MJJG: List-O-mania Intertextual Refs part deux

Sat Dec 12 22:52:32 UTC 2020

Thanks Becky & Raphael for your interesting posts, I too have finished MJ, but I'll circle back (pg.44-54)...

I hope this season of Advent finds you well in this the year of our lord 2020... It's snowing where I'm at this very moment, after a spell of unseasonable warmth, I try to take advantage before the pale cold reigns supreme, to get my daily walk in. The houses in the old neighborhood resplendent in their yuletide regalia, and if one looks hard enough, a fever dream, somewhere in my mind's eye, are the dead remnants of Carolers from a time best forgotten, heard their howling plaintive cries, together an unending spectrum of wild light frenzied, each house a chorus line of hollow dancing skeletons, exposed and left to rot. Somewhere, 'midst a Domed and Spired horizon, abandoned that fell shadow which beckons me hither...

Atomized we are, cloistered in discrete spectra, and Dopplered into insignificance...the non inertial passer-by approaches the speed of light... the Space-Time manifold contours bending ever so subtlety, with Gravity, a bowling ball knocking pins back on a trampoline, and the ever so sad public school boys, with their headmasters' pulsating fist poised ever so subtlety above the backside of their tiny heads, as they eternally conjugate those blasted latin verbs for us, if only we could listen to that which is barely audible... the dead procession of time! The Illusion, Maya as some refer to her...

Anyway, I just want to briefly add to the impressive list you all have compiled... The character Abdul is fascinating to me, and if one looks at Stephanie St. Clair's bio she was married to the fellow :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_Abdul_Hamid

The Harlem/Islam thread is interesting, though I think Reed is more or less satirical, but he does sympathize...

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Saturday, December 5, 2020 8:12 PM, Raphael Saltwood <plainmrbotanyb at outlook.com> wrote:

> Great, any way you want to go with it is fine with me.
>
> I originally had a plan to just post 4 times a week but I keep getting interested & drawn in.
>
> (We could open all the 10-pg sections simultaneously and go completely asynchronous, for all of me...)
>
> Glad to hear from you - I used to daydream about moving to North Dakota, sometimes still do on particularly hot days...I was going to condition myself to be a firefighter in the national forests, ND was noted on the Federal jobs website as a location where they needed more applicants - you have to walk 3 miles in 45 minutes with a 45 lb pack on your back, and other stuff.
>
> Get Outlook for iOShttps://aka.ms/o0ukef
>
> From: Becky Lindroos bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
> Sent: Saturday, December 5, 2020 10:35:00 AM
> To: Raphael Saltwood PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com
> Cc: pynchon -l Pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: MJJG: List-O-mania Intertextual Refs part deux
>
> Raphael - I like your list - I’ve finished the book and I’ll just start where you are. Thanks.
>
> Becky
>
> > On Dec 3, 2020, at 8:52 PM, Raphael Saltwood PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com wrote:
> >
> > 19.  p 61 “[Earline] picks up the New-York Sun which lies on the doormat. The headline is about Haiti. VooDoo generals.”
> >
> > The free online archive only goes to 1916, (probably copyright or something?)
> > https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1915-07-28/ed-1/seq-1/ Is for example the date of the initial US invasion, not the main story of the day but has a front page lede reading “2 Hour Fight Gives Hayti [sic] a New Ruler.”
> > ... doesn’t it seem likely that Mr Reed accessed the Sun Archive somewhere, and responds to their language usage in headlines by either quoting it or quoting slight exaggerations or distortions?
> > Why The Sun in particular?
> > May not be pertinent, but in 1925 after owner Frank Munsey died he left the bulk of his estate, including The Sun, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They sold it off in 1926 to William Duart, but while they owned it, —- The Sun could’ve been a target for the Mu’tafikah!
> > (Tenuous @ best)
> >
> > -   On pg 64 he calls the Sun “the Atonist voice.”
> >
> > 20.  pg 71 “Gamalielese,” Mencken’s description of Harding’s prose.
> >
> > 21.  pg 71 “The question as to which is more reprehensible, the alleged custom in Haiti of eating a human being without cooking him or the authenticated custom in the United States of cooking a human being without eating him. The Haitian custom would have, at least, a utilitarian purpose in extenuation.”
> >     James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (autobiographical)
> >
> > 22.  pg 73 “Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. The only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”
> >     Footnoted on pg 75 as “Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Dance: from Ritual to Rock and Roll, from Ballet to Ballroom (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960), p. 39.
> >
> >
> > — more detail than any other footnote so far, maybe he really wants us to read this one?
> > —- the author was an authority on brainwashing, not dancing. But this book really exists. And some other interesting titles by him.
> >
> > 22.  pg 74 “Christianity has never been worldly nor has it ever looked with favor on good food and wine, and it is more than doubtful that the introduction of jazz into the cult would be a particular asset.”
> >
> > -   Carl C Jung, Psychology and Religion, West and East
> >
> > 23.  pg 74 “...the African deities were fond of food, drink, battle and sex.”
> >
> > -   David St Clair, Drum and Candle
> >
> > 24.  pg 75, “The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind.”
> >
> > -   Carl Jung
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> --
>
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l

</plainmrbotanyb at outlook.com>