"Strange shift to be working," it seems to Maxine ...

[Mark Kohut]

another superb focus from BE....and so resonant w his wonderful rich
tropes....

I remember when we were group-reading this, a Plister asked: where are P's
preterites?....
Some, such as me, were led to say, P knew in this NYC book, they had been
driven out of NYC by
money and steel and glass.....

But, here, in echoic hints of "Lowlands" is his internal metaphor for
that.....just garbage, sea gulls, those vile-eating birds.

And the perfect symbolic shorthand of "a Presidential visit? 'making a
movie?"

........LOVE his genius.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:37 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> ... The industrial racket from back in the marshland behind the giant
> cliffs of ruin has grown continuous. Now and then workers, in long-standing
> Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming
> exchanges. "Strange shift to be working," it seems to Maxine.
>    "Yeah. Nice overtime for somebody. Almost like they're up to something
> they don't want anybody to know about."
>    "When did anybody ever want to know?" March lapsing for a moment into
> the bag-lady character in her commencement speech at Kugelblitz, the one
> person dedicated to salvaging everything the city wants to deny. "Either
> they're playing catch-up or they're getting it ready to open for dump
> business again."
>    A presidential visit? Somebody's making a movie? Who knows.
>    Early seagulls show up from somewhere, begin inspecting the menu. The
> sky takes on a brushed-aluminum underglow. A night heron with breakfast in
> its beak ascends from its long watch at the edge of the Island of Meadows
> ...
>
> Bleeding Edge, pp. 168-169
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>