LISS/STEPVR Mister Grammar person says right on
Michael Bailey
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Apr 24 04:46:56 UTC 2020
-peterthooper wrote:
before she knew it
- after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off etc etc etc
(I think this is the one Gerald Murnane rejected, but you *could* do this
in a sentence if you felt like it, imho.
For instance -
"Before I knew it, after awhile I was thinking in long, convoluted
sentences." You get the "before and after" contrast with an
"understood
but". Tickles my funny bone.)
this clause is questionable and makes me go, where's the colon/semicolon
list format, oh yeah, we're in unreliable subjectivity here, I'll buy it
----------------------
**** minor quibble: understood "but" would demand a comma after
"awhile" wouldn't
it? Also maybe there is a way to conceptually parse this without 3 dependent
clauses hanging off of "before she knew it."
I personally like it. But it's quite unusual for Pynchon, whose clauses
usually sound off like ringin' a bell.
It does make me wonder if it got fixed in a later edition???
Mine is from 1997, though.
The transgressive nature of it all fits in with the purport of the
paragraph, which
is Frenesi's readiness to assume a "mother" self-concept (despite
towering doubts)
being rudely and transgressively interrupted by Brock - and, for Frenesi's
non-fans, by her susceptibility to his blandishments.
(also the, like, cycle of life stuff from earlier in the page,
the loss of the relationship with Sasha - as the Katherine Helmond
(requiescat in pace) character says to the Goldie Hawn character in
"Overboard" (1987), "If you have a baby, you can't be the baby.")
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