GR translation: feel your age delivered into a new kind of time

Mike Jing gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Tue Jul 4 06:23:47 CDT 2017


OK, that makes it more difficult to translate. I'll probably have to
lean more towards the latter.

Thanks, Monte.

On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 8:36 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Definitely both: the musical context supports the sense of a new musical
> time signature [tempo], and the WWII context ("Lindy-hop into the pit by
> millions") supports the sense of... not just an era or epoch changing, but
> one kind of historical awareness morphing into another.
>
> (This is one of the most remarkable passages in GR, and attending to it
> again just generated my 118th new response:
>
>  One of the core logical/philosophical objections to time travel -- to
> treating time as a dimension fully analogous to spatial dimensions -- is as
> old as H. G. Wells' story. In space, "travel" or "movement" *MEANS* change
> of position with time. So doesn't the idea of travel through time imply a
> meta-time for your "travel" to "happen in," implying an infinite regress?
>
> Philosophy goes about its (worthy and necessary) task of putting warning
> signage on these tricky spots. Pynchon, from the beginning, has been doing
> some of his most spectacular somersaults over what we mean by time. I'm not
> committed to any specific narrative about him and Nabokov at Cornell, but I
> would bet my life that while working on GR he read and learned and took
> confidence from (at least)  the rewritten Speak, Memory (1966) and Ada
> (1969), in both of which N does just that kind of acrobatics.
>
> On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 3:31 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> V471.33-472.3, P479.27-39   . . . she looked at him once, of course he
>> still remembers, from down at the end of a lunchwagon counter, grill
>> smoke working onto the windows patient as shoe grease against the rain
>> for the plaid, hunched-up leaky handful inside, off the jukebox a
>> quick twinkle in the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting
>> swing notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next
>> beat, jumping it pah (hm) pah (hm) pah so exactly in the groove that
>> you knew it was ahead but felt it was behind, both of you, at both
>> ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your age delivered into a new
>> kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest, the graceless
>> expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus
>> indifference, watched you lindy-hop into the pit by millions, as many
>> millions as necessary. . . .
>>
>> Here the word 'time" is used in the sense related to music, is that
>> correct?
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
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