NP except tangentially. More remarks on Anniversaries. if interested.

[Mark Kohut]

There is a fine scene in the book occasioned by a NYT article
on the completion of whole new aspects and line arrangements
of the subway system. The thematic bandwidth here is that the
10 year-old girl in the novel is so smart and self-confident she
can navigate the whole subway system better than anyone.

But the narrator, who is her mother, the one who journalizes the NYT
stories blended with an overarching narrator-- that stylistic
free indirect discourse kind of narrator who is Johnson effectively--
writes of wanting to debunk some subway myths that others---he/she is from
Germany, of course---
have about NYC. That everyone is always in a hurry, always rushing about,
is not true in the subways, he sez. He describes people getting off and on
and the description can remind Pynchon readers of the dance of anarchy
under the bridge scene in CoL49. Ways: like a massive dance of entrance and
egress. No one collides. It's 1967. All self-organize at
a steady pace to come off flowing around those waiting to go on. The
finding
a seat or a place to stand inside allows lots of freedom to flow around
other people. (Of course,
contact does often happen here but it's all good usually. {he does have an
unknown to us friend of Gesine
report she once found semen on her coat---but we seem free to disbelieve
that since no substantiating
details are ever offered.)) Maybe she too partakes of the 'myths' of NY
subways.

Another comparison beyond the anarchic dance is, of course, the description
of the traffic leaving LA
going up that famous--to locals--major highway hill in Inherent Vice and
merging as smoothly as if such self-organizing, no
contest of wills, no aggression, is operable. Or was at the end of the
sixties anyway.


PS: And, the English of this book has, occasionally, Pynchon's 'sez' for
"says' and I'd love to know how
the translator arrived at that use.