GR translation: pick up the reflexes for Intent to Gawk

[Mark Kohut]

Besides all that Jochen has found---and it lead me to some good stuff re
Shakespeare's use of "mopery"---
I think that even more might be encased in the phrase. ...

First, Mopery , an ambiguously rich word in the way back time, one of the
meanings of which is "droolingly stupid".
Like when you're in love---as Romeo is described early in his play over his
girlfriend BEFORE Juliet...
and as Hamlet early IS...as he talks, thinks and doesn't act.....

Go back to a little earlier in GR than Mike starts the quote...get most of
the scene:

Here we remember that this dream scene is perhaps also a seance...."Why
shouldn't the IG go to seances?" after
we have TRP giving us Jung's "ancestral pool in which everyone shares in
the same dream material".

Where from the text it appears we get one of [Jung's] archetypes (ancestral
pools) which looks "pretty much like any other" "after you get a little
time in--whatever that means over here"
[the Other Side]
---then we learn that some 'new hires'...who have passed thru 'feeling' and
"wonder'---those words often indicating some
mystic vision on the other side from this side of understanding --- the
"over here"--clearly some timeless, whatever that means, realm.

That seersucker crowd, those bureaucrats, who were once full of such
excitement over the afterlife....but they have now "calm[ed] down fast
enough"....
so as boredom, part of some meanings of mopery, has set in, they are now
"picking up [from the temporal side] [again] "the reflexes for
Intent to Gawk"...for simply looking around now without feeling, nor
wonder, just a kind of half-depressed boredom, so to speak.

Perhaps one of Pynchon's sublime image and scenic riffs on
bureaucracy....the crowd without feeling or wonder even where the Wonders
are supposed to be infinite.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 1:20 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> So in this context, does it mean that the newcomers have downgraded
> their active gawking to mere Intent to Gawk?
>
> On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 6:53 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > you know, this could be really interesting: because P used the majuscule
> I
> > looked up "Intent to Gawk" which sounded like a legal term for me and
> found
> > "mopery with intent to gawk" which led me to
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mopery where I found P (GR) (and Heller's
> > Catch 22) mentioned – the wiki has only appearances of the word after
> p.417:
> >
> > Slang: a trivial, imaginary violation of law (also seen defined as: act
> of
> > moping; vagrancy, dawdling); "The War must've been lean times for crowd
> > control, murder and mopery was the best you could do" 570; "Magda was
> picked
> > up on first-degree mopery" 742; "Edelman [...] accused last year of an
> 11569
> > (Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument)" 755;
> >
> > Nice is the definition by R. Baker, quoted by the wikipedia after Safire:
> > "mopery isn't a crime, but only an old policemen's joke in which it's
> > defined as the act of displaying yourself in the nude to a blind person."
> >
> > One could argue that you are born with Intent to Gawk, there's nothing to
> > pick up later.
> >
> > 2016-10-02 5:54 GMT+02:00 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:
> >>
> >> V411.2-14, P417.28-40   Kekulé’s dream here’s being routed now past
> >> points which may arc through the silence, in bright reluctance to live
> >> inside the moving moment, an imperfect, a human light, over here
> >> interfering with the solemn binary decisions of these agents, who are
> >> now allowing the cosmic Serpent, in the violet splendor of its scales,
> >> shining that is definitely not human, to pass—without feeling, without
> >> wonder (after you get a little time in—whatever that means over
> >> here—one of these archetypes gets to look pretty much like any other,
> >> oh you hear some of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the
> >> first day, “Wow! Hey—that’s th-th’ Tree o Creation! Huh? Ain’t it!
> >> Je-eepers!” but they calm down fast enough, pick up the reflexes for
> >> Intent to Gawk, you know self-criticism’s an amazing technique, it
> >> shouldn’t work but it does . . . .
> >>
> >> What does "pick up the reflexes for Intent to Gawk" mean?
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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