Shadow Ticket Group Read 2025

[Corbeau Castrum]

I think of deaf and dumb as being professional confidentiality, the character's essential humility (whether in terms of ego ie their lack of righteousness, or more spiritually/preterition), and as related to the Fool tarot (which is connected to Tyrone Slothrop in GR if memory serves)

This also connects to Pynchon's own self-image, which is extraordinarily self-deprecating as indicated by Slow Learner's introduction (and other anecdotes I've heard).

Deaf and dumb is also maybe 2/3 monkeys (sees evil, but hears no evil and speaks no evil [if you accept my tendentious interpretation that dumbness = not speaking, eg "struck dumb"]) — and doesn't that characterize pynchon, his immense knowledge and vision of the world, seeing all this evil in the world, but ultimately paralyzed to act upon this vision?

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-------- Original Message --------
On Friday, 01/09/26 at 21:08 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great stuff so let's use Chandler on the detective as Lancelot-like (as I remember it; PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong here.)
>
> an objective 'professional' knight-errant...more Quixotic than Lancelot....
> Works for love of it.....like heroes
> is outside marriage in more ways than one..
>
> And why 'deaf and dumb"?.....it is all in his head not ascertainable by real world senses?...Idealistic, yes but
> beyond the senses??/
>
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 7:59 AM Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me> wrote:
>
>> There are some basic similarities shared between Pynchon's detective novels post-ATD, presumably the genre conventions as he understands them. They consist of:
>>
>> a private detective protagonist (i.e. not police/the state) who tries to remain “professional” (“Trying to be professional here,” 3 IV “Hicks trying to stay professional,” 2 ST)
>>
>> is deaf and dumb (“Deaf and dumb, part of the job,” 4 IV, “Professionally D and D,” 36 BE, “D and D, Lino, that’s me,” 26 ST)
>>
>> is happy to work without immediate pay (“All on spec, eh?” 7 IV, “Not that I mind working on spec,” 11 BE)
>>
>> struggles with matrimonials (“I don’t do matrimonials, man,” 191 IV, “I hate matrimonials,” 127 BE, “[…] too bad that matrimonials, as you’ll recall, were never my line—” 4 ST)
>>
>> There are perhaps some other commonalities exclusive to Pynchon's detective novels but these are the ones most obvious to me.
>>
>> On Friday, January 9th, 2026 at 19:33, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> So, this first chapter alone seems to me most like the beginning of *Inherent
>>> Vice *as TRP sets up
>>> the private dick and the 'case"...this is obvious I know but back to basics.
>>>
>>> Q: I am not great detective novel well-read enough nor well noir
>>> movie-watched enough to know this:
>>> I know many, many open with the 'dame' visiting our detective and some kind
>>> of human entanglement
>>> happens that matters for the case....Is it the case that most start with a
>>> new dame that the detective
>>> has never known?
>>>
>>> Or why do both of Pynchon's similar mysteries start with, relatedly, a
>>> woman with which the detective has some kind of history?
>>> And, also,although I have to refresh the plot details, Maxine in her
>>> mystery has a past entanglement emerge (but not at the beginning, right?)
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l