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

Jochen Stremmel jstremmel at gmail.com
Tue Jul 4 06:50:07 CDT 2017


"Definitely both": I'm still not as sure as you, Monte. The "time" in this
passage:

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. . .

is not ambiguous in my eyes, not in the senses you mean. And that doesn't
make the passage any less remarkable.

2017-07-04 13:23 GMT+02:00 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:

> 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
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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