The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

[J K Van Nort]

I was just going through the Echo & Narcissus story from Ovid. Narcissus hunts a deer that leads him to Echo’s lonely glade. Echo is a mountain nymph, who can only repeat what she hears.
Oedipa drives an Impala (antelope) into Echo’s Court and sees herself (reflection) in the sheet metal nymph. While we may not take this allusion any further, it adds to the compact prose as Mark identifies.
In solidarity,
James


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On Saturday, May 11, 2024, 07:21, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

page 16....This reading, the phrase Echo Courts rings in my head as more
of the narcissistic self-absorption of Oed's time and place.
"the face of the nymph was much like Oedipa's"..."not exactly
a hooker but the windstorm blowing up the vulgar outfit of
the nymph...'the hot sun and the dead-still air"....what a wasteland....
and that upskirting windstorm is what Oedipa has, "remembering her idea
about a slow whirlwind, which she couldn't hear"....

God is dead-ness. The air is entropic. And that God who used to speak
out of the biblical whirlwind had slowed down and could no longer be
heard....

I mean.

TRP is so f'in COMPACT. Verbal quilt of compressed meaning. But we knew
that, right?
--
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