SLPAD - 110 - "Low-Lands" - 22

[Mark Kohut]

No, Mike...the author wanted to be a writer from his youth and would have
kept writing no matter what.

On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 6:00 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Gratuitous theorizing -
> If the author was briefly married and ready to settle down working at
> Boeing, did he run a simulation showing him something like Flange, and opt
> for writing instead?
>
> (A quote from one of the many books reviewed in The Last Whole Earth
> Catalog: "I don't want a career. I want a careen.")
>
>
> The extended dump/slow elevator simile, though, is only the intro to an
> even more elaborate passage:
>
> "But something else too: here at the end of the spiral he felt haunted by
> yet another correspondence, and could not place it until searching back he
> came to the music and words of a song."
>
> We get a bountiful earful about Delgado, sea songs, and a broader context
> sea stories, told in various situations,  eg sitting on a depth charge on
> the fantail waiting for movies to start.
>
> There's a book with that in the title:
>
>
> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199412.Movies_on_the_Fantail_A_Sailor_s_Diary_and_Memories_from_Other_Men_of_the_USS_Barr_DE576_APD39
>
>
> But Delgado preferred to sing them. The one Flange has in mind goes:
>
> A ship I have got in the North Country
>
> And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity,
>
>             O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,
>
>             As she sails by the Low-lands low.
>
>
>
> But even when he remembers the song, it's a springboard towards an
> admittedly irrational association it awakens in him - the rational
> association would be with the Low-Lands of Scotland - but he instead thinks
> of the illusion that "anyone who looks at the ocean under a special
> illumination or in a mood conducive to metaphor" would have, perceiving its
> surface as a solid, walkable plain.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>