0008 BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING

[Nathan "N.R.", James Mayn]

Aloha wrote: "I could have sworn you mentioned the part to read in the meteorology book somewhere."

I did mention Aristotle's Meteorology as an outside possibility. But not that McElroy had it as a likely source.

[Aloha]

Oh, okay. Thanks, Nathan.

[Aloha]

Wait a minute, I purchased the Cole book based on a recommendation from you (?). Definitely because somebody said that McElroy referenced Cole's book for his research. You? Who? My brain is scrambled with too many facts to sort right now.

[Nathan "N.R.", James Mayn]

Aloha wrote: "Wait a minute, I purchased the Cole book based on a recommendation from you (?). Definitely because somebody said that McElroy referenced Cole's book for his research. You? Who? My brain is scr..."

I only remember your adding it and thinking you had found something. The only thing I remember mentioning in regard to meteorology is the Aristotle. I know that there are a number of economic texts that are relevant, but I don't know where he sourced his meteorology.

[Aloha]

Hmmmm. I specifically purchased this book by this author due to a recommendation as outside reading for W&M. *scratches head*

[Aloha]

I'm reading on Hesserl's phenomenology on time, which Heidegger owes a debt to for his ideas. Hesserl presents inner time consciousness in three-dimensional terms. We experience both the past and the future in the present.

[Nathan "N.R.", James Mayn]

Aloha wrote: "I'm reading on Husserl's phenomenology on time, which Heidegger owes a debt to for his ideas. Husserl presents inner time consciousness in three-dimensional terms. We experience both the past and..."

You start reading Husserl and Heidegger and we'll never get a review outta ya! (smile)

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time

I don't know why I don't have a copy of this.

[Aloha]

I'm a dolphin, Nathan. I flip through the pages. No way am I reading other books while rereading W&M and trying to comprehend it. The more I delve into it, the more questions I have. I have lots of questions regarding the ending. I should go to that thread. Only people who've read the book to the end can help me. I'd hate to write a review that is way off base with the meaning of the book. I have a bunch of great pieces, but I'm trying to find a unified meaning. Not there yet.

Husserl's work on internal time is really interesting. I'm going to try to find that book, too.

[Nathan "N.R.", James Mayn]

Aloha wrote: "Husserl's work on internal time is really interesting. I'm going to try to find that book, too. "

Yes, but then you'll have to read Being and Time! (smile)

[Aloha]

I have, but it was a while back in the fog. I have it, but didn't input it into GR. I flipped through that, too, as a refresher.

[Jonathan]

I love you guys.

Interesting to see Heidegger pop up in this thread, as he has done in my reading of other McElroy novels - I think there is definitely much to be said about the connections, and I am sure any review I do of this will likely contain his name...

As for this section, it is interesting to see how (having read Lookout and others) I was already prepared to be floating untethered and un(but not really)directed. Joe requires our trust and our investment and commitment, and I have no doubts that, when I reach the end, much will become clear.

But regardless of any of that, there are so many wonderful sentences here! Flowing through thought and being and time and that strange "we" of the angels (the ungendered/postgendered universal consciousness?).

[Nathan "N.R.", James Mayn]

Jonathan's commentary.

Originally #16 ::
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The first chapter starts with someONE not being 'so sure what had happened, or when it started', but BETWEEN US, WE 'already remember what's been going on'. We are not alone. How? That's another question.


#20
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pp.8-20

I don't think anyone can get through the first BREATHER without more questions than answers, and that's okay, because well, as the text reminds us, we haven't half begun. I believe that this is text to be re-read, parts read alongside other parts, investigated, and that some point, the gaps will be, bridged? No, probably not bridged by the relationships we are used to seeing, even in more 'experimental' novels, but able to be connected by us as we put things 'together in mind'? Maybe. That's my hope.

(Though I do worry that the meaning of some sentences are possibly lost in bizarre syntax and/or abstraction and may never be meaningful by the end, but said sentences are rarer than I previously remembered, and will perhaps be rarer still with even more focus on my part.)

Anyways, I want to think about what we can know at this point and the big questions we should start thinking about, even here 'not half begun'.

First, the points of summary, what I have found that we can know. We can know a great deal about Jim/James Mayn, Grace Kimball, and a certain songbird with a tapeworm or two working their way inside of her.

'Call her Grace Kimball and she will hear'. In place of a father, she found a 'power vacuum'. Oh, he's around, he's sitting in a house in 'one of America's middles', drinking and staring out the window 'like a passenger'. He sings in the bathtub. Grace gets out, gets married, gets divorced, ends up in NYC. She starts a kind of woman's group that I'm sure we'll hear more about, and yeah, she makes money off it. It is the 'mid seventies of the Twentieth Century' and she can do that. She's a kind of healer maybe, like the Owl Woman she remembers her teacher told her about as a kid. The Owl Woman used earth magic, but really, what is magic if not understanding?


