GR translation: the sus. per coll. crowd dangling

Sat Jan 18 05:34:57 UTC 2025

It’s Benny Profane who’s explicitly a schlemihl, but I have a harder time
connecting Slothrop with anything so organized as heresy than with simply
continuing the schlemihl trope.

We could argue that incremental steps towards agency show in BP, TS, Doc
Sportello, and for sure Maxine…

- the reading that italicizes itself for me is there’s a “sus per coll”
crowd of which Amy Sprue was one

“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”

A nice comma before “dangling” would enhance the possibility that he’s not
contemplating all the previously hanged Slothrops…but more generally the
“died without issue” crowd

But that possibility is still there.

Thanks for adding a facet! The reference to centuries’ couplings (I was
almost certainly misreading that as the centuries themselves coupling, but
that kind of messing with time doesn’t come to the fore until AtD - so
thanks for shining that light) raises the distinct possibility that
Slothrop won’t in fact be fruitful & multiply - that he represents some
sort of insouciant American innocence being lost in the fog of war - or
some kind of heresy of an ingrained rather than a thought-out nature - that
his irresistibility to certain ladies and his kookiness won’t be embodied
in future generations Punnett charts…

Or maybe all those couplings - would the resulting fertilizations follow a
Poisson distribution?

“Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke,
alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery,
permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over
not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy
to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by
which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the
living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human
face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same
assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to
meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window,
and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling
objects….

(Bananas for breakfast tomorrow (-; )

On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 10:45 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I think the line" dangling off the family tree” is a humorous metaphor and
> not a reference to literal hanging, and that they( the danglers) are
> individuals without children, like the ancestral witch,  but for any number
> of possible reasons. Death by hanging is only one of the possibilities.
>  There is however the idea of a commonality of estrangement between them
> and  heresy  and its costs seems to be a connective theme throughout the
> novel. Witches are heretics, an early Pynchon was a heretic,  Slothrop is
> in heretical flight from the the holiest of western capitalism’s holy wars.
> Not his first time being flushed out of the devils ass. The devils kiss is
> the idea that witches kissed the devils anus(probably mostly just
> unchurched loovers who mouthed each others sex organs without shame)
>  Course Slothrop, not an acolyte of devils or toilets was just looking to
> retrieve his harp which he found in the green hills of postwar personal
> liberation out there  where the wild witches and the rainbows roam. But I
>  digress.
>  It is an oddly constructed sentence and hard to know with certainty how
> to read it.
>
> On Jan 17, 2025, at 6:43 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
> Or He knows naught about witches even though there was one, one of the
> last to be hanged in Salem dangling,  several among the various pairings,
> off the family tree.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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?
> --
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