CoL49 Group Reading chapter 3, pg 31, 32
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 19 15:05:09 UTC 2024
> On May 19, 2024, at 3:14 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> “Things then did not delay in turning curious”
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet <https://wordhistories.net/2021/04/15/two-left-feet/>, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off) This L Carrol quote does carry some of the sense of OM’s experience of seeing her world in an intensely different way. Metzger may also be an appropriate introduction to a mad and in this case somewhat sinister world.
>
> A) twice again, the word “revelation”
From the correspondence of printed circuits to the town, to the hide and seek appearance of hidden bones, to the alternate postal system and changing lines of a murder mystery the corporate and world of PI is being revealed.
>
> B) the narrator floats the idea that The Tristero is a system of thought
> which may supplant the idea of Rapunzel’s Tower for Oedipa.
>
> Why is the language so conditional?
>
> C) and tells us that she will come to be haunted by the way things fit
> together - logically
>
> i) Does the word “haunted” have a negative connotation which suggests that
> The Tristero won’t be any more satisfying a myth to live within than
> Rapunzel?
>
> ii) is there really anything at all logical about how getting jiggy with
> Metzger would start a voyage of discovery? If so, what?
>
‘I could tell you my adventures–beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’
>
> D) Pierce peering at his stamps, an interest she never shared - “little
> colored windows into deep vistas of space and time”
>
> i) if she at this point describes stamps as “his substitute often for her”
> and “ex-rivals, cheated as she by death” then can we re-cast her words to
> Wendell (“It was over. Before he put my name on it.”) as leading up to,
> “but now I’m feeling it again?”
>
>
> - sympathetic description of her husband’s infidelity. Like, extremely
> sympathetic
>
> “It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities
> to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive”
>
> i) other inabilities to communicate:
> Letting him preemptively complain before telling about her day (patience
> is a virtue)
> Not understanding his car lot angst but consoling anyway (kindness is a
> virtue)
> Are there more?
> --
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