View source for The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 28 14:53:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings,
Welcome to the first week of our group reading of CoL49. I'm your host for the week, James, and I'm providing a summary as well as some questions to ponder as we read. I'm really looking forward to this deep dive of Pynchon, as this will be my first group reading. So here goes!!

Summary -

Oedipa Maas comes home to find that she has been assigned executrix of the estate of a former boyfriend, the real estate mogul, Pierce Inverarity. She remembers images of their relationship and then spends the afternoon completing her housewife duties of shopping, preparing lasagna, and mixing drinks, while she tries to remember the last time she spoke with Pierce. Only while watching the news does she remember a 3am phone call from him where he uses a number of caricature voices without saying anything about why he has called. When her husband wakes and tells her to hang up, Pierce promises a visit from the Shadow and then hangs up. As she is remembering this, Wendell, her husband comes home, his sad work stories take precedence over her questions about the executrix role. Mucho’s job at the radio station is unfulfilling and his previous job as a used car salesman made him commiserate more with the purchasers than his profession. When she finally tells him, he suggests their lawyer, claiming to be incapable of helping. That night she gets a call at 3am from her shrink, Dr. Hilarious, who asks if she is taking her pills and if she will participate in his LSD experiments. She tells him no on both counts. She wakes the next morning and goes to their lawyer, Roseman, who first takes her to lunch and hits on her then offers his advice and services. Roseman has an issue with the tv show, Perry Mason, whom he considers a poor representative of his profession. Oedipa remembers a trip to Mexico City where she viewed a triptych by Remedios Varo. The center panel shows women weaving tapestries that flow out the window of a tower into a void that their tapestries attempt to fill. She cries realizing that Pierce is not the rescuing knight that would save her Rapunzel. She asserts to herself that an “anonymous and malignant” magic holds her in place. This magic can only be measured with her cunning and fear, leaving her to wonder what could rescue her from the magic.

Questions to ponder -

How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's Tupperware world?

How are we to interpret the four images that come to Oedipa when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, sunrise over Cornell western-facing slope, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)?

Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?

Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?

Why does the Rapunzel allusion appear here?

Can't wait to hear your responses. I'll respond to the questions later in the week (Wed?) with my thoughts.

In solidarity,

James


Responses in order
Jemmy Bloocher jbloocher at gmail.com
Sun Apr 28 15:39:21 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Hi James and Group,

Excellent!
I was thinking about Rapunzel - I need to read this story actually (and now years later I can read the original German and of course it had to be German!),
Oedipa is effectively a prisoner. Interestingly reading it this time round, I felt the claustrophobia more than I ever did in previous readings. Oedipa is trapped by her position, by the characters around her and her fate is decided by factors almost entirely outside her control - the absurdity of becoming the executrix of Pierce‘s estate and more! Her escape from this tower we see later, but bringing Rapunzel in right from the off is important as we then see her tower illustrated (in our minds) by the things which are already encroaching and see them develop. She is in a barely reachable room, one window. Pierce is this multi-faceted thing which is at this window.
Where and who is Mucho in this fairytale?
Where and who is Dr Hilarius?

They too, like Pierce, use different voices and faces (Fu Manchu) and oppress her (consciously or otherwise (is this unconsciously in Mucho? What are our immediate expectations/first impressions of a car salesman turned DJ of all things).
I need to parse who the comparative characters would be in Rapunzel. I am off to look them up.

Reading this I have a narrator always (unreliable?) and this stands true in my mind in the last page or so. It is almost televisual. I can almost hear the voice. Kind of like a cross between Bob Ross and Richard Burton.

Will write again when not on phone, but computer

Jem

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Apr 28 17:49:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Good summary with one disagreement over whether the thoughts of the last paragraph are really Oed’s. You seem to have doubt on this point also. I think there is a distinct change of voice, starting  with the line "Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.     …...
In my reading Pynchon is drawing back from her internal processing and memory to an authorial POV. 

These were really good questions IMO and provoked me to dig into them. Some think I  say too much but this is how my Pynchon mind works.. 

If naming the main character Oedipa alludes to Oedipus Rex, what is the plague that drives her to solve the riddle/case? 

Her name seems more related to a very general aspect of the Oedipus complex and the forces of fate in a particular time and place than a one-to-one correspondence to the Greek Tragedy. But there is a sense in which the Play( both the Couriers’s revenge, and  her investigation into the mystery of Pierce Inverarity, leading to the ancient  postal war) is the thing by which we catch at least a glimpse of the ultimate emptiness of the missing King. Oedipa wants to escape from a world where every day and every place is the same( Mexico not an escape just an accidental name of a world where everything is rootless colonized, another tourist destination).  ( similarly Kinaret is not in her life the scene of Jesus ministry and confrontation with the powers of priests and empire,  but a California suburb with Muzak ), but she is also afraid of losing control ( LSD, tranquilizers, hallucinations that are anything more than her active imagination like the bust of Jay Gould, Uncle Sam poster).She is ok with alcohol and never seems to consider that her use may well be leading to alcoholism.  That space between boredom and fear  is the plague and curse of her starting point and that is where she stumbles and remains trapped as  the story implied in her name unfolds a battleground  and tragic destiny in which she is a kind of accountant rather than an agent of change.  She attracts every man who sees her but wants some kind of prince to enable a realization of a deeper role, of a life of the soul? She is Rapunzel whose hair , (feminine creativity) has no root in her being or her relationships. She sees that women may weave the world, while she feels destined to barrenness. Her very tears hidden behind dark glasses.

My feeling is that her feminized Oedipus pattern which would be killing her mother and marrying her father,  takes the form of not pursuing her moving vision in the tower, but abandoning her own creativity in exchange for sex, submission, and “marrying” one man after another  from the masked omnivorous prince Inverarity to the sensitive Mucho, to the amoral greed head lawyer Metzger to the theater director Driblet, while looking for an explanation of the dark forces at play: fascism, greed, power struggles, creativity and freedom constrained by corporate hierarchies.  I like her and identify with her search for what’s  going on, and that makes her tragic inability to penetrate the limits of her destiny all the more painful even while I laugh with the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto and the Hymn to Yoyodyne.

We want her to be the magic truth-telling revelation  of Angelo’s doings but watch her most solid  documentation of that story sold off in a stamp auction. All in all she seems to have a strong correspondence to the life of Remedios Varo, escaping fascism and the church and the male dominance of the surrealists only to be somewhat trapped in the psychological trauma of her past and the forces of history. We do not know if Oedipa , like Varo will insistently bear witness to her inner and outer life, tell her truth. 

OK, too big of an answer but it just spun out as I was trying to give myself some tools to think about this novella. Oedipa is us, another soul who has seen the machinery of domination, has experienced its damage, has desired a better destiny and despairs of any real reconciliation with the human condition. 

How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's Tupperware world?

Mostly he goes inward into his need for meaning and ethical consistency and sensual discernment while Oedipa goes outward into curious evidence: human bones in a fake lake, bar talk near Yoyodyne, P.I.’s stamp collections, a mysterious war between information sources, ancient plays. Both Oed, and Mucho are  well suited to their methods. Each is looking into the shadows.(  a turn of events  proceeding from within and from the promised visit from Lamont Cranston aka PI aka???. Her shadow is a fear that she will appear to be hysterical, crazy, unworthy to be taken seriously. His shadow is that he will lose his compassion, his desire to have authentic connection to music, to others, that he will instead accept an easy and meaningless life. 

How are we to interpret the three( actually 4) images that come to Oedipa when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)? Don’t forget the missed sunrise.

The Bartok Concerto starts off somber but strong and assertively directional. The  solo oboe has a darker lonelier tone that feels to me like the individual caught in larger( social, historic, energetic?)  movements who feels that something within is getting lost. By the 4th movement it is more overtly crying against the overt cheeriness of the orchestra; disconsolate is the perfect word. Oedipa’s sense with Inverarity is not so much being invited in to the action at last but assigned to exquisitely self -aware exclusion, mocked from beyond the grave. She mocks back with memories of a sunset others missed, birds awakened, PI’s icon having crushed him. A young republican housewife and dutiful executor of the tycoons will, she has within a wild feminist disdain for this whole set-up, and we can only admire her for that. 

Mazatlan was an indigenous culture center before the Aztecs, before the Spanish colonizers, before the various Mexican revolutions, before the lighthouse tower marking an international port, before the German mining enterprises we will visit later in ATD, before Hollywood and jet set tourism, Mazatlan retains Its ancient indigenous name meaning a center teeming with life, specifically with sacred deer. We do not know the geographic range of pre-conquest of Huichol spirituality, centered currently in north central high country, but we do know the centrality of deer and peyote to their ceremonial practices of renewal and reconnection, and to my mind it hints at what Oed is seeking or needing as she slips the constraints of 50s republican safety.
From abstract of article by Barbara Meyerhoff USC
The interpretation is offered that the fusion of Deer, Maize, and Peyote, particularly as achieved during the Peyote Hunt resolves a series of contradictions in Huichol life-societal, historical, and ideological. It is suggested that the Peyote Hunt represents a historical and mystical return to the original Huichol homeland and way of life, and a symbolic re-creation of "original times" before the present separation occurred between man, gods, plants, and animals; between life and death, between the natural and supernatural; and between the sexes. On the Peyote Hunt, men become gods and at the most dramatic moment of the event, when the first peyote is "slain" and eaten, the important social distinctions of age, sex, ritual status, regional differences and family affiliations, are eliminated. A state of unity and continuity, which epitomizes the Huichol view of "the good," is reached and this continuity is between man, nature, society, and the supernatural. The "retrieval" of this unity is seen as perhaps the most important function of the ceremony, and of the entire symbol complex.

But the original indigenous and truly other Mazatlan is for Oed a closed door, her closest glimpse through the visionary art of Remedios Varo. With PI it is is a tourist town for the likes of John Wayne and the jet set he is part of, a trophy experience, a colonial hotel, the mysterious Pacific reduced to a  beautiful tamed wildness, a  place to catch Marlin in in an expensive boat with sate of the art fishing gear, a confirmation of ownership, dominance, a fancy brothel like Cuba before the revolution, a  scenic place to drink Mescal and Mexican Beer and walk on the beach, a part of America’s backyard, a potential investors paradise.

Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call? If so, how does that pattern connect to the quest? Pattern: 1)Vampire voice, 2) comic Negro (Step& Fetchit? Amos & Andy?) 3)hostile Pachuco (cultural rebellion through style, dangerousness)   4)  interrogating Gestapo Officer.5) Lamont Cranston (seemingly his primary mask ) ??? Secretive preserver of  a certain law and order? 

I want to go further with this question but will hold off for now.

I would like to introduce another question that haunts me in COL49. Why do we find out so little about Pierce Inverarity whose will and testament and estate is being examined and who was the Main character’s former lover? Is he the murderous aspirant to the throne of the American Dream? 

Is Pierce Inverarity best mapped onto Howard Hughes( Hollywood playboy and actor bought RKO radio, original fortune from oil mining bit that could ‘pierce’ hard strata like nothing before, real estate and casino speculator, linked to CIA, the founder of aerospace research at El Segundo later acquired by Boeing and located very close to Manhattan Beach where TP wrote the book, far right wacko accused by his lawyer on deathbed of being involved in Kennedy assassinations? Pynchon definitely has a fascination with Hughes (Inherent Vice) and real estate. Is Pierce I. not so entirely fictional?

János Széky miksaapja at gmail.com
Sun Apr 28 19:09:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Actually the 'dry, disconsolate tune' in Bartók's Concerto, mvmt 4 comes from the syrupy patriotic song "You are fair, you are beautiful, o Hungary," very popular at that time. Bartók himself described this movement as a serenade by a young lover, interrupted by drunken revelers. So it seems to be about an exile's (since 1940) lament over the loss of his homeland, with an ironic twist.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Apr 28 20:58:19 UTC 2024

CoL49

So the oboe part is supposed to be syrupy. It sounds sad to me, full of longing, and more so in its difference from the rest of the orchestra.  I guess I just don’t have Mucho’s ear for music. It did make me think I should listen to more Bartok. So in Bartoks’ description, was the main orchestra the drunken revelers? Maybe I’m not too far off.

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Mon Apr 29 19:20:49 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

1. If naming the main character Oedipa alludes to Oedipus Rex, what is the plague that drives her to solve the riddle/case?

Joseph, I agree with you that Oedipa is named after the Complex and not the tragic Rex. But I disagree that the female version of the Oedipus Complex is Oedipa killing her mother and marrying her father. If that were the case, Pynchon would have named her Electra. So, in fact, Oedipa's latent obsession (need? destiny?) is to, like Oedipus, kill her father and marry her mother. What does that mean? Is Pierce (already dead as the story starts) the Daddy and is she herself the Mommy?

My take: Oedipa, when we first meet her, is trapped in the nightmare of suburban housewife non-existence. She's put herself in her own Rapunzel-castle. She needs to climb up there and rescue herself. She had wasted too much time hoping that Pierce would be the one to carry her away from her drab existence. Now that he's dead, she has to be her own Prince Charming - to marry herself. She's not a tragic, doomed figure. The book is the story of how she gets out of that confined head-space she's in. She literally leaves, embarking on a quest. It doesn't matter what she learns from Lot 49. She's self-actualized by asking questions, following the breadcrumbs out of captivity. Hilarius wants to draw her back, inviting her to join the LSD bridge inward, but she wants none of it. Good for her.

I certainly don't want to posit Pynchon as some sort of you-go-girl feminist. But he was definitely reading the ethos, creating the rebellious housewife character (filtered through the male gaze) that also cropped up in The Graduate (1967) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). As opposed to channeling the actual women's movement, which he may have viewed with some alarm or hidden hostility. Actually, Oedipa reminds me very much of the Mad Housewife. Young, highly intelligent and educated, but unutterably bored and stuck, by virtue of marriage.

2. Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?

Reading up on The Shadow (specifically the radio show), it seems clear that by voice-switching, Pierce is staying solidly in that persona, as the Shadow has all sorts of alter egos and work partners. Chinese alter-egos were prominent, but perhaps Pynchon thought those were way too cringy to mimic? The Comical Negro is pretty egregious, even if it was a staple of radio at the time. Pierce addresses Oedipa as Margo, the Shadow's love interest created for the radio show.

It's kind of interesting that Pierce talks as a radio character, and Mucho is a radio DJ. Later, isn't there a moment where Mucho distorts his name and/or Oedipa's name to compensate for the radio distortions? Meanwhile, the producers of The Shadow radio show, created Margo as a character, because they were afraid the male voices would all sound too much the same (unless reduced to ethnic caricatures). So there's a sense that both these men speak to Oedipa in coded or distorted  language, as a means of expressing (or hiding?) the truth.

3. Rapunzel/Remedios Varo

The thing that struck me about the young women in Varo's painting is that, though trapped and insignificant (like Oedipa), they've found a way to code their messages and get them out into the world. Which is what the W.A.S.T.E. alternative postal system is doing. Real communication by the marginalized. So it's a good image for Oedipa to have in mind as she starts her journey. It's a life-changing journey, but it's not of self-discovery, it's outward, towards discovery. Of what? The reality behind the distorted
coded messages that Pierce, Mucho and ... everyone in power employ.

4.  Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?

I vote for it being Oedipa's internal monologue. We're making the journey with her, not watching her make it from afar. If Stencil can think of himself in third person, so can Oedipa.

LK

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Apr 30 04:18:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Laura
So your picture of Oedipa is very close to how I went into this my 3rd or 4th  read and the whole novel struck me differently this time, with the funnier and frivolous parts seeming funnier and the shadows feeling much darker, and  left me with this feeling that Oedipa had not really seized her own path of liberation or confronted the violence that was being covered up by greed or more violence. She is braver as we see in her confrontation with Hilarius, but also numbed into questioning her own experiences and accepting a passive role in the resolution of the estate and the mysteries she has uncovered.. My  current feeling is that this novel is as close to allegory as Pynchon gets and Oedipa is too human to fit into her allegorical role. This may be part of the unresolved tension that produced disquiet and P.’s feeling of having missed the mark. 
We both seem to agree that her path is outward, and Mucho’s more inward but Hilarius and Driblet are reminders that the inward leads to the outward and vice versa. If the mind or soul manifesting nature implied in the word psychedelic is accurate, and I happen to think it is , Hilarius manifests the violence of his use of psychological manipulation and his affiliation with fascism, whereas Oedipa keeps returning through travels, questions, research to her inner life and the question of what she actually wants to do with her life, what does the information she is uncovering mean for her. One of the things that has changed in her is a greater empathy for those on the margins, the preterite. This empathy  is something we see in Mucho earlier also. Perhaps the abrupt ending was needed to leave her future more open than my thoughts indicate.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Apr 30 17:26:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading chapter 1 4th Question

Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call? If so, how does that pattern connect to the quest?

Pattern: 1)Vampire voice, 2) comic Negro (Step& Fetchit? Amos & Andy?) 3)hostile Pachuco (cultural rebellion through style, dangerousness)   4)  interrogating Gestapo Officer.5) Lamont Cranston (seemingly his primary mask ) ??? Secretive preserver of  a certain law and order? 

It’s hard to say how much of a pattern there is. It is not real obvious that there is one. 3 of the voices are somewhat sinister and imply a rater threatening search for information: Transylvanian bat search, Gestapo interrogator, Shadow with clue to the killing of professor quackenbush.  We also find that the Lamont Cranston voice is a kind of standby mask for Inverarity a major persona. He also threatens Mucho with a visit from the Shadow. In a sense this threat is fulfilled  with the executor letter and Oedipa drawn away from Mucho by a quest into Inverarity’s  shadow lands.

Let’s stop here to ask who the fuck is PI and does he represent something larger. Later an actual rep of Gestapo mind, Dr Hilarius, in his latest “research with LSD” says to Oed “I want YOU!” and she images the classic Uncle Sam poster and tells Hilarius no. I don’t think it a crazy stretch to push this novella toward allegorical qualities and pose PI as the US’s claims on individuals and particularly what that means for the spouse of PI’s  and Uncle Sam’s quintessential American longing.. Does Uncle Sam want us to be free or want us to be soldiers to protect and serve his ambitions for power and wealth. There is a common theme throughout P’s writing which is symbolized by the V male  wanting to colonize and control the presumed feminine. That seems to be an expansive conception  which in much western literature includes  the actual  female, the land, resources, and even the subconscious, the inner mythos. 
This colonial enterprise makes a fair amount of dark space for the flight of the inner vampire,  whose predation recruits new vampires. Whatever PI has begun has a transcendent corporate life and will not die with him. His vampire appetites live on in Metzger, in the inheritors of his empire, the buyers of the stamps, Yoyodyne, The holy narcissism. 
So what about Comic Negro and Pachuco and their brief appearance sandwiched between vampire and fascist? They are the what remains in popular culture of a people thoroughly disenfranchised, masticated and humiliated, both former slaves and former owners, portrayed as fools who deserve to be mocked, whose place in Los Angeles continues in the 50s  to be stolen by white real estate interests, whose image is controlled by the unquestioned racism of much of Hollywood.. In The Shadow as secret enforcer of American law and order required an alter ego. from Wikipeda: In their first meeting, The Shadow threatens Cranston, saying that unless the playboy agrees to allow the aviator to use his identity when he is abroad, then Allard will simply take over the man's identity entirely. 
In the larger cultural context of the 50s-60s McCarthy style anticommunism was king.( PI’s lawyer Metzger is a staunch anticommunist as are employees of Yoyodyne). There was a power struggle between JFK who was turning away from the anti-communist wars and the CIA because of Cuba, and ending when Kennedy was killed in Dallas. CIA former head put in charge of assasination investigation. A story that can easily map onto the Courier’s revenge. The war in Vietnam has kicked into high gear under Johnson after falsification of Gulf of Tonkin incident. Among many other CIA activities later revealed in the 70s was Operation Shamrock  (wikipedia)in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. 
Shamrock was the basis of  an NSA watchlist. Many Nazi Intel officers had been recruited into our CIA NSA and were active in Europe in Operation Gladio heaed by James Jesus Angleton ( not to be confused with Duke Angelo). Angleton once said, ”Deception is a State of Mind, and the Mind of the State” 

This historic context brings up the question of what really is Pynchon investigating through Oedipa Maas. One of the oldest and most successful activities of the CIA is its influence on mass media, Papers, TV, Internet. In many ways we are still in the age of competing communications systems and that is the central focus and discovery of Oedipa Maas.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Apr 30 22:43:06 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Everybody probably knows the lore tidbit about “Pierce Inverarity” being very similar to stamp collecting terms, as in “pierced inverse rarity”

But I’m trying to remember a source for that - didn’t have any success with a cursory Google.

Will find it eventually but assistance wd be appreciated

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 1 00:46:26 UTC 2024

No Subject

JKQ: “Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?”

1. Disembodied voice from a familiar person.
2. Familiar voice speaks with other voices, characters with their own individual messages.
3. Familiar voice is now dead, but has sent her on a mission now that he is passed over.

Sounds a lot like a sound to a SEANCE  me.

David Morris

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 1 03:01:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Had not heard of ithat exactly( the “pierced inverted rarity”)but know that rarity is key what makes coins and stamps valuable. I tried searching to see if anything came up and did find something that fits the Lamont Cranston, Pierce I. Howard Hughes aviator and postal service themes. It is one of the most expensive of rare stamps called the inverted  Jenny with a picture of a biplane upside down, the stamp was a celebration of the first plane used for airmail in1918.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-inverted-jenny-24-cent-stamp-came-be-worth-fortune-180969090/#google_vignette
How the Inverted Jenny, a 24-Cent Stamp, Came to Be Worth a Fortune
smithsonianmag.com

From the article
"the upside-down visage actually proved somewhat prescient. Piazza says that the plane engraved on the Inverted Jenny–Number 38262, which flew <https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/15-may-1918-2/> from Potomac Park near Washington, D.C. on May 15, 1918 for the first airmail delivery–was piloted by an inexperienced man, who got lost during his flight and had to make a crash landing. When his plane hit the soft ground in a field in rural Maryland, it flipped over. Art, as it so often does, imitated life itself.”

Zat shit weird enough for ya?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 1 07:21:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

The pretty great Richard Poirier's review of *The Crying *had this; paraphrased but very close:
Funny names like Pierce Inverarity turn out to lead to, if you went there, a famous real life stamp collector named Pierce who could tell you (or sell you) an "inverse rarity".

I am of the 'school' that believes that unlike Dickens' characters' names (in general), Pynchon's are usually goofs, put-ons as that 60s phrase had it....they are Tom joking with all of us about all of the dead ends of supposed 'scholarship'.

It is a name referentially leading nowhere, another part of the theme of 'conspiracy". Another sign that is a mystery.

I will also put this reading in the context of Oedipa's name. First, I like the scholar who read her full name as Oedipa my ass....
We cannot easily map her name onto any of Sophocles" drama and basic meanings obviously. I say Pynchon knew that, intentionally, of course. He has said in one of his early letters to a friend (or his first editor)--'"my meanings are all there; on the surface of the texts"and in one sense we can get that. Even if we have to look up much, it is right there.....

So, since for those of us who know the whole short novel already and know especially Pynchon's thematic use of the law of the excluded middle, I also see Oedipa Maas as a name between logic and farce, so to speak...a surreal joke of a name.

But also, speaking of both sides of an excluded middle, IF Oedipa Maas has any connection to real world meaning, I think this: It comes from Pynchon's immersion in Freud and his entourage--Fromm; Brown, esp as we know---who deeply explored what Freud said the Oedipa Complex was really about: The psychodynamics of history. Pynchon is a profound historical novelist. Lot 49 is, among much else, his great thematic statement of THAT concept....

Mike Weaver mike.weaver at zen.co.uk
Wed May 1 10:09:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Has the 'Oxford English Dictionary International Phonetic Alphabet' been mentioned yet. Sorry if I duplicate - I'm only skimming these posts at the mo.

cheers
Mike

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 1 14:52:03 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

The names are intended to induce a simultaneous sense of the shallow and the arcane.  The style of writing itself is evocative.

The effect of which is an orbital paranoia.

The author has never in his ethereal earthbound stay stenciled a name that did not for him flash a branching blue lightningbolt into other landscapes territories and temporalities, which upon striking strike out again, branching and flashing.

It is almost as if everything happens all at once.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 1 14:57:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

JKQ: “How are we to interpret the four images that come to Oedipa when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, sunrise over Cornell western-facing slope, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)?”

"Interpret” is probably exactly the misdirection Pynchon intended with this list. I would say it’s more an invocation of disparate mood evocations.  Don’t forget that one of the main subjects of this book is futile searches for meaning

Pynchon seems to be trying his first stab at the Joycean pages-long sentences that make GR so difficult and rich with poetry.  I am finding his attempts at such complexity much less successful here (so far).

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 1 16:01:15 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

I am finding them as good as Portrait of the Artist....

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 1 17:24:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

That is not to say that he sees everything.  It's a possible tract to peruse and pursue.  Imagine his great delight to learn subsequently that the images on rare stamps may be inverted.  Might also make him somewhat paranoid.  But we all have our own lightningbolts.  I for one see DeVere in Pierce Inverarity.

I am interested in origins.  So when I see DeVere in a name clearly associated with ancient traditions, like Pierce Inverarity, I wonder what more esoteric items Tom may have indicated.  Master Atlan certainly knew all about eclipses, past and future.  They do cast a shadow.

I am going to presume that Tom was well acquainted with Grave's Greek Myths.  The structure alone, the format, the layout of the book would have pleased him.  While it appears to be somewhat chronological and linear it often seems to carry on by association, and it's enjoyable to bounce around from the index to chapters to notes to names to index.  And it ends with Odysseus.

The Sphinx was the daughter of Typhon, or Orthrus, and Hera had sent it. All four of those names orbit around to the origins of ancient Egypt, which gave birth to such embedded numbers throughout the subsequent traditions as 49, as DeVere was well aware.

It is interesting to note that Graves states that Laius "pierced" Oedipus' feet after birth, and later Graves suggests the possibility that *Oedipus* was originally *Oedipais*, then immediately again mentions "the piercing of Oedipus' feet".

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 1 18:11:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Association is the way a higher order of consciousness can operate.  If you see your uncle's favorite footwear, you can immediately see and know everything about all your uncle's favorite footwear in all of his lives forward and backward.  That is, the entity who plays your uncle, all its other lives in which is obtained favorite footwear.  You would never have to read about the footwear, or hear or learn about them.  They're all just there, present, in a flash.

That's how it is possible.  So then you just assume the entity playing Pynchon is bleeding through to a degree.

Yes I am being whimsical when I say forward and backward, as there isn't any.

Charles Albert cfalbert at gmail.com
Wed May 1 13:11:16 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

What is the meaning of Maas in Dutch? 
noun. mesh [noun] (one of) the openings between the threads of a net. loophole [noun] something that has been left out of a law or contract that allows people to legally avoid obeying it. (Translation of maas from the PASSWORD Dutch–English Dictionary © 2014 K Dictionaries Ltd

I think I'll just leave it there, like a fart in an elevator.

love,

cfa

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 2 01:10:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings Jemmy,
I only see your posts on the list-serve, so I'll respond by pasting your response at the end.I immediately went and read Grimm's Rapunzel but in English and realized how much of the story I'd forgotten or never really understood. For one, I'd forgotten about the parents and the rampion leafy greens, to think the parents gave up their daughter for salad! Also the prince doesn't rescue Rapunzel but is ambushed by the witch after Rapunzel let's slip they'd been meeting. He escapes the witch but falls into a thorn bush which amazingly enough blinds him. Meanwhile Rapunzel has been left by the witch in a 'desert space'.  Apparently the rendez-vous had been more than just a kiss, because when the prince blindly gropes his way to her desert space, she has a baby boy and girl. She cries tears of joy to see him. They fall in his eyes and presto, he's regained his sight! They go back to his dad and live happily ever after.
Some interesting connections for the prisoner, Oed. I think that the patriarchal savior of this story isn't clear. Still Oedipa must find her own way out of the prison, since both Mucho and Pierce have failed. I lean to the narrator, as 3rd person limited/omniscient uses phrases like "she may fall back on..." and "As things developed, she was to have all manner..." which imply his knowledge of how this plays out, unlike Oed.
Thanks for the thoughts. Cheers!
In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 2 01:10:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings János,
Thanks for the details about Bartok. I had skimmed a few articles, but this helps me considerably. I'm going to find a copy to listen for myself. Any recommended performances?
I think that along with the other images, it offers a sublime/sacred tone contrasted with the profane/materialistic slamming door and the bust of that notorious robber baron Jay Gould.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 2 01:10:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings Laura,
Thanks for the perspective on Oedipa. I lean more toward the allusion to Rex for his riddle-solving and detective spirit. However, I think that part of the "plague" that Oedipa faces is patriarchal and suburban. The Rapunzel analogy works better for this because as you pointed out, Pierce doesn't deliver her from the prison, and she knows this before his death. Unlike Rapunzel (see my summary of Grimm's in a previous post to Jemmy), Oedipa keeps her tears to herself, hoping for a new way to look at the world. Pierce's death offers her the opportunity to explore outside the alternate to going insane by marrying the DJ Mucho.
Thanks for the background on the Shadow, and I find it interesting that we know so little about Pierce's internal world or how he feels about Oedipa. His constant use of voices indicates an inability to be open and honest, which must have been why she recognized that he wasn't the prince rescuer but a man who "had true guile come more naturally to him". He has to shim the lock with his credit cards, more of his wealth privilege.
As I mentioned when I reread Grimm's Rapunzel story, the last time the prince climbs the tower, it is on the shorn tresses that the witches holds to trap him. Two things are interesting about the 2nd half of the story, Rapunzel is placed in a "desert space" and left by the witch, who after the prince escapes her, is never seen again. The prince makes a blind journey to finally find Rapunzel, rather than she searching for him. Of course the end has all the patriarchal trappings of a happy ending.
I think that the end of the paragraph is the narrator's voice, both communicating Oedipa's thoughts and also what he knows will happen next.
Thanks for your thoughts and joining the reading! Cheers!
In solidarity,

James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 2 04:47:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

Yes, Oedipa is Rapunel, caught in sunny California and boring suburban changeless days. Repressed self-unaware days? With fondue parties. California, where Nixon was from and, later, Reagan was born again. We will learn Oed is a Young Republican. ....the American culture is scientific-based intellectually, since that mag is mentioned. Science, technology, just a few years after the start of the space race and our nation's push to be first in it, all things science.

Oedipa will soon let down her hair. This novella is, among other things, a quest novel as many have taught it.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 2 04:47:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

..."and the room which knew"

What a clever way to say the room was spinning because she had a Kirsch-fed half-drunk on.

Pierce's voices are from largely "darker' characters in normal understandings..The Shadow, that Jungian concept, appears. The Shadow is visited on the hypersensitive Mucho....Much of, feeling, human feeling, empathetic understanding of preterite lives....grows more poignant on each rereading.

And Mucho does not believe....he has lost meaning in his work, where we spend most of our days. What does it mean
to "not believe in any of it?"...being a disk jockey?......the music? The choosing of it? And in a short novel about what we can believe in, this is some kind of internal thematic metaphor.

I have personally, just recently, lost a belief in some volunteer work I was doing and the feeling is a noticeable emptiness inside.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 2 08:55:42 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings Joseph, 

Thanks for the feedback on the summary & questions. I agree that the narrator provides us with what Oed may be thinking and then shifts to an observer offering perspective.
I tend to see the Oedipus Rex allusion as more associated with his riddle solving and quest to escape the revealed fate. He's an early detective, trying to find the source/cause/perpetrator of the plague. I'm not sure the Freudian theories apply here. Who would be her parents? We don't ever meet them as I remember (I'm focused on staying within the weekly reading). Someone later makes the name an anagram of an Oxford English Dictionary, which fits with Mucho's pet name. The tears behind the bubble glasses has some interesting allusions to the Rapunzel story that I summarized in a previous post responding to Jemmy.

