AtD translation: Whitehall, Blackpool

[Mike Jing]

Thanks for the reply, Rich.


On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 11:12 AM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Whitehall/Blackpool. yes, literally black and white, but two places that
> are polar opposites, the heart of bland power, the former, the latter, the
> coney island funfair of the avg joe in the latter
> or so i think
>
> rich
>
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2026 at 1:34 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> P701.5-16   “Look here,” Cyprian imagined he could explain, “it isn’t ’s
>> if
>> one starts off intending to live this way . . . ‘Oh yes planning, you
>> know,
>> to seek a career in sodomy.’ But—perhaps less at Trinity than at King’s—if
>> one wanted anything like a social life, it was simply the mask one put on.
>> Inescapable, really. Every expectation, most of us, of leaving it all
>> behind after the final May Week ball, and no harm done. Who could have
>> foreseen, any more than the actress who falls in love with her leading
>> man,
>> that the fiction might prove after all more desirable—strangely, more
>> durable—than anything the civilian world had to offer. . . .”
>>
>>        Ratty, bless him, didn’t blink any more than he usually did. “My
>> alternatives were a bit less colorful. Whitehall, Blackpool. But it’s only
>> fair to warn you, you might have to absorb a bit of character assessment.”
>>
>> Apart from the wordplay, is there anything else about Blackpool that's
>> relevant here?
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>