#21
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pp.8-20 continued

'Mayn was the name, and of the two sons, the one who would eventually go away was James'. But did he go? or was he sent? Or was the leaving his mothers? Like Grace he's 'once wed, once divorced', but he's a family man. And a traveler. Mayn's mom didn't tell stories, but grandma does, though sometimes the stories could sound a little like what was going on in little Mayn's life... James looks at a photo of his father, dressed up, a best man. That photo was taken the day Mayn's dad met Mayn's mom. Then McElroy gives us the amazing image of Jim as a fetus, curled 'like a cleft' in his mother, hearing Caruso 'underwater' on his dad's Victrola. Damn.


#23
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pp.8-20 continued II

At one point we begin to follow a tapeworm's track. Where? In a diva, a songbird, an opera singer's gut. How did it get there? In her food, a pike, flown to her favorite Japanese restaurant by an Ojibwag (if I can read my handwriting correct) Indian Medicine man. She ate the worm on purpose, to lose weight. It was prescribed by a physician for weight loss. The whole thing kind of makes him sick, but he does it. Why does SHE do it? Probably a lot of psychological and social reasons, but maybe it's because her audience matters to her with a 'depth so great it verged on the invisible'. What does the Medicine Man get from all this? Apparently he gets an aeronautics scholarship from a South American gov't. Our Opera Diva has connections high up.

So what questions should we look to examine at this point? Probably the most pressing is the nature of the "We". 'We are the relations between them' it says on p.10. Are 'We' the reader, connecting the characters or is the 'We' really the embodiment of said relation? Who are the angels? These questions will be asked again, but I think we can begin to look for the answers now...


#26
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pp.20-end of BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING

Yes, this is DENSE in comparison to the first chapter, but McElroy is not trying to punish us, he's trying (among a couple-three other things I can see, and probably just as many I can't) to give us a look at a large swath of characters all at once, presumably so when we view their lives up close, we will already have some context for them. This swirling text is a really interesting way of doing exposition. (And I should note that it's not just characters he's introducing here, but concepts. Light. Sound. Futurity. One of the innovations of Gravity's Rainbow was to draw from science and technology as much as literature and art. Women & Men seems like it will take that approach even farther...)

Another thing that McElroy does to help ease our reading is provide us with models of his book and how to read his book. A model of the novel, an opera, is described as 'an articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small units'. This line, or a form of it, appears 2X more in this BREATHER alone. An example of how to read the book appears when the text speaks of Mayn retelling to himself his grandmother's stories, 'to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not'. We are told that it is up to US to connect characters, events: 'Yet if the chance remains that they [James & Grace] should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation.'


#28
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pp.20-end of BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING

Jim Mayne has a father (Mel), a newspaperman; a mother (Sarah), a violinist; a brother (Brad), three years younger. Mom has a way of 'being left alone' and dad seems indifferent to Jim, but Grandma Margaret tells him the kind of stories that have you laughing and jumping seven steps (!) down into your backyard. He seems to have a number of compelling boyhood friendships though, that I imagine as directed by Tree of Life era Malick. Sometime between 1940 and '50, Mom died, but there is no body buried under 'yon granite memorial'. She went missing, drowned, 'salt in her lungs'. She exists in her sons now as an 'absence, brought close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap. What does James do now? He's a weatherman [edit: reporter] What does he NOT do? He doesn't dream, or so he says. What does James do IN THE FUTURE? Well, perhaps he's there now and he's imagining his past life, though he experiences it as his present. Yep.

#30
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pp.20-end of BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING

There are a lot of interesting Grace passages in the BREATHER, but I don't think she had quite as much of a sustained presence as Jim/James. She gives some interesting advice: 'even if you are a Sunday cocksucker, investigate other sources of protein.'

Our Diva is still there, worried about a visiting officer discovering her tapeworm secret. He just wanted an autograph. She wants him for the evening. Her doctor wants her, but he's cancelled on for dinner, relegated to brunch tomorrow.

So many other threads I don't have time to comment on: parents quizzing their child about homework that seems pretty hard, but what do you expect when the kid is doing four terms in a week and a half; did I read it right? yes, MATTER SCRAMBLER BEAMINGS; an inquisitor, about to torture; and probably the most overtly funny section of the book thus far, a part about how to desensitize the room of a 'breather' with unknown allergies. Don't forget to vacuum the vacuum!

Please discuss things like what it means to "fall into the horizon" because my head hurts a little. Yes, it really does, but I keep reminding myself

'THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS STILL WORTH CHANGING.'


#48 (response to Aloha :: "Also, why does he make the choice to frequently use the word "cunt", which is a vulgar term for a female genitalia?")
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I'm reading it in hardcover, so I can't control-f (or the e-reader equivalent) and see where exactly "cunt" is used, so all I have is my memory, which sez that the only place I've seen "cunt" is in the first chapter, where the word is probably used because the guy has a hard-on and is further sexualizing/eroticizing the vagina, beyond that more neutral word. If Kimball uses it a lot, I wouldn't be surprised. It seems like she's a kind of pro-sex feminist, perhaps undertaking the project of reclaiming certain "vulgar" terms.