BtZ42/10 Reverse flow of food

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Since "Yardbird Parker" and "Cherokee", the jazz standard from 1938, do 
appear on the same page as the passage you quote, it could be possible 
that "salted peanuts" refers - also - to the bebop tune "Salt Peanuts". 
Of course this would be an anachronism, because "Salt Peanuts" was 
composed in 1942 and, likely, not widely known before its recording by 
Dizzy Gillespie and his All-Stars (including Charlie Parker on alto sax) 
in 1945, whereas the Roseland Ballroom scene takes place "circa 1939" 
(Weisenburger). But since the novel's actual action takes place after 
the composition of the tune and since it's all haywire in the sodium 
amytal trance anyway, such a reading might make sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1Wl-NmzWg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Peanuts

Sorry for bothering the list with my enthusiasm for music.



On 21.05.2016 18:40, János Széky wrote:
> After a woman's eyes "tell him, in the instant, what he is," that is, 
> what goes down the toilet:
> "Upstairs in the men's room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons 
> kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries, 
> chef's salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, 
> after-dinner mints, a Cha Clark bar, a pound of salted peanuts, and 
> the cherry from some Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned.'"
> Now that reminds me of the much longer food-and-nutritive list of what 
> middle-class students of Pynchon's age are composed of in Been Down So 
> Long It Looks Like up to Me (p 12-13):
>
> https://books.google.hu/books?id=FJoAjhihQhwC&pg=PA281&lpg=PA281&dq=been+down+too+long+farina&source=bl&ots=V_47VsxZqB&sig=69gAczstDwqZ47txDo2UpsIHuN8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6s6aYyOvMAhXkKJoKHVR1CnUQ6AEILDAD#v=onepage&q=eggs&f=false
>
> If we read GR also as a commentary on the time when Pynchon wrote it, 
> it might be noted tha the critique of "consumer society" was a leading 
> slogan of those years. Slothrop gets rid of what Pynchon's roommate's 
> mates have incorporated before his unique descent begins. It also 
> prefigures the first phase (in the Monte Carlo/Nice scenes) of his 
> longer, metaphorical descent later in the novel, having got rid of the 
> middle-class and military building blocks that he had been made of.
>
>
>
>
>

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