Your background of the indigenous Mazatlan opened some ideas as well. Having spent much time in Mazatlan, not just the Gold Coast, but wandering the city itself, your point reminded me of Pynchon's Baedeker travel books and his portrayal of the European tourist blind to the life behind the sightseeing and drinking.
I was thinking about how Pierce's voices alternate between authority figures and those opposed or oppressed by that authority, ending with the Shadow, who, if I remember right is more of a vigilante and probably a blend/tool of authority while maintaining an outsider aspect.
Thanks for the responses! Cheers!
In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 2 19:16:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Oops

> On May 2, 2024, at 3:07 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> I don’t really read a lot of Pynchon criticism, some, yes, but I prefer to search things out for myself, so anyway I had not heard this reference. I too looked it up and my best find was the inverted Jenny, which I mentioned earlier. The only mention of piercing was another stamp that was rare because the perforations on the edge were off somehow and the stamps were  cut or pierced. Nothing that had the whole phrase "pierced inverted rarity", so I am skeptical until someone has a something  more than memory. Here is a seemingly very thorough  list of stamp errors by an auctioneer house for collectibles. Perforation errors are called imperforate or misperforate, not pierced and where I read about a collectible pierced stamp the word pierced was not used as a stamp collector term but just as a descriptive term of how the error occurred.
> 
> https://www.warwickandwarwick.com/news/guides/rare-error-stamps

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 3 02:34:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

May I ask, who is this DeVere - DeVere the Irish poet?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 3 03:22:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Thanks for the details, I ran into the same lack of confirmation for the (too-pat?) reading of “pierced inverse rarity”

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 3 03:25:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Thanks, Mark, for the pointer to Richard Poirier, and for the reality check 
- it’s unwise to build ambitious theories on a character’s name alone, isn’t it?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 3 03:53:41 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Extrapolating from footwear to narrative stances and attributing avuncularity to the author -

Treatment of the super-rich as a phenomenon and as people in CoL49 is evoked in a few of Oedipa’s memories of Pierce, and a lot of details of his footprint in the economic landscape of Southern California

There’s a way to see this treatment as a way of inveighing against the effects of extreme wealth (and possibly part of a tendency evinced in AtD’s Vibe family - certainly malefactors of great wealth - and also in Jess Traverse’s “monopolist” quote from Emerson in _Vineland_)

But it could also be a thought experiment - how does someone cope after rejecting the more unsavory aspects of capitalism embodied in Pierce, when the effects of it are all around her and he made provisions to keep her involved?

There’s a modicum of tenderness to the portrait of Pierce that emerges - nowhere does Oedipa remember him being deliberately cruel*, just not connecting with her Rapunzel self-concept - and bringing them into jeopardy with the precarious bust of Jay Gould on a narrow shelf above their bed (which apparently she never felt empowered to move.)

The chance of mishap would be non-trivial in the event of an earthquake or strong tremor.

What a vivid way to dramatize the risks to Pierce and Oedipa of his admiration & emulation of the ethically challenged financier!

In fact - maybe that’s how Pierce died?**

* I think it would have almost certainly have been she who slammed the hotel room door - but his “Shadow” warning to Mucho doesn’t seem very friendly of a flex, does it?

** I think of him as much older, but he could just as easily have been a Wunderkind, couldn’t he?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 3 12:48:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

It sounds to me that psychiatrists pretty much invented the term paranoia , so kind of have first dibs on what it means. But Hey. The greek root , para( beside, outside of,)and noos ( mind, higher self) does not seem to me to automatically imply unwarranted fear, even if shrinks  may have been looking for a term that could label that mental state. The thing is that there are ,as I said before, often  actual reasons for wariness and watchful distrust.  The root word could apply to either situation or even just an altered mental state. The reasons for Oedipa  to be on high alert are many and grow as her journey proceeds. The good sense of that wariness or paranoia is born out as she investigates the stamps and Tristero  and when Hilarius goes full insane Nazi. Her calm handling of that  is more fearless than fearful and defuses potential violence. 

Howard Hughes came to mind as I was searching my memory for someone who was rich , attractive, mysterious, a ladies man,  suited the Hollywood Mazatlan crowd of the time and who Thomas Pynchon was interested in( in Inherent Vice he is an important character). That he was involved in Radio and Movies along with aerospace seemed a further plus for him as a model for PI. He also lost his attraction to several women and was unfazed. It is just a working theory and I’m seeing some other evidence, but my idea is to keep going as long as it fits and to explore the Couriers Tragedy as it might relate to the JFK assassination.. If Pynchon actually had this in mind he left it pretty obscure, but I am also seeing some strong coincidences. Not expecting agreement but hoping for a respectful look at where this idea takes  a reader.

> Yes I appreciate your political reading of 49.  I have not yet reached much beyond the first scene at The Scope, and so cannot judge for example how the JFK/CIA scenarios may map onto Courier's Tragedy.  I might be somewhat surprised if it did, only because it was so very contemporaneous to the penning of the novel, and Pynchon so young.  But then again I read into the book some things that weren't known until a decade or five after the book was written.  That's my paranoia.  How is that possible.  And I agree with you, I'm not afraid of it either.  The only aspect of all the items you listed regarding the CIA of that time is that I happen to believe that JFK had no intention of leaving Vietnam.  His inner circle, oh I'm not real good with names, was it McNamara perhaps, and one other one especially wrote memoirs shortly after and rewrote JFK's intentions, or misremembered the facts.

> Earlier today for the hell of it I googled the definition of paranoid, and holy shit, that's not what I mean by paranoid, that dark clinical psychiatric stuff.  Who cares.  I mean, the psychiatrists can own the word, but it happens to be a great word so I'll use it how I please.  When I said "orbital paranoia," it was quite intresting to me because just a couple days ago I came across a webpage called Spermatikos Logos, and the minds there seem much in the spirit as myself, and they just happened to, at the very beginning/top of the explanation/reason for "spermatikos logos", quote Oedipa from 49 saying "orbital paranoia."  Well, I had not reached that far in the book, but the phrase just happens to fit perfectly my "paranoid" "reading" (last time I'll use quotes) of the book.  The question immediately became, is the guy who made the site aware of what "orbital paranoia" actually refers to?  It looks like he does, but hey, I'm paranoid that way.  Then five minutes later I learned the same guy is somehow connected with the p-list (I may not recall that right), and so I used the phrase in my groupmessage.

> What else was I going to say.  Oh I can go over in more detail about Oedipus from R.Graves, but I left my book elsewhere until tomorrow.  The piercing is what father Laius did to baby Oedipus before he deserted Oedipus on a mountaintop.  It's just interesting how obviously the word pierce occurs so closely to Graves saying Oedipus was originally Oedipai.  And the bit about Oedipus changing the Theban matriarchy (goddess Hera worship, which gets to paranoid reading) to patriarchy, and you can see how a young Pynchon might see all that and do some simple inversions and boom.  Plus there is Perseus which is a bit of an overkill but there it is.  Graves also has a very interesting comment about the Freud complex with regard to Plutarch and hippopotamuses.

> Seeing DeVere in Pierce Inverarity, well I said that was my own lightningbolt, and that I see it.  As in the name, not the character.  But DeVere fits in with my paranoid reading, so he is sort of in the back of my mind as we go along.

> That reminds me, no I had never considered Howard Hughes as a model for Pierce.  Where did you get that, again?  If it has something to do with something that occurs later in the book, that may be why I didn't catch it.

>>>>>The names are intended to induce a simultaneous sense of the shallow and the arcane.  The style of writing itself is evocative.

The effect of which is an orbital paranoia.

The author has never in his ethereal earthbound stay stenciled a namethat did not for him flash a branching blue lightningbolt into other landscapes territories and temporalities, which upon striking strike out again, branching and flashing.

>> I love this, especially the first  line and 3rd paragraph. The effect for me, though,  is different than paranoia. For me paranoia connotes unjustified fear. It isn’t what I feel from the referential and obscure nature of Pynchon’s  work , including his proper names. As far as the role of paranoia in P’s fiction I basically think the searchers are the least paranoid and the V characters who see themselves as in-the-know are the most paranoid.   There are times when extreme wariness and distrust make perfect sense and can enable someone to survive  or evade a real plot or deception. When I read in Pynchon about an unhinged investigation into Slothrop’s uncanny predictions of U2 rocket attacks and his growing apprehension that he is being manipulated and studied, I do not think of it as all in Slothrop's mind and just unjustified paranoia. His  own suspicions are imperfect and rather limited,  but fully justified in light of the reader’s knowledge of the larger picture.. Slothrop  never produces an elaborate conspiracy theory, but he  is in fact the object of an actual  and rather weirdly elaborated conspiracy to get information without making direct inquiries. . So I do not buy into the idea that all attempts at meaning making from the available data in a Python novel or from history and current events are a doomed comedy of paranoid delusion as some here seem to suggest.( not saying that is your position) I will contend for Pynchon as a writer of wholistic satire whose stories reflect both a sense of humor about the sheer weirdness of things, along with troubling mythic and social comparisons between past and present, recognized criminality and hidden criminality,  and among various ways of knowing and living.

>>  Rather than paranoia , the effect for me is relief that someone else has such a sceptical, lateral, branching, and searching mind, and intense curiosity as to why he is doing what he is doing and if it is worth thinking about. I think most Pynchon readers start with a fair amount of that particular relief of recognizing someone who sees the strangeness, creepiness and hilarity of reality and has made prose to match it without getting so obscure (Finnegan’s Wake) that only a handful can read it with any understanding . I want to know which parts emerge from a universal subconscious and which are a more deliberate mapping of social , psychological and historical events and patterns.  For me it’s basically dark satire; kind of like several seasons of  South Park or Simpsons cartoons written by an intellectually omnivorous genius. 

>> "The Sphinx was the daughter of Typhon, or Orthrus, and Hera had sent it.

>>>> All four of those names orbit around to the origins of ancient Egypt, which gave birth to such embedded numbers throughout the subsequent traditions as 49, as DeVere was well aware.

>>>> It is interesting to note that Graves states that Laius "pierced" Oedipus' feet after birth, and later Graves suggests the possibility that *Oedipus* was originally *Oedipais*, then immediately again mentions "the piercing of Oedipus' feet".

>> Interesting mythic detail. We know Oedipa has been pierced with a capital P ( if you are translating from the vulgate), but how do the pierced feet  in the myth tie into  COL 49 ? How was she abandoned,  and who in this case is Laius, Oedipa’s father? She  helplessness is that she feels trapped with no savior prince and an unfulfilling but comfortable life. She seems more prone to save people than to kill anyone over a traffic dispute.. If it is a metaphor of internal life it would be helpful to fill out the picture. In the only battle in the novel she manages to save Hilarius’ life and deliver him to the police.

>> De Vera seems a complete stretch to me, both linguistically and  as a life pattern. PI collects wealth and power, De Vera dissipates a received inheritance, and is not a credible candidate for the real  Shakespeare  (Evidence exists that Oxford was known during his lifetime to have written some plays, though there are no known examples extant <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extant>.) 

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Fri May 3 13:28:03 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

I've always assumed Pierce was older, but the reference to the hillside on the Cornell campus (obviously a personal one for Pynchon) could indicate that he was a college friend.

The bust of Jay Gould looming over them in bed ( would a pretentious proto-capitalist lug a bust of his idol to his college dorm?) is maybe an ironic homage to the quintessential robber baron. Was Pierce (and by extension, Oedipa) hoping or fearing to become him? Maybe succumbing to Capitalism, in its most brutal, robber baron form, is a kind of death wish. Oedipa was spared, but maybe Pierce got what he deserved,or asked for. It's not for the faint of heart.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 3 13:53:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

YES!.... to Oedpa being ensnared in robber baron capitalism...The tower is everywhere.

Yes, a pretentious budding capitalist would lug a bust--he becomes a 'developer' we remember, and wealthy early---and see
what Pynchon thinks of that in the rest of his fiction, particularly his other sixties novel, *Inherent Vice*

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Fri May 3 13:57:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Just how obscure or metaphorical of a writer is Pynchon? I mean, in terms of the "COL49 is really about the JFK  assassination" theory.

One of the delights of Pynchon, pre-internet, was the tremendous research he put in, using resources such as old Baedeker's guides and the Boeing archives, among others, which would be hard or impossible for his readers to access. This richness of obscurity was his signature. It's why Bleeding Edge, written about and amidst the Internet, didn't have that Pynchon aura about it (for me, anyway).

But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted. His gift to the readers of his pre-internet books, read in pre-internet times, was to give them a nodding acquaintance with the obscure and the hidden, and to
point them ( as he did for Oedipa) towards unseen connections.

I don't believe that he was trying to become his own obscure material; that he was playing Pierce to a future Oedipa who would point out: COL49 is a metaphor for the JFK assassination. I think he wanted to connect with his readers, not dodge them. Joseph, do you actively disagree with this, or are you on the fence? Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his lectures for one course) of Nabokov. But Nabokov wanted his readers to fully participate in his jokes and games.

LK


David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri May 3 14:29:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 9:57 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote

*“But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted.”*

Ah! You have fallen unintentionally upon the central metaphor of this novel!  It is almost a perfect restating of the metaphor of Oedepa’s journey:  Conspiracy is a key metaphor for the search for existential or spiritual or realistic or ANY kind of significance in one’s everyday experience.

Trust me: Pynchon was only licking his chops with this one. He is quoted as aiming for GR to keep the scholars stroking their chins like they did for Ulysses.


His gift to the readers of his pre-internet books, read in pre-internet times, was to give them a nodding acquaintance with the obscure and the hidden, and to point them ( as he did for Oedipa) towards unseen connections.

I don't believe that he was trying to become his own obscure material;


Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his lectures for one course) of Nabokov.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 3 14:51:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

On May 2, 2024, at 11:53 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Extrapolating from footwear to narrative stances and attributing avuncularity to the author - Treatment of the super-rich as a phenomenon and as people in CoL49 is evoked in a few of Oedipa’s memories of Pierce, and a lot of details of his footprint in the economic landscape of Southern California

> There’s a way to see this treatment as a way of inveighing against the effects of extreme wealth (and possibly part of a tendency evinced in AtD’s Vibe family - certainly malefactors of great wealth - and also in Jess Traverse’s “monopolist” quote from Emerson in _Vineland_)

> But it could also be a thought experiment - how does someone cope after rejecting the more unsavory aspects of capitalism embodied in Pierce, when the effects of it are all around her and he made provisions to keep her involved?

This strikes me as a rich and important question because it is so universal to the US and to any society benefitting from cruel or unsavory practices of acquisition. There is no doubt that most of us have some benefit from practices we oppose. How far can anyone distance themselves from that entanglement?  What does it do to conscience, to politics, to life pursuits, to our attitudes to those on the losing end of  power arrangements? I can see this question looming behind her Uncle Sam ‘hallucination’. What does she owe to his insistent desire?  For Oedipa, whose tendency with men is to put them first but only up to a point.

"Mucho Maas, home, bounded through the screen door. “Today was another defeat,” he began. “Let me tell you,” she also began. But let Mucho go first.”, well , for her who is as educated and intelligent as the men she meets, and as brave in danger, and is, in a secretive resistance to male presumptions,  deeply affected by  Remedios Varo and her vision of feminine power and creativity she finds herself in a direct confrontation with what  those male presumptions mean and how powerfully l embedded they are in her world.  This is clearly to my mind one of the most persistent questions and themes in COL49. to 

> There’s a modicum of tenderness to the portrait of Pierce that emerges - nowhere does Oedipa remember him being deliberately cruel*, just not connecting with her Rapunzel self-concept - and bringing them into jeopardy with the precarious bust of Jay Gould on a narrow shelf above their bed (which apparently she never felt empowered to move.)

I want to repeat 2 short stories taken from Howard Hughes life( Wikipedia, an imperfect source but usually gets the basics right and easy to use) to show both sides of this coin. In 1936 he was out drinking and dancing with one of his babes  and driving home on a foggy night when he hit and killed a man. The only witness at first said the car was going too fast and erratically and the man killed was in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Some journalists say Hughes bribed the witness, and that is why  he changed his testimony to fit Hughes version of the story and exonerated him, his partner for the evening also went with Hughes innocence. I think it  is not unfair to say he most likely  got away with negligent homicide and used his money to do so. 
10 years later Hughes was testing an aircraft( XF-11)  and crashed through a technical failure, getting severe burns and bad injuries, broken ribs etc. He was pulled from the scene by William Durkin who he generously sent 200 $ a month from then on .
The thing that is particularly troubling about the combination of humane and ruthless behavior with those who are very powerful is how easy it is to cover large scale savagery with presumptions of either good intentions, or decent behavior in other parts of life. Or to excuse it because it was widely endorsed by the society and leaders. Abu Graibh comes to mind as a case where the the cover up justice falls on the lowest ranking participants. Fallujah advanced the career of a General. No weapons of mass destruction ever appeared in Iraq. One could go on for along time this vein and with more egregious examples.  

South Africa tried to resolve this dilemma with a truth and reconciliation process. The central importance of this was to admit that the crimes of apartheid really were crimes and those who participated made immoral personal choices, while seeking to put the past behind and open the door for change. It was not so easy as it sounded and did not adequately address the inequalities that had resulted, but it seems like a noble and merciful attempt to change direction by acknowledging the implications of white supremacy and colonialism. 

Metzger mocks  Oedpa’s search for explanations and answers about some of Inverarity’s seemingly creepy activities: "this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts.”  In fact Oedipa’s primary motive seems more personal,  both about her responsibility in questions of PI’s estate, and trying to see who the hell this man she had cast as prince really is and why so many men want to exclude her from serious pursuits.


Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 4 00:55:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

I second this heartily and without irony.

Just look at all the hints of other meanings....that don't connect...... that dead TV is a real communication device, so to speak.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 4 16:47:19 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Just how obscure or metaphorical of a writer is Pynchon? I mean, in terms of the "COL49 is really about the JFK  assassination" theory. 

One of the delights of Pynchon, pre-internet, was the tremendous research he put in, using resources such as old Baedeker's guides and the Boeing archives, among others, which would be hard or impossible for his readers to access. This richness of obscurity was his signature. It's why Bleeding Edge, written about and amidst the Internet, didn't have that Pynchon aura about it (for me, anyway). 

But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted. His gift to the readers of his pre-internet books, read in pre-internet times, was to give them a nodding acquaintance with the obscure and the hidden, and to point them ( as he did for Oedipa) towards unseen connections. 

I don't believe that he was trying to become his own obscure material; that he was playing Pierce to a future Oedipa who would point out: COL49 is a metaphor for the JFK assassination. I think he wanted to connect with his readers, not dodge them. Joseph, do you actively disagree with this, or are you on the fence? Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his lectures for one course) of Nabokov. But Nabokov wanted his readers to fully participate in his jokes and games. 

LK


The book holds the reader’s attention because in looking into PIs story Oedipa tugs at certain threads and among other mysteries comes across a hidden history of an alternate postal system and turf wars between that system and the historically recognized postal systems. This leads her to personally witness that system while wandering in the Bay Area. Along the way she also comes across a murder mystery play that mentions the alternate postal system by name and has other elements that reflect PIs activities like buying bones of murdered GIs for profit. 

Neither the postal discovery nor PI himself, nor the murder play are real. Can we agree on that? If they are not real, are they referential in any meaningful way to actual concerns and history and people? Why are we interested almost 60 years later? To be honest it is not writing style or characterization or jokes  or the deceptiveness of paranoia that  drew me back, but life in a war zone, in a war that never ends, and that only a few writers are imaginative and comprehensively informed enough think about in fictional form  . I am not the first person to wonder about the connection to JFK, or the battle over control of communication media, or secretive  coups. The book was written within a few years of the Kennedy killing, with global CIA coups playing out in many places, and the early stages of attempts to infiltrate global media by the CIA. This was a fresh wound in the american psyche at the release of COL49 with many books being written and an investigation headed by one of the most likely suspects in the assassination. Yes these were the kinds  of things that would have and did concern Pynchon along with many others. It is my understanding that some who knew him say he went to Mexico to lay low because of concern he might be targeted for his writing. He was suspicious about the death of Richard Farina.That probably was unwarranted paranoia if true, but he was already at work or just finished 2 books that touch on what the US became after WW2, the cult of war and engineered  social control and political fear mongering and 1 that touches on the same subject matter mostly in British and European history.  Yes he uses satire, alternate myths drawn from many sources,  and there is a lot of paranoia. Much of that paranioia is justified and some is not. But I do  think he is trying to use fiction as a tool to explore and to  lead the reader into a picture of reality that is bigger more complex and often more sinister than the normal fare. He uses satire and jokes to ease the tension, but there is great deal of reality here that leaves us unsettled as to the implications. That is a role fiction and writing in general has always played.  

For me COL49 is meaningless without metaphoric reference to real historic events. In that sense it is almost like Pilgrims Progress or something equally if inadvertently  allegorical like Beowulf; allegory is  a form basically untenable in modern literature but it may be one of the only formal structures that can come from a short novel  dealing with something like the Kennedy assassination, because of the huge shift implied if it was done by coordinated secretive powers.  There is much  evidence for the involvement of powerful forces and the shift in direction from his killing. That is what allegory does. It deals with the largest forces of perceived reality.  The KFK killing  is another part of US history  that is still unresolved 60 years later with documents still withheld past several due dates. An old Italian murder mystery  among nobles seems oddly appropriate as a form to outline the event as power struggle..  One thing TP seems to me determined to not allow is the idea that Oedipa is going mad, she is the most sane person in the novel, though Driblet is as sane as one could be considering his situation as a creative.. She knows the difference between an imagined mental picture and what she has seen or the words and stories she has heard. Even knowing that difference she asks herself could her experiences in San Francisco have been engineered by PI.  She is in every way,  cognitively and metacognitavely astute. Most of us , like Oedipa,  try to explain what we see and experience both personally and on a larger social and historical and spiritual scale  as a coherent reality that we have some agency within, and we are all faced with some very dark doings in the world.  If it is all a meaningless shadow play projected from the minds of the talking monkeys I guess reading Pynchon is one way to while away our hours. If we are also participants in shaping our world and the world to be inherited by other humans , and if there are those whose projections threaten us,  then sorting some off these questions out  and learning to live in harmony rather than constant state of war would be a handy survival tool. I am the first to admit that Pynchon is skeptical that that can happen. I am too, but  I feel the commonest of common sense to be held in basic moral concerns and the attempt to free oneself from bad habits and false stories, and again,  I find that in Pynchon too.

Please everyone, I am not saying  COL49 is intentional allegory, just that in its brevity and references it is more like allegory than anything else TP has written.  I am not interested in making a major defense of this idea, it is just my own best approximation of how I see the peculiar nature of the smallest of Pynchon books and a possible reason that it fails to represent his work as a whole. It would be very interesting to see a comprehensive collection of his own references to the book. Of corse I realize that human psychology, greed, power trips, rock and roll, lawyers and awomen trying to free themselves from patriarchal patterns are all important to the book. Hard to find a more multivalent author than Pynchon. I am interested in all those aspects too and think them worth thinking about as I will inevitably do along with others.  But there is weird core to this story and I see a murderous  power struggle there.  Unfortunately things have not changed much.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 4 23:19:06 UTC 2024

Not P (just another bust that isn’t Jay Gould)

I learned Putin does not have a bust of Lenin In his residence, but of Peter the Great.

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Sun May 5 04:45:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Can I ask you, is there any particular reason why you mentioned Pilgrim's Progress?

And Beowulf, but mainly why Pilgrim's Progress?

I'm willing to seriously entertain your political allegory thesis, and that 49 is meaningless without it, but I am curious to know why you chose Pilgrim's Progress?

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Sun May 5 12:26:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

I happen to agree with this.

As unsavory a phrase as "licking his chops" may be, especially with Pyn, that's the feeling I get reading 49.  He was just warming up.

So why not do the one that was...not a drill?  The one where he actually bites in.  Let's see how the author does with the second war, rather than sad suburban housewives.

I don't recall much of GR, if anything, so I'll start.

Ten pages a week.  The thing with the summary of the ten pages at the start of the week isn't necessary.  It's almost as fast to just read the ten pages.  Summaries are a lot like summaries.

Questions are always, questions questions.

Questions don't have to be great or good, or remotely anything, just questions.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 5 13:13:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Agreeing with David's remark about "just warming up" I will put a slightly different slant on its meaning:
With his later longer and perforce richer novels, he could elaborate on this deep lifelong theme.....all the way
thru* Bleeding Edge. *

This 'short story marketed as a novel" is, in retrospect, only the first manifestation of the theme Morris defines well.
This work is not any kind of early attempt at what was a major later book....one thing about Pynchon that is not true
of many, many good writers is that each book is so different superficially....plots, setting, nature and quantity of coherent themes.......

BUT it exists itself with other themes right here in 1965-1966---and for all time--even if he had died at Farina's pub party rather that Dck before he could write *Gravity's Rainbow *even.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 5 13:46:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Dude …. Wildman!
Unexpected change-up - nifty idea - giddy-up

I think that’s your idea here, switch to GR seamlessly, not spilling a drop?

Also easing the host burden by removing the synopsis (or making it optional if anyone likes doing them?)

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun May 5 14:37:27 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Greetings,
I’m fine with dumping the summary, but are we also saying that we’re not finishing CoL49? While I’m all for continuing the group read into GR, I still want to finish CoL49 first.
As to questions, many of the posts the first week posed or added questions. If we want to eliminate the hosting and just post based on 10 pages, I support that too.
When we go to GR, 10 pages per week will be less of a concern b/c I imagine most of us have a Viking pagination edition.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun May 5 14:43:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

*“ease the host burden by removing the synopsis (or making it optional if anyone likes doing them?)”*

I think it’s useful to have a (brief) synopsis of each section, as a signal to those only tangentially interested/involved to keep track of where we are in the narrative. But its length, and the amount of “context” (quasi-commentary) should be totally up to the individual host.  JK’s synopsis was VERY thorough. Mine will be bare bones.  I think we risk the thing to quick invisibility without it.

Discussion questions are the meat, and a host will have the opportunity to focus attention on their section for a deeper dive at those. Of course, everyone should take a stab at suggesting what they want to discuss

David Morris

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 5 14:46:39 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

Even better

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 5 15:20:31 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading. Week Two. May 5 to May 12?

I cannot find the revised schedule but I believe we started last Sunday and I chose Week Two which starts today.

Please look over and self-summarize. A summary is itself a Reading, imo, and I prefer my own phenomenological reading. Some bits, some observations, some varied possibilities and my choices among them often. Sometimes.

Also, I have a copy of the original hardcover, the pagination of which is quite different from later editions. Chapter 1 begins on page 9, for example. Old-fashioned bookmaking where all the earlier pages are laid-out like books used to be. One page a huge 49 After the earlier words of the title on the opposite page saying BY THOMAS PYNCHON.   We know from later books that Tom valued and took control of those elements. Did he here? ( I say "Cork" Smith let him, yes)

So, my page 16---"it was Dr. Hilarious, her shrink or psychotherapist".....a reminder that this use of 'shrink' is the first found citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. [headshrinker appears in either* The Wild Ones *or *Blackboard Jungle* in the mid-fifties] Linguists tell us the use of words in speech can precede the earliest print usages by many years, a decade or more (and this varies as much as words, of course)

Can bring us back to the time of the story, esp when we read on about 'die Brucke'.."the bridge inward". As this novella and Oedipa have just emerged from the 50's, we can reflect that most cultural historians, regular historians and most psychologists still
Consider the 50s a quite repressed decade. *Howl *did not Howl for no reason. Betty Freidan's *The Feminine Mystique, *a huge bestseller about repression was published in 1963 with the interviews and writing starting in 1957. (she originally told her publisher the book might take a year to research and less to write)

Oedipa is trapped in that world but---how suburban repressed is she? Or is that where her quest begins?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 5 15:24:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

I only chose Pilgrim’s Progress because it is a classic  well known allegory  and one that was still being thought about and used as an example of the literary form in Pynchon’s college days, doubtless due to its role in Puritan history and hence US history. It does involve a departure, from a former life and pursuit of another world and there is some distant similarity to Oepipa's pursuit of escape from suburbia. That is a pretty vague and general pattern, but it is also  kind of an enduring version of the american dream, the city on the hill, land of the free, journey west, new world, I lift my lamp beside the digitized golden  door etc.) Maybe what seemed like a random choice resonates  even though it seemed random and obvious. That is the thing about allegory, it is hard to completely escape. It shows up in Freud and Jung as psychological patterns. It is a mode of thought that has to do with the metaphoric nature  language  itself.

Beowulf is not laid out like an allegory or considered to be such that I know of, but it is an extremely  staple pattern of English literature, american film-making, and generic political scapegoating of the evil other. Is it Allegory?  When you think about it, there really are no literal Grendel’s or Mother monsters living beneath the waters,  but there is a recurrent war in western mythology against the indigenous primitive( Celt, biblical Heathen, barbarian, indigenous wild savages, the whole murder for Progress’ sake shtick). In the age of US as superhero we generate new monsters on a daily basis, Octagon man, dirty bird boy, Dish Thrower girl,  Hell Raiser but we love the old standbys of communists, fascists, college students, Mexicans, etc  The war has a limited role for the feminine,  The monster that must be slain always has a mother who is even more dangerous because who can tame a  mature wily  dame, She is the breeding ground for revolutionaries, folk singers, egalitarians, bakers  and restless plebeians ; she is the suckling breasts of free stuff, unionism, shamanic nature cults, anarchists, Taoists etc.  The hero must take a hard steel sword into the murky ( fangoso means muddy) waters of the actual creepy subconscious and shove that sharp sword right through the heart of the soft bitch of the  nurturing feminine if you want to join the heroes , leave behind the zeroes, and rise to claim the ringleted  child-faced blonde to live happily after.
OK I’m getting carried away, but yes I think the word allegory has some hefty relevance to that myth.  I even think there are legitimate monsters to be slain but they are  usually more like Beowulf, Hilarius, and Pierce Inverarity,  than Grendel or his Mother.  More like James Jesus Angleton and Alan Dulles than JFK, Che Guevara or Elenor Roosevelt. Plus I prefer the concept of boycotting the assholes  and living cooperative local lives  to going around slaying sentient beings. But… sometimes people have to defend themselves against violent aggression, and so far humans are doing lousy job on that front. And the war machines are outa control. 

The Peaceful Lier,   by Kenneth Patchen

Now I saw the big shtoonks kicking the cans off the little shtoonks 
And charging them for the service.
Now I have to admit that is a a pretty special arrangement, but
I think I will just lie this one out in my own peaceful way.

(From memory, so no offense  to the memory of a favorite poet.if I got it a bit  wrong)

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW NEXT?

David’s understanding of COL 49 is a bit different from mine but it does seem almost an exercise in certain ways and may have been mostly a way to keep funding GR.
David did not suggest cutting this read off as far as I can tell. I want to keep on, and if we cannot get through this shortest of P novels, taking on GR would likely be a doomed enterprise.
 I think I would not be able to continue full participation myself, but would be glad to host a couple weeks, I suggest 20 pgs /week.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 5 16:03:33 UTC 2024

COL49 tidbit....goes out for David M and Laura.

Surely for the first time I noticed TRP writing into the story a clear example of overinterpreting:

When Oedipa overinterprets Mucho's words on being Executor (or Executrix)----"Yeah, yeah, *I meant only that, Oed*. I'm not capable."

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 5 16:20:52 UTC 2024

book design follow-up post

The first two flat pages after the cover of Lot 49---the one that is the back of "the board' and the connected following page, first piece of paper are light paper bag brown with this across both pages.

w. a. s. t. e.   w.a.s.t.e.  w.a.s.t.e.     w.a.s.t.e

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun May 5 16:57:39 UTC 2024

book design follow-up post

And the question thus arises:

Robespierre Rogue?
or
Reference Raspberry?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 5 17:03:51 UTC 2024

COL 49 Schedule for Kindle- Penguin Press 2012 version : to post or not to post?

