At So-Called Bill’s excellent suggestion, last week turned into one final rest, reflect, and reread week before the grand finale. Now here we are, tanned and ready, primed for the big wrap and just — jinkies! — two more weeks to go. I really like the word “jinkies.”
Next week: Page 706 (p/v), once more with feeling….
Two weeks more? Hokay, where is it we’re ending this week? I’m getting to the point where I can see light through the pages left–OK, so I need a job and am trapped in a loveless marriage (joke), so sue me–I can’t see stretching it out 2 more weeks. What’s happening where we should be?
I’m under the weather, so my thoughts may not be as lucid as they should be. Perhaps I’m more susceptible to the radio waves “They” transmit to my brain. (Where the hell is my tin foil?) Anyway, I’ve been troubled lately by why TP would write this book, about WWII, when he did. I short, how much can we view this book through the prism of Vietnam? The war years of the first part of the book are actually the most sane – at least we know who the enemy is. It’s the post-war Zone that’s the most chaotic, dangerous and confusing. TP is documenting the rise of the military-industrial complex which needs conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, etc.), and good healthy dose of paranoia (“Which side are you on?” “Side two” “Your with us”) to thrive. Does TP point the way with the Nixon quote preceding the last part of the book?. Does the Zone =Vietnam? In short, does Pointsman = J. Edgar Hoover?
So-called “heuser,” I think you’re on to something there.
I really enjoyed the time warp. I feel like I read much better this time, and I’m sorely tempted to go back and start this section a third time. “The Story of Byron the Bulb” is a whole little universe unto itself.
I inexplicably found doing a fairly obsessive thing: Typing into a Word file a little something from each page, a sentence or a paragraph, whatever particularly grabbed me. Just now I glanced back over the beginning of the file and found that these little bits had accidentally formed themselves into something. Not a narrative, exactly, or a summary, but something. I’m going to paste it in below, for anyone who might be interested. These cover pages 620-626, one paragraph from each page:
* * *
Could it be there’s something about ad hoc arrangements, like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the people you need to be with? that more formal adventures tend, by their nature, to separation, to loneliness?
“You’re all on a different frequency. There’s no way you’ll get interference from us. We’re too far separated. We have our own problems.”
“Your ‘light and kindness’ are the jigging of the doomed. You can smell mortality in every one of those bouncy little tunes.
Omens grow clearer, more specific. He watches flights of birds and patterns in the ashes of his fire, he reads the guts of trout he’s caught and cleaned, scraps of lost paper, graffiti on the broken walls where facing has been shot away to reveal the brick underneath—broken in specific shapes that may also be read…
(no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense” back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane)
Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself…
…and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…
Hey, So-Called, you’ve broken the code! If we read only every third word, the whole book makes sense! Or maybe it’s every third graf… every fifth page? Damn, I was so-called close…
OK, one more thing. At one point I decided to look up the word “gerät” on the Web and came across this page on some German dictionary. It has a multiplicity of meanings, all closely related. Check it out:
http://dict.leo.org/?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&relink=on§Hdr=on&spellToler=std&search=ger%e4tger%e4t
i keep running into refereneces where TP has the word ‘ass’ juxtaposed with some sort of reference to an insect. as i get closer to the end of the book i incresingly get the feeling someone is watching me.
A proposal for the final wrap-up. There is a quote about a final image of Slothrop: ‘There’s supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo a friend.” ‘
I propose that we generate the album’s cover, with all the Death March survivors on the cover. How many are there? I know we are geographically dipersed, but I think I could monkey it together if I get appropriate shots of people. If anyone is interested, that is.
Whaddaya think? Incentive to finish it up?
Marsup,
I think that’s pure genius. Count me in.
just in case the site runs away again: mug mug mug mug mug!
ok, now that that’s taken care of, i want to add that i loved myrtle miraculous and the rest of the gang. the whole extended bit–the new paranoia, the spectators, the broadening of perspective (a pulling back from paranoia?), the weaving back in of the immortal bulb–it was like dreaming in color and as fine as anything else i’ve loved in this book.
the photo. insane. yes! I’m in. yes!
Quick note. Finished Sunday.
made it to 723 and i’m getting mad at TP (i’ll start calling him toilet paper in my head). maybe it’s me but with only a hop and jump (no skip) left, i’m not getting the wrap up that i would have hoped. maybe he’s a master of resolution, i’ve got more than a few questions in my head but maybe i haven’t been catching things like TP would expect?
I went to hi schol with a Cecil. I wuld kick his butt on Fryday, and laugh at him. Is that u Cecil?
Judy
I’m pretty sure I’m some other Cecil. But — and this is ironical — I went to elementary school with a Julie, and I used to let her believe she was kicking my butt on Tuesdays, but really, I was doing a very sophisticated dance.
Oh, if only I could still dance like that today.
late hit … still crawling, mid 400s, not dead yet…