"A fine-looking little girl, sir," Randolph, brimming with avuncularity.
* * * * * * * * * *
I swear these first few sections focusing on the Chums of Chance are just Pynchon fucking with his readers. He's all, "Here you go! A story that reads like a regular old story with a regular old plot with regular old characters with funny names! Just 1000 pages of easy peasy lemon squeezy stuff like this! I learned my lesson with Gravity's Rainbow! I'm an easy read now!" Then after a few dozen pages . . . WHAM! Here's some shit about the physical qualities of light! Here's some tough mathematical concepts! Here's how photography changed the way we viewed the world in much the same way as the Gutenberg press!"
I don't really know about any of that but I suspect it's all coming! I can tell all of this regular plot is just lulling me into a false sense of security. Pretty soon I'll be walking right into the punji pit!
"brimming with avuncularity"
Yes, it's a weird statement to say a person is brimming with the attributes of an uncle. But Thomas Pynchon is a weird guy. I suppose I could just read it as brimming with kindness and generosity but Pynchon chooses his words with care! He wants us to picture Randolph as an uncle. He's a person of authority but not so much that you can't sass him and he'll mostly play along. Lindsay is the dad! Miles is the mom. Darby is the child. And Chick is the cool guy in the leather jacket who owns a motorcycle and lives upstairs where you can hear him banging chicks all day long.
How come that was never an episode of Happy Days? Where none of the Cunninghams can get any sleep because Fonzi is always fucking so loud?
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