BEg2 chapter 13 Misha and Grisha

[David Morris]

For Pynchon, “The Zone” has some  very prominent meanings in his early
masterpiece GR.  Any use of the word subsequently in other novels can’t
help but recall GR’s Zone.  Since GR it’s been used many ways, but I think
it’s got a special near-spiritual meaning having of “being”  in what
Pynchon also refers to sometimes as a “state of grace,”  very much like an
athlete calls being in the Zone.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 6:35 PM Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Whenever I read the word 'zona' I think of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I wonder if
> this usage is part of russian prison slang?
>
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 8:31 PM Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > ...prefer to be called Deimos and Phobos, one of them says.
> >
> > stainless-steel jailhouse choppers - was hoping to find a bunch of images
> > but it's rather slim pickings other than Richard Kiel and Konstantin
> > Rokossovsky, who's more of a WWII person.
> >
> >
> > However, there is a recent quote from Viktor Navalny -
> >
> >
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/26/alexei-navalny-russia-prison-state-tv-china-labour-camp-psychological-violence
> >
> > “You might imagine tattooed muscle men with steel teeth carrying on with
> > knife fights to take the best cot by the window,” Navalny was quoted as
> > saying. “You need to imagine something like a Chinese labor camp, where
> > everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere.
> > There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”
> >
> > He said guards monitored them as they watched hours of state propaganda,
> > not allowing them to read or write, and waking inmates up if they fell
> > asleep.
> >
> > But Navalny remained upbeat about the future of the regime of Vladimir
> > Putin
> > <https://www.theguardian.com/world/vladimir-putin>, insisting that one
> day
> > it would end.
> >
> >
> >
> > Igor contextualizes them, after a fashion. "Just out of zona, distant
> > relatives, now not so distant. Brighton Beach, it's heaven for them. I
> > bring them over to Manhattan so they can have look [again, article-free]
> at
> > hell."
> >
> > zona - Russian jail
> >
> > Brighton Beach - has changed since Brighton Beach Memoirs.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>