BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 25.03.2016 17:22, Monte Davis wrote:

> ... 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) 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_%28Gogol_short_story%29>


The word "adenoid" also appears in Naked Lunch:

https://books.google.de/books?id=8r4cBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT78&lpg=PT78&dq=adenoid++%22naked+lunch%22&source=bl&ots=YNC0HlpPxh&sig=BPDoowd0_TTYShFszA2npU8SneI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiowqr59t3LAhXC0RQKHYCtDwYQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=adenoid%20%20%22naked%20lunch%22&f=false

In its more sarcastic passages, the sound of Gravity's Rainbow resembles 
that of Burroughs' novel. And "Meeting of International Conference of 
Technological Psychiatry" sounds like something Pynchon could have come 
up with in part 4 of GR. Does anybody know for sure whether Pynchon 
actually read Burroughs' novels and what he thinks about them?


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160326/f4d6157e/attachment.html>