So it looks like there are at least 3 ways COL 49 Has been paginated. My Penguin 2012  version which I have on Kindle starts Chapter 2 on page 15 ( had given print version to my daughter,) so would go to pg 24

So this could get a bit confusing as we move along. Let’s be patient with that. I don’t know if anyone else is using my  version  but if so I would be willing to work out and post our host schedule using that pagination.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun May 5 18:18:18 UTC 2024

COL 49 Schedule for Kindle- Penguin Press 2012 version : to post or not to post?

My suggestion is that the host identifies the last paragraph by its last few words. The next host starts there and identifies next ending paragraph. 
Does that work?

In solidarity, 
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun May 5 18:22:28 UTC 2024

COL49 tidbit....goes out for David M and Laura.

Nice catch! I also noticed that her comment comparing his trauma related to his used car salesman job to the ptsd people suffer from war, that maybe then he could get past it. Somehow the idea that cooperating with capitalism’s destruction is harder to overcome than war experiences. A strained analogy but more realistic when I read recent posts on this thread regarding Oedipa and collaboration with capitalism and it’s exploitation. Sounded like something a Goldwater Republican would say: just get over it already Mucho!

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 01:26:10 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

my page 15:     "When was [so-sensitive] Mucho going to forget?"...

Mucho cares but can't be cool about it. Fails Pynchon's character ideal (in one sense): Keep Cool But Care, from *V...*

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon May 6 02:47:11 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

The conflicted soul is the Christ/Jesus dynamic. To be unconflicted is to be without a soul.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon May 6 04:04:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

1) How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's Tupperware world?

If she’s able to sincerely make a layered lasagna, while also sympathizing with his problems, she has embraced her part of a “breadwinner/homemaker” partnership more successfully than Mucho has been able to prosecute his.

This disparity reverses Pierce’s superabundant provider abilities versus her ability to be satisfied and find a fulfilling stance in that
partnership.

If she has found a normalcy in being Mrs Maas, he hasn’t found a corresponding satisfaction in going out for employment. His earnest efforts don’t find the mark at either the used car job or the radio station - his distress being compounded by a natural feeling of suffering by comparison with her ex-. Even though that seems to be what she likes about Maas - he’s not automatically boss of all he surveys.

Are Mucho’s struggles an alternative to Oedipa’s adaptation? It seems more that their division of labor is working for her but not for him. That his striving in an increasingly complex and sometimes hostile work environment isn’t buttressed by being married to Oedipa despite her efforts.

2) How are we to interpret the four images that come to Oedipa when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, sunrise over Cornell western-facing slope, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)?

The Cornell image is the one which interests me most.

If they were watching the sun rise (on a western-facing slope?) together, then it seems plausible that they were students together, fell in love there, whereupon he embarked upon his mogul course of action with her (at first)

(This seems to harken forward to Mr and Mrs Ice in _Bleeding Edge_ and the growing rift between that couple.)

In which case it’s a short hop to Dickens: Scrooge, Fezziwig’s party, and Belle’s disappointment

 I always wonder about the time frame - in this scenario, she must have spent at least a few years with Pierce as he grew fabulously wealthy, before leaving him and finding Mucho (these things take time)

At least Scrooge had the decency to leave Belle alone with her new partner.

3) Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?

I’m impressed & contented with what’s already been contributed on this.

(If i were going to add anything it might be something about drunk-dialing an ex-, which may be a pattern, but your question - & the existing answers about a relationship among the different voices - is more interesting)


4) Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?

I like the existing answers

5) Why does the Rapunzel allusion appear here?

By delving into the story, you made the interesting connection with the parents trading Rapunzel for salad greens.

Like Rachel Owlglass in _V._, she’s acting with a freedom relatively new for women  - presumably her parents didn’t sell her to Cornell,

but urging her (as parents do) to go to a definite not-home place and undergo education culminating in a ceremony of adulthood could feel like a form of abandonment-

Turning her over to this process changed her - at the time people spoke of an “Mrs degree” but her thought process shows acculturation beyond spouse-readiness.

There’s a paucity of parenting & family in this story; if Oedipa wants to fulfill a biological imperative to bear offspring, she’s decided against Pierce, and Mucho isn’t working out either. Neither her parents nor either of her husbands’ make an appearance - (do they?) I think there’s a brief encounter with some children in the book, but not one that fascinates her the way that WASTE does.

One way to interpret this would be expanding the role of a woman beyond the Suzy Homemaker idea - using her education to try to revise the effects of Pierce - what she objected to in him, she will presumably work against as executor? Or - he might hope - now she will begin to understand his vision?

Or it could almost be a tract against that idea - just when she thinks she’s gotten out of the “trophy bride complicit in the sins of wealth but allowed a pet project or two” business (like, say, Laura Bush and libraries, which, say what you will, is a point of light)

- trying instead to set up a “could you coo, could you care, for a little love nest we could share?” scenario as Mrs Maas -

Pierce drags her back in.

Does it seem more reasonable to approve and sympathize with her course of action, and relate to it as to what a reasonable person of goodwill, with a good mind, might think and do vis a vis “the world (this one), the flesh (Mrs Oedipa Maas), and the testament of Pierce Inverarity” -

(Which was the title of an early version of the novel published in Esquire’s December 1965 issue as a short story.)

- or to see a cautionary tale against being lured into the tangled spiderweb of Mammon-worship represented by Pierce’s estate, and away from the sweetness and light of domesticity & marital fidelity?

Interesting tangent (imho)
Found this in Reddit -

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/eaoz86/the_world_this_one_the_flesh_mrs_oedipa_maas_and/

“This is the early version published as a short story referenced in that Jungian paper I brought up in the reading group threads:


*"In December 1965 Esquire published a preliminary version of the novel as a short story titled “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity.” By resorting to the Catholic dogma, the title clearly indicates that the figure of Pierce Inverarity may be understood as the Devil who, combined with World and Flesh, conform the Three Enemies of the Soul and give readers an early hint that Christian religion is going to play an important part in the story."*


The poster gave a link to this interesting paper -
http://typh.unizar.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/F.-Collado-Crying-in-Critique-2015-Postscript.pdf


The quote above is from the Reddit post, not the paper - the abstract for the paper is

“Abstract: In Pynchon’s second novel, after having fallen in a complex net of uncertain signification, protagonist Oedipa Maas finally realizes that she should escape categorical binary thinking. This article contends that Oedipa’s portrait is also informed by Jungian symbolism—an underestimated source of Pynchon’s fiction—and by the author’s literary quest for V., two factors that merge in the novel with other interpretations to develop a dense search for meaning that eventually announces the coming of social change.”

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon May 6 05:36:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

> 1) How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's Tupperware world?
 
> If she’s able to sincerely make a layered lasagna, while also sympathizing with his problems, she has embraced her part of a “breadwinner/homemaker” partnership more successfully than Mucho has been able to prosecute his.

> This disparity reverses Pierce’s superabundant provider abilities versus her ability to be satisfied and find a fulfilling stance in that partnership.

> If she has found a normalcy in being Mrs Maas, he hasn’t found a corresponding satisfaction in going out for employment. His earnest efforts don’t find the mark at either the used car job or the radio station - his  distress being compounded by a natural feeling of suffering by comparison with her ex-. Even though that seems to be what she likes about Maas - he’s not automatically boss of all he surveys.

> Are Mucho’s struggles an alternative to Oedipa’s adaptation? It seems more that their division of labor is working for her but not for him. That his striving in an increasingly complex and sometimes hostile work environment isn’t buttressed by being married to Oedipa despite her efforts.

I like this sympathetic view of Mucho. I think we find out as the story unfolds there is more to depth to their relationship than is initially obvious. 
 
> 2) How are we to interpret the four images that come to Oedipa when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, sunrise over Cornell western-facing slope, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)?

> The Cornell image is the one which interests me most.

> If they were watching the sun rise (on a western-facing slope?) together, then it seems plausible that they were students together, fell in love there, whereupon he embarked upon his mogul course of action with her (at first)

OK I really don’t get how you face west and see the sunrise. Is it a joke I’m not getting? We live in a north south valley, so when the sun rises , if you are looking west you see the light slide down from the treetops to the uphilll neighbor’s slope  to closer trees and down to the grass or snow. It can be quite beautiful but I probably would probably not call it  watching the sun rise  even though it actually is a way of watching a sunrise.

> (This seems to harken forward to Mr and Mrs Ice in _Bleeding Edge_ and the growing rift between that couple.)

> In which case it’s a short hop to Dickens: Scrooge, Fezziwig’s party, and Belle’s disappointment

> I always wonder about the time frame - in this scenario, she must have spent at least a few years with Pierce as he grew fabulously wealthy, before leaving him and finding Mucho (these things take time)

> At least Scrooge had the decency to leave Belle alone with her new partner.
 
> 3) Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?

> I’m impressed & contented with what’s already been contributed on this.
 
> (If i were going to add anything it might be something about drunk-dialing an ex-, which may be a pattern,
> but your question - & the existing answers about a relationship among the different voices - is more interesting)

> 4) Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?

> I like the existing answers
  
> 5) Why does the Rapunzel allusion appear here?
 
> By delving into the story, you made the interesting connection with the parents trading Rapunzel for salad greens.

> Like Rachel Owlglass in _V._, she’s acting with a freedom relatively new for women  - presumably her parents didn’t sell her to Cornell,

> but urging her (as parents do) to go to a definite not-home place and undergo education culminating in a ceremony of adulthood could feel like a form of abandonment-

> Turning her over to this process changed her - at the time people spoke of an “Mrs degree” but her thought process shows acculturation beyond spouse-readiness.
 
> There’s a paucity of parenting & family in this story; if Oedipa wants to fulfill a biological imperative to bear offspring, she’s decided against  Pierce, and Mucho isn’t working out either. Neither her parents nor either of her husbands’ make an appearance - (do they?) I think there’s a brief encounter with some children in the book, but not one that fascinates her the way that WASTE does.

> One way to interpret this would be expanding the role of a woman beyond the Suzy Homemaker idea - using her education to try to revise the effects of Pierce - what she objected to in him, she will presumably work against as executor? Or - he might hope - now she will begin to understand his vision?
 
> Or it could almost be a tract against that idea - just when she thinks she’s gotten out of the “trophy bride complicit in the sins of wealth but allowed a pet project or two” business (like, say, Laura Bush and libraries, which, say what you will, is a point of light)
 
 - trying instead to set up a “could you coo, could you care, for a little  love nest we could share?” scenario as Mrs Maas -
 
> Pierce drags her back in.
But not Pierce alone, she still wants escape, she is not miserable as housewife but bored and perhaps feeling inadequate to Mucho’s needs. Also Roseman may have sparked greater curiosity. Who was this guy?How many chances does anyone get to try to understand such a driven person up close, without them around to bother you. On a larger scale, where am I, who shaped this world, what exactly does the money and power get you? And how does it work?
 
> Does it seem more reasonable to approve and sympathize with her course of action, and relate to it as to what a reasonable person of goodwill, with a good mind, might think and do vis a vis “the world (this one), the flesh (Mrs Oedipa Maas), and the testament of Pierce Inverarity” -
 
> (Which was the title of an early version of the novel published in Esquire’s December 1965 issue as a short story.)( 

> - or to see a cautionary tale against being lured into the tangled spiderweb of Mammon-worship represented by Pierce’s estate, and away from the sweetness and light of domesticity & marital fidelity?
 
> Interesting tangent (imho)
> Found this in Reddit -

> https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/eaoz86/the_world_this_one_the_flesh_mrs_oedipa_maas_and/

> “This is the early version published as a short story referenced in that Jungian paper I brought up in the reading group threads:

> *"In December 1965 Esquire published a preliminary version of the novel as a short story titled “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity.” By resorting to the Catholic dogma, the title clearly indicates that the figure of Pierce Inverarity may be understood as the Devil who, combined with World and Flesh, conform the Three Enemies of the Soul and give readers an early hint that Christian religion is going to play an important part in the story."*

So I think I posted a bit on Pierce Inverarity’s name. One  bit was a rearrangement of the letters that came out with these words:
Prince aire verity.   The devil is called the prince of the power of the air. Aire( archaic with e) could also be pronounced Heir, Verity of course is truth. Near the end of the Couriers Tragedy the bloody parchment from Niccolo's( heir) body is transformed miraculously( and I suppose ridiculously) from lies to 'verity’  in a truth-telling confession of the crimes of Angelo and a revealing of the murderous Trystero.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon May 6 06:26:58 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

> 1) How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's Tupperware world?

He’s one of the many in the Schlemiel line. The noble loser.  They each have specific flavors, eras, and sometimes gender.  Mucho and Oedipa are both in the plastic hell-purgatory, and we don’t get the sense that either one is on any fulfilling path. Both stuck in limbo until Oedipa is Pierced from the other side of the Veil.

Whet she accepts her quest, she graduates from the passive Schlemiel to active Mensch, following a heroic path.  It might also be observed that some Pynchon’s questing mensch become deranged, some transcendent.

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 08:54:24 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

Yeah....Mucho is....Oedipa wasn't but now will be....speaking of the novella's dynamic....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 09:00:29 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

Seems to me this world, Oedipa's and Mucho's we are presented with, is not much worth accommodating to. P makes that clear. the deckless days, the values she inherited and now inhabits and now will flee from on her quest.

The tower is everywhere...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon May 6 09:02:11 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

Greetings Michael,
I went on Google Maps, and the Uris Library has a western slope where it seems obvious students would lay, sit facing west. You would have to be looking uphill, against the grain, to see a sunrise come over the building. There is a path, from where the maps street view image is taken, that they may have been walking along to see a sunrise, while everyone else was looking west.
Oed’s memory felt like a moment when the two lovers had simpatico, feeling their love allowed them to see what others didn’t. Along with the images of the birds flying and the Bartok music, are sacred/sublime memories set against the door slamming and the Gould bust profane images, hinting at their different views that possibly led to their breakup.
I posted the view of the library and slope in the Pynchon wiki, if you’d like to see it.

In solidarity,

James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 09:17:57 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

Dr. Hilarious is a joke. Pynchon's in-one's-face naming. Calling up Oedipa, full of fear and anxiety, at 3 AM?...
Turns the 'call anytime' ethics of real doctors inside out. One can think of the political challenge in real life deabtes: How will you
Handle that 3 AM call about a major world crisis?

Oedipa is sensible enough not to trust him and says so. I suggest this, by his name and actions, P is showing us suburban majority America's feelings about headshrinkers then. (the guy who wrote the L49 Companion says Hilarious shows the
ubiquity of such Head docs, I suggest TRP might have been a little prescient but that what it really shows is the lack of belief---so to use a Lot 49 notion--in them, their efficacy then---and in general, maybe.)

Here's a great psychotherapy joke: "I'm having an hallucination now". Says Oedipa...."don't describe it" says the doc...
what a real shrink wants he refuses.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 09:22:16 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

I still believe what I wrote about Oed's memories, as of course I would:
All of loss--perhaps forever--and unconnection and even fear (the Jay Gould bust). I see nothing in the text about their love-seeing. This is about their end....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 09:24:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

For a writer to tell us of NOT seeing, no one seeing,  a sunrise is a clever, maybe beautiful subversion of a romantic trope...imo.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 09:49:54 UTC 2024

Since it's Showtime for me this week

I must talk about 'the tower". ( So, the challenges to my interpretation can begin--or maybe some agreements with more nuances?).

I hold with those who find it to allude--and it is all over modernism, from Eliot to Yeats to Dylan and scores in between--to Frazier's Bough studies and Eliade ( we know young Tom read the latter and Eliot) wherein anthropologically the church tower, the spire,---see Golding--the steeple is everywhere. Villages, towns, cities in all of history usually have the church building, with its "tower" as the highest part of the town. Reaching to the heavens, to God, of course, acknowledging and paying homage.

The tower in Lot 49---like the twin towers in NYC---are the opposite of Frazier's findings. Show how the culture has lost that
religious/spiritual meaning, of course shown everywhere in the first chapter of this novella, that is, the loss is shown everywhere.

TRP throws down:
"if the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

PS: early sociologists like Weber (and others), ---And Weber was a great influence on TRP--trying to characterize the structures of societal beliefs--the tacit dimensions everyone felt, well, tacitly, spoke of the holding together, the coherence as 'magic"....(well, at least one of them did)

What or who is the Knight of deliverance?   Does Oedipa go thru some challengers to Knighthood on her quest? Starting with Roseman and Metzger?

PS. A whole good recent-enough novel was called *The Tower is Everywhere. *

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon May 6 12:47:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

> For a writer to tell us of NOT seeing, no one seeing,  a sunrise is a clever, maybe beautiful subversion of a romantic trope...imo.
>

Of course. And conceptual vision of the unobtainable, ineffable.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon May 6 14:59:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

> For a writer to tell us of NOT seeing, no one seeing,  a sunrise is a clever, maybe beautiful subversion of a romantic trope…mo.

But does a person have a memory of no one including him or herself seeing a sunrise?  It does not sound like a strong memory basis to me.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon May 6 16:59:41 UTC 2024

Oedipa

"She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

Oedipa by her tearful connection to this painting sees it as a painful description of her own situation as a woman or even a description of  the begetting, nurturing, weaving of the unacknowledged feminine face of creation, whose creative abundance she realized as the very place she stood. She wants to carry this way of seeing with her as a lens to see past the naming and engineering  and fighting for turf that she has mistaken for her landscape and her proper labor.  She sees that the limits she wishes to escape are not the boundaries of her own ability or self assertion or her appeal to a magic prince of deliverance, but  a malignant external “magic” visited on her and by extension on everyone who has seen the sheer beauty that is possible. That power and wealth have not freed but abducted and enslaved.  This is the real point of departure for her journey, where she leaves Inverarity in “gut fear” . But so far, observes the author and herself now that PI is dead, she has been guided by that gut fear, the superstitious aspects of marriage, and female cunning, but still feels trapped, so we are asked, “what else”. In some ways she is a reverse of the Oedpus story because she does not blind herself  when she sees and confronts where she is what she has done, but seems to have gained a second sight, like the weeping prophet Jeremiah.

Often the hero’s journey involves going into the stronghold of darkness and malign power ”to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force,” perhaps to probe for weakness. In V this metaphor was modeled on Dante’s journey , but instead of Beatrice, the divine feminine, the journey leads to a kind of mechanized seductress/vagina/machine bride. And it is questionable  whether an emergence into the light is possible. Neither the whole sick crew nor anyone else seems to be going anywhere, the colonialist conversion of the rats has failed. Only the experience of seeing the world more as it really works seems to remain after the journey as any possible guide away from the endless loop. It isn’t much, but...

Will Oedipa fare any better? Will female cunning and her cleansed vision carry her further? Or is it just stay tuned, for another exciting episode of”THE SHADOW”. Even when we  are awakened in the middle of the night  by the cartoon voices of an insane culture, whether it is capitalist stereotypes or fascist dreams of rewiring the souls of restless women, for the most part all we can do is hang up . Agency in the face of these things is limited and building an army of lovers no easy task, some would say doomed. If as Michael suggests through the original title referring to the world flesh and devil,  there is a strong Christian component to the framing of this dilemma, do we see any redemption, any transcendence? 

Well, maybe. I am most impressed by Oedipa’s  persistent courage even as malign forces and her own doubts plague her search, even as those who help her are killed or die mysteriously. 
Even as her search connects her not to a powerful movement for change, but the weak and poor and their persistent means of communicating, a faint hope of healing and reconciliation.

Krafft, John M. krafftjm at miamioh.edu
Mon May 6 18:53:18 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

Someone pointed out to me a long time ago that going out to watch the sunrise on the library slope was a "dating" joke (maybe not just at Cornell) _since_ the slope faced West. That's not what people went out there for. Surely Oedipa is savvy enough to remember that.

John

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 6 20:16:53 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

Ah, so there's the fond remembrance wanted....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon May 6 21:17:06 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read

Freshman 1976. Unfortunately never reclined with anyone on that slope. Too much of a thoroughfare between the dorms and the quad.  So many better places for romance on that campus

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue May 7 09:41:25 UTC 2024

COL49 tidbit

Kinneret is an old name for The Sea of Galilee, speaking of more religious signs that don't map.

            Charles Sanders Peirce---pronounced purse– is the American philosopher who founded pragmatism, which he
called pragmaticism, a semiology of signs......

            Surely just overlapping coincidence at an abstract level since TRP did not call Pierce, Peirce.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue May 7 10:26:20 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

it seems from my experience with L49, that one name we do not talk about is Mucho's boss, Funch. ...wanting to stop Mucho's horny DJ voice, as he hears it, is he a fun cruncher?....is he Fun squeezed out?

Is Mucho's horny voice sorta meant to indicate the entry of Rock & Roll, or horny pop into mainstream music around this time?

Funch wants a Pat Boone cover voice instead of Mucho's Chuck Berry voice?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 8 11:28:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

I am not sure if I sent this or a revised version of this. I can not find that I did but the looking was fast. If I did, sorry, and you don't need to read it again. You don't need to read it at all actually.

"One summer afternoon" coming home from a suburban fondue party--remember fondue?-- high on Kirsch begins Pynchon's first California work, a sunny tipsy beginning not found again until *Vineland. *A beginning as casual as a Ross MacDonald California mystery---he with birds---often jays--to start a novel. (we know Tom liked MacDonald, Ross exploring dark Freudian family dramas in his mysteries.).

Then the complexities complexify. A sudden unenviable duty: Executrix. A door slammed long ago, ending something. A sunrise nobody can see: that dry disconsolate tune about homesickness; and a dangerous bust above their bed. Relationship memories. Man, can Tom do it so compactly. As he can reduce the prolixity of a good realistic novelist--Lewis; Dreiser---to lists!. Maas's of the insides of cars.

I think the bust of Jay Gould, by the way, stands for the bust of Jay Gould, unlike some.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 8 11:45:31 UTC 2024

Fwd: Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon! One of our Greats. The intellectual illumination does not end.

I will be part of Pynchon in Public today, somewhere, sometime. It is a good memory to have been part of the effort on that.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 8 12:00:00 UTC 2024

…COL49 Group Reading

TRP is some kind of Jungian, or jungian-inspired person. See the James Hillman, a beyond Jungian, blurb.


Tom Pynchon's Ghost
<https://twitter.com/kvtp11>
@kvtp11
<https://twitter.com/kvtp11>
·
8h <https://twitter.com/kvtp11/status/1787695363450646572>
“Words and paper did not seem real enough to me... I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired... I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower... Bollingen.” -C.G. Jung

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 8 14:12:14 UTC 2024

COL 49 Hilarius, Printed circuits, Echo Courts, The paranoids, Metzger

Hilarius is part of a landscape  we find throughout the novella of activities more sinister than we or Oedipa know- I hear him with the voice of Henry Kissinger. He is conducting an experiment he calls 'the bridge' on housewives using LSD. He scares Oed and she does not trust him or want his drugs( tanquilizers or LSD).  Later it turns out he is an ex Nazi scientist. As soon as WW2 was over, there were numerous Nazis recruited into various endeavors of the US government. One recruiter of ex nazis was  James Jesus Angleton, a senior figure in THE CIA( Duke Angelo?), who specialized in Nazis with anti-communist background or from unique research fields. There is a reasonably high probability  that Hilarius is one of these, willing to do questionable psychological research.  In its early phase(50s-60s) MK Ultra was interested in the possibility of  reconfiguring the human mind by wiping clean previous conditioning and then reconditioning the person. It was well under way under way in the 60s and using LSD and Curare under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, or Donald Cameron out of Toronto branch of MK ultra. We can only imagine the purpose of his housewife experiments but it is not at all implausible for that secretive government program. Hilarius clearly regards Oedipa as a particular challenge and he is right. How Pynchon knew about these things so early, while they were still wrapped in secrecy is hard to fathom, but quite common for him.

Here are 3 lines from Wikipedia profile of Sydney Gottlieb; 1) Dulles( head of CIA) and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum>", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services> but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol>, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline> before realizing LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
2)Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation>, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUATONE>, later known as the U-2 spy plane <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2>. In 1953, he arranged a safe house <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house> for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. 3)Gottlieb administered LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD> and other hallucinogenic drugs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen> to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson> LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. Hilarius is also the name of a saint from Arles who was involved in a power struggle with the pope.

When Oed heads for San Narciso to meet Metzger and theoretically to look into Pierce’s books and records, She tells Mucho to hang up on Hilarius if he calls.  At this point hanging up seems a minor metaphor about closing one mode of communication which often opens another one. In this case, as she heads into San Narciso and before she gets a room at Echo Court( Are these increasing references to myth important or just greek herrings?) she stops and looks down at the “ ordered swirl of houses” and  she is reminded of opening a transistor radio and seeing for the first time a printed circuit board: "there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant".To my mind the encounter with the Varo painting, and this moment of genuine insight  into the future and felt transcendence rooted in a space of openness and possibility have a distinct similarity to both a classic mystical experience and the similar states that can come from a benign psychedelic experience.  Both times she was turning from a power figure, Pierce and then Hilarius and finding something remarkable rising from within. This moment is followed by a moment of deep sympathy for Mucho and his estrangement from his role as DJ; even though he is very fond of the music,  it fails his need to believe in something. Is this what binds them, what they share in common?  Of course, she is about to descend from the sublime, if slightly smoggy  heights and be pulled by fleshier forces and perhaps even devilish ones. 

“Deception is a State of Mind, and the Mind of the State” James Jesus Angleton.

As she drives past the detrital junkiness of a California automobile-based city, Oedipa begins to see the freeway  as a hypodermic needle delivering heroin to a world not so much wind-in-the-hair free as numbly sedated. She pulls into Echo Court with its 30 ft high sheetmetal nymph whose face echoes Oedipa’s. I grew up in Ca and there were lots of cartoony buildings and roadside attractions. When I was young and on a nice day they could seem magical but soon they seemed dingy, noisy, fakey. Oedipa is disturbed a little by the fan blown gauzy covering of the nymph revealing a demeanor and form more lurid than nymph-like. The hotel manger is singer for ’the paranoids’, a band who function more than a little like a greek chorus, observing the action and commenting.  Metzger, PI’s  lawyer and co-executor comes to introduce himself and uses his good looks, child actor role in a movie that mysteriously plays on TV that night, lots of booze, and deception to seduce the first reluctant, then enthusiastic Oedipa. It seems as if it is part of a script written by Inverarity or as if he has his own designs on who will manage the disposition of the estate. The interchangeability/similarity of lawyer and actor already noted in Roseman’s issues with Perry Mason, comes forward and Manny DePresso, another lawyer turned  actor is mentioned . ( in similar events of the time,Reagan got political with conservative speech in 64 and became governor in 66.) Metzger seems to act as an agent of deflection and deception and throughout the novel and uses anti-communism as a kind of religious orthodoxy and to some degree an excuse for fascism( Tony Jaguar), for racial segregation( Yoyodyne) and for those who know where the bodies are buried and what the secretive assassins of the Tristero are all about.  Metzger is also another dead end for whatever Oedipa is looking for in men. In American history, lit and film there is a powerful albeit sentimentally false tradition of the lawyer fighting for truth, but in COL 49 that is mocked and undermined. Metger is a predator and manipulator who likes an easy mark. The last we see of him he has seduced one of the Paranoids young girlfriends. I find that Metzger maps quite strongly onto those in  the Couriers Revenge who are in on the secrets of Duke Angelo and his inner court loyals, part of the chill that spreads when the audience  or action comes near a hidden truth, a defender, not of individual liberty or excellence or accountability, but of the power and control of corporate investor/owners.

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 8 18:00:24 UTC 2024

Oedipa

You know what that part with the tearing up behind the bubbleshades is referring to.  Oedipa is so sad because she is feeling not-at-home.  She misses Home.  Homebase.  She's looking at the triptych and she's tripping out, she really is.  Who *are* these creatures?  Look at them, with their little heart-shaped heads.  Why can't I get off this freaking rock?

The tower is her rocketship.  She ran out of fuel.

The 48 angelic cries.  The 49 tables.  The 50th gate of heaven.  Yet, whence the 50?  Why 50?  Why does it appear so often in all the myths? What is its origin?  Sure they tell you it has to do with Passover and escaping those terrible Egyptians, and to do with some guy called Omer who counted all the days between the harvests, from the receiving to the giving.  Seriously, why the 50?  No one has the key to the 50th gate. Oedipa is stuck at the 49th gate.  What is the key to the 50th gate?  I had no idea it was Pynchon's birthday, I would have guessed late July.  But since it is  Pynchon's birthday today, I will state the obvious which many have observed.  The key to the 50th gate is Love.  Love Divine. 

It is the fuel for Oedipa's rocketship.

This planet is not our natural habitat.  We do not need planets.  We are ever expanding consciousnesses from other dimensions.  Indeed we are not from one dimension or another, "from the 4th", or "from the 9th".  We are omni-dimensional, in one and in all of the countless many.

We are not bound to the laws of this physical system of reality.  We are an individualized unity of consciousnesses who form worlds, and worlds within worlds, ever reaching and expanding, ever the piercing in vere rarity.  We form material and nonmaterial temporal systems of reality of infinite probabilities and potentials and varieties.  We are the infinities within each particle of infinity.

We create and project worlds, and then we explore them.  We have projected this world, and some of us individually have placed ourselves within it and allowed ourselves for a time to forget who we are.  We write our lives beforehand then live them out in a state of forgetfulness, wondering who we are and why we are here.  In time we each awake back to our greater infinite selves.  And from time to time we sleep again, then again awake and return, worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems.  We call it the Eternal Recurrence.

I am Zarathustra the Awakened One.  I am Prometheus.  I am the Pyramidion. I have the Coordinates, I have the Angle.  I Am That I Am.

Orbit around and you will see.  Don't let the paranoia bring you down.  We are here.  I have returned again.

Now everybody--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoWd2KyUro

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu May 9 03:26:21 UTC 2024

Fwd: Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon! One of our Greats. The intellectual illumination does not end.

Got my CoL49 paperback, totin’ it to the Wawa Station…a little late and not super public, but it’s the thought that counts, innit?

Happy birthday to the guy who at one time or another I’ve thought of as the guy behind a lot of different posts - We could all be pseudonyms except me, a-and how does anyone else know I’m not?

More realistically, even if he’s never even seen this list, he has inspired all this wonderful ideation, persiflage, badinage, zomoskepsis, and interaction, with those glorious books.

Many happy returns, Mr Pynchon!

Richard Ryan getmerichardryan at gmail.com
Thu May 9 04:40:08 UTC 2024

Fwd: Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon! One of our Greats. The intellectual illumination does not end.

One hopes and expects he has a tale or two left in him.  Salud!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 00:05:39 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read cont.

*2 *Sick Dick and the Volkswagens..
Play this meaning as it lays.....

Mucho does not believe.....who does he represent?...the hollow suburban American?  The working man's meaningless daily life?...A typical American of the early 60s soon to believe only in a different--counter--culture?  is belief in everything the tower surrounds and holds onto, unbelievable? (although we can be fond of it, ala Mucho on this group.)

Is this like all of the older generation who were fond of the Beatles, say, (and other English groups) but did not "believe" in them? A fad...not really music, etc...

The time frame of Lot 49 IS the British Invasion...musical, of course...

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 10 03:20:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - The bust & Jay Gould

I don’t know anybody who has a bust of anybody in their house. Does anybody here?

Would you call it an affectation?

Schroeder has a bust of Beethoven on his piano. Presumably for inspiration.

The Schroeder character was introduced in 1951 - so this oddity could have been an inspiration for Pierce’s bust of Jay Gould.

I’m not thinking of the bust of Jay Gould in terms of gnarly symbolism but just, like, wouldn’t you agree that it might be significant -

“if this is who Pierce admires enough to have a frickin’ bust” in a position near to the frickin’ marriage bed because he wants, while
sleeping, a-and while copulating, to have the bust nearby - 

 (ok, I’ve typed “bust” enough times, it’s starting to sound weird)

I refreshed my memory of Jay Gould in Wikipedia.
Fairly typical robber baron, n’est ça pas?

