BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

Tue Mar 29 11:47:50 CDT 2016

Gwenhidwy on, among other things, an adenoid-sounding neo-plasm (175-6):

"In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found
below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live
inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as
the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the
ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to
the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down
all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The
East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The
people out here were *meant to go down first. *We're expendable: those in
the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don't mean the Threat
has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac
dreams, it's not accessible to *us*. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another,
en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary... or of waves
of darkness... waves of fire.... Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the
immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of *my *business, city
dreams.... But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the
centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very
worst, se-cret fears?  The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and
cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here,
exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don't deny it--*known*, Pointsman! that
the front in Eu-rope someday *must *develop like this? move away east, make
the rock-ets necessary, and *known *how, and where, the rockets would fall
short. Ask your friend Mexico, look at the densities on his map? east,
east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live, that's who's
getting it *thick*-est, my friend."

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 4:32 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have read *The Nose; *read during some great Russian Lit classes back
> before the revolution hit my world. (which one, you ask?) I had Mrs. Rene
> Wellek teaching it (although she wasn't that yet, all of which I only
> learned later); I was lucky since Rene was at Yale, probably teaching
> Laura, and I wasn't at Yale. .
>
> Anyway, it is a delightful, playful story, all about class and its
> effects, Gogol's deep theme, although I can't much remember any snotty
> details. But I think I do remember, or have created a critical memory, that
> sez this 'dream' thing in reverse is just the way Gogol, akin to other
> writers, tried to suggest *reality itself *on the page (again. see my
> previous post and Collected Works) just as when
> Swift had Gulliver bring back a hanky (I think) from Lilliput found when
> Home.
>
> Anchoring satiric works in *reality is *a long tradition in literature.
> Otherwise, someone might not get "the point",  just the supposed joke.
>
> By the way, speaking of rubber dummies and sex, I also recommend a story
> by one Landolfi called *Gogol's Wife,* in which she is
> a kind of balloon and hijinks ensue very controlledly. Only an idealist
> can write satire---and love high-mindedly an 'ideal' woman?
>
> Gogol’s Grandson
> Susan Sontag <http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/susan-sontag/>
> JANUARY 23, 1964 ISSUE <http://www.nybooks.com/issues/1964/01/23/>
> Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811200809?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0811200809>
> by Tommaso Landolfi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal and John Longrigg and
> Wayland Young
> New Directions, 183 pp., $4.00
>
> Several years ago, *Encounter* published an extraordinary story by an
> Italian writer, quite unknown in English, named Tommaso Landolfi. The story
> was called “Gogol’s Wife.” It purports to be the account, told by a
> hanger-on of the great Russian writer, of Gogol’s marriage to an inflatable
> rubber dummy, with whom he has a mysterious, exalted, and shameful
> relation. It was Landolfi’s clean, deliberate style that was so striking:
> that, combined with a lovely freedom of invention, allowed him to bring off
> this incredibly pure potion of the grotesque and the ludicrous. It is
> difficult to praise “Gogol’s Wife” too highly. On the basis of this story,
> one instantly and gratefully acknowledged Landolfi as a writer of the first
> rank.
>
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:09 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_8335291721811729908_m_5330065343338238479_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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