In my children's literature class in college, the professor often wanted us to write essays based on exactly one sentence from the text. You know, really burrow down into the meat of that sentence! Get to the bottom of those scant few words by writing dozens and dozens of more words. I never really did understand how or why she wanted us to do this. I mean how much did Lloyd Alexander really want us to get out of his description of the protagonist lying down on a tree root to get some rest?! What she wanted was for us to speculate on every possible meaning of every sentence in ways that just seemed like a huge waste of time. Did she expect us to write an 800 page analysis on a 150 page book?! Oh, sure, I've been slowly working on an explication of The Bible that's about forty pages into Genesis and it's already three hundred pages long. So maybe she taught me something?
No, no! She absolutely didn't! Because every time I tried to do what she expected, I would branch out (what do I mean by "branch out"? Write a seventy word explication of my word choice) and begin discussing other aspects of the story, like the sentence that came before the sentence I was supposed to be concentrating on and also the sentence which came after and, you know what? Because I was so precocious, sometimes I'd discuss sentences even more distant from the explicated sentence than that! I forgave her though because she complimented me the day I wore my Alice Cooper in Wonderland costume to my classes.
But imagine if I took her advice! I already write long-winded digressions of every single thing I write something critical about. Am I also supposed to write long-winded explications of every single sentence as well? Sure, it would probably be helpful for Gravity's Rainbow! But it would also be embarrassing because people would truly understand the high percentage of sentences in this book which provoke this reaction from my brain: "DER!"
Although, I will say her method of explicating texts is absolutely the right way to explicate the Lucia Joyce chapter in the third book of Alan Moore's Jerusalem. Just wait until I do some blog entries on that mind fuck!
This section begins with an advertisement for Lazlo Jamf's Kryptosam, a substance which is invisible until somebody jerks off on it. Super good for secret messages unless the recipient is a woman. Although I suppose if she really needs to read the secret message, she can find a male friend and jerk him off on the message. The cute bit of the advert is how it suggests the message be sent alongside some porn appropriate to the person in question. So if you're sending a secret message to Brigadier Pudding, you'll want whatever the print equivalent to Two Girls, One Cup was in the thirties or forties. I bet the equivalent was a woman standing fully dressed with a shocked little "o" of a mouth and her hand just about covering it up as you can sort of see the hint of a toilet in the background. So risqué!
The actual narrative begins with Pirate looking at the "porn" sent with his current secret message (is it the message that came in the rocket? I don't remember ever learning about the message in the small cylinder! If I had to guess using only the knowledge of what I remember from my first reading, I'd say it was a message sent in the 000000 (Gottfried and his Imipolex womb having been destroyed) about Katje and how to rescue her). The "porn" is a black and white image of Scorpia Mossmoon, the wife of Clive Mossmoon and the woman Pirate thought he could become a civilian for (until it was apparent they couldn't remain together and he re-enlisted), in the room they talked about living together in and wearing a sexy outfit which he often pictured her in but had told nobody about. So somehow They know exactly what will get him to ejaculate all over his secret message. Although it works so well Pirate nearly doesn't get his penis out and pointed at the message before blowing his secret message decoder load.
A still encrypted message appears through the smear of Pirate's jizz which, after decoding in his head, gives Pirate a time, a place, and a request for help. So it might be to rescue Katje. But is it from Katje? Or is it a gift from Blicero for his little Gretel? Perhaps, although doubtful, it was from Gottfried.
"There is a time given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on him from higher than Earth's atmosphere, salvaged from Earth's prime meridian, keeps the picture, hmm, and washes his hands. His prostate is aching. There is more to this than he can see. He has no recourse, no appeal: he has to go over there and bring the operative out again. The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels."
Now to undo some of my speculation! There is no reason to believe this message came in the 000000. That rocket, being as mythical as it winds up being, was almost certainly launched nearly straight North along the magnetic line (this has to do with mathematical reasons discussed during the subsequent and much, much later allied launch of the 000001 (and was somebody in that one as well? Slothrop?! Bianca? Ludwig and his lemming?!)). But who would have sent this one? It seems obvious the operative is Katje, even Blicero suspected as much. But would she have been able to get the message into a rocket? Or, and I think maybe I might sort of understand this better when I get to the Blicero/Hansel/Gretel section later, Blicero sent it himself.
This is why I needed to re-read this thing immediately! Because the first time through, I quickly forgot about Pirate's message from the rocket here. That's the problem with being so easily entertained by the secret message that can only be read after you smear semen on it. Of course I was concentrating on that aspect of this passage!
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