3 standout tidbits:

- Tried to corner gold, screwed a bunch of people & businesses up for months, & didn’t even make a net profit after the lawsuits

- Quoted (somewhere) as saying something about “he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/29/hire-half/?amp=1 someone chased this down - pretty interesting - sounds like not a very accurate quote

 - mentioned in GR in context of being the partner of Jubilee Jim Fisk in the “cornering gold caper”;

(From _Gravity’s Rainbow_
“It is gone where the woodbine twineth.” Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told the Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould’s scheme to corner gold in 1869.)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 10 04:06:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - The bust & Jay Gould

If I were a more motivated writer I’d have a bust of Pynchon - but, over or on my desk

Learned the hard way about Damocles things over the bed with a bulletin board years ago

Is there a bust of Pynchon available?

No, not that I could find - there’s a nice one of Dylan Thomas, tho’

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31442984478&com_cvv=d30042528f072ba8a22b19c81250437cd47a2f30330f0ed03551c4efdaf3409e

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 10:47:44 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - The bust & Jay Gould

No, no one I've ever known...just Presidents at the White House...(althugh a friend recently said he had statues of Don Quixote around.....but fictional characters aren't quite the same (except that real persons are felt mythically in some way, right?)

Owning a bust of a beloved ancestor or historical figure can feel like welcoming them into your home, their presence weaving a thread of personal history into the fabric of your space.

A guy on Reddit says a bust makes him feel the owner wants a dialogue with their revered personage. He felt this after watching a John Adams documentary.

Sounds right on to me....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 11:23:58 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot49 Reading Group

Metzger, German for butcher.

Scholar named Nicholson riffs on how early butchers in the heart of Europe, due to the peripatetic nature of their trade, were given letters to deliver.....an alternative postal service.........

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 12:01:59 UTC 2024

Fwd: Crying of Lot49 Reading Group

Mucho  = Much of...(whoever he is; whatever he represents?)

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri May 10 12:05:37 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot49 Reading Group

Mucho Mass = Much MORE! A Huge amount (of something)!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 12:19:28 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot49 Reading Group

YES!...Much of the mass of men/humanity! (with conceptual punning).....In Against the Day Pynchon overtly speaks of mass man......(that early--mid?-- sociological concept)...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:32:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

The beginning of CoL49 establishes several themes in the first few pages: sublime-vs-mundane (Eliade’s sacred/profane); spiritual-vs-materialist kleptocapitalism; quest; ‘We’-vs-’Them’;  paranoia and entropy; stultifying suburban lifestyles; Haves-vs-Have Nots; Elect-vs-Preterite; order as control; freedom as rejection of order.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:33:33 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading

When Mucho gets home, his despair and lack of belief in his DJ job reinforces the theme of contributing to an order in which we don’t really have faith or want to participate but can’t not participate. How can he believe in an order that doesn’t care for the pathetic customers at his used car lot? In fans that can enjoy the music he doesn’t believe.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:35:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading

For me, the images/memories have a pattern of sacred ending in profane. The slamming of a door links to initiation/rites of passage where the initiate has closed the door on the past, much as the door slamming represented the end of Oed’s relationship with Pierce. The bird flight is a release, while the Cornell library sunset represents a moment of shared sublime, where she and Pierce saw what no one else did. Music is sublime and sacred, and Bartok’s piece intended to evoke memories of national pride, pride in place, a sacred place that has been lost. Contrasting those is the teetering bust of Jay Gould, vulture capitalist, poised above their heads, waiting to come crashing down. The whitewash perhaps an attempt to make him less ghoulish? By the way, Gould is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The map of the cemetery notes the location, but the mausoleum, a huge columned monstrosity, has no identification of who rests there. (Gould Mausoleum)
https://www.mausoleums.com/portfolio/gould-mausoleum/ 

Gould Mausoleum

View our classic mausoleum gallery. Learn about the Gould Mausoleum. From Forever Legacy, America's Premier maus...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:36:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading

Pierce’s late night phone call voices swing back and forth between authority figures (elect) and disenfranchised (preterite). The Transylvanian embassy and the Nazi gestapo alternate with the comic negro and the Pachucos. The Shadow was an elect who acted as a vigilante in cooperation with the police like Batman. Is this an indication that Pierce might have vacillated between seeking wealth/power and something opposed to that, ending as a tool of the elect? I’m not familiar with the Shadow, but what little I know indicates a vigilante type character.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:37:10 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group read

I do find Pynchon’s 3rd person limited narrator here to shift into omniscience at points, talking directly to the reader as a narrator rather than simply communicating Oed’s thoughts and actions. Phrases like “As things developed…” and “Such a captive maiden…” indicate that the narrator has shifted to omniscient, able to see where Oed’s quest will lead as well as to provide a more studied explanation of her reaction to Remedios Varo than she contemplated in the moment. Why do I find this significant? Because it is so subtle, that the reader often doesn’t notice the shift to omniscience.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:38:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading

While Oedipa has some alignment with Rex, especially the detective/problem and riddle solver, I think that the Rapunzel tale has far more analogies. The tower and her confinement and escape, the patriarchal rescue and happy ending of the tale contrast with her suburban housewife marriage. In Rapunzel, the girl unwittingly discloses her relationship to the witch. The witch abandons her in a wilderness, Kinneret-Among-the-Pines? Rapunzel’s tears heal the prince’s blinded eyes, while Oed’s tears are hidden by her bubble glasses, which she imagines will capture the tears and provide her with a sad vision that refracts the world through those tears. Her prince/Pierce has returned via his will, but she cannot heal him and won’t live happily ever after in the patriarchal world.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:39:39 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

I find the Beatles allusions overt but hilarious from “I Want to Kiss Your Feet” to the band’s name, since Volkswagens were called “Beetles”. Later when the band serenades Oed and Metzger, they sing a song with the lyric: “On the lonely sea”, which is a Beach Boys song from Surfin’ USA, a 1963 release. Both the Paranoids and the Beach Boys repeat the line throughout the song. Got that tidbit from the podcast, Mapping the Zone.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 15:54:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

The Gould mausoleum link didn't go through last time:https://www.mausoleums.com/portfolio/gould-mausoleum/ 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 16:18:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

A definition that we all know but maybe should think on again, per J K here...

While the third person omniscient point of view has full access to the thoughts and feelings of all characters, limited third person
omniscient is restricted to a single character. The third person limited narrator allows the writer to explore the plot through the thoughts and feelings of that specific character.

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Fri May 10 16:57:42 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

We never get to know (and, presumably, Oedipa never got to know) the real Pierce, just as the identity of The Shadow was unknown (until it wasn't - maybe revealed at some shark-jumping moment in one of the show's later incarnations). As JK says, Pierce vacillates between elect and preterite voices, making it difficult for at least the college-age Oedipa to know what he's really about. On the campus hill, he's romantic and approachable, but Gould is always looming over their relationship, if in whitewashed
form. So Pierce is a kind of shape-shifter, like the Norse character Loki. I know that Pynchon references the icy North in GR. But are there any Norse mythology references in COL49, other than (maybe) Pierce as Loki?

I haven't read Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces for ages, but his concept is that all world mythology shares some basic tropes. The Hero receives a call to adventure, causing him to leave the safety of his home and set out to find something and/or seek knowledge, and eventually, to return, enriched. The shape-shifter/trickster is a stock character. And it's this shapeshifting trickster who calls Oedipa to adventure from the safety of her drab suburban life.

LK

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 17:07:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

One might say, Pierce is her Shadow (in an extended Jungian metaphor) as her the-tower-is-everywhere America has all its unadmitted shadows....'

And, after Laura's nice riff on heroes, Campbell,etc.....here might be a nice time to mention in all the history Campbell tells the myths of, there were just about zero female heroes, almost no female adventurers, which is the first reason C of Lot 49 is feminist amongst its themes...a female on her quest....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 10 17:28:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading - The bust & Jay Gould

It’s true,  I don’t know or recall anyone who has an actual bust of an historic person. It is something you only see in public buildings. The Greeks did Gods and heroes, but the Romans, more earthly  status oriented, did detailed likenesses, even castings of famous people, made death masks..  Seems like real macho culture to me, but for some these busts ( and other busts as well)could be aspirational, an homage to a guiding figure. Gould, the Golden Guiding Light  or the guiding light to gold, and Scottish to boot.

> On May 9, 2024, at 11:20 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don’t know anybody who has a bust of anybody in their house. Does anybody here?

> Would you call it an affectation?
 
> Schroeder has a bust of Beethoven on his piano. Presumably for inspiration.
 
> The Schroeder character was introduced in 1951 - so this oddity could have been an inspiration for Pierce’s bust of Jay Gould.
 
> I’m not thinking of the bust of Jay Gould in terms of gnarly symbolism but just, like, wouldn’t you agree that it might be significant-
> “if this is who Pierce admires enough to have a frickin’ bust” in a position near to the frickin’ marriage bed because he wants, while sleeping, a-and while copulating, to have the bust nearby -

> (ok, I’ve typed “bust” enough times, it’s starting to sound weird) 

> I refreshed my memory of Jay Gould in Wikipedia. Fairly typical robber baron, n’est ça pas?

> 3 standout tidbits:
 
> - Tried to corner gold, screwed a bunch of people & businesses up for months, & didn’t even make a net profit after the lawsuits

> - Quoted (somewhere) as saying something about “he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”

Howard Hughes once said,’ you have to remember  I can buy or destroy anyone I want to.'

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri May 10 18:03:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

I said it earlier, but essentially I agree with your Hero Quest comments. The “Everyman” is touched/anointed by an otherworldly force, and is sent on a mission. In the course of his journey he is tested, tricked, sometimes given a magic potion which transports him to another world and/or transforms him into a higher level of consciousness.

It’s all in GR. Which makes me think of a seance. Pierce[the veil] brings forth obscure messages, impersonating exotic spirits, and shakes Oed awake to action…

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 18:50:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

San Narciso. Does this relate to narcissus and narcissism? After All this is Pierce’s creation, his plinth, and considering his efforts from beyond death to bring her into his web again, this seems likely. He appears quite self-absorbed. There is a tow in the Philippines called San Narciso, but no saint that it is named after? There is a Saint Narcissus of Jerusalem, but I don’t see any relationship except to the Greek myth of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus Narcissus & Echo]. This seems clearly alluded to when Oedipa pulls into “Echo Courts” motel, which has a painted sheet metal nymph holding a white blossom. Echo is a mountain nymph whom Juno curses to be able to only repeat what others say. She falls in love with Narcissus, who rejects her. Her fellow nymphs put a curse on Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection. He dies staring at his reflection in a pool, as Echo repeats his final word, Farewell.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 18:51:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

Pynchon’s allusions may be rabbit holes or detours, distractions. Much of what we research and discover may lead down false paths. How much or how little the allusions and references have to do with understanding the central idea of the book may depend on how in depth we go or whether we ignore these detours.Either way, the reflections and analysis we practice, the more we have new/fresh interpretations of a story like Rapunzel or Oedipus Rex. Whether this is Pynchon’s intent or not doesn’t matter, he leads us to play with these ideas, which for me is one of the joys of reading TRP. Look at how much the group has explored Oedipa’s, Pierce’s and Mucho’s names. How much time we spent on a bust of a robber baron for that matter. At the same time, we have gained more knowledge about the stories, myths, people alluded to in Pynchon. Even if he didn’t intend to directly allude to them, he must have read/studied these allusions/references. We share his interest in them and vainly assume that we have some connection with the person, not just the author’s work.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 18:52:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

Wendel Maas has no abilities of value it seems, only a pathetic, debilitating empathy. Is there a cringiness to his DJing? His boss accuses him of being too horny when he should be a father figure to the teenagers who call him. Mucho doesn’t deny this; he cowardly mutters “censorship”, which implies that he deliberately acts horny. His miserableness contrasts with the descriptions of his movements, which Oedipa notices: bounding through the screen door, gliding across the room like a large bird in a thermal. Is Oedipa happy in this marriage? It’s hard to say since she follows her routine of wifely duties. Their bodies remain interlocked when Hilarius calls, I think she wants this to be true love, but her memories of and the vagueness of when her relationship with pierce ended, make it difficult to identify where her marriage and relationship with Pierce entwined.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 18:53:11 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

I still want to discuss some of the issues like how Wendell’s auto lot job was his “Korea”, that if he had gone to WWII or Korea and returned with PTSD over fighting the enemy, he might not be so traumatized. This analogy of Oedipa’s implies that the horrors of war have shorter-term effects than the trauma created by being/contributing to the capitalist system. Overtly strained analogy that places capitalism’s crimes and destruction above theat which war causes. Capitalism does produce and thrive on war and conflict. This comparison coming from a Republican housewife feels more like a rich man telling a beggar to get a job. It sounds like “just get over it already, Mucho”. The Korean War would be fifteen years in the past, and Vietnam would be just starting to escalate as Johnson takes over from Kennedy. So Oedipa and Mucho would be part of the silent generation, born during the depression and before the war, much like most of the British invasion, the rockabillies, and the silent Americans who elected Nixon and cried when Goldwater was clobbered. TPR would also fit into this category/generation, too young for Korea, too old to be drafted into Vietnam. They knew the men and women who served in those wars of the past,, honored them as heroes, yet their escape of a war-time draft left many of them able to simply say, “well If I had been called up, I would have gone!” without having to actually make that choice or have it thrust upon them. Generation X had a similar situation since the draft ended before they came of age, and an all-volunteer army allowed them to make similar statements around the Afgan and Iraq Wars, while cheerleading a war they would never have to fight.

In solidarity,
James

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Fri May 10 19:22:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

We know that Oedipa went to Cornell and had a romance with an aspiring robber baron, but instead of marrying up, she married down. Mucho Maas is much less. The used car salesman was (and is, I guess) a cliche representative of all that's vulgar and low class. Cleaning the scrounge out of other people's cars, he's not poor, but he's poor-adjacent. Even as a DJ, he's just a sad-sack working stiff.

Oedipa cares about him, presumably, but hangs out with somewhat affluent, lasagna and fondue eating suburban housewives. Lasagna being a little more exotic in those days.

So Oedipa exists between the elect and the preterite ( yep, the excluded middle class) as she embarks on her journey. The perfect place to view the two halves of America.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 19:38:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

His empathy is also a Good. He feels for humanity, the least among us.
“Debilitating” for action, for doing anything about it, even just keeping some cool. Imo.

I believe the text when Oedipa says Pierce is really dead to her. Why else would TRP have her say that.

And Mucho believes it too—he who doesn’t believe in a lot of things.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri May 10 19:52:27 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

I can’t think of any character of Pynchon’s having  “abilities of value” that we are supposed measure to find them “honorable” as opposed to “pathetic.”

If anything, we are supposed to sympathize

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 10 20:11:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

So Pierce is a kind of shape-shifter, like the Norse character Loki. I know that Pynchon references the icy North in GR. But are there any Norse mythology references in COL49, other than (maybe) Pierce as Loki?

What comes to mind is the Icy unswimmable waters of Lago di Prieta, rhyming with icy waters navigated by the submarine Justine, rhyming with the cold lake where the flower of Faggian youth ended up in their battle with Tristero, by which Nicole was killed,,  and the strangely named Fangoso lagoon( strange because it is for scuba divers who would want clarity to explore the imported Spanish galleons, but Fangoso means muddy, murky.) Bones in the cold depths everywhere. And some question as to who knows where the bodies are buried which Oedipa is curious about but  Metzger, Cohen and Driblet discourage.

Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.
Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Paragraph 40

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 20:19:03 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

As someone in the thread has mentioned, Mucho violates McClintic Sphere’s maxim: Be cool, but care. His empathy engulfs his inertia and drive. He can’t get past that to act as Mark points out. The empathy demonstrates his connection to humanity, but he can’t get beyond it. He seems incapable of the distance necessary to be "cool" while caring. So why does he “bound through the screen door and gliding across the room. It’s as though his directs his energy effusively, leaving none left for the real struggle. As to her affection for him, I’m ambivalent since she doesn’t even make it a day before she’s having sex with Metzger, which is non-consensual since he continues after she falls asleep, but she initiates it when she finds him sleeping. That doesn’t sound like someone happy with their marriage, even if she’s over Pierce. Also, she says she ended with Pierce a year before she married Mucho, but she felt obligated to tell him, which implies that she still had a relationship with Mucho after they met/began dating. Yes, sympathy is how we should respond, but that sympathy comes from critiquing his actions.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 10 20:33:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

Yeah, Metzger and she complicate our--my--too easy words.....but we will learn she knows of his flings with younger women---girls really as Oedipa wonders about too young......

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri May 10 20:41:29 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

I am also reminded with Mucho’s unbelief of Eliade’s description of nonreligious man as seeking to rid himself of his religious heritage as well as being incapable of belief, which leaves him unable to recognize the sacred or even the sublime in the world. He has an existential relationship to the world that he inhabits. Mucho seems to be in constant existential crisis.

in solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 10 20:45:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

Just to add to this thought there does to me seem to be a sense  in which Pierce wants his many fronts to be pierced and for someone to peer into the depths and see where the bones and galleons long since emptied of gold lie hidden, but also where the fishes swim and dolphins play.. Or is Pierce insane, at war with death, like Howard Hughes or Jay Gould, throwing first his, then other peoples bones on the gaming table until the game was over. Does every criminal secretly want a record of his or her greatest crime? To empty out the air prince for verity?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 10 22:43:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading

So Pierce is a kind of shape-shifter, like the Norse character Loki.
>> I know that Pynchon references the icy North in GR. But are there any Norse
>> mythology references in COL49, other than (maybe) Pierce as Loki?
 
> What comes to mind is the Icy unswimmable waters of Lago di Prieta, rhyming with icy waters navigated by the submarine Justine, rhyming with the cold lake where the flower of Faggian youth ended up in their battle with Tristero, by which Nicole was killed,,  and the strangely named Fangoso lagoon( strange because it is for scuba divers who would want clarity to explore the imported Spanish galleons, but Fangoso means muddy, murky.) Bones in the cold depths everywhere. And some question as to who knows where the bodies are buried which Oedipa is curious about but  Metzger, Cohen and Driblet discourage.
 
> Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
> The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.
> Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.
> Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
> Paragraph 40

More watery graves: 

Driblette drowns or is drowned in his Genarro suit the night after the last performance of Courier’s Tragedy. 

When Prof Bortz studied Wharfinger’s notes he came across An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of That Outlandish And Fantastical Race.

This book  has another chilling story.  Diocletian Blobb , riding in a Torre and Tassis coach in the Mountains. Being attacked by the Lake of Piety by black cloaked rider "who engaged them in a fierce, silent struggle in the icy wind blowing in from the lake.”
All were killed but D Blobb, who was given this message" in perfect English: “Messer, you have witnessed the wrath of Trystero. Know that we are not without mercy. Tell your king and Parliament what we have done. Tell them that we prevail. That neither tempest nor strife, nor fierce beasts, nor the loneliness of the desert, nor yet the illegitimate usurpers of our rightful estate, can deter our couriers.” And leaving them and their purses intact, the highwaymen, in a cracking of cloaks like black sails, vanished back into their twilit mountains.”  This inquiry with Bortz  quickly leads to the history of the Tristero and the power struggles it enters.

Returning to the shadow theme we find Bortz has this theory: Bortz …. held, for instance, to a mirror-image theory, by which any period of instability for Thurn and Taxis must have its reflection in Tristero’s shadow-state.” 

Are we back at Echo Court with Oedipa writ large, her nymph outfit blowing in the artificial wind? It’s all like a word fugue, the saddest and silliest Bach arrangement ever, layers and variations galore.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 11 01:04:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

I like the reference to the Prince being healed by Rapunzel's tears at their reunion. But  who and where is Oedipa’s prince? Who holds her captive and why do her first tears stay in her own eyes? Is Inverarity both witch and prince, is Oedipa both Rapunzel and witch and prince? And who are the twins Rapunzel gives birth to? One poignant scene for me is when Oed after her long night in the Bay Area helps the old sailor up the stairs, hugs him,  listens to him and takes his letter to the w.a.s.t.e. post system . The healing of compassion opens many doors on her quest, but cannot seem to stop a tragic pattern of untimely death, of wasted lives. To my mind these are too universal as dilemmas, too large in their implications to be restricted to a fictional character. I can’t accept that we are destined to frightened blind searching in societies In which power struggles define everything, and creep into more and more of our inner and outer lives. 

 Context is critical. I think it is a good idea to look at all of Pynchon’s contemporary novels to get a sense of what this first of that series of novels is all about. They all concern the internalization of external American  power struggles, the tendency of great powers to betray the revolutionary appetite for freedom, to murder their forefathers and then become the same thing: Police powers vs youthful assertions of play, of music,  of non-violent new possibilities for culture; working families versus corporate overlords and the FBI.,Secrecy versus transparency. Life in a TV addicted nether world versus life as connection to family, lovemaking, Redwood groves, pacific waves, change. Life as an instrument of colonial violence directed by hypocrites vs life doing an honest job of using minimal force  to keep american business honest. 

There is a tendency in recent American culture to ascribe paranoia to those with little power but honestly looking for truth, and to negate the more classical and sociopathic  paranoia  of the powerful.   What we are looking at in Pynchon is not just the psychology of individuals and our common delusions, but "the psychology of power*" and its far more dangerous delusions. This appears in the phrase “magic, anonymous and malignant.

* a phrase borrowed with permission from my daughter Rebekah.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 11 01:33:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

I disagree with this and the whole idea that war trauma is more meaningful or easily overcome than the search for meaning that Mucho is working through. As many vets of the Vietnam War committed suicide as died in combat. The effects of PTSD on vets has ruined many families. Mucho finds his abilities in his acute hearing and musical sensibilities. We get a glimpse of how this plays out even “on the natch” when he reappears in Vineland. I don’t read him as someone Pychon just leaves behind even if Oedipa does.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 10:32:40 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

Look what I have just found. re Oedipus and Freud-- aslant, anyway. (And of course said decades after* the Crying of Lot 49.*)From Edna O'Brien, great writer; great writer about women. From Philip Roth's interview with her in *Shop Talk. *

*"if you want to know what I regard as the principal crux of female despair, it is this:  in the Greek myth of Oedipus*
*and in Freud's exploration of it, the son's desire for his mother is admitted;the infant daughter also desires her mother*
*but it is unthinkable, either in myth, in fantasy or in fact, that that desire can be consummated." *

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 10:48:29 UTC 2024

No Subject

P 14, paperback.. "Did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it?....
To not believe in the music of your time, what does that mean? To not be at one with your time, I would say. And, the music of the time alluded to, the Beatles for example was the art of its time. Of its time and for all times, to adapt Jonson on Shakey. The music of the spheres, to go back to that famous concept of unity with the cosmos, does not exist for Mucho.

Mucho is alienated from the heartless world of the tower. Bosses who destroy your freedom--the 50s all over. A world which does not help the working class in their car despairs. The Scientific American ethos of value-free facts---Just the facts, M'aam--Dragnet reviewing the books which might humanize a little more. Pierce's narcissistic suburban sprawl of deckless days built by robber baron capitalism.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 10:57:33 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read

p. 15 "She had never known numbers to run so high. It seemed unnatural".

I think it was Ruth Benedict (or one early anthropologist) who talked of natural "organic' communities whose math, whose counting,  went like this:  One, Two, Many...

I think it has been shown that Pynchon has deep thematic feelings about natural.  About organic communities---see all his interpreted history of the origins of European towns and cities in *Against the Day....*

Notice how imaginative numbers in *Against the Day* are.....bad things....unnatural by definition......

Here is some of that in embryo....a bit of his fuller world vision in embryo....I suggest.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 11:20:44 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

page 16....This reading, the phrase Echo Courts rings in my head as more of the narcissistic self-absorption of Oed's time and place. "the face of the nymph was much like Oedipa's"..."not exactly a hooker but the windstorm blowing up the vulgar outfit of
the nymph...'the hot sun and the dead-still air"....what a wasteland.... and that upskirting windstorm is what Oedipa has, "remembering her idea about a slow whirlwind, which she couldn't hear"....

God is dead-ness. The air is entropic. And that God who used to speak out of the biblical whirlwind had slowed down and could no longer be heard....

I mean.

TRP is so f'in COMPACT. Verbal quilt of compressed meaning. But we knew that, right?

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat May 11 11:30:05 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

I was just going through the Echo & Narcissus story from Ovid. Narcissus hunts a deer that leads him to Echo’s lonely glade. Echo is a mountain nymph, who can only repeat what she hears.
Oedipa drives an Impala (antelope) into Echo’s Court and sees herself (reflection) in the sheet metal nymph. While we may not take this allusion any further, it adds to the compact prose as Mark identifies.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 11:41:10 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read

"imaginary numbers", of course, not imaginative numbers, LOL....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 11 13:27:44 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read

Oops I wanted to change some mistakes and expand this post a bit.
> On May 10, 2024, at 9:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I like the reference to the Prince being healed by Rapunzel's tears at their reunion. But  who and where is Oedipa’s prince? Who holds her captive and why do her first tears stay in her own eyes? Is Inverarity both witch and prince, is Oedipa both Rapunzel and witch and prince? And who are the twins Rapunzel gives birth to? One poignant scene for me is when Oed after her long night in the Bay Area helps the old sailor up the stairs, hugs him,  listens to him and takes his letter to the w.a.s.t.e. post system . The healing of compassion opens many doors on her quest, but cannot seem to stop a tragic pattern of untimely death, of wasted lives. To my mind these are too universal as dilemmas, too large in their implications to be restricted to an I
Individual fictional character.   We seem to be asked whether we are
> destined to frightened blind searching in societies In which ruthless power struggles define everything, and creep into more and more of our inner and outer lives. 

> Context is critical. I think it is a good idea to look at all of Pynchon’s contemporary novels to get a sense of what this first of that series of novels is all about. They all concern the internalization of external American  power struggles, the tendency of great powers to betray the revolutionary appetite for freedom, to murder their forefathers and oppressors and then become the same thing:
Going to war with the values espoused
> Police powers vs youthful assertions of play, of music,  of non-violent new possibilities for culture; working families versus corporate overlords and the FBI.,Secrecy versus transparency. Life in a TV addicted nether world versus life as connection to family, lovemaking, Redwood groves, pacific waves, change. Life as an instrument of colonial violence directed by hypocrites vs life doing an honest job of using minimal force  to keep american business honest. 

> There is a tendency in recent American culture to ascribe paranoia to those with little power but honestly looking for truth, and to negate the more classical and sociopathic  paranoia  of the powerful.   What we are looking at in Pynchon is not just the psychology of individuals and our common delusions, but "the psychology of power
structures” and their 

>  far more dangerous delusions. This appears in the phrase “magic, anonymous and malignant. 

Ovid’s metamorphosis is rife with the malignancy and venality of the Gods. Nymphs and less powerful local spirit beings are frequently the ones injured by the whims and ego battles of the Gods, their wild places with ancient natural wholeness are disrupted, the trees cut down.  This seems best interpreted as the practical pattern of rape and destruction of dominance-based power arrangements. In COL 49 even gravesites, normally seen as sacred, are seen by lawyers and developers as having no right to be where the freeway is planned. 

The political underpinnings of the suburban landscape  is not far in the background in COL 49. Missile factory,  Hidden Bones, Nazi scientists, a Mafia mob boss with fascist history and a bone chilling murder story involving a war over basic communication and facts, and a question of who will be heir. What about the will of the people in who they choose? What happened to the rightful elected leader who refused the will of the Military Industrial Complex, who refused the plans to go to war to take back Cuba for the mob bosses and CIA, who turned from wars for dominance? JFK was shot and neither the implications of murder by a lone communist agent, nor the implications of other gunmen, nor Oswald’s involvement with the FBI and CIA were followed through to a full reckoning with the facts. Shadowy figures seen by witnesses, the eyewitness Zapruder film, the medical autopsy , the murder surrounded by cops of Oswald I watched on live TV, all danced in a choreography of obfuscation before the nation, while the dead presidents enemy who he had just fired from the CIA presided over the investigating commission.  An unlikely trail of dead bodies accompanied the independent investigators who sought witnesses and evidence. In a Congressional Committee on assassinations the chief counsel Robert Blakely said the CIA lied and withheld information which made all findings invalid.
In many obvious ways the Cold War and the coming hot war in Vietnam of this time were not about preventing authoritarian structures but retaining and expanding authoritarian structure favored by the most powerful  western corporate and government  forces and alliances to emerge from WW2.   In Vietnam, in  Aug1964, a year after Kennedy’s murder, the military carried out “Operation Pierce Arrow” where aircraft carriers started bombing North Vietnam in a response to an exchange of fire in the Gulf of Tonkin in which the question of who was aggressor and what happened is still  in serious dispute. Pierce Arrow.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat May 11 14:25:57 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

“Let your hair down.” What does that “action” usually mean?

It’s the key Oed sees as the means of her “rescue.”  And she BLOWS her first attempt with Pierce (she bares her artificial wig, powerless).

“Soon realize that her tower […] [isn’t her captor] that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anomalous, and malignant, visited on her from outside for no reason at all.”

And she realizes that she has no defense, and very little to even measure the shape or power of the force which traps her.

David Morris

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat May 11 15:04:58 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

So:

1. The “WHAT” which precedes (ushered in, causes?) “that which remained” (buffered sensation/experience), is Oed’s realization that she has been caught *irretrievably* by a malignant force of Magic.

2. Her intuition told her that if she let down her hair, she would be rescued. But the malignant force transformed her hair into an artificial lie. Powerless hair. Oed has no defense against that magic.

3.  Oed sought escape, was DEMONSTRABLY 👿 thwarted. And is sent/embarks on a journey whose *environment*, *that which remains*, is a kind of limbo, disassociation, shock.

David Morris

Krafft, John M. krafftjm at miamioh.edu
Sat May 11 15:27:48 UTC 2024

Lot 49

p. 15 "She had never known numbers to run so high. It seemed unnatural."

And if she's _approaching_ San Narciso, aren't they running in the wrong direction--higher instead of lower?

John

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 11 16:43:56 UTC 2024

Lot 49

It would seem so.....so, a rare slip-up by Tom?  or should we read it this way: He is miles away--by blocks from downtown San Narcisco driving to Los Angeles, he thinks.....BUT then is in a miles away neighborhood, with street numbers so high and he is so far away from where the numbers start that he is traveling away from San Narciso but not on the highway toward Los Angeles obviously.....off the highway into a highway exit mess of streets--"the road's skinny right-of-way" heading still toward LA?.....I don't know nuthin' "bout drivin' in California except for the classic Bullitt chase scene (lol) but I have seen such under highway complexity In the New York area where Robert Moses did his dirty---or even New Jersey (Jersey City where I lived where if you
got off the highway you could tanglingly still be going in the same direction as the highway but where shops, factories and other
buildings were)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat May 11 16:52:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading, early days

I always thought Oedipa had been married to Pierce but just realized that’s unlikely. Also my idea of Pierce as an older guy isn’t at all borne out in the text.

There isn’t anything about him loving or marrying anyone else after her, is there? So it’s even more like a Scrooge/Belle dynamic.

- Makes more sense as a college love affair -

- Drunk dialing her years later (who hasn’t done that or at least thought about it?)

- The Jay Gould bust as an undergraduate affectation

- On the narrow shelf in a dorm room is closer to being understandable, than had they been married living in a house with plenty of room

- Making her executrix - more likely as an old flame than if she had been his spouse

- Even an inattentive ex-spouse would probably know more about Pierce’s businesses than Oedipa does, going in

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat May 11 17:36:26 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

BTW, this kind of convoluted sentence (which Pynchon seems to be perfecting for heavy GR use) always makes sense, never looses its object/subject, doesn’t morph without tangible tethers. Someone A long time ago told me that one should not parse Pynchon. I completely disagree.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 12 10:49:21 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

p 15,,,"fence topped with barbed wire"--another of TRP's favorite working images/symbols…"guard towers"---the tower is everywhere....

