BtZ42 Another Adams; another Pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

Monte fixes the flashback timeline to a T. All so hidden by TRP
line-by-line in seemingly seamless text:
(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). "

And I am also reading Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, which I am
going to half-presume TRP also read early, since acknowledging Henry for
his Education would, don't we think, have lead him to read other important
works of his? (I will repeat here that in the opening pages of his
multi-volume, therefore pretty detailed History of America, Henry writes of
how the mail was delivered seven times a day in Philly and NYC in
1800...incoming mail indeed, but the US postal service united the country
then, maybe until the 1960s, so to speak, when the Trystero mail service
'appeared' in Lot 49.)

Anyway, if interested just read page 10 below and see if you too are not
struck with the way Adams moves seamlessly in time between centuries,
flashbacks within a "where's the present time"again?  kind of paragraph.
Adams names the times is the difference from P's style.

https://books.google.com/books?id=P_UDV8dPdIEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Mont+saint+michel+and+chartres&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjArorHgujLAhUG4yYKHQiRB_AQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Mont%20saint%20michel%20and%20chartres&f=false

This book is very interesting, full of "new journalism' kind of personal
asides and short digressions galore. You know how the East as mysterious
Whatever pops up in Pynchon,
"the Oriental" unexplained even in the early section here? Well, Adams,
when he segues to Francis of Assisi counterposed to the muscular, military
11th century saints like Michael, calls him, Francis, Oriental!?...have
never heard that before (although I know the Greek novelist Kazantzakis did
write a novel about him somehow embodying some of his own themes of
life-embracing Zorba the Greekness, so to speak)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160331/9b374b0f/attachment.html>