizzling night"
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (13-14) memory from 1935 of Loaf's fantasy, the Moslem Messiah --
>>>>> which alerted the Firm to Pirate's talent
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (14-16) "At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening" -- date
>>>>> after 1935, but indeterminate -- the Adenoid, an outgrowth of Foreign
>>>>> Office Balkan specialist Blatherard Osmo. This sequence ends with Osmo's
>>>>> mysterious death in 1939, so the "2 1/2 years" Pirate spent in daily visits
>>>>> to the Adenoid were within the 1935-1939 span... IF, that is, this
>>>>> recollection is of "real time" rather than of Pirate taking part in an
>>>>> ongoing Osmotic fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > I doubt it's coincidence that this sequence goes from the Rumanian
>>>>> hint at "what will happen after WWII" to the senior diplomats' fears of
>>>>> "Balkan Armageddon," i.e. a replay of WWI's origin in Serbia (cf. also
>>>>> Against the Day).
>>>>> >
>>>>> > So... why an adenoid (i.e. a tonsil), rather than an appendix or
>>>>> spleen or hypothalamus? Why human tissue at all, rather than some other
>>>>> stand-in for Osmo's fears? Its slimy protoplasmic aspect led me on first
>>>>> reading to think of SF movies:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Master_X-7
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_II
>>>>> >
>>>>> > And its _sshhlop_ing of the troops is parodically close to a scene
>>>>> of the Martian death ray in Wells' The War of the Worlds.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > All I got -- not much -- is a vague association of the "adenoidal"
>>>>> voice with a nasal drawl allegedly common among the UK twits and toffs who
>>>>> might have populated the Foreign Office in those days. Still around under
>>>>> new management:
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/that-adenoidal-nasally-geek-voice
>>>>> >
>>>>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story)
>>>>>
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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