With Yoyodyne we see America, the military-industrial complex Ike said to beware as a garrison state.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 12 11:17:54 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

Metaphor in “CL 49”
<https://brill.com/downloadpdf/display/book/9789004484030/B9789004484030_s005.pdf>
GMM Colvile - Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas …, 1988 - brill.com
… But were Oedipa some *single* *melted* *crystal* of *urban* *horse*, LA, really, would be no less … Sometimes *one* feels that Pynchon is feeding into his novels all the data he has, consuming it,

Reflect on this metaphor in Oedipa's existence: IF she were pure heroin, it would not matter to LA! Oedipa's meaninglessness in LA. LA: "happy, coherent, turned on anyway"...without her.

Suburban girl trapped--meaninglessly-- in Varo's tower with the others. Needs to let down her hair to escape...yet a wasteland all around her......

Picturing all this reminds me that a lot of P's vision in V. is still here. A deadland. meaningless NYC and yo-yoing nowhere.  YoYodyne is back making the connection.....and as an objective correlative.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 12 20:03:07 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read of 2024

p. 17. Milles of the Paranoids band. ..Oedipa offers him a kindness, to get his band listened to...

Suddenly, Miles, projecting that Oed wants HIM as he "moves in on her" so she picks up the rabbit ears and he whines, "you hate me too." He is paranoid.

"There is no way outta here, says the Joker to the Thief. "--Bob D.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon May 13 00:57:25 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

Section 3, the first 1/3 of the 20 page chapter 2 (about 7 pages): p.23-29ish. [beware sentences spanning pages]

Synopsis

Mucho “wants to believe” in jobs, English bands, a world he chooses to support. But seeking that life, Misery and Sincerity seem his inseparable fate.

Oed leaves Mucho, and his barely-managed desperation, for Pierce’s dominion, San Narisco. And as she descends into its maze of madness, she senses “an intent to communicate” (from patterns), it falls to deliver, and so is “a revelation [trembling] just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Her choice of abode in Echo Court seems unwise, but then she sees that the nymph is herself, and now WE can see why she might be helpless against the malevolent magic imprisoning her where ever she goes.

Motel room cyclops windows “gagged each with its roaring air conditioner” is a wonderful image. More desperate imprisoned souls.

Authenticity seems in short supply with her faux-Brit bohemian warden-gate keeper, Miles, always almost what he thinks you want him to be.

But Mettzger IS what OEDIPA WANTS! And she is immediately suspicious he may be a TRICKSTER.  He’s offering her his debone, and wants to “come in there.” She’s already deployed the best move she’s got, and “had let her hair down all the way.” So she invites him in.

Metzger’s Freudian child actor Mother domination bitching prompts Oed to nearly slip, saying “You certainly don’t look,” [gay]. She now suspects his faked sexual attraction to her. Turns out, he is the Narcissus to this Echo chamber.

David Morris

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon May 13 05:02:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading, early days

Maybe a college affair that got revived later, maybe less than an affair , but either way something  that later became a trip to Mexico, because that  was only a year before she married Wendell. Also it does not seem , apart from attraction and sex , like they had developed any personal intimacy. Dude was doing voices all the way to Mexico. Also part of what turned her off was his talk with the Mexican anarchist on the beach that comes out later, where he is such an archetypal oligarch that he revives the anarchists dedication to his convictions. We don’t know jack about why Cornell and why Kinaret or her parents and whether they actually sold her to a witch when she was done breastfeeding( Not your typical young republican background). 

The whole question of why PI chose someone who walked away from him is intriguing. Did he want to suck her back into his world, or expose his doings to the light?  Did he have a premonition of death.? Why nothing about how he died? Pynchon treats him almost more like a many voiced corporate board than a person. Oedipa herself struggles to feel any intimate connection, fantasizes about death by falling stone bust of Gould.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon May 13 07:07:34 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, the Group Read, cont.

San Narcisco, near-LA:  a 'grouping of concepts",....not like any real town or city; nothing grounding it as a city. Suburban America squared. A narcissistic city, by punning...where everyone sees themselves in the water, so to speak? Where everyone sees Pierce--another grouping of concepts?---as their unknown doppelganger?

   - 10 Best Cities Near Los Angeles. ...
   - Santa Monica, CA. ...
   - Pasadena, CA. ...
   - Burbank, CA. ...
   - Irvine, CA. ...
   - Newport Beach, CA. ...
   - Arcadia, CA. ...
   - Torrance, CA.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue May 14 09:20:09 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

Some questions about the second half of chapter two.
How consensual is the sex?Why do the characters in the movie die?How does Eliade’s ‘non-religious man’ respond to the many religious images presented by TRP? How does a drummer set up on a diving board?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue May 14 11:51:00 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

TRP makes sure to write the sex scene as consensual... I could quote where but we can all read closely.....

What this scene means re sex in America then is more difficult to define....crazy situation and actions, surreal as that overused word goes........

Starting observation: it is clearly Oedipa 'letting down her hair" as David wrote.... It is in the text....the way to escape her tower in this tale......

But......she "won't be easy" we are to learn later as Metzger quotes Pierce....She is not free & easy. Frenesi.....She wants Metzger....thigh-pressing warmth...he's movie star handsome.... she began kissing him to wake him up with his visible hardon---TRP does not have her grab it to wake him up, we notice---she is typically 'romantic" full of Romance novels' kissing as the way...... and melts emotionally...Metzger trying to undress her she feels like a Barbie doll....Barbie that emblem of Everywoman then, a suburban doll then...

I happen to be reading K's *The Metamorphosis *too and Oedipa is so wrapped she can hardly turn herself over is not unlike Gregor the insect when he is on his back and cannot turn over....

It is humanly bad, armored sex...He goes unconscious with the booze; she is self-character-armored---big 50s phrase from Wilhelm Reich....a little scene about trying to get it on before the sixties broke that open....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue May 14 12:38:18 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

2nd half of ch 2 summary. COL 49. 

The bet about the ending ( death or victory) of the movie Cashiered is sealed with an odd arrangement where if Metzger wins he gets sex, but after he refuses to put up a bottle of Tequila if she wins, because it will put her to sleep,  there is no agreed prize for her. She bets on death under the waves.
(cashier2 | kaˈSHir | verb [with object] dismiss (someone) from the armed forces in disgrace because of a serious misdemeanor.) They are drinking lots of Tequila, she is reminded of first seduction with PI.  ?? Movie continues with father on Turkish Beach  but Metzger notes they must have mixed up the reels. ( coincidence  of movie showing that evening looks prearranged). They start to play strip Botticelli with OED having to remove item of clothing for every question asked. She clothes herself  to the point of being a human beach ball, then knocks down hair spray can which caroms  around accompanied by tv battle sounds, Paranoids & friends peek in, then leave. We find out Oedipa is 28( from broken mirror).

"Now and then a commercial would come in, each time Metzger would say, “Inverarity’s,” or “Big block of shares,” and later settled for nodding and smiling. Oedipa would scowl back, growing more and more certain, while a headache began to flower behind her eyes, that they among all possible combinations of new lovers had found a way to make time itself slow down. Things grew less and less clear.”

OM comes back from bathroom finds M "fast asleep with a hardon and his head under the couch. She noticed also a fat stomach the suit had hidden. On the screen New Zealanders and Turks were impaling one another on bayonets. With a cry Oedipa rushed to him, fell on him, began kissing him to wake him up. His radiant eyes flew open, pierced her, as if she could feel the sharpness somewhere vague between her breasts.”
 ( The word pierce here makes another a connection between M and PI.)

They fall asleep on the way, but as they climax the lights go out when the Paranoids, playing by the pool,  blow a fuse. 
Afterward, when the lights and TV come back on,  they watch final movie scene featuring Baby Igor electrocuted and screaming as water fills the sub and the father tells the dead Igor “you are for salvation;I am for the pit”. An unlikely fundamentalist-inflected last line. 

OM gets temporarily pissed because she should have won “You won me,” Metzger smiled.  
“What did Inverarity tell you about me,” she asked finally.
 “That you wouldn’t be easy.” 
She began to cry. “
Come back,” said Metzger. “Come on.” After awhile she said, “I will.” And she did.

      ???? Here are some questions that struck me from 2nd half of ch 2.  No expectations of answers unless someone gets inspired to write something , but what questions do others have? For me the best questions I have are the ones that sincerely puzzle me. 

?Is America and/or Oedipa Maas easy to seduce but hard to keep a relationship with? 

?How does  this maudlin WW1 submarine drama, ending in drowning,  relate to the seduction of OM? Do either  or both relate to the larger arc of COL49?  

?Why does OM cry?

?  Real estate and ownership  as deeper layer of patriarchy, substrate of empire.  America  and 51% ownership.  51% of 1%, owning the owners? 

?Are booze and (unusual) men OM’s  primary vulnerability?  Liquor seems more prominent in COL 49 than any other Pynchon book. Reasons? 

? Beaconsfield  cigarettes with bone charcoal. OM asks “Bones of what?” M answers that PI knew , owned 51% of process. Why does Pynchon keep having human bones end in the cold depths or ink or a trail of smoke? Tobacco company as sign of founding father status?

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Tue May 14 17:00:36 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

If you're into water and lakes for the unconscious, I was going to point out that the I Ching 49 hexagram is the well.  But then I checked and the well is 48, not 49.  Hexagram 49 is revolution.  "Chaos from order," according to the "interpretation" I randomly clicked on.

I have also gotten into my head that Metzger looks and acts just like Benicio Del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  I hope that doesn't poison anyone else's well.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue May 14 19:52:14 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

Thompson's book was years later, we know.....Hunter doesn't seem to me to get character-creating clues from other novels....esp a so-minor character BUT.........could be a real social type of the times those two geniuses saw and created separately.....

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Tue May 14 21:43:18 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

What's worse is the movie didn't come out until at least '83, '84, and I kept thinking Leaving Las Vegas while seeing Del Toro.

Not thinking about the Leaving movie, as in viewing it in my head and always seeing Del Toro's Fear and Loathing character acting in the place of the FaceOff guy's Leaving character and Del Toro saying the Leaving lines. By now yes but not earlier.

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Tue May 14 22:49:12 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Reading

Yet if it is true that the future forms the past, which seems true enough, then it would not be entirely inaccurate to suggest Thompson formed Metzger when he wrote Fear and Loathing.  I was not suggesting that, but it would be a tremendous reading of the material.  As far as all that is about, it would not be utterly insane to suggest Gravity's Rainbow formed the second war.  The nature of probabilities allows it, if one has a creative enough interpretation of probabilities.

Some of us are not hemmed in by beliefs about illusory physical laws regarding gravitation and things like limitations on the probable.  This entire system age is about shackling the probable and sleepwalking through it.  Such causal and temporal musings are worth expanding because they concern the vital elements of limitlessness.

It would be absurd to raise these ideas in a group dedicated to the writings of say Ann Coulter.  But they may have valid application in this one.  Again I was not implying Metzger was lifted from Gonzo, or even that Del Toro lifted his schtick from Cage, but denying the possibility caused me to wish that I had, as the notion has more probable validity than the belief that the second war came after the first.

Ultimately I am saying, everything depends on Johnny Depp.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 19:29:38 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Speaking again of sex, Oedipa and Metzger, when I wrote about bad sex--not fully conscious, engaged, loving 
Lawrentian sex--there is the countertruth (if I am right)...that

They came together, satisfyingly.

The need? The meaning?

Oedipa's bite, thru the sharkskin suit into M's arm? Not normal. WTF? And I was led to these words in Margaret Atwood's early poetic narrative *The Journals of Susannah Moodie. *A Canadian woman on the prairie, struggling, in the mid-nineteenth century.

 "you dangle on the leash of your own longing; your need grows teeth."

No, no influence on Pynchon, maybe the reverse?  1970

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 15 19:51:03 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024
My problem with the sex, especially after Oed initiates it by kissing him awake, is that he undresses her while she sleeps, or at least falls in and out of sleep. I wouldn’t keep undressing a woman that I just met when she has passed out, and I hope most men wouldn’t try to have sex with her when she’s asleep.
Part of this is also a young Pynchon writing about sex. This whole scene doesn’t feel authentic. Metzger is passed out in his underwear. She is drunk and notices his aging belly. She really then suddenly wants to jump him? A man she had already identified as possibly putting a con on her. 
This whole scene is hard to take. Is it necessary to move the plot forward? The maturing of his sex episodes in GR show a quantitative leap forward from this.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 15 20:02:32 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

The sex Oed has with Metz is a guarded WTF sex.  He initially flashed his sexuality so expertly that Oed figured he must be an actor setting her up, maybe hidden camera. He turns her on. He doesn’t APPEAR gay… He’s annoying, but her hair-down mode is powerful. So she feels up for the challenge

David Morris

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 15 20:15:40 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Men have WTF sex all the time.  It’s not “real” or love. It’s SEX

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 15 20:40:21 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Does that include having sex with someone who is asleep that they just met?

I’m fine with Oed having WTF sex, and she wants to have it. In Metzger’s situation, I wouldn’t continue if the woman had passed out. Using sex to wake her up is presumptuous at best.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 21:17:09 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I've read the scene closely again..."his radiant eyes flew open, pierced her"---"an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her".....WTF parody of Romance novels is one slant.........."she couldn't help him undress her.  {She's a puddle of melte emotion]  ......then the Barbie doll metaphor and she falls asleep "once or twice".....

Notice that Oedipa says "as if, she thought, he were......[a] little girl"....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 21:22:21 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

One might see the sex as the way so many women, mostly married in The Feminine Mystique way because the major way then, as a working metaphor....self-armored women with men so boring they, the women, fall asleep during the foreplay that isn't foreplay for THEM.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 21:30:09 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

It IS interpersonally and legally very dicey for him to continue when she is asleep--but we read of him continuing before we read she fell asleep once or twice BUT.....IF a NO at any time is her human right, then........yes, very dicey......like the pool hall scene in V.....

But this indicts Metzger, of course, not an embodiment of any of TRP's values.....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 15 21:30:22 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

The sex scene with Metz is pure Pynchon slapstick-farce. It’s more like a comic duel. It’s by no means anything about love. Its erotic value is more comic-kink than hot fetish.  It’s really more a battle of wit

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 15 21:48:47 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I didn’t find it funny. The scene in the bathroom with the aerosol can, funny. The Paranoids asking if this was some British thing, funny. 
I never equated this with love, just lust and sex. Consensual SEX is continuous and consenting. That being said, I go back to my point that this is not a good Pynchon sex scene. Not b/c of the question of consent, but just not realistic, unlike the sex between Roger Mexico & Jessica, Slothrop and nearly any encounter, or even the brutal sex between Lake with Deuce & Sloat. 
One last question on this point: why does Oed cry at the end before returning to Metzger?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 21:59:11 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I think she cried because there was hardly even an LIKE in it, much less love....he and Pierce talked over doing it to/with her....this ruins Pierce's supposed love for her......A man who loves you doesn't go talking over with a judgment how hard it is to seduce you.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 15 22:06:21 UTC 2024

Character patterns in life

I am sure most of us reading this have heard something of Trump's current trial?....

Getting to his shorts with Stormy when he invited her to dinner....meet him in his room.... I guess some dickheaded men do this as a way to show they want IT yet not LITERALLY get physical until......

Metzger is the lawyer, the Rudy Guiiani to the Trump-like Pierce/Jay Gould (developer, rapacious--but not a rapist, entitlement-feeling and acting rich guy) is the right hand lackey after the same woman. interchangeable. A doll for both of them.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 15 22:28:04 UTC 2024

Character patterns in life

I thought of that too. Same icky feeling. You summed up the analogy well, Mark.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 15 22:34:37 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Comedy is often DARK 👿
It’s funny to make the audience SQUIRM

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 15 23:13:31 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I didn’t squirm either, not like I did when Katje shit in Pudding’s mouth for the first time. It also made me laugh. 
I just think Pynchon didn’t create a realistic, funny, or dark sex scene. He’s not perfect, especially in this and parts of V.

In solidarity,
James 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 16 09:40:45 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read, glancingly-related

On letting down her hair like Rapunzel.

"Change your hair; change your life"--Solange in* Inherent Vice*

*"Sometimes, you like to let your hair do the talking"---James Brown*

You want to read about how changing your hair can change your life, read at least the beginning of *There's Always this Year, *a book about basketball like* Moby Dick* is a book about whaling......as original as art that works....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu May 16 09:49:05 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read, glancingly-related

There’s a section in GR where o soldier is cutting another soldiers hair, one strand at a time. And the modulations between the different lengths are sending a secret message.  N.O. Brown also has a relevant section in LAD.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 16 21:18:34 UTC 2024

COL49

COL 49 AS MODERN DAY ALLEGORY: ( roughing out some thoughts on this  organizing idea)

Oedipa/ America: Beach Ball protection outside, inebriated desire inside.  Quest for truth and for real history and inheritance. Conflicted feminist awakening

 Metzger/  agent of Ownership class : Baby Igor as bait,    game playing as hook, handsome self serving lawyer as agent of property.      

Pierce Inverarity: unscrupulously gotten national inheritance, seducer who never gives up, corporate identity with many voices

Wendell Mucho Maas: Talented sensitive middle;  salesperson secretly unsure of product;  dissatisfied compassion for the preterite;  DJ for youth but not a believer in youth culture;  finds change of direction through soul manifesting psychedelics and deeper attention to music and auditory vocal signals.

Hilarius/    : agent of fascistic  or control-based state  specializing in research and development in mind control.  He specializes in paranoia  (fear inducing faces), but is internally conflicted   and ends losing mental stability drowning in paranoia. I

Driblette :  possible relation to Pynchon;  artist  who is attracted to dark materials, conflict, social political power struggles. When questioned about Couriers Tragedy,  he is very defensive, insists it means nothing, is only entertainment, words unimportant, only dramatic effect, but is clearly nervous about those inquiring about textual details.    Ends up drowned like characters in play.

Tristero  vs. Thurn and Taxis:  clandestine power struggle over  communication system as violent as direct political wars .

Manny Di presso: agent of key figure in the Inverarity alliances, Lawyer/actor/lawyer connectied to criminal underworld and fascism. World of paranoia ruthlessness. 

Mythic layers include Narcissus and Echo, Oedipus based power/inheritance struggle  leading to 

OK I want to take this sketch of key players  in the drama further,  but think I will  post it as is,  and pick it up later. My own sense is that while there is no reducing the layers of Pynchon’s writing to allegory,  all satire has symbolic or representational characters and situations so that looking at the way the parts of his complex structures interact can clarify certain patterns and provide avenues of understanding.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 17 13:24:31 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

Some questions about the second half of chapter two.
> How consensual is the sex?
Probably about 51%. But normal inhibitions are in a showdown with tequila.. And it is a weird set-up with Metzger seemingly almost commissioned by Pierce “she won’t be easy” Inverarity. The likely possibility that as lawyer for the powerful owner of 51 % of the town he could have set up his movie to be played soon after his arrival. Why does she put on the layers of clothes if not in some attempted reluctance to play by his rules. There is also some possible payback to Mucho  for his indiscretions. I can see the whole thing as a political seduction: the idea of the leader and state as the innocent heroic child ( B Igor)now grown to a handsome man , and wanting cooperation. It’ a weird come on.

> Why do the characters in the movie die?

Again I see a kind of psychological political seduction.  All the sacrifices of the innocent and guilty  offered on behalf of 'the people’, America, the babe.  How does one turn this down? When it comes to real historic information concerning the bones in the bone charcoal  cigarette filters Metzger warily puts off answering.  


> How does Eliade’s ‘non-religious man’ respond to the many religious images presented by TRP? 

The alienation of those who have no connection to the  transcendent shows up in numerous ways as do instances of connection. One form of refusal of spirit is idolatry like the bust of J. Gould, the phallic yoyodyne rockets, the nymph echo, or  Maxwells free energy demon. Another is the eagerness to bury inconvenient truth, unpleasant memories or criminal murder like the bones of soldiers, like texts mentions the tristero. Or even to  transform them into profit, to the secret ink of conspiracy. against all perceived enemies.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri May 17 13:31:37 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

Oedipal was fully aware of the situation and the questions regarding Metz character, sincerity, sexual orientation, possible agendas.  She “had let her hair down” ON PURPOSE, as a means of ESCAPE.  She was sparring with Metz (some people enjoy that kind of thing) The whole time they were having sex. And she drank the alcohol, her own volition, fully cognizant. It meant to be drunk.

I don’t think pension was intending for the readers to be his rape police.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 18 01:11:21 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

> She “had let her hair down” ON PURPOSE, as a means of ESCAPE.  She was sparring with Metz (some people enjoy that kind of thing) The whole time they were having sex. And she drank the alcohol, her own volition, fully cognizant. It meant to be drunk.
She wasn’t sparring very hard, he said no tequila, so that  she was going to win nothing if her guess was correct. Yes the game was part of the  appeal of the evening, which I mentioned myself earlier.

> I don’t think pension was intending for the readers to be his rape police.
I don’t think so either, and made no claim Oedipa was raped. 
Yes she was an adult and a full participant  regardless of whatever needs and desires were being expressed.  She continued the affair for a while too,albeit with growing tension between them. And a similar tension grows in her - what does she really want, what do others actually want from her, how to tell what is real, what is the nature of the larger  game she is part of?

As readers we are finding out more about both characters and Pynchon leaves us to think for ourselves about what they do, say and think.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat May 18 05:30:20 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

How does one set up a drum kit on a diving board?

Very carefully (ba dum tss!)

- a temporal reference: “the place he’d begun his land speculating in ten years ago”

Also - if Slick Dick and the Volkswagens released “I Want to Kiss Your Feet” the same time as The Beatles released “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (recorded on October 17th, 1963, released in the UK on November 29 and in the US on December 26th of that year, making it one of those artistic endeavors created just before & released just after a cataclysmic event - in this case JFK’s murder most foul - which might mean something (but what?) — it entered the US pop charts at number 45 in January, 1964, and became their first #1 hit in America - “starting the ‘British Invasion’” according to Wikipedia) then Mucho probably would’ve been aware of it as early as January 1964 (or earlier if he followed international industry trends)

Placing Pierce’s beginnings as a real estate tycoon in the mid-fifties.

None of which tells us more about when the Mexico trip took place, does it?

Hey, there’s even a song now called “San Narciso”

https://youtu.be/hoN-vTlnuzo?si=bkgdINxSE8UvkZyR

San Narciso
Out to sea we hear
Los Angeles calling
each one of us falling
into vorticist dreams.
In the air you see
the city cells sprawling
like circuits installing
these silicon dreams.
I run out of mind inside,
and so go out to find you,
but then something reminds you

Oh San Narciso shines
from sea to sea,
the message we're sending,
we want to believe.
Oh concentrate
and watch us move the sea.
Entropically trending,
but we want to believe,
yeah, we want to believe.

I can work the phones
to sort out these demons
with some formal agreements,
or you could let down your hair.
I can feel your pulse
break free from surveillance,
now it's the last thing that makes sense,
the only reason I care.
I ran out of mind inside,
and so I'm coming to find you
before something reminds you

Oh San Narciso shines
from sea to sea,
the message we're sending,
we want to believe.
Oh concentrate
and watch us move the sea.
Entropically trending,
but we want to believe,
yeah, we want to believe.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat May 18 06:49:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - misc notes

https://youtu.be/TdgFpn5_P9M?si=hR6t37YINEhorLhL

Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, mvt 4

Revelations

“Hey,” said Oedipa, “can’t I get somebody to do it for me?” “Me,” said Roseman, “some of it, sure. But aren’t you even interested?” “In what?” “In what you might find out.” As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations.

Then a couple pages later - there’s the first one already, although she doesn’t apprehend it - but it’s early days

“…so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Long sentence dep’t: word count 264

Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in,
Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look.

This, and the lies & chicanery I guess is what gave him the willies so bad?

“By the time he married her he’d already been two years at the station, KCUF, and the lot on the pallid, roaring arterial was far behind him, like the Second World or Korean Wars were for older husbands. Maybe, God help her, he should have been in a war, Japs in trees, Krauts in Tiger tanks, gooks with trumpets in the night he might have forgotten sooner than whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly with him for going on five years.”

(“whatever it was about the lot” - she doesn’t know, does she? A-and all the 264 words paint a picture, but it’s not that terrible, a different sort of person might even enjoy the different carscapes - not begrudging himself a pleasure in the commerce, doing his best to give an honest deal - it wasn’t he who put sawdust in the transmissions or honey in the cylinders, or called clunkers creampuffs.

(Was it that he couldn’t bear being “one of those guys” and despite his best efforts with hair and wardrobe he couldn’t both keep his job and also give these people a good deal on those crap cars so he felt himself sliding into that category anyway?)

Temporally speculating - so he did that for two years -

2 years at the hellish used car lot, then 2 years more (at KCUF) before Oedipa & he got married.

Now she’s talking about 5 years - so, like, they are now married for 3 years & he’s been working at KCUF for 5. Maybe even an anniversary lunch, a certain feeling of residency making him feel empowered enough for a little pushback in Funch’s direction, but no real clout in setting his own parameters.

Too early, 3 years, for a marital seven year itch, but certainly long past the honeymoon.

- they’ve been married 5 years
- Pierce had been speculating for 10 years

- Pierce and Oedipa were over a year before she married Maas - so their breakup would’ve been 6 years back - if it went on from college the whole time quite a lengthy item (4 years if he went right from college into speculation)

- so maybe she went back home after graduation and he pursued her to Kinneret-in-the-Pines, where she

“…had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she’d happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass.”

Something happened that embarrassed Pierce and her both, when he was “halfway up” her tresses.

The prudish answer:
Premarital sex & the Pill taking her off a pedestal, removing the likelihood of making babies, and muting the imperative of marriage, so Pierce is “getting the milk for free” and not wanting to “buy the cow” (what an unflattering formulation!)????

No textual evidence for that.

What the text says is “her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great uncharted wig”

Some sinister sorcery -
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke)

If it’s not the Pill, it’s radio like those circuit boards she doesn’t  understand, the advanced legalese cementing Pierce’s effects, the sad technology of Mucho’s cars, the flying aerosol can, the bone filters, the neon Echo, the (tame) Impala she drives.

The controversial statement:

“Maybe, God help her, he should have been in a war, Japs in trees, Krauts in Tiger tanks, gooks with trumpets in the night he might have forgotten sooner than whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly with him for going on five years.”

Basically she’s tired of his bellyaching and starting to get pissed.

Same genre as parental “I’ll give you something to cry about” or “think of the starving children in China, how would you like to eat leaves?”

but internalized - not yet ready to voice the complaint to him - And maybe she never will.

The “God help her” is her feeling a little guilty right while she thinks about it -

And then there’s this bit:

“You comfort them when they wake pouring sweat or crying out in the language of bad dreams, yes, you hold them, they calm down, one day they lose it: she knew that.”

This is folk wisdom
 
“Lose it” here I think isn’t in the colloquial sense of “going postal” or something - CoL49 might predate that usage?

She means lose the memory.

But what this illuminates is that in her comforting of Maas, she’s drawing upon the folk-wisdom of comforting a returned soldier.

Which both Oedipa & I feel is disproportionate - & I think that’s what’s meant by the passage.

not that combat veterans “should” get over their trauma more quickly, but that the hypothetical veterans she imagines, who faced hugely more daunting memories than Maas, hypothetically got over *their* distress more rapidly than the comparatively neurasthenic car-lot veteran who’s still carrying his.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat May 18 06:54:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - temporal correction

- they’ve been married 5 years

——— I mean 3 ———-

- Pierce had been speculating for 10 years

- Pierce and Oedipa were over a year before she married Maas - so their breakup would’ve been 6 years back - if it went on from college the whole time quite a lengthy item (4 years if he went right from college into speculation)

——— no, their breakup would’ve been 4 years back & 6 years from the start of Pierce’s business

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 18 06:56:44 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

MB: "making it one of those artistic endeavors created just before & released just after a cataclysmic event - in this case JFK’s murder most foul - which might mean something (but what?) "

One thing it meant was this: Walter Cronkite, America's most trusted man, who had seen the happy crowds at Heathrow when the Beatles landed there when he did.....called up his buddy Ed Sullivan---who had booked the four lads long before the Sunday after JFK's murder most foul, who of course cancelled them as the nation went into mourning for the End of Camelot and its Fisher King—called up his buddy Ed Sullivan, repeat, because I'm sure I lost you the thread.---Ed was always moving on to the new hot group or thing so The Beatles had missed their chance until Walter called him up and said, (I paraphrase), Remember that boy band full of happy songs that everyone loved, bring them to America we need to overcome the most foul gloom that pervades the land.....

He did and the sixties of optimism, hope, new found freedoms and some increased happiness started...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 18 08:32:24 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

TRP in his blurbing of Hillman (and other clues) is more Jungian than Freudian, some say. Whether true, this is good on narcissism as we read in Echo Court....(love TRP's glancing wit.) ... I mean narcissism and echoes....

https://x.com/TheaEuryphaessa/status/1791097974392569890

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat May 18 08:59:50 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

1954 - Pierce begins his career

1957-59
1959 - Maas starts at KCUF
1960 - Oedipa/Pierce split
1961 - Maas-Oedipa (nee ?) nups
1964 - Pierce kicks the bucket*

Right?

* https://youtu.be/h57UR-oIE_g?si=lr-EZFCWxhsaVYFx

( fuller clip from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” which premiered  November 9, 1963: https://youtu.be/w00Kab17aeI?si=Q-2f9rk9XnTuPDDn )

I also misquoted:

- What the text says is “her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great uncharted wig”

Unanchored wig, rather.

To tenaciously develop the trope or whatever it is - “letting down her hair” would mean inviting him to “meditate in her
direction” as Sandra Dee says in “Grease”

Suppose that climbing the hair is the legitimate way to woo - dealing directly with something that grows out of her, and entering her imprisoning environment via Oedipa herself, whereupon they bond and escape that environment.

But some type of “sinister sorcery” (or “technology indistinguishable from magic”) - one thing that would break the spell might be a rudimentary knowledge of weights and measures - makes it impossible for her to believe that she can continue supporting his climb, so her imagination morphs the hair into an unanchored wig to avoid having to imagine her neck breaking under Pierce’s full weight, which even if he’s not that big a guy would either break her neck or pull her down into the window frame, with disastrous effects on her larynx. Or pull her out the window entirely so they both fell?

Or maybe he’s the one who loses the sense of enchantment and thereby evokes the wig.

Something interferes with the fairy tale - but Pierce is still attracted:

“…down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he’d have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower.”

Thanks to JK, I now know that there are many complications to the full Rapunzel tale, and as Shakespeare wrote, “the course of true love never did run smooth”

But does Oedipa know the whole myth?
Those gnarly details seem like they would come from one of the unexpurgated Grimm books, whereas wouldn’t Oedipa (like me) have been more likely to be exposed to bowdlerized versions -

So that in her Rapunzel fantasy, the prince would shinny up those locks, and then (“it is intuitively obvious”) happily ever after?

Or - the sinister sorcery could simply be Oedipa realizing that she’s just not that into the guy.

 She really likes the Rapunzel fantasy, just doesn’t care for Pierce. All his credit cards &c can’t buy her love, but she is willing to hang with him on a temporary basis,

—- and was open to that already:
“ he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he’d have done to begin with.” 
- I think that’s what that means, that she never saw him as a life-changing magical suitor. She tried but it just wasn’t her - faking it, not really making it

https://youtu.be/IkFBOd4YN60?si=tinLOk933zPpYGDq

(Simon & Garfunkel, 1967)

 though she still wants the real thing (er, the Rapunzel illusion, that is) & becomes more & more unhappy with Pierce.

https://youtu.be/srwxJUXPHvE?si=an8qShBx1h08ilKX

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 18 11:58:32 UTC 2024

What Oedipa should have done upon being awoken?

https://x.com/wonderofscience/status/1791476013303820402

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat May 18 13:17:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

“Suppose that climbing the hair is the legitimate way to woo - dealing directly with something that grows out of her, and entering her imprisoning environment via Oedipa herself, whereupon they bond and escape that environment. […]

[***]Something[***] interferes with the fairytale”

SOMETHING? It’s identities as:
“some sinister sorcery”
And:
“ having no apparatus except gut, fear and female, cunning to examine the formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force”

But a more precise, deeper look by Oed reveals that the fairy tale is not so easily understood.  The Tower is seemingly inescapable, because it FOLLOWS HER, as in, “Wherever you go, There you are!”

