[John Bailey]

I distinctly remember the adenoid section from my first reading of GR
decades ago, mainly because the inclusion of an adenoid seemed so
*abject*. Why not a familiar and easily isolated body part? Fiction
has no shortage of crawling hands or swiveling eyeballs or disembodied
brains etc but this tiny, slimy thing I'd never seen let alone
imagined outside a body swollen to gargantuan proportions... I think
my mind wanted to turn away from the image. Too gross, too excessive,
too impactful. A fine introduction to the rest of the book, then.

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 5:33 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Adenoids are different from tonsils - they're higher up, behind the nose.
> Swollen adenoids are generally a problem in childhood, after which they tend
> to shrink. When swollen, they hamper breathing, and so they may need to be
> surgically removed.
>
> Some thoughts on the giant adenoid:
>
> It first appears to Pirate, some time between 1935 and 1939,  together with
> "the unmistakable smell of gas." Gas - giant adenoid preventing either a
> giant child or mass numbers of children from breathing - could be a
> vision/premonition of the kids who will die in the Nazi gas chambers. "The
> Army shows up in full battle gear with bombs full of the latest deadly gas."
> But the giant adenoid cannot be gotten rid of, communicated with or
> understood. Eventually, Lord Osmo is able to ignore it and focus on the Novi
> Pazar beat. Osmo dies in a tubful of pudding (connecting him with the
> soon-to-appear Brigadier Pudding). Two old-school Brits who are still
> focussed on the politics of WWI - totally unable to address the brewing
> holocaust.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Kohut
> Sent: Mar 26, 2016 9:21 AM
> To: Monte Davis , pynchon -l
> Subject:
>
> MD---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:
>
> more to come but remember that Richard Schlubb, when he is brought in to
> loop the history is described as 'adenoidal" .....
>
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l