GR translation: the sus. per coll. crowd dangling

[Michael Bailey]

Maybe so but for me the more satisfying reading is there’s a “crowd of
Slothrops” dangling (by the neck, one presumes) off the family tree because
they were hanged (for a variety of reasons)


…rather than “a crowd of witches”, since to get there we need to override
the strong impression of uniqueness from the textual “one genuine Salem
witch”

- which you could of course do by positing witchy-Slothrops hailing from
different locales…dangling from different branches…


 I like the idea a variety of crimes under the “hanged Slothrops” umbrella
better than a phalanx of Slothropian Wiccans

I mean, were they all so hapless as to be caught and hanged?
Tankers…feebs…?? (-;


Especially since the occasion for bringing it up was Geli’s mention of the
“devil’s kiss”

(Which, what th’ heck is that anyway? - urban dictionary has some useful
suggestions)


So we’re thinking of
- Slothrop unfamiliar with terminology
- even though he had one Salem witch ancestor
- by the way, she was hanged, like a number of his other forebears

Or (possibly)
- he had one Salem witch great-great-
- and a number of other Wiccan-adjacent begats
- all of whom got caught and killed
- but he *still* doesn’t know what is the devil’s kiss
- guess none survived to tell the tale

Works either way, I suppose. I have a preference but I’m glad to now have
an alternate.





On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 4:45 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Not sure I agree with your interpretation or Michael’s. I think the
> dangling is continuing the sentence followed by a participial phrase set
> off by commas but  connecting directly  to “ off the Skothrop family tree.
>  So the idea is his Witch -ancestor was one of several (back through the
> centuries’ couplings) dangling off the Slothrop family tree.   Meaning, to
> be literal, that she was among those where the bloodline stopped abruptly
> for one reason or another.
>
> > On Jan 11, 2025, at 3:05 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > V329.19-24, P334.14-19   “For the devil’s kiss, of course,” Geli
> snuggling
> > oh-you-old-silly up to his armpit there, and Slothrop feeling a little
> icky”
> > and square for not knowing. But then he knows next to nothing about
> > witches, even though there was, in his ancestry, one genuine Salem Witch,
> > one of the last to join the sus. per coll. crowd dangling, several of
> them
> > back through the centuries’ couplings, off of the Slothrop family tree.
> >
> > Does the "the sus. per coll. crowd" refer to the people so punished
> within
> > the Slothrop family tree, or is it the such crowd at large? It appears to
> > be the former if "dangling" modifies "crowd" here, is that correct?
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>