“ such a captive maiden [Oed] Soon realizes *the tower [is]* like her ego, *only incidental*.”

The tower, like her ego, are fictional, constructs, artificial devices, which are symptoms of an invisible and ubiquitous “Magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.”  One’s Ego is an attempt to meditate a fatally wounded inner psyche with the slave’s fate once finds thwarting the desires of the Id (Pynch was deeply into Freud at the time. It’s an ever-frustrating inescapable task.

So there was no way that she could be rescued by a man.  The Counter-magic escapes her right now. But that’s what she’s looking for on her quest.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat May 18 15:08:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

Taking this psychological analogy, a little further, if the tower is a similar construct like the ego, The ego is constructed to restrain the unbridled desires of the Id. And “letting your hair down” is the goal of the repressed Id.  It wants to let its freek-flag fly!  But the Ego holds it back. Thus, Oed’s sinister magic is HERSELF

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 18 15:17:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

The guy who wrote/edited the Companion to Lot 49 book, does the politically correct questioning of the phrase "female cunning".....

That phrase seems to me easily understood whether one is a feminist or not.....

Females, esp in the time of Oedipa's time, needed a kind of cleverness [cunning] that could not be the cleverness of males in a patriarchal society, men freer to do adventurous things to "find themselves"... Women naturally learning how to become themselves against men's desires, in general, a cunny cunning, to not overlook the pun.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 18 15:19:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

Invisible, unanchored, but REAL...

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 18 15:35:21 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read, section 3

There is  a popularity struggle indicated between the VWs British cheery style and the greek chorus role of the self named Paranoids that might also point to a change in US culture brought about by the JFK murder.  One odd thing about the Paranoids being directed to sound British is that the Beatles and Stones had learned their style mostly doing American Rock. The music salespeople often prefer imitation to the real , are often the last to get the power of authentic art.  What goes less mentioned  is that one of the transforming forces in both cultures was outsider music  like rhythm and blues Tex Mex and roadhouse music. The resistance to this influence may be being indicated in the cultural  stereotypes projected in PI’s voices.

I’m listening to Robbie Robertson’s Testimony  which includes a telling incident from this time. All the members that became The Band were playing one of the last tours as Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks and played a gig in Dallas in a burnt out roofless building hired by a nightclub owner who called himself Rubinstein and shortly after JFK was killed and they realized the guy who hired them in Dallas was Jack Ruby. Soon after Levon Helm entered a sham marriage to evade the Draft and the Vietnam War.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 18 18:23:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

Yes. This is pretty much  how I am reading Oed’s psychological terrain seen through the Rapunzel story.. My sense is that she can lo longer play the role of maiden saved by Prince because a) PI is 3/4ths asshole and b) he has not brought true escape but a realization about the deeper nature of her entrapment. 

Her tower length hair as  genuine outgrowth of feminine identity is severed by that realization and what remains is no longer a sustainable connection to herself or  PI.

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Sun May 19 04:19:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

Maybe she is lacking/searching for self-love, maybe without even realizing it.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 19 05:41:03 UTC 2024

Lot 49 tattoo.

https://x.com/biblioklept/status/1791889182928908645

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 19 07:14:44 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading chapter 3, pg 31, 32

“Things then did not delay in turning curious”

A) twice again, the word “revelation”

B) the narrator floats the idea that The Tristero is a system of thought which may supplant the idea of Rapunzel’s Tower for Oedipa.

Why is the language so conditional?

C) and tells us that she will come to be haunted by the way things fit together - logically

i) Does the word “haunted” have a negative connotation which suggests that The Tristero won’t be any more satisfying a myth to live within than Rapunzel?

ii) is there really anything at all logical about how getting jiggy with Metzger would start a voyage of discovery? If so, what?

D) Pierce peering at his stamps, an interest she never shared - “little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time”

i) if she at this point describes stamps as “his substitute often for her” and “ex-rivals, cheated as she by death” then can we re-cast her words to Wendell (“It was over. Before he put my name on it.”) as leading up to, “but now I’m feeling it again?”

-  sympathetic description of her husband’s infidelity. Like, extremely sympathetic

“It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive”

i) other inabilities to communicate:
   Letting him preemptively complain before telling about her day (patience is a virtue)
   Not understanding his car lot angst but consoling anyway (kindness is a virtue)
   Are there more?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 19 08:22:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34

“Report all obscene mail to your potsmaster” This postmark raises questions.

As she thinks later (I seem to recall) Pierce was rich enough to commission all kinds of fuckery.

So if Wendell put the letter in their mailbox for the US post to pick up - a Pierce myrmidon could easily have intercepted it.

Or it could just be a misprint.

Metzger interprets it literally - and I think the idea of a potsmaster is somewhat pleasing, with which I think she shows concurrence by tossing a brassiere at him instead of something harder.

- the question of Pierce hovers over the whole story - did he set all this stuff up? If so, why? Is it having the desired effect, or are her mental gyrations different than what he might have wanted?

Why did she cry when Metzger told her Pierce said she wouldn’t be easy?

Who is this Metzger anyway? He says he wasn’t close to PI, just drew up the will. But if Pierce was confiding about Oedipa’s “easiness” (which is tough to construe as anything other than sexual) then he must’ve expected their tryst; indeed, he may have directed it. Purchased it, to put it baldly. Although it’s also tough to imagine Metzger raising objections or his price, isn’t it?

Why is she staying at a cheap motel? She didn’t check in with Pierce’s people and no credit card was mentioned as coming with the notification, was it? So she would’ve at least checked in with her own money - but since Metzger was motivated (& presumably paid) enough to track her down, Pierce’s funds would probably come into play. What’s an executrix role without a few perks?

That such a room would have a walk-in closet would seem unlikely, but the gyrations with the dresser prove that description was exaggerated.

Their restlessness when the room “became impossible” leads them out of the Paranoids’ purview in search of strong drink, to a bar called “The Scope.”

The nose-picking nerds in The Scope resent them when they walk in, but the bartender explains the electronic music setup.

Metzger asks questions as if unfamiliar, but if he’s doing all this at Pierce’s behest, he’s actually brought her there on purpose, and would know already.
- unless Pierce just told him to bring her there & he’d never been before

Then Mike Fallopian, a “frail young man in a Sta-Prest suit” invites himself to join their party, with a pitch for the Peter Pinguid Society.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 19 09:01:03 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 35-36-37

Forgot to ask - if the postmark is Piercean, then is this tampering with his mail a phase of “Mucho getting a visit from The Shadow”?

There was indeed a Russian fleet in San Francisco harbor during the Civil War
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/may/visit-russian-squadrons-1863

Unable to find Peter Pinguid, as expected.

But I love his cogitations in his cabin: “Appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery”

However, why did he feel that was a reason to resign his Confederate commission? “Lincoln and the Czar forced him”?
How so?

An ambiguous nighttime naval encounter (by which he was as over-traumatized as Mucho by the car lot?)

Internalizing the idea that the South was now up against Russia was more than he could take?

Driven to brooding by the hypocrisy of the wage-enslavement practiced in the North?


The punchline for this action is Peter Pinguid, like Rimbaud, spending the rest of his life acquiring wealth. As a real estate speculator.

Tickles Oedipa into spraying her drink; also the narrator seems tickled into more than usually casual language: “[Oedipa] sprayed it out again in a glittering cone for ten feet easy…”

Then the mail call, the postman here being “a fat kid, looking harassed.” Metzger spots a Yoyodyne badge on him, and - inquisitively? or tutorially? - asks Oedipa, “What do you make of that?”

Is he already easing her on down the road towards The Tristero?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 19 11:50:39 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

if we have to know ourselves aright, to love ourselves rightly, then I see Oedipa, from the allusive name and her quest to be seeking self-knowledge even though---isn't it a condition of full self-awareness that you can't really realize what you are seeking?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun May 19 12:04:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

> if we have to know ourselves aright, to love ourselves rightly, then I see Oedipa, from the allusive name and her quest to be seeking self-knowledge even though---isn't it a condition of full self-awareness that you can't really realize what you are seeking?

“Realization” is another term for “Enlightenment” in Consciousness Circles.  Many consider it a more-accurate term, because Enlightenment sounds like a final point of total Consciousness possible. But realizations can be extremely powerful and profound, but they are not end points. And they are a multitude, not a single universal ultimate state.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 19 15:05:09 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading chapter 3, pg 31, 32

“Things then did not delay in turning curious”
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet <https://wordhistories.net/2021/04/15/two-left-feet/>, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off)  This L Carrol quote does carry some of the sense of OM’s experience of seeing her world in an intensely different way. Metzger may also be an appropriate introduction to a mad and in this case somewhat sinister world. 

A) twice again, the word “revelation”
From the correspondence of printed circuits to the town, to the hide and seek appearance of hidden bones, to the alternate postal system and changing lines of a murder mystery the corporate and world of PI is being revealed.

B) the narrator floats the idea that The Tristero is a system of thought which may supplant the idea of Rapunzel’s Tower for Oedipa.
 
Why is the language so conditional?

C) and tells us that she will come to be haunted by the way things fit together - logically

 
i) Does the word “haunted” have a negative connotation which suggests that The Tristero won’t be any more satisfying a myth to live within than Rapunzel?

ii) is there really anything at all logical about how getting jiggy with Metzger would start a voyage of discovery? If so, what?

‘I could tell you my adventures–beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Sun May 19 16:43:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34

Then Mike Fallopian, a “frail young man in a Sta-Prest suit” ...

I'm reading an old, tattered Bantam paperback version (13th printing, November 1976), and on p. 31, the text is: "a frail young man in a drip-dry suit" ... When was the change made? Drip dry (no need to put in the dryer, is a different concept than Sta-Prest (no need to iron).

Also, the cross-edition error of confusing Czar Alexander II (who freed the serfs in 1861) with Czar Nicholas II, who's best known for being murdered by the Bolsheviks. A deliberate error on Fallopian's part? Or Pynchon's?

On another note, I noticed for the first time (unobservant!) a citation:

A portion of this novel was first published in ESQUIRE magazine under the title "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedpia Maas) and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity." Another portion has appeared in CAVALIER.

Cavalier was a Playboy-like publication with fiction and nudies. Apparently the excerpt was called "The Shrink Flips." Anyone read either excerpt?

Laura

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 19 18:07:42 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34

Laura,

Small terrific find...

And, No I did not read either mag excerpt but you can see there are changes even from the title..I have read
that there are (small) changes....

Here's a backstory regarding it being in *Cavalier.*...a plethora of Playboy mag wanna-bes sprung up like erections
in the period and some of them felt that to draw some of---or add to---the Playboy audience they should do what Playboy did-----pay real money for real writers' stories.....(I actually remember reading about this in the abstract)--- So, Cavalier musta paid well---did it outbid Playboy? Even Esquire for the second part?.....

I don't know and I don't know if we collectively know....

I only read *Playboy* for the stories, of course and don't think I ever even bought one....(someone else had them)... 🤣   And one thing I can't forget is how many languages all the "models" knew.... Yeah, yeah....I still hardly know English.

Mark

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 19 19:31:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

No, you’re totally right - Tried to buy the e-book so I could copy & paste

but there was a fail of some kind

so I was using the paperback & in the short time between looking at the page & typing at my phone there was slippage.

The text says “drip-dry” not Sta-Prest

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Sun May 19 20:49:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

Dang! I thought I'd discovered an exciting discrepancy for us to parse.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 19 21:49:31 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

This is from my notes on the chapter and proposes that the Czar mistake was Fallopian’s.

 ! Nicholas 2 !( inaccurate history Nick 2 didn’t become czar until 1896*)sends Russian flee to SF Bay Area  to “keep Britain and France from (among other things) intervening on the side of the Confederacy.    What were the other things and are they relevant to story? 4 corvettes 2 clippers under rear ad. Popov (probably fictional)

Did TRP get this wrong himself or is he putting wildly inaccurate history in the mouth of Fallopian and the Pinguid society , oddly combined with a real but  nitpicky and meaningless possible incident ( Confederate vs Russian ships) of recorded history, and showing that neither the Birch-like PP society nor the educated anti communist corporate lawyer Metzger,  nor the Cornell educated stickler for accuracy, Oedipa, know enough about Russian history to catch this glaring mistake? How many Americans would? Alexander II made the declaration to free the Serfs and was emperor during US civil war and my sense is that Pynchon did know this!  

 Fallopian’s point in the story is to make a claim about US Russian hostility and the history mistake makes it sound like he might prefer continued serfdom along with heroizing  the confederacy.“Peter Pinguid was really our first casualty. Not the fanatic our more left-leaning friends over in the Birch Society chose to martyrize.”

John Birch , Baptist Missionary turned Army Air Force intelligence officer turned OSS officer was killed by Chinese Communists in an area they controlled on a mission to convince them to wait for a turnover of authority by Japan to the Kuomintang. He was allowed past several communist checkpoints but was shot when he entered  his destination area and refused to surrender his sidearm. There is a similarity here to his usefulness to the far right despite the questionable nature of his martyrdom, to advance inaccurate JBS history( Illuminati conspiracy theories, Ike as secret communist etc.)

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon May 20 00:17:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 35-36-37

Peter Pinguid, translatable as Fat Dick, is obviously a stand-in for Mike Fallopian who conveys the whole story, and who replaces Alexander with Nicholas . Why?Because  Nicholas was the first internationally known historic martyr to the Bolshevik marxists and the major figure kept alive  in the  Western image of the Russian revolution. ( MF has proselytized with this story before)The speculation on PP feeling betrayed by a Northern  abolitionist alliance with a Russian abolitionist Czar and his anger about that and the North's supposed hypocrisy while allowing "wage slavery” is just imaginative speculation by MF  that reinforces Fallopians need for a martyr who drives the war with Russia and therefor Marxism further back than the Birchers.  The whole story’s net effect goes something like this: The real war with Marxism goes back to the civil war when Peter Pinguid takes a heroic rebel stand  against wage slavery  and abolitionism  somewhere between Carmel and Pismo Beach with one ship or another gone in the morning and nobody actually hurt, after which PP then moves to LA to become a  real estate speculator. With the real estate  ending  MF achieves  uncontrollable laughability and OM spews . Why she confides in him after this is hard to fathom. She seems blinded by her vulnerability to men. 

Mike's Fallopian brain is pregnant with some pretty weird fetal possibilities via his chosen fat Dick.  He is also interested in stamps and has a small scale secret postal system at Yoyodyne. Much later in the book, after suggesting her entire experience looking into PI’s stamps  and Tristero may have been entirely orchestrated by Inverarity, recommends a visit to Tremaines Swastika and Gun shop.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon May 20 00:57:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - Popov not fictional

“4 corvettes 2 clippers under rear ad. Popov (probably fictional)

- not fictional -

From https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/may/visit-russian-squadrons-1863

“To quote the New York *Daily Tribune *of October 2, 1863, we hear that:

The "Joint Committee" went out to welcome the Russian visitors. The band of the *North Carolina *performed the beautiful Russian National Air, "God Save the Czar," as it passed the vessels, while the Russian seamen mounted the riggings to acknowledge the compliment by loud and hearty cheers. The band of the flagship *Alexander Nevsky *struck up "Yankee Doodle" in return….”

…yada yada blah blah blah…

“Another surprise awaited the American people. A few days later the telegraph flashed news from San Francisco that a squadron of Russian cruisers had passed the Golden Gate and was riding at anchor in San Francisco Bay. This unit was commanded by Rear Admiral Popoff and was made up of the following ships: The corvets *Rynda, Kalevala, Bogatyr, *and *Novyk, *and the clippers *Abrek *and *Gaydamak.*

All this happened, as stated before, in the year 1863. Northern shipping at that time was being severely ravaged by the commerce raiders of the Confederacy.”

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon May 20 01:13:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading ch3 35 “among other things”

JT wrote:
“ Nicholas 2 !( inaccurate history Nick 2 didn’t become czar until 1896*)sends Russian fleet to SF Bay Area  to “keep Britain and France from (among other things) intervening on the side of the Confederacy.    What were the other things and are they relevant to story?”

Lower down in same article - elaborate elaboration -

(Tl/dr: Polish revolt against Russia drew French support from Napoleon III, France enlisted England & Austria to “extract  concessions” from Russia; Russian fleet threat to English merchant shipping made them think twice)

(Better summary, from the article:
As we have seen, Russia launched this naval expedition primarily in her own interest, to avoid a threatening war in which she would have to face a superior enemy while her western provinces were in open rebellion and other borderlands ready to revolt at the first opportune moment. We must keep in mind, however, that the United States and Russia were traditionally on friendly terms. As America alone had stood by Russia in 1854 during the Crimean War, nine years later Russia was the only great power siding with the Federal Government and quite openly expressing its friendship, although Prussia and a few smaller European countries were also sympathetic with the North.)

Long, detailed quote:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/may/visit-russian-squadrons-1863

All this happened, as stated before, in the year 1863. Northern shipping at that time was being severely ravaged by the commerce raiders of the Confederacy. The exploits of these raiders equaled, if not surpassed, both in adroitness and damages inflicted upon the Northern merchant marine of the United States, the activities of the well-known German raider *Emden *and her sister-ships during the World War. It has been recorded that by November, 1864, more than 1,300 vessels flying the Union flag had been sunk
by Southern raiders, the net proceeds arising from the sale of condemned prize property amounting to over 13 million dollars.

If we keep in mind that the Northern merchant fleet on the high seas had been reduced during the Civil War from about 2½ million tons to a little over 1½ million tons and was being continuously harassed by successful attacks of the *Alabama,**Florida, *and other Confederate ships, the arrival in New York and San Francisco of cruiser units belonging to a friendly nation was naturally an event of great importance.

As far as the Union was concerned the political situation presented itself as follows: England was supporting the South more or less openly by allowing British shipyards to build ironclads and cruisers for the Confederacy, half-heartedly interfering with the delivery of these ships only upon the most strenuous though tactful remonstrances from the United States Ambassador, Charles Francis Adams, whose protests, however, were not always successful.

Let us now examine more closely the motives that prompted Czar Alexander II to dispatch his fleets to New York and San Francisco.

In January, 1863, the latest Polish revolt had broken out openly. Due to the intensive propaganda carried on for some time by the numerous Polish *émigrés *in various European capitals, the rebellion quickly gained the support of public opinion throughout Europe. In France especially the Polish patriots were in high hopes. The adventurer-emperor Napoleon III was favorably inclined toward their cause. His Minister of State at that time was Count Walewski, a son of the Emperor's august uncle, Napoleon I and the Polish Countess Walewska, who was naturally pro-Polish. Moreover it was a political tradition of the second empire to further Polish national aspirations in reverence to the memory of the Great Corsican who created the independent Grand Duchy of Warsaw.

Napoleon III succeeded in persuading Great Britain and Austria to join him in a diplomatic demonstration against Russia on the Polish question. Both of his allies deemed the moment opportune to exact some advantages from the Czar while the latter was preoccupied by the disturbances on his western frontier. Prussia refused to become a party of the coalition and Bismarck,
in defiance of the German Parliament and public opinion, even offered the Czar military assistance to quell the Polish insurrection. The Allies,
France, Austria, and England, entered into a lengthy exchange of notes with the Russian government and the political situation became alarmingly tense. Czar Alexander II, with open rebellion in his Polish and Lithuanian provinces, had also to reckon with the possibility that Finland and the Caucasus would rise in revolt at the first opportunity. Such an opportunity would easily present itself with the arrival of joint Anglo-French fleets and landing detachments both in the Baltic and Black Seas.

The demands of the Allies became increasingly aggressive. Finally Napoleon III dispatched a sharp note to Russia demanding immediate recognition of Poland as an independent country. This the Russian government could not grant but it realized at the same time that a refusal of the French demand meant only one thing—war. The crisis approached rapidly. Russia faced a desperate situation. Her Navy, recently reorganized, was absolutely insignificant in comparison with the fleets of the two largest naval powers of Europe. In case of war the seacoasts of her far-flung Empire, in the Baltic and Black Seas and the Far East, were entirely defenseless and exposed to blockade, bombardment, and landing of troops by her enemies. Her only chance lay in having England quit, as in such an event the French fleet alone would not be sufficiently large to bother Russia on all her maritime frontiers. Thus Russia would not be forced to scatter her Army in order to defend her various seaboard provinces. Besides, Austria would think twice before attacking the innumerable host of "Holy Russia" concentrated to repulse any invasion, especially as Emperor Francis Joseph knew that Prussia would not hesitate to come to the assistance of the Czar.

Russia's problem reduced itself to the means of keeping Great Britain out of an alliance with France and Austria. A simple and at the same time brilliant solution was found by Admiral N. K. Krabbe, at that time in command of the Russian Navy.

The dashing exploits of the *Alabama *and other Confederate raiders had conclusively demonstrated that a comparatively small number of well-armed and equipped cruisers could cause havoc among the merchant marine of their enemy, even if their adversary had a much superior naval force. As more than 75 per cent of the British merchant fleet at the time of the Civil War consisted of sailing vessels, the sudden appearance of about a dozen Russian steam-propelled cruisers both in the Atlantic and Pacific would greatly alarm England. These cruisers, which were able to sail under canvas when things were slow and get up steam and easily overhaul any prize they sighted, could still evade on the huge expanse of the two oceans any possible dragnet of the British Navy. They had a great advantage over the German raiders of the World War inasmuch as they were not dependent to such an extent on coaling stations, but could cruise under sail for practically an unlimited amount of time if necessary.

The vision of a dozen of such cruiser raiders ravaging British merchantmen on all the Seven Seas was enough to strike fear to the heart of even the staunchest Tory, because, after all, "Britannia rules the waves" only for her commerce, and the balance sheet of an English merchant is almost as important to him as the Magna Charta.

Fully realizing all this, Admiral Krabbe submitted to Czar Alexander II his daring plan.

The Russian Navy at that time commanded only about twelve vessels which were up to date and fit for cruiser duty. He proposed that two cruiser squadrons of approximately equal strength should be formed and dispatched to Union ports, one from St.  Petersburg and the other from Vladivostok, with orders to arrive simultaneously in New York and San Francisco, respectively. The success of the whole plan depended entirely upon its being carried out both swiftly and secretly. Both fleets were outfitted for the crossing and subsequent cruiser duty on the high seas in less than a month. The entire personnel of the expedition was selected from unmarried men.

The squadron that left St. Petersburg for New York was the most important one and it was, therefore, especially necessary for this unit not to divulge its movements as, in view of the straitened relations of Russia with England and France, these two powers would undoubtedly prevent the squadron from leaving the Baltic Sea. Orders were, therefore, issued to Admiral Lessofsky, commanding this squadron, to have his ships leave Kronstadt (the naval base of St. Petersburg) singly, as if to relieve ships on patrol duty off the coast of Courland. Near the island of Bornholm, two colliers awaited them and the squadron replenished its bunkers. In order to hide his movements Admiral Lessofsky then proceeded through the seldom used passage of the Little Belt, avoiding the main trade route of the Big Belt where he would have been in danger of encountering British scouting vessels. Once out of the Baltic Sea he set his course straight north and leaving the British Isles far south turned westward for New York.

In the meantime Admiral Popoff, in command of the other squadron, had left Vladivostok.

The successful synchronization of the movements of the two squadrons starting from points a continent apart and with the distance to their respective ports of destination varying many thousands of miles was a remarkable achievement for those days, especially if we realize that at that time there were no telegraph or railroad communications between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok and the order to Admiral Popoff had to be dispatched by special courier who traveled many weeks in order to deliver it. The order to Popoff contained among others the instruction to place his ships at the disposal of the Federal admiral should the English or French fleet attack the city of San Francisco but to remain neutral as long as the bombardment was concentrated on the military fortifications only.

A surprised Europe learned one day from arriving American newspapers that a Russian cruiser squadron had cast anchor in the harbor of New York and that a few days later another Russian fleet had passed the Golden Gate. These newspapers also brought accounts of the enthusiastic reception of the Russians by the American people.

The impression created by these events on the governments and public opinion of the three Allies was tremendous. It now appeared that while the two mightiest naval powers of the time were threatening the coasts of the Russian Empire, the Czar had turned the tables on them and his fleet was menacing England and France from the rear. Having evaded their watchfulness, the Russian squadrons now occupied, especially with regard to England, such a commanding and invulnerable position that the Allies were forced to change their policy abruptly. All speculations as to advantages of actions against Russia's unprotected coasts momentarily faded before the possibility of the colossal losses which the Russians could inflict upon the sea trade and colonies of England and France. Russia's game was won.

The first power of the coalition to sense the unsteadiness of the situation—the possibility of England withdrawing from the Alliance—was Austria. She not only hastened to compromise with Russia but expressed her willingness to co-operate in the quelling of the Polish revolution. A sharp note which England already had dispatched to St. Petersburg was hurriedly stopped in Berlin and soon England abstained completely from further interfering with Russian affairs. Left alone, Napoleon III tried to "save his face" by suggesting a congress to discuss the Polish question but this proposal found no response either in Austria or England. A few weeks later Alexander II issued an Imperial Rescript regarding foreign interference in the Polish situation couched in such phrases that had it been published before the arrival of the Russian fleet in America, it would have meant immediate war with the Allies. Nothing happened now, however.

Both Russian squadrons stayed in America for almost a year and were recalled only after the Polish rebellion had been definitely crushed and when the ultimate success of the North was clearly visible and any danger of England's intervention in the Civil War had vanished.

After the end of the Civil War, the American government, learning of the attempt on the life of Czar Alexander II sent to St. Petersburg a special naval detachment consisting of the monitor *Miantonomoh *and steamer *Augusta *with a delegation to congratulate the Emperor on his deliverance from danger and to express to Russia the appreciation of the United States for the help Russia rendered to preserve the unity of the American people by sending her Beet to America.

The question, whether England's entry into the war on the side of the Confederacy at this critical moment of the struggle would have been crucial to the North is a matter of speculation for authorities on military operations. It is undisputable, however, that it would have created a most precarious situation for the Union Government and seriously jeopardized its chances for victory.

It was, of course, for various reasons that England decided to remain neutral, but the presence of Russian cruisers both in the Atlantic and Pacific played undoubtedly a major part in influencing British statesmen to adopt that policy.

As we have seen, Russia launched this naval expedition primarily in her own interest, to avoid a threatening war in which she would have to face a superior enemy while her western provinces were in open rebellion and other borderlands ready to revolt at the first opportune moment. We must keep in mind, however, that the United States and Russia were traditionally on friendly terms. As America alone had stood by Russia in 1854 during the Crimean War, nine years later Russia was the only great power siding with the Federal Government and quite openly expressing its friendship, although Prussia and a few smaller European countries were also sympathetic with the North.

The services Russia thus rendered the United States undoubtedly influenced Congress in 1867 to agree to the purchase of Alaska upon request from Czar Alexander II. Alaska at that time was considered a barren wasteland.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon May 20 07:42:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading Ch3 38, 39

The muted posthorn makes its first appearance, in a graffitied come-on on the "latrine" wall which also mentions WASTE.

She's "heading for the ladies' room" - but sees the graffiti on the "latrine wall" - so that would be in a stall?

She copies it, "thinking : God, hieroglyphics" ("God" as an expostulation, modifying, or clucking over, the idea of hieroglyphics on a bathroom wall.)

After quietly expostulating that they weren't supposed to have seen the mail call (but if the whole thing's been arranged by Pierce, then of course they were supposed to have seen it) Fallopian explains to them about the mail service. It's more of a startup and a proof of concept, nothing much of interest being sent, piggybacking on Yoyodyne's inter-office delivery service unbeknownst to Yoyodyne. This doesn't seem sustainable, as Yoyodyne's security people already have suspicions and there's a lot of turnover among their delivery people.

The example letter, like Maas's letter to Oedipa, come to think of it, is "newsless" - if the entire alternate postal system is like this, it's no better than the regular one.

But it does serve to introduce the topic of Mike's book, "a history of private mail delivery in the U.S., attempting to link the Civil War to the postal reform movement that had begun around 1845.

Just goes to show that conspiracy-minded thinking can find unpleasant plotting even in something seemingly benign as stamp collecting.

these guys have no idea!
xkcd: Degree-Off <https://xkcd.com/1520/>

A-and is she gonna sleep with Fallopian?

"All Oedipa would remember about him at first, in fact, were his slender build and neat Armenian nose, and a certain affinity of his eyes for green neon."

-------Sharing the fruits of my Armenian nose research - (I'm not making this up)
Armenian People (armenianexplorer.com)
<https://www.armenianexplorer.com/article/armenian-people>

"A major distinctive feature of Armenian people is their nose....average length 58 mm...second-largest in the world after the Kurds....The noses of prominent Armenian cultural figures, such as Arno Babajanyan, Mher Mkrtchyan, and Yeghishe Charents, are clearly expressed in their statues....It is no coincidence that the most popular medical intervention in Armenia is nose surgery."

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue May 21 08:27:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading ch 3 part 1, 40

“So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero.”

And so begins a florid paragraph of narratorial comparison between Oedipa’s unpacking of The Tristero, (or rather, should one say, its gradual self-revelation?) and her glacially-slow disrobing & seduction at the hands of Metzger.

Like said seduction, will it take, the narrator wonders, a heap of desultory (so desultory as to send her to sleep), yet elaborate & involved, foreplay “before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness”?

This incremental repetition of murky foreshadowing echoes the beginning of the chapter; one might suspect one’s leg being pulled, or even one’s nose being slightly tweaked* - there’s a part of at least some readers (<coff coff - me>) which is just reading to get to the sexy parts & is going “yeah yeah some kind of conspiracy but meanwhile Metzger with his beautiful eyes and Oedipa dreamily drunk and obviously long-deprived of good lovin’ are about to Make Out!” and the dilemma of ethics of sex with an asleep person (I mean, obviously I wouldn’t…that rascal Metzger though…) only heightens the interest, making it easy to skip over other points being made -

But maybe that’s the point - as Pierce’s proxy, Metzger is introducing her to, well, his stuff, “manufacturing consent” as Chomsky might say;

And the paragraph continues to draw the parallel between that sort of objectionable sex & the “revelations” to be foisted upon the mostly? partly? feignedly? ambivalently? unwilling - & sometimes unconscious - Oedipa by Pierce and his damnable will -

-  o-or are they wrought by The Tristero itself, a greater force just using Pierce?

* quite irreverently this image comes to mind
https://www.thirdmindbooks.com/pages/books/2226/robert-crumb/mr-natural-no-2

Finally we transition out of that speculative metaphor although there’s still a little left in the pipes to start the next paragraph:

“The beginning of that performance was clear enough. [wait a minute, I thought the beginning was “that night’s infidelity with Metzger” way back at the beginning of the chapter?!]

“It was while she and Metzger were waiting for ancillary letters to be granted representatives in Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida, where Inverarity had developed real estate, and in Delaware, where he’d been incorporated.”

- which seems like it’s starting to take awhile…So they decide to take a gander at Fangoso Estates.

There’s a tiny bit of “longhair” humor in one of the Paranoids not being to drive properly because he couldn’t see thru his hair - I remember jokes like this in the ‘60s. Lots of them. The Beatles kind of started that trend. The hair, that is. The jokes maybe originated in a lot of barbershops independently.

(Sigh - good times!)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue May 21 09:13:33 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 pt1, 41

Okay, at the beginning of the chapter the narrator’s foreshadowing specifically specifies “Oedipa’s encapsulation” as the thing which “might be” being undone by all this Tristero business. And that action being incepted, as it were, by her first act of coitus (“infidelity”) with Metzger.

Whereas later on, the slow denuding of her - now that she’s de-encapsulated - on the occasion of their umptieth coupling is compared to the slow revelation of The Tristero. So it’s also the beginning - of the next step.

They arrive at Lake Inverarity.

“Out in it, on a round island of fill among blue wavelets, squatted the social hall, a chunky, ogived and verdigrised, Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino. Oedipa fell in love with it.”

Hmmm. Rachel Owlglass only loves her car - Oedipa must like the strong silent type.

Is there a word for love of a building?
One Quoran says aesthete / another, “architecturalophile”

But is this love a displaced love, newly realized, or refreshed, for Pierce? Is Metzger a proxy for Pierce, who’s watching from the Great Beyond as his factotum shows her what a fabulous guy he was, how wonderful his creations were?

“Now aren’t you sorry?” type thing - and maybe she is, a little? Is that why she cried when Metzger told her Pierce had said she wouldn’t be easy? Or because the idea of Pierce doing all that is pretty fricken sad?

Oedipa’s as-yet- (and maybe always-to-remain-) unconsummated love for the social hall recedes into the background - she might’ve made it work, if it weren’t for those meddling Paranoids! (Well actually they’re trying to get out to the island too…)

At least there’s a picnic of sorts.

Eggplant parmagian’ sandwiches and tequila sours, sounds nice.

“Hey, blokes,” yelled Dean or perhaps Serge, “let’s pinch a boat.” “Hear, hear,” cried the girls.

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 22 01:43:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

Circles of consciousness, rather.

Orbit, damn you!  Orbit!

Lack of love of self certainly explains a few things, doesn't it.  Taste in men, sort of thing.  It is a reasonable assessment that the woman, bless her heart, would not see a prince in a human error who has a bust of a fraudster capitalist over his headboard, if she loved herself.  Or let lawyers rape her on cheap motel floors.

Divine Love is a self-love.  The Master isn't going to set you free into the circulating fields of infinite consciousness, if you don't love yourself first.

Of course the greatest of artists are conscious of what we call the unconscious.  Which is vital and alive and aware, superconscious, to say the least.  And of course connected.  Your unconscious is Aware, and attached to all others.  They communicate, make love.  Codified in the chromosomes, the genes, whatever, everything is an idea materialized.

Again, the greatest artists are a bleeding through of prime reality.  You can do it too, you are just closed off at the moment.  This author, count on it.  It knows what is happening.

Damn it, where is my Herodote, this shit isn't hard.  Consciousness forms matter.  Matter is a form of consciousness.  This system is just one of many with totally different rules that govern the blind.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 22 01:50:16 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

I guess you can give a nice sermon…
… if you like proclamations spun as literary commentary. A lot of that stuff going around. Too bad only a little of that stuff goes a long way…

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 22 01:53:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

I don’t disagree with you, BTW, but maybe you have read the book?

O G octogonalyoyo at gmail.com
Wed May 22 02:09:25 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

I know you don't disagree with me.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 22 03:00:05 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 refs

Lissajou
yibble

Radio Cologne

drip-dry suit

Lissajou figures on oscilloscope nice pic with many example figures
https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/279584/automatic-image-recognition-of-lissajous-figures-on-oscilloscope

Yibble -
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yibble

Also used in _V._

Radio Cologne (Westdeutsche Rundfunk) -

https://www.soundohm.com/product/radio-cologne-sound-das-s

(Review of a book about that scene - my favorite phrase from the review: , unfurling radical new sounds from their walls that collectively amounted to global conversation striving for a more democratic, transnational, and creatively egalitarian image of the future through practices of sonic abstraction.

No wonder the nerds were excited about it! Longer excerpt from the review:

…composers like *Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Thomas Kessler, Franco Evangelisti’, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Iannis Xenakis, John McGuire*, and* Luc Ferrari *(to name only a few) - one of the most important discrete histories in the development of avant-garde and experimental electronic music over the course of the second half of the 20th century.

First conceived as the sonorous realization of modernism during the early decades of the 20th Century, the project of avant-garde music only fully hit its stride and entered the board of cultural conciseness during the post-war period, as technological advancement - the invention of magnetic tape, synthesisers, and every computers - facilitated the develop new creative methods and languages in the form of music concrete, electronic and electroacoustic music, as well as computer music. Subsequently, across the 1950s and 60s, electronic music studios sprang up in nearly every corner of the globe, unfurling radical new sounds from their walls that collectively amounted to global conversation striving for a more democratic, transnational, and creatively egalitarian image of the future through practices of sonic abstraction. Among the most important of these studios was* Cologne's WDR  Studio for Electronic Music*, the subject of an incredible new book and X5 CD collection - “*Radio Cologne Sound The Studio for Electronic Music The WDR*” - written and edited by *Harry Vogt * and * Martina Seeber*, published by the Wolke Verlag imprint.

Drip-dry suit: (tl/dr - surprised to learn drip-dry suit connotes suavity)

https://bamfstyle.com/2013/01/18/charade-dark-suit/

Cary Grant in Charade (1963)

“In the film, Grant plays the well-suited hero or foil (depending on the scene) to Audrey Hepburn’s character, housewife Regina “Reggie” Lampert, who is gradually learning the layered criminal truth about her recently deceased husband. Although he was 59 years old when the film was made, Grant makes a convincing action hero, spending most of the final third of the film running, jumping, and shooting.

As to be expected, Grant is immaculately suited through most of the film.

Unlike his previous prominent foray into espionage cinema, *Charade provides* Cary Grant with multiple wardrobe changes and the chance for the actor—then pushing 60 years old—to showcase his ability to easily outdress actors half his age.

Grant’s most frequently worn suit in *Charade* is a dark navy blue suit, featured in many of the film’s signature scenes from the orange tamoure dance to the climactic chase through Paris. One sequence finds Grant’s character walking with Reggie along the Seine, enjoying ice cream, when she spills some of the confection on the suit. Grant brags that the suit is 
“drip-dry” and proceeds to show her as much by wearing it into the shower…thus foiling her plans to search it for clues to his identity.

BAMF Style reader Shaiaz Shah deducted from Grant’s “drip dry” comments that this dark navy two-piece suit is likely the Haspel “Exemplar” suit in a then-groundbreaking polyester/rayon “wash-and-wear” blend. Haspel seems to support this theory on their site <https://www.haspel.com/pages/history>. https://www.haspel.com/pages/history

Joseph Haspel Sr.’s sons, one of which was Joseph Jr., took over the company in late 1950s, championing wash-and-wear fabrics and blends, combining comfort, ease and style. Celebrities started wearing Haspel, Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird or Cary Grant in Charade. That was Haspel. Nearly every President since Coolidge has worn Haspel too. It’s a brand, in short, for ballers.

- so that means that rather than a sign of him being a cheaply clad lowlife, drip-dry suit is much more likely to be a signifier of a certain amount of swag accruing to Fallopian!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 22 04:18:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group reading ch3 Ref: Krasnyi Arkhiv

Mentioned as repository of an official report with a description of Pinguid’s sea encounter.

I was thinking that might be a fictional archive off of Red Square, but it was a real publication -

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2491707

Even if you haven’t got jstor, the sample page is pretty informative

Another link also has a nice description which I was able to copy: https://www.eastview.com/resources/journals/krasnyi-arkhiv/

*Krasnyi arkhiv* was published in Moscow from 1922 until June 1941 first by the Central Archives of the USSR and later by the Central Archival Administration. The proclaimed goal of this journal was to reveal the secrets of diplomatic documents hidden in the archives of Tsarist Russia and to regularly publish important archival papers “for the education of the proletariat.” These included official documents of the political police department, diaries and personal correspondence of the highest political figures (members of the royal family, top officials of the Tsarist Russia, etc.) The complete set of *Krasnyi arkhiv* contains more than 900 unique archival documents on the history of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, development of the Bolshevik movement and the Russian communist party, the Russian civil war, Russia’s foreign policy, and the history of Russian endeavors in Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The journal also includes literary-historical materials, such as 16 publications on Alexander Pushkin, 12 publications on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 14 publications on Leo Tolstoy and numerous other materials on famous Russian classical writers and literary critics.

Also available at Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/pub_krasnyi-arkhiv

I added a Cyrillic keyboard on my phone (surprisingly easy) & tried searching for Bogatir & Gaidamak but no results.

As a sanity check, a search for Popov got 77 hits, which is a lot but doesn’t seem enough for such a popular name (https://forebears.io/surnames/popov) in an archive with thousands and thousands of pages.

Help on this from someone with Russian skills wd be mighty nice (-; - not so much looking Peter Pinguid but for anything about the Popov San Francisco Bay presence during the Civil War -

Admittedly it’s at best a sidebar hoping for an Easter egg -

But it does seem to show Mr Pynchon dipping into Russian history even prior to GR/Tchitcherine.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 22 04:33:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

Just kind of splashed up against my mind -

This idea:

You’ve got the sex scenes to draw an audience

They’re there, & probably what one would mention to a friend at the water cooler, oh yeah, you’ve got to read Pynchon, “Oedipa does LA” - but does one really get massively turned on by them? (Rhetorical question)

So by intertwining them with the historical stuff, and even drawing comparisons, the reader who was trying to plunge into prurience starts instead to use their brain to figure out what the heck he’s talking about

Not only a way to comply with the letter and spirit of “redeeming social value”

But also a good marketing strategy

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/u4zoam/what_are_the_sales_of_pynchons_books_worldwide/

Apparently V [with both elements but slightly more discrete] had sold three million copies in the US by 1970,

Crying of Lot 49 had also sold three million copies before GR came out, so it was over six million before his most popular book

These figures, it turns out, came from the estimable

https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-1973-letter-to-bruce-allen-and-the-marketing-of-gravitys-rainbow/

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 22 05:27:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - Lissajou / Botticelli

“Two phase-shifted sinusoid inputs are applied to the oscilloscope in X-Y mode and the phase relationship between the signals is presented as a Lissajous figure.

In the professional audio world, this method is used for realtime analysis of the phase relationship between the left and right channels of a stereo audio signal. On larger, more sophisticated audio mixing consoles an oscilloscope may be built-in for this purpose.

On an oscilloscope, we suppose *x* is CH1 and *y* is CH2, *A* is the amplitude of CH1 and *B* is the amplitude of CH2, *a* is the frequency of CH1 and *b* is the frequency of CH2, so *a*/*b* is the ratio of frequencies of the two channels, and *δ* is the phase shift of CH1”

“realtime analysis of the phase relationship between the left and right channels”

Everyone is probably heartily tired of “right-brain/left-brain” ideation (I know I am) but the many occurrences of some kind of a duality (2 floors in Entropy, Stencil and Profane, elevated and gutter language in GR) elsewhere in Pynchon’s works make it difficult to ignore a bifurcation in the story -

A) On one channel, Oedipa’s awakening into sexual “infidelity” with its good and bad aspects (and her reactions both thoughts & feelings which are all very interesting & imho would still be so without the Tristero (but of course then what would she be having them about?)),

- sidebar: _Story of O_ 1954 would be an interesting compare/contrast here - or what if O had a college education and more agency ??? -

B) and the limning of recent history with each Tristero brushstroke also adding real or plausibly fictive historical details, nicely crafted in beautiful language.

Which if that scheme doesn’t directly imitate the Lissajou figures, at least thinking about a possible connection provides the concept of “more than one thing going on, and they are related”

Seems pretty relevant to that thorough likening of “strip Botticelli” to “Tristero revelations”

- Botticelli isn’t a game anyone I’ve ever met has played.

I did read a reference to it in one of the “Man from UNCLE” novelizations - quite some time ago - Napoleon Solo and a lady friend were playing it, & maybe Ilya Kuryakin was also .

- quick sidebar w/r/t Man from Uncle, 1964-68, so available to Tubeophile author at time of writing - though I’d be surprised if he read any of the novelizations - ¿quién sabe? - perhaps the show with its frequent trope of “pulling in innocents to a spy caper” and its rather lighthearted approach may have helped to inform if not the “plot” but the tone - like “what would the civilian be thinking during all of this” or even, “what would happen if UNCLE turned over the case to the housewife? Or if Napoleon slept with the
informal recruit”

- I figure it’d be Napoleon, but the girls I knew all seemed to like Ilya, so maybe it’d be he.

———

Wikipedia said Botticelli’s kind of like 20 questions, but trying to guess specific people.
 
Which I think could be useful as a way to feel out new acquaintances to assess how “hip” (well-informed) they were, & in which areas. How many questions you could come up with? How long to zero in?

So linking The Tristero to a game of strip Botticelli is a similar angle to the quite sound marketing (and legal - because obscenity challenges were only beginning to recede into the past) strategy

Similar to writing on the bathroom mirror “SEX!”

And then, lower down, in smaller print, “now that I’ve got your attention, clean the sink”

Strip Botticelli! Now that I’ve got your attention, isn’t it interesting how many weird things happened in postal history? Makes you want to buy a lot of stamps, doesn’t it?

The beginning of Chapter 3 even suggests that outcome: “Much of the revelation was to come through the stamp collection Pierce had left…”

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 22 07:45:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

Those sales figures for V and Lot 49---and then GR on the reddit fabtalk are WRONG, very wrong.

THAT IS ALL.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 22 07:51:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

But is the source for that Reddit post, which I linked to lower down

https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-1973-letter-to-bruce-allen-and-the-marketing-of-gravitys-rainbow/

also wrong?

 Someone named Gerald Howard seemed to be speaking rather authoritatively (quite a ways down in that link)

“Gerald Howard writes about <http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html> the marketing of *Gravity’s
Rainbow* in a Pynchon-themed edition of Bookforum (Summer 2005):

Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly
prohibitive for Pynchon’s natural college and postcollegiate audience. *V.* and *The Crying of Lot 49* had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the ’60s. Then I suggest we all commit suicide.) According to a letter from Cork Smith to Bruce Allen (who reviewed *Gravity’s Rainbow* for *Library Journal* but wrote to Viking complaining about the novel’s price), Viking would have had to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to break even. By comparison, *V.* and *The Crying of Lot 49* had sold about ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? “

Do you have more insider knowledge about this, Mark?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 22 08:00:15 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 purpose of intermingling

NO, Howar is a famous-enough insider..a major editor....his figures are surely right......He would NEVER talk of millions, since that was not even close then.....

The Crying of Lot 49, not V, took off in ales when it was published as that groovy Bantam paperback....because it is SHORT...and groovy...and mysterious and endlessly talk-aboutable...as we are proving....

Laura Kelber laurakelber at gmail.com
Wed May 22 16:55:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

Nicholas II instead of Alexander II? It's an odd error, whether Pynchon very deliberately inserted it in Fallopian's dialogue to show "us" that Fallopinan was historically inaccurate, or to show us that Fallopian was deliberately switching the czars. If the first, I'm sure many people, especially pre-internet, completely missed the switch. Why not make a more obvious blunder (the dates of the Civil War, for example)? If the second, why would Fallopian, who considers John Birchers left-wing, turn the martyr of the Bolshevik Revolution, and someone who wasn't responsible for freeing the serfs (if that was a problem for F.) into the villain? Maybe to make the point that Fallopian was so right wing that even Nicholas II was way too Bolshevik (though I think the John Birch comment makes that same point)?

Or maybe Pynchon (younger then) just actually made a mistake and his editor didn't pick it up?

Laura

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 22 17:14:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

The Companion to Lot 49 assumes unquestioningly that it was a simple minor error of young Tom.

Just sayin'.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu May 23 03:44:31 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - corrigendum, addendum

I wrote:
“Whereas later on, the slow denuding of her - now that she’s de-encapsulated - on the occasion of their umptieth coupling is compared to the slow revelation of The Tristero. So it’s also the beginning - of the next step.”

Obviously that’s all muddled up. They played Strip Botticelli and watched Igor that first night.

Now that they’ve been doing it for awhile, my comment should be something more like, “Fallopian’s revelations are the beginning of the next step, the first removal of an earring from the overdressed mystery of The Tristero, like Oedipa back in that first night at Echo Court - a mystery which will reveal itself as slowly as…” (etc)

Tequila sour recipe:

https://www.acouplecooks.com/tequila-sour/

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu May 23 07:08:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - “so began”

“So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense as Oedipa’s own street clothes in that game with Metzger in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed
be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness. Would its smile, then, be coy, and would it flirt away
harmlessly backstage, say good night with a Bourbon Street bow and leave her in peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear?”

What kind of passage is this?

I realize that others will probably have different interpretations - & hope to read about them

But for my money,

a) it’s descriptive of what Oedipa might be thinking quite a bit later - reminiscing, or a journal entry, or maybe she’s talking to a trusted friend or a shrink, possibly even a new husband (since we know from _Vineland_ that she & Mucho will be splitsville)

b) that being the case is a strong indication that she will survive to look back upon it - I mean the paragraph works best (imho) as her thinking back “that’s what it seemed like at the time” — or more complexly, a narrator who does know what will happen but isn’t telling, suggesting some of the ways Oedipa might later look back on this executorship.

c) building upon the foreshadowing at the beginning of the chapter: “That’s what would come to haunt her most, perhaps…” -

d) the narrator has to put that “perhaps” in to preserve the mystery as a reminder that more stuff will happen, as a guide to the parameters of the story - “Best case, she learns about the Tristero, it leaves her alone; worst case it turns nasty - read on & find out”

Phrase by phrase:

“the languid, sinister blooming”

languid and sinister, as opposed to energetic and dexterous?

Quite different, then, compared to the direction of the additions to her sort of Weltanschauung one might expect after a straightforward executrixship, of which she might say later,

“oh yes, I went down to LA, checked in right away with the attorney.

“My co-executor Metzger was very businesslike and professional and helped me to understand what needed to be done. I stayed with him and his wife in a spare room.

“ I went back to Kinneret on the weekends, and it’s funny, but Wendell and I have started to feel much closer. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe?  He found a new job as a social worker.

“The estate allowed me a salary which I banked, and expenses. He’d left me his stamp collection, which I sold to a nice young man named Genghis Cohen. I gave him a discount because I felt a little protective - he didn’t seem very organized.

“Pierce had set up a charitable foundation, and most of his holdings went to that. I declined further involvement, and after 6 weeks went back home. It was nice of Pierce to think of me, I guess, but I never will understand why.”

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 23 15:21:20 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch3 - “so began”

On May 23, 2024, at 3:08 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> “So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of  historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense as Oedipa’s own street clothes in that game with Metzger in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness. Would its smile, then, be coy, and would it flirt away harmlessly backstage, say good night with a Bourbon Street bow and leave her in peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear?”

I am gong to speculate based on the parallel allegorical reading which I am continuing to rough out. In this view Thurn and Taxis and later national postal systems represent the communication systems of empires and nations as they develop through history and record themselves( usually in a self serving narrative) and the changes in power structures which are proclaimed as historical reality.  Tristero Co-exists with this  and is  both the communication network and the secretive parallel power maintaining apparatus of the ultra-rich, families , individuals, mercenaries, spies that see themselves as the proper nobility. I do not believe Pynchon is describing a unified hierarchy with a clearly defined agenda, merely the dialectic of social forces that is as ruthless in its doings as the mare apparent historical players. This often intersects with  rogue military and spy networks. Sometimes there is disruptive confrontations between the Tristero type structures and those individuals and entities deemed legitimate.
 That is what happened with the JFK assassination. There was a conspiracy managed by the CIA , Mafia and others to control by violence a leader signaling a change of direction and defying the Cuba manifested plans of a Tristero style bid for imperial power.   Oedipa in this allegory represents the american public as the nation with its post McCarthy freedom of thought asking many uncomfortable questions about the JFK murder and the escalation in Vietnam, What is moving toward Oedipa in the above passage, and what is soon to be revealed in its terrible nakedness is the murderously dark side of the American Dream, the Shadow vigilante, the ownership who thrive on military spending and project a landscape carefully shaped like a circuit board for its own ends. She has sensed that it wants to communicate but is rightly terrified of what .

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 23 15:30:38 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch3 - “so began”

I also wanted to throw out a passage for possible feedback because it confuses me as to a layman’s translation of the ancillary letters part.

The beginning of that performance was clear enough. It was while she and Metzger were waiting for ancillary letters to be granted representatives in Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida, where Inverarity had developed real estate, and in Delaware, where he’d been incorporated.

My only thoughts are that this guy Pierce Inverarity is wildly rich and his interests wide. I still think the best real life rep is Howard Hughes.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 23 20:10:51 UTC 2024

No Subject

https://x.com/kvtp11/status/1793705109580587394

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 24 03:16:42 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read

Chap 3..Let's look at the text, not just the historical puzzle. First paragraph has the word 'logically' three times."the way it fitted,
logically, togther"  Pared with 'as if there were revelation all around her".....my computer wants to aout-crrect to 'revelations"...

but one logical revelation is all.

It was to come throught the stamp collection. What are your associations with a stamp collection? I remember when stamp collecting was marketed as a way to see and learn about the world. Stamps were created by countries to honor their heroes; to honor their history; to honor the natural beauty of a country. Stamps were a revelation of the history and life of a country....

What could mute stamps say? Muted post horn. silent history.

Potsmaster. "So they make misprints".

The motif that history can be printed wrong, so to speak? Foreshadows The Courier's Tragedy and even Pynchon and the Peter Pinguid Society getting history wrong?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 24 06:15:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - legal stuff: ancillary letters

Starting with Delaware (the equivalent in college terms of an “easy a” course, famous then for lax regulation & thus a haven for speculators - of which Pierce was one  - I think South Dakota is now equally lax)

https://delcode.delaware.gov/title12/c015/sc01/index.html

(a) Letters of administration with the will annexed, letters of administration, letters of ancillary administration with the will annexed and letters of ancillary administration shall be granted by a Register of Wills to such person or persons as shall be entitled to such letters under this section upon their giving bond in accordance with this title.


So Oedipa & Metzger don’t have to traipse all over the country.

Why don’t they go ahead in California instead of waiting for those other places, one wonders?

One possible explanation is that Pierce foresaw a need for synchronization, timing, acting together.


General description:

New York
https://trustandwill.com/learn/ancillary-proceeding

New York State law provides that a personal representative of an estate filing for probate in New York must be a New York resident. This means that in order to file an ancillary proceeding in New York, you must first appoint a New York resident as your co-representative. (Assuming you do not live in New York.)

Together, you would file a petition for an ancillary proceeding with the New York Surrogate’s Court. In this petition, you must identify the assets that are located in the state, as well as list the beneficiaries of the decedent.

Along with the petition, you must also file an authentic copy of the Will, along with the court order or decree admitting the Will to probate. Also include the letters issued by the court appointing you as the personal representative of the estate (Executor). If your documents happen to be in a foreign language issued by a foreign nation court, then you must also provide a certified English translation of the documents.

Upon reviewing the documents, the court will likely issue ancillary letters to the personal representative. They will often do so without requiringfurther evidence if they determine that all the documents submitted are valid. Once these letters are issued, the Executor can proceed with their duty of collecting the estate assets, paying for any estate debts, and making distributions to beneficiaries.

Texas, Arizona, & Florida seem quite similar from their statute law (for anoraks)


Texas:
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/ES/htm/ES.501.htm

Sec. 501.002.  APPLICATION FOR ANCILLARY PROBATE OF FOREIGN WILL.  (a)  An application for ancillary probate in this state of a foreign will admitted to probate or otherwise established in the jurisdiction in which the testator was domiciled at the time of the testator's death is required to indicate only that probate in this state is requested on the basis of the authenticated copy of the foreign proceedings in which the will was admitted to probate or otherwise established.

(b)  An application for ancillary probate in this state of a foreign will that has been admitted to probate or otherwise established in a
jurisdiction other than the jurisdiction in which the testator was domiciled at the time of the testator's death must:

(1)  include all information required for an application for probate of a domestic will; and

(2)  state the name and address of:

(A)  each devisee; and

(B)  each person who would be entitled to a portion of the estate as an heir in the absence of a will.

(c)  An application described by Subsection (a) or (b) must include for filing a copy of the foreign will and the judgment, order, or
decree by which the will was admitted to probate or otherwise established.  The copy must:

(1)  be attested by and with the original signature of the court clerk or other official who has custody of the will or who is in charge of probate records;

(2)  include a certificate with the original signature of the judge or presiding magistrate of the court stating that the attestation is in
proper form; and

(3)  have the court seal affixed, if a court seal exists.

Added by Acts 2009, 81st Leg., R.S., Ch. 680 (H.B. 2502
<http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/html/HB02502F.HTM>),


Arizona
https://www.azleg.gov/viewdocument/?docName=https://www.azleg.gov/ars/14/04207.htm

Except as otherwise provided in chapter 4 of this title, to acquire the powers and undertake the duties and liabilities of a personal
representative of a decedent, a person shall be appointed by order of the court or statement of the registrar, shall qualify and shall be issued letters. Administration of an estate is commenced by the issuance of letters.


Florida

(1) If a nonresident of this state dies leaving assets in this state, credits due from residents in this state, or liens on property in this
state, a personal representative specifically designated in the decedent’s will to administer the Florida property shall be entitled to have ancillary letters issued, if qualified to act in Florida. Otherwise, the foreign personal representative of the decedent’s estate shall be entitled to have letters issued, if qualified to act in Florida. If the foreign personal representative is not qualified to act in Florida and the will names an alternate or successor who is qualified to act in Florida, the alternate or successor shall be entitled to have letters issued. Otherwise, those entitled to a majority interest of the Florida property may have letters issued to a personal representative selected by them who is qualified to act in Florida. If the decedent dies intestate and the foreign personal representative is not qualified to act in Florida, the order of preference for appointment of a personal representative as prescribed in this code shall apply. If ancillary letters are applied for by other than the domiciliary personal representative, prior notice shall be given to any domiciliary personal representative.
(2) Ancillary administration shall be commenced as provided by the Florida Probate Rules.
(3) If the will and any codicils are executed as required by the code, they shall be admitted to probate.
(4) The ancillary personal representative shall give bond as do personal representatives generally. All proceedings for appointment and administration of the estate shall be as similar to those in original administrations as possible.
(5) Unless creditors’ claims are otherwise barred by s. 733.710, the ancillary personal representative shall cause a notice to creditors to be served and published according to the requirements of chapter 733. Claims not filed in accordance with chapter 733 shall be barred as provided in s. 733.702.
(6) After the payment of all expenses of administration and claims against the estate, the court may order the remaining property held by the ancillary personal representative transferred to the foreign personal representative or distributed to the beneficiaries.
(7) Ancillary personal representatives shall have the same rights, powers, and authority as other personal representatives in Florida to manage and settle estates; to sell, lease, or mortgage local property; and to raise funds for the payment of debts, claims, and devises in the domiciliary jurisdiction. No property shall be sold, leased, or mortgaged to pay a debt or claim that is barred by any statute of limitation or of nonclaim of this state.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri May 24 07:16:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - co-executors

Since Metzger and Oedipa are co-executors, can they act independently?

Texas:
https://riddlebutts.com/practice-areas/probate/fiduciary-duties/#:~:text=Pursuant%20to%20Texas%20law%2C%20any,any%20conveyance%20of%20real%20estate.
Pursuant to Texas law, *any Executor or Administrator can act alone to bind the estate*, except that all Executors must execute any conveyance of real estate.

New York:
https://www.justanswer.com/estate-law/54kfs-co-executor-bind-estate-real-estate-transaction.html

It depends upon the will. If the will is silent or unless the will provides that either executor may act alone, the consent of both executors is going to be required to bind the estate. If there are more than two co-executors, the act of a majority can bind the estate.

The other states are harder to find.

I don’t think it matters a heck of a lot. Metzger is going to be doing the heavy lifting and Oedipa mostly signing stuff.

Why did Pierce make her co-executor anyway?

Was it because he didn’t fully trust Metzger?

Maybe he really didn’t mean she wouldn’t be easy “sexually” - but rather that she would make his job more difficult?

Reading into this quite licentiously, what if Pierce was a kind of visionary - people with that kind of ability are quite rare - and, knowing this, his idea of succession planning was to put the mantle onto Metzger, hoping that Oedipa would inspire Metzger in a similar way to that in which she had inspired Pierce.

Beneficiaries are never listed, though. Without that knowledge, that thesis can hardly fly, though it remains an enticing possibility.


- Tristero obviously suggests “triste” or sadness.
- the other spelling which also occurs is “Trystero”, suggesting a rendezvous

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tryst

1
*: *an agreement (as between lovers) to meet
2
*: *an appointed meeting or meeting place


This novel is clearly not about the details of the estate, (is it?) but more about what Oedipa gleans from her involvement.

Once again speculating beyond any reasonable remit (except the Scrooge tale) it seems as if she left him because she wasn’t into all that wheeling and dealing & felt he had become less than lovable.

& it seems like he was resisting that narrative by showing her the fruits of his efforts.

99% it seems like she disdains it.

Just that one time (iirc) she feels some affection for one of his works - the social hall on the “lake isle of Inverarity” if you will…

In fact fell in love with it.

This is a pretty strong statement; if she’d seen this while they were still together, would that make a difference? Like after knocking down all those trees & building fancy homes, in the middle of it all is this lake with a social hall - where people would gather for fun and frolic and other important stuff -

And like Faust, saved by the eternal feminine because he wanted to make the moment last when he was helping people - Pierce escapes damnation -

Oedipa accepts his vision, falls in love with it in fact, and knowingly lets Metzger get on with executing, no longer worrying about that aspect but instead developing her own thoughts based on her authentic self which unfortunately was still never that into the dude no matter how deep his undying devotion to her.

To quote _Gravity’s Rainbow_,
““Yeah well,” as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, “you know, he did love her, folks.” ”


And her own thoughts get more and more interesting.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri May 24 12:57:23 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch3 - “so began”

Version2 of JT response:
> 
> I am gong to speculate based on the parallel allegorical reading which I am continuing to rough out as we read.  In this view Thurn and Taxis and later national postal systems represent the communication systems of empires and nations as they develop through history and record themselves( usually in a self serving narrative) and as their historians record the changes in power structures which are proclaimed as historical reality.  Tristero Co-exists with accepted history  and is  both the communication network and the secretive parallel power maintaining apparatus of the ultra-rich, their powerful families , influential individuals, mercenaries, and spies who see themselves as the proper nobility. I do not believe Pynchon is describing a unified hierarchy with a clearly defined agenda, merely the dialectic of social forces that is as ruthless in its doings as the more apparent historical players. This often intersects with  rogue military and spy networks. Sometimes there is disruptive confrontations between the Tristero type structures and those individuals and entities deemed legitimate. Some of these instances of murderer and removal from power are mentioned later, mostly by Bortz,

> That is what happened with the JFK assassination. There was a conspiracy managed by the CIA , Mafia and others to control by violence a leader signaling a change of direction and defying the Cuba manifested plans of a Tristero style bid for imperial power.   Oedipa in this allegory represents the american public . She , like the nation with its post McCarthy freedom of thought, is  asking many uncomfortable questions. The public and unconvinced journalists are asking about the JFK murder and the escalation in Vietnam;   Oedipa Maas is asking about a power struggle and  murder in a Jacobean play, a secretive postal system called the Tristero, and GI’s  bones fished out of a lake being turned into charcoal, and the weirdly coincidental mirroring between the play and the doings of Pierce Inverarity.,  What is moving toward Oedipa in the above passage, and what is soon to be revealed in its terrible nakedness is the murderously dark side of the American Dream, the Shadow vigilante, the ownership who thrive on military spending and project a landscape carefully shaped like a cir

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri May 24 20:10:45 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Manny Di Presso's punny onomatopoeic name,so to speak, doesn't get talked about enough...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 25 08:13:43 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

sexual voyeurism by the young. Driving Metzger into a crazy closet where he loses interest. (I would too).

Popov = popoff?

Fallopian = WTF? Why a guy with this female body thing? A tube too, which allows birth? ...he brings us some history being born?

"as if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G--strings of historical figuration" As in V, history is a woman....which is why Fallopian?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 25 12:00:00 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read

Later reflection......"Logic...fitting it all together tightly".....the thing about Logic is that it all depend on the premises.......to fit together a revelation is to find the premises to believe the revelation.....this read it reminds me of the "logic' of the Middle Ages worldview--All of Acquinas's "logical' Catholic foundational worldview fit the 'revelation"......

So, again, tangentially, TRP has here all compact, the observation (In V too) that THAT worldview is defunct......that revelation is no revelation......

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat May 25 16:27:31 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - Lissajou / Botticelli

Thoughts on strip Botticelli. 

The most famous Botticelli painting and the obvious reference is The Birth of Venus.  Looking at this painting produces another left-right conundrum. Venus, assimilative of  Greek Aphrodite, is born from sea foam and is usually depicted nude. (She is the  goddess of love, eros, fertility, prosperity, prostitution and even victory. ) In the Birth of Venus she is shown rising on a shell from the turquoise sea, naked with long( Rapunzel-like)  luxuriant blonde hair,  a thick strand of which covers her vagina. There are figures on her right and left. On her right is  a partially clothed airborne  Zephyr embracing a figure who could be her sister or feminine brother, He blows toward her, his soft breeze carrying flowers. On her right is another blond-tressed woman, who is more earthily voluptuous and standing on the shore (Gaea?). She is holding forth a beautiful piece of cloth rippling in the breeze decorated also with flowers, It looks as though the cloth is intended to provide a covering for Venus but Venus seems blissfully indifferent and Zephyr’s breeze would seem to oppose that effort. What is pure unadorned love? A fantasy, a balance, a commitment, a dangerous delusion? All these questions are part of COL 49

Part of OM’s pursuit of liberation has to do with a need for sexual bliss , but internally she wants that combined with love. She is caught between the Zephyr of blissful freedom and the earthy need for a deep soul connection she felt in the presence of the Varo painting. She is not alone in wanting a union that embraces both  the healing of tears and  delight of pleasure. If we look at her as I have been doing as an allegorical type of reference to the soul of the american people we can see a similar struggle raging in the culture of the time. Throughout  the culture we can see a   reckoning with patriarchy and a dark violent past,  a reckoning with the desire to live up to the role of  heroic liberator from fascism, but mixed with with all the PTSD, alcoholism, Neo colonialism and Mcarthyist madness  that followed. Paranoia is not just aberrant unrealistic  individual psychology; it was coming into the culture like a wildfire from the highest levels for often devious and self-serving purposes.The pendulum of history swings a bit.  McCarthy gets shut down, SGT. Pepper strikes up the band, Kennedy wins over Nixon, a fresh breeze is blowing away the plans of the CIA and Curtis LeMay when seemingly out of the turquoise blue sky the presidents head gets blown off. The baby boomers are listening in. Questions are being asked.  The securities of left brain linear logic make their case with war and media management and resistance to civil rights and anti -war movement, endless prosperity via Oil and  atomic victory; the right brain says look at the big picture, freedom and friendship are possible. Remember the suffering, how easily fascism became a global cult.  What kind of world do we want? Not that simple but a reasonable rough approximation. Who will win the affection of the lonely princess, the people, the duck-and-cover generation?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 25 19:48:55 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 37, Harper Perennial paperback.....

"Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the
same creeping horror"

What is the underlying truth of both of them? A theoretical abstractionism? ...is that the creeping horror, words that don't signify reality just meet as words?...the words are not the territory.....THAT creeping horror akin to the possible horror Oedipa is trying to track down....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun May 26 00:05:07 UTC 2024

THEY WANT TO RULE

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 26 02:33:27 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34 - drip-dry is right

It was a high point for me:

Reaffirming drip-dry over Sta-Prest (-;

Looking up drip-dry & finding that Cary Grant quote from “Charade” (1963) which seems timely & even has thematic similarities

Feeling a little more respect for Mike Fallopian on that basis.

Thanks for noticing!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 26 06:18:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - echo of “Low-Lands” / handoff

Quick note:

Low-Lands:
They started down a long spiraling road into the dump.

CoL49

They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry, and eventually, shimmying for the sand roads, down in a helix to a sculptured body of water named Lake Inverarity.

Joseph mentioned a dawning awareness of “something awry” post-1963

Holding that up against the paragraph I was wondering about - particularly

“…as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness. Would its smile, then, be coy, and would it flirt away harmlessly backstage, say good night with a Bourbon Street bow and leave her in peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she
never wanted to hear?”

There are points of similarity.

The two choices are what intrigue me.

The narrator seems to think it’s the Trystero which will choose how to appear to her, but doesn’t it really depend on how she chooses to see it?

Either Oedipa will notice there’s a pattern and move on; after all, the world is full of such patterns - Norman Mailer has the characters in The Naked and the Dead ruminate on how somebody’s making big money off World War Two, but he didn’t chase that idea for the rest of his career.

Or she will become obsessed as a personal mission with finding out more - as did Mae Brussel, (may she rest in peace) who started by reading the entire Warren Report, and couldn’t quit until she’d compiled a huge archive of shady goings on, which is still available https://maebrussellresearchlibrary.com

I look forward to other Livingstonian insights.

Thank you and goodnight!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 26 07:23:00 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

TRP, Jungian.......

Does THIS gloss a lot of Lot 49?

https://x.com/SophiaCycles/status/1794467474605322617

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun May 26 07:51:30 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch3 - echo of “Low-Lands” / handoff

Correction please

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:18 AM Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> I look forward to other Livingstonian insights.

Which may be forthcoming at some point, but more probable for tomorrow are Joseph Tracy’s, to which I more correctly look forward.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 26 09:53:00 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

What is the joking meaning behind the paranoids and their fan groupies being sexual voyeurs?

They don't know how because until the sixties they didn't too early in general. This adulterous half-a-Hollywood couple are role models?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun May 26 13:23:26 UTC 2024

COL 49 2nd section of chapter3

Below is a SUMMARY of  the 2nd 10 pages of CH 3 of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 in which Manny Di Presso shows up at Fangoso Lagoon  and we discover the source of certain bones.

Metzger, the Paranoids, their Girlfriends, and Oedipa Maas have gone to Fangoso Lagoon, an artificial body of water made by Pierce Inverarityfor scuba divers containing sunken ships ,human bones. And other Disneyesqe touches. The name is od because it means muddy or murky in Spanish. The Paranoids suggest they pinch a boat and Metzger closes his eyes.

A telling question that starts to reverberate as Metzger closes eyes to many things:1)bones from La prieta, 2)involvement of Tony Jaguar 3)  questions about bones in lake,  curiosity about the CR play’s similarity to  events leading to PI’s acquiring the bones> And as he asks Oed to close hers and stop her questions.

Paranoids start 17 foot aluminum power boat called Gozilla2  and a person covered in blue plastic moves closer, says Baby Igor, I need help. Its Manny Di Presso, lawyer turned actor in scuba suit and wrapround glasses running from 3 men who work for Tony Jaguar( Cosa Nostra) and jhe asks to join them  in the boat which speeds away.( MD keeps referring to car on other side of lagoon, an XKE he bought while temporarily insane)

Metz asks “are we on camera? “Manny D says “this is real”  that “he” has someone watching lake. He is Tony Jaguar , Mob boss. and employer of MD, who’s now lawyer again. Manny D says only the way pilot of Metz's life will be shown is if he wins a big case like the one MD is bringing on behalf of Tony Jaguar against PI estate.

They dock at an island with an elaborate social hall and Metz and OM find out MD is fleeing Tony Jaguar his client to avoid pressure to loan Jaguar money against inverarity case. MD presumes they will lose case. TJ is in Gambling debt trouble; trouble  that MD wants to avoid. 

The case is about beaconsfield filters and the  bones supplied by TJ who says he wasn’t paid. Metz says PI scrupulous about payments; Metzger  presumes the bones were from cemetaries ripped up by contractors working for PI.     MD says no, these bones came from Italy  from Lago di Pieta , some into filters and some to decorate bottom of Fangoso, Lago di Pieta in COL 49 was scene of battle in which a company of GI’s was killed by Germans and their bodies and weapons put into lake and sank. 

Historically this is a reference to the Lake Maggiore massacre ( also 1943)in which Panzer division killed 56 greek and Italian Jews and threw bodies in Lake Maggiore. ( In 1957 an artificial lake was made in Pertulsillo province in Italy , finished in 1962) and called Lago di  Pietra.) 

Tony Jaguar had been corporal in Italian army and bought bones to sell in US through Mob.  failed to sell bones for fertilizer , stored in Fort Wayne Indiana until Beaconsfield interest. (Weird Fort Wayne connection to JFK assassination-https://jamesfday.medium.com/the-jfk-assassination-new-link-between-the-civil-air-patrol-and-wandering-bishops-2b42634449ec )

Then paranoids interrupt and say story sounds like that  ill Jacobean revenge play  they saw called The Courier’s Tragedy.
Manny D freaks that they have been listening,’ But we don’t repeat what we hear says paranoid girlfiend and don’t smoke Beaconsfields, we’re all on pot. Drummer produces fistful of MJ joints to be smoked.
 At this point 2 men chasing MD approach in boat and MD takes off in Godzilla 2, stranding others on the island. They are rescued by sending SOS with lit joints after juicing smoking and hearing paranioids  disjointed or perhaps jointed  version of Courier’s Tragedy.

OM decides to see this play at the Tank and gets Metz to take her.   (I will start  a summary of the Courier’s Tragedy next.)

QUESTIONS:
1) what is with all the lakes and  water bodies real and fake? Baby Igor drowning in the Mediterranean, Fangoso Lagoon, Lago Di Pieta, Knights of Faggio killed and dumped in lake, Kinnaret( older name for Sea of Galilee) , Peter Pinguid vs Popov in the Pacific off Pismo Beach story in earliest freedom fight with Russians? 
Stretching the possible instances of this imagery we have Boticelli’s naked Venus rising from the sea foam, Oedpa’s  copious tears at Varo Painting and her soulful relation to Pacific Ocean, Driblette drowning or being drowned in Pacific.
 Possible angle) Jung associates water with subconscious/collective unconscious.

2) what is with the specific repetition of the theme of bones at the bottom of the water, bones as ink, bones as cigarette filters, bones as human memory vs financial opportunity? 

3) Any thoughts on lawyers as actors, actors as lawyers? Accurate and inaccurate  information in fictional drama( movies, stories by characters, myths, plays, TV dramas) as Pynconian or theme? 

4)Why are there so many ex or not ex fascists: Hilarius, Tony Jaguar, Fallopian to the right of Birchers recommending Tremain’s Nazi armband and guns, to a lesser extent but connected to PI is Metzger and Yoyodyne anti-communism.

5) logic of  Manny Di Presso in skin Diving suit running from his employer to avoid loaning him money??? 

6) why Fangoso? 7)  What are Paranoids about?

HAVE A PLEASANT LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun May 26 20:18:15 UTC 2024

Postal service and stamps reflection

https://x.com/aliner/status/1794582485327642942

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 29 00:50:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - co-executors

> Since Metzger and Oedipa are co-executors, can they act independently?
Seems like the point of those laws is that they have to agree to do anything important
The weird part being how little any of those details  of settling the will, who are the inheritors, where all this money and power is going enter the picture. The parts OM gets interested in( The bones , the stamps, the W.A.S.T.E. , the play introducing Trysero meet constant resistance from Metzger. The parallel that comes to mind is the elaborate systems by which criminal activity provides itself with legal cover and how it can all unravel if someone just keeps tugging on a particular anomaly or suspicious act.

OM is tugging more out of curiosity and the web of connections her curiosity brings together than Metzger.  What is hard here is knowing what Inverarity wanted at all. We don’t know how he died, if he foresaw his death, where he wanted his money to go, who he cared about( if anyone )though he seems to have felt more strongly about OM than the logic of the story tells us, his relatives, his foundations . Metzger, I feel, has a goal, but we don’t know that either. OM almost declined the role, but got involved through the kind of  curiosity and skepticism and her decisive self defense against callous self-absorption  that Inverarity knew, was stung by, and seemingly respected. 

If we go to the idea of OM as the american public, faced with the bizarre circumstances of the JFK killing some of the reactions that surround her confusion and blind groping make sense, the disappearing and reappearing power struggle, stretching back through generations, the distractions, the transfer of evidence as something seemingly as trivial as a stamp collection is sold. The bizarre record contained in those stamps.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 29 01:32:08 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

> "Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror"

> What is the underlying truth of both of them? A theoretical abstractionism? ...is that the creeping horror,

   The way I see it, both Metz’s observation and Fallopians makes some kind of sense. Marx didn’t write “Communism” He wrote Das Kapital.  But he did not want to end Industrial production, just distribute the wealth  evenly and dignify industrial work. Fallopian seems to reject  industrial civilization itself  , but It is probably mostly seeming. It’s   dubious that any kind of coherence can come from Fallopian or that he cares to seek it. He is disgruntled with the thing he is embedded in but doesn’t seem to really want to walk away. He wants more to go back to settler colonialism, a primitive imperialism of military dominance. The anti-communism of the time was so rampant that it led to Birchers accusing Eisenhower of being a Commie. Meanwhile Mike Fallopian works at Yoyodyne, and buys swastikas that come from a store owned by Inverarity. He tells OM the Inverarity probably set the whole Trystero and W.A.S.T.E episodes up. He is like an armed gnostic who thinks of Inverarity as a DemiGod with impossible levels of control. His hero is so ridiculous that OM spews in laughter.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 29 02:06:21 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch3 - echo of “Low-Lands” / handoff

> The narrator seems to think it’s the Trystero which will choose how to appear to her, but doesn’t it really depend on how she chooses to see it?

Not necessarily,  Once you see someone and they become aware of your interest, that person or organization has their own agency and may well feel compelled to deal with you on their own terms, and those terms  may change depending on the level of threat, interest etc. 
Trystero is an alternate power base and communication system. While fictional , it has real historic parallels According to more than one source  on CIA history, the CIA was modeled on Germany’s secret police. Regardless it thrives on secrecy and that is not the way our republic was set up. The US constitution is not designed for global imperialism and spy networks. There is no provision for a clandestine spy agency run by the executive branch. That is a  more European model. And the communication system of accountability based on law  and maximum transparency diminishes as secrets and deception grows.  

 Example from some JFK notes - major Investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen inteviewed Jack Ruby, having done investigations of Mob, and exposing JFK affair with Marilyn Monroe( shortly before MM suicide? She(DK) had exposed a CIA Mafia plan to kill Castro .  Criticized Warren Commision with Ruby interview she had obtained from source , got involved with Mark Lane i( Military Intel) & Ron Petakand and  was found dead in bed in  highly suspicious circumstances in 1965. Her files on the JFK murder were taken.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 29 02:13:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - co-executors

By the way Michael, Thanks for digging into this legal stuff. I really did not have much of a clue.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed May 29 08:13:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 - Bourbon Street bow?

Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote in response to my question

…but doesn’t it really depend on how she chooses to see it?

- Not necessarily,  Once you see someone and they become aware of your interest, that person or organization has their own agency and may well feel compelled to deal with you on their own terms, and those terms  may change depending on the level of threat, interest etc.

- Example from some JFK notes - major Investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen … was found dead in bed in  highly suspicious circumstances in 1965. Her files on the JFK murder were taken.

——————- to which I feel inspired to reply,

Not in any way to justify secret retribution, but that was my point - that the more overt interest Oedipa takes, the more likely “the void will stare back” & the type of action she takes will determine its next move.

I think that’s the narrator’s suggestion: they (a non-binary pronoun seems appropriate here) appear to be addressing the reader, or even considering for reasons of their own what kind of tale to spin from here -

By likening the unveiling of The Tristero to Oedipa’s own oh-so-gradual disrobing I think the narrator is shaping expectations - Being alert to the terms of comparison, we notice that The Tristero mystery plays the role of the seducee here -

Oedipa is the one calling for minute disclosures and patiently lulling the mystery even to the point of sleep while gaining the knowledge she seeks - she’s the Metzger in this dynamic, reveling in each step. (That is, once the fully-clad seducee has woken the would-be seducer)

I imagine them reveling, ymmv I guess, but something keeps them going at their respective tasks.

As Metzger is with respect to Oedipa, wanting some action without commitment, she can at best (I think the narrator is suggesting) from The Tristero hope for

“…its smile, then, [to] be coy, and [for it to] flirt away harmlessly backstage, say good night with a Bourbon Street bow* and leave her in peace”

Metzger, one imagines, would be mortified if Oedipa fell in love with him, demanding he fulfill her Rapunzel fantasy and revealing more need than he can imagine satisfying, like that movie where the lady boils the bunny.

Oedipa also quite reasonably wants (and/or the narrator & sympathetic reader want for her) to avoid a situation where The Tristero would take an undue interest in her, “…instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear”

* Bourbon Street Bow - this song on Bandcamp https://thetorches.bandcamp.com/track/the-bourbon-street-bow
talks about somebody doing a “Bourbon Street Bow” as in bowing. I’m unaware of what that would look like.

Google gave me a bunch of Bourbon Street “bow ties” and “hair bows” and numerous references to this passage, but the song - I did spring for a copy - is the only non-Pynchon reference to such an obeisance. Or maybe they got
the idea from Pynchon too. 

Maybe he’s glancingly referencing the Garrison investigation?

Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote in
response to my question

>…but doesn’t it really depend on how she chooses to see it?

- Not necessarily,  Once you see someone and they become aware of your interest, that person or organization has their own agency and may well feel compelled to deal with you on their own terms, and those terms  may change depending on the level of threat, interest etc.

- Example from some JFK notes - major Investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen … was found dead in bed in  highly suspicious circumstances in 1965. Her files on the JFK murder were taken.

——————- to which I feel inspired to reply,

Not in any way to justify secret retribution, but that was my point - that the more overt interest Oedipa takes, the more likely “the void will stare back” & the type of action she takes will determine its next move.

I think that’s the narrator’s suggestion: they (a non-binary pronoun seems appropriate here) appear to be addressing the reader, or even considering for reasons of their own what kind of tale to spin from here -

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Wed May 29 08:41:32 UTC 2024

Chapter 3 pg 32-33

Michael posed:

“Things then did not delay in turning curious”

A) twice again, the word “revelation”

B) the narrator floats the idea that The Tristero is a system of thought which may supplant the idea of Rapunzel’s Tower for Oedipa.

In the Tarot deck, the Tower is card XVI, preceded by the Devil. It is associated with sudden, disruptive revelation and catastrophe as well as higher learning/knowledge. The card has the tower often topped with a crown, which symbolizes “materialistic thought being bought cheap” according to the wikipedia entry.

I also think of the tower of Babel and the efforts to reach the heavens/find God/achieve higher knowledge being destroyed by confusion and loss of communication.

If Tristero replaces the Tower, then it is a form of communication that may be lost or meaningless (Fallopians letter) despite attempting to achieve higher knowledge. 

The Tower card also represents escape and liberation (Rapunzel).

Does this also hint at her relationship with Metzger, bought cheap?

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed May 29 09:05:15 UTC 2024

Chapter 3 pg 32-33

Finally!  An observation that is actually about the heart of the novel!
Bravo!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 29 14:42:47 UTC 2024

V-2 misc…

A friend of mine from my town, is going to a just-created memorial event for his uncle, killed in this mission.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: frank mccluskey <frankmccluskey11 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, May 29, 2024 at 10:18 AM
Subject: Literary history
To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>

This is the mission my uncle died on in WWII.  He was sent to hit the hydrogen factory for the V2!!!!!

https://search.app/WPxFHYfMpPTTiaFT7

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 29 23:33:27 UTC 2024

Shall I project a world? ---Crying of Lot 49

Jungian reminder...

https://x.com/SophiaCycles/status/1795952688993083692

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 30 08:44:10 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 3

Michael asks: Why is the language so conditional?

C) and tells us that she will come to be haunted by the way things fit together - logically

i) Does the word “haunted” have a negative connotation which suggests that The Tristero won’t be any more satisfying a myth to live within than Rapunzel?

ii) is there really anything at all logical about how getting jiggy with Metzger would start a voyage of discovery? If so, what? 

I suppose the conditional language implies that Oed is trying to understand this, trying to offer possible explanations. The only logic I can see in this is that the first syllable in Tristero may be tryst, which is how her relationship with Metzger begins. So a tryst leads to the Tristero. Also Metzger in German is butcher, and there was a butcher delivery of mail/messages in the middle ages when butchers apparently traveled around to offer their services. They would pass on messages from other customers. So he provides the first messenger to deliver a message from the Tristero. She may be haunted by the myth or by the revelation, which seems to hint at a higher unity of explanation but never reveals it fully.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 30 08:45:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading chapter 3, pg 31, 32

Michael asks:
-  sympathetic description of her husband’s infidelity. Like, extremely sympathetic

“It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive”

i) other inabilities to communicate:
   Letting him preemptively complain before telling about her day (patience is a virtue)
   Not understanding his car lot angst but consoling anyway (kindness is a virtue)

   Are there more?

The communication between Oed and the men in her life points to being a vessel for the men to divulge themselves into. She is reception, and they can't/won't hear her. Her virtue for the men is her ability to listen while they complain, mansplain, etc. This leads to her heightened 'sensitivity' to new revelations and communications. This may also be part of the 'logic' of beginning with Metzger. Throughout chapter 2, Oed reveals heightened sensations, Metzger's warm thigh touching, her increasing lust for him, her awakening to 'getting laid', her breast touching his nose. Then she is also sensitized to revelation, printed circuit for real estate development. Again the tower of Babel comes up as part of this inability to communicate. She fits the role of the sympathetic housewife as vessel for her man's desires, complaints, jeremiads, etc.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu May 30 09:03:38 UTC 2024

Electronic Music

Here is another of the sacred/profane contraries that TRP presents to Oed. The bar patrons create “live” electronic music as if it were a jazz jam session with everyone joining in with their axe or using some of the gear in house. It also reminds me of Henry Adams’ dynamo v. virgin especially the description of the St. Louis worlds fair and the glass of the various churches in France that he surveys. 
Using man-made/profane materials to create sacred/sublime or the dynamos powering the lights in St. Louis that Adams can’t convince anyone to see. The glass that the tourists ignore or rapidly survey and move on.

In solidarity,

James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 30 11:47:16 UTC 2024

Electronic Music

Some posts I keep thinking about today, JK Thanks.....I did keep asking myself, Why electronic music?...another communication fail? the music of the spheres turned anti-human?....like V herself at the end?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 30 15:38:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading chapter 3, pg 31, 32

J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
 
> Michael asks:-  sympathetic description of her husband’s infidelity. Like, extremely sympathetic
 
> “It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive”
Not so sure we are being asked to believe her part in ”their failure to communicate has a virtuous motive”. The failure is shared. Self centered patterns of behavior often go unchallenged to avoid the difficulties of honest communication. We never see Mucho shutting Oed down and though he clearly knows of Oed’s infidelity he does not and almost surely would not be accusatory or judgmental. Metzger on the other hand goes into an idiotic rant against do gooder's liberalism over her questions about the bones. She wants someone on her side, but it is not Mucho who has been asked for that or who has shut that down with ideological bullshit.  I see Mucho and Oed’s relationship as tragic rather than a one-sided failure, they are both confused and unsatisfied and needing a change. When they do begin to change and grow into new terrain, they fail to talk it out, ask questions try to understand each other. I do not see this as result of patriarchal dominance, but pain avoidance. It seems to me to speak of a more general atomization that has many causes and no easy solutions. Big divisions lead to small divisions. Already there is no mention of either partner’s parents, siblings, friends. This was not untypical of suburban life but a big change from most of human history.  Later in the novel OM has a dream of making love on a beach with Mucho. This is not a loveless relationship but a failing one and it is not so simple as the idea that Mucho is a male Jerk with no empathy for Oed or for others. 

 Oed is so good at asking questions and getting information from many people in pursuit of understanding and making responsible choices about some very troubling information that extends in many directions: PI- mob connections, Yoyodyne-right wing racist connections,  ancient and modern power struggles within communication media, ownership concentration of wealth in one person’s hands. She has learned to use her outward receptiveness and sympathy  to get at the truth. But sadly she cannot probe at, and seek a more open dialog with Mucho. And, sadly, she is not alone. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu May 30 16:58:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 The Courier's Tragedy

I got in touch with Richard Ryan and he is loosely following along but won’t have time to engage until end of June. My section went part way into the Couriers Revenge after which Richard was going to host the end of the chapter. I offered to take his hosting section and he agreed so the Courier’s Revenge play itself should carry the read into early next week.

The Couriers Tragedy ( bare bones, I wrote this to clarify and offer a reference for the main actions of a play that can be a bit confusing)

Act 1)Duke Angelo of Squamuglia has killed the good Duke of adjacent Faggio 10 years earlier so that his protege the illegitimate son Pasquale can serve as regent until the rightful heir , Niccolo comes of age. The Duke’s plan is to murder Niccolo by getting him to go into a  cannon in a game of hide and seek and then blowing  him away. The loyal-to-Niccolo Ercole saves Niccolo by substituting a goat.
Act 2) l Secretly an older  Niccolo, working for Thurn and Taxis mail carriers. is at the court of Angelo waiting for “a crack at the Duke”. The Duke wants to join the 2 Duchies by marrying his sister Francesca  to Pasquale despite her being Pasquale’s  mother and the Duke’s incestuous lover. Francesca doubts the Church will allow it but Duke Angelo says he will bribe the Cardinal, and he and Francesca have sex . Niccolo tells his real story to court attendant Domenico, who goes to betray him, but tells the loyal Ercole who tortures and kills Domenico, cuts out his tongue and sets it on fire.
  Duke Angelo tortures the cardinal for refusing permission for the incestuous marriage, Ercole hears it and reports back to Faggio of plan for Pasquale to marry his mother. 
 Niccolo hears from a group of Angelo’s men the story of 50 Faggian knights killed near the Squamuglian border right before Niccolo’s father was poisoned. Niccolo says if the 2 events are connected then “Boy, the duke better watch out”. This is overheard by Vittorio.
“Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, “This is my body,” the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying. Altogether, a most anti-clerical scene, perhaps intended as a sop to the Puritans of the time (a useless gesture since none of them ever went to plays, regarding them for some reason as immoral).”
Act  3)Pasquale’s orgy in Faggio  is interrupted by  Faggians disguised as apes and dancing girls who torture and kill him. Gennaro enters and proclaims himself interim ruler until the return of Niccolo
Act 4) Duke Angelo, upset by the coup against Pasquale and sensing the threat to himself writes to Gennaro to appease him, revealing that the ink is from the bones of the dead Faggian Knights. Gennaro is marching toward Squamuglia. Angelo sends the letter via Thurn and Taxis’s rep Niccolo. The Dukes courier Vittorio enters to report on Niccolo’s treasonous words and  Niccolo’s true id is revealed. Furious Angelo, amidst a chill and indirect words orders  a secret pursuit of Niccolo. Everyone knows who is being sent but cold silence prevails.
 Genarro’s army hears from a spy that Niccolo is on his way, they rejoice but grow somber and pray for the protection of St Narcissus when they are told he rides for Thurn and Taxis.
Back at Squamuglia, Ercole is revealed as Domenico’s killer, and hastily tried and killed in  “a refreshingly simple mass stabbing. “
Niccolo, by the same lake where Faggians were killed, reads the Duke’s letter and realizes he is riding toward his restoration,  but then, ”in lithe and terrible silence, with dancers’ grace, three figures, long-limbed, effeminate, dressed in black tights, leotards and gloves, black silk hose pulled over their faces, come capering on stage and stop, gazing at him. Their faces behind the stockings are shadowy and deformed. They wait. The lights all go out.” In Squamuglia, Angelo, unable to muster an army begins an orgy. Gennarro finds the dead Niccolo and Angelo’s blood stained letter, which is miraculously transformed into a full confession of Angelo’s crimes.The Faggians mourn. “But Gennaro ends on a note most desperate, probably for its original audience a real shock, because it names at last the name Angelo did not and Niccolò tried to: He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn, And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn. No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero. Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut;”

Act 5 we are told is anti-climax as Squamuglia is sacked. “It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse. At the end of it about the only character left alive in a stage dense with corpses is the colorless administrator, Gennaro.

Questions:
1)I guess the big question for me is what is this bloody mysterious 17thC murder mystery with its invocation of an entity that is part competing mail service , part expert assassination service for ambitious royals doing in the center of a Pynchon novel about the settlement of a post war  California tycoon’s estate?

Most probably get the gist of what I am thinking. But how would others answer that question?

Let’s hear some other questions, proposals, tentative theories  etc. about this play.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 09:39:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 The Courier's Tragedy

Joseph wrote:

Questions:
1)I guess the big question for me is what is this bloody mysterious 17thC murder mystery with its invocation of an entity that is part competing mail service , part expert assassination service for ambitious royals doing in the center of a Pynchon novel about the settlement of a post war California tycoon’s estate?

“Post war” - at first I thought you meant a postal war…

It sure is a murderous play.

Boilerplate kind of answer: the horror of the occurrences in the play contrasts with the placidity of Oedipa’s life thus far; not unusual for entertainment except in how far into gore it goes -- the fact that it to some extent mirrors real occurrences during and after WWII is meant to be unsettling, but also compelling, leading her further into the mystery.

Speculation: the Hobbesian gestalt of “The Courier’s Tragedy” & the Beaconsfield bones, and the soporific calm of the Inverarity legal proceedings, function as a figure/ground contrast.
Is the seemingly endless parade of revenge a background against which the orderly transfer of assets is taking place, or vice versa?

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 1 14:25:25 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34

So how much is Metzger involved in the manipulation of Oedipa? How much does he direct the events that happen so far?Most lawyers wouldn't seek out a client by searching the local motels, especially not on a Sunday. He seems to know quite more than he admits he knows. Does he lead Oed to The Scope, or is this an accident? Would he know that the ladies bathroom had W.A.S.T.E. graffiti? Would he expect Fallopian to be there? 

On the other hand, he can't really have known that the Paranoids would have gone to the play, or did he give them tickets? He doesn't trust them to get drunk around him, or at least he's too cheap to share. Also the whole Manny Di Presso arrival and departure don't seem to be part of Metzger's plans.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 1 14:30:46 UTC 2024

Poopoo

Joseph wrote:

 ! Nicholas 2 !( inaccurate history Nick 2 didn’t become czar until 1896*)sends Russian flee to SF Bay Area  to “keep Britain and France from (among other things) intervening on the side of the Confederacy.    What were the other things and are they relevant to story? 4 corvettes 2 clippers under rear ad. Popov (probably fictional)

Did TRP get this wrong himself or is he putting wildly inaccurate history in the mouth of Fallopian and the Pinguid society, oddly combined with a real but nitpicky and meaningless possible incident ( Confederate vs Russian ships) of recorded history, and showing that neither the Birch-like PP society nor the educated anti communist corporate lawyer Metzger,  nor the Cornell educated stickler for accuracy, Oedipa, know enough about Russian history to catch this glaring mistake? How many Americans would? Alexander II made the declaration to free the Serfs and was emperor during US civil war and my sense is that Pynchon did know this!  

I've been doing research to add to the Pynchon Wiki on CoL49, and I actually found the Admiral Popov who commanded a squadron that wintered in San Francisco, declared he would defend the city if attacked, and even helped put out a fire on San Francisco wharf. Then catching up with the listserve after the down period, I see Michael found an excellent source with even more details. If you don’t mind Michael, I’ll add that source in the Pynchon wiki.
TRP's research shouldn't be questioned. He's making Fallopian an unreliable character, and much like rabid conspiracy theorists, MF (or Fat Dick) is willing to make the facts fit his conception. Even the two ships named by Fallopian actually belonged to Popov's squadron. The communication blurring is deliberate. The more MF is discussed the more his name & PP become a whole new double entendre.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 1 15:00:09 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch3 The Courier's Tragedy

Aesthetically and psychologically this  light dark contrast  suffuses Pynchon’s work.  The effect  veers from renaissance chiaroscuro  to road runner cartoon with blood.  I get the feeling that Pynchon  wants to pull the dark background of distant events into the foreground of mundane affairs  to amplify both the comedy and the way most human lives are inevitably in  contact with their historical moment, and some cannot avoid either  direct collision, or direct  collusion. Some also prefer escape, which is rarely easy and Pynchon seems to respect that response also.  
   My thought is that for a work of fiction or non-fiction to evoke such a strong curiosity and investigation as Oedipa Maas  gives to The Courier’s Tragedy,  it has to connect to something very real to them, something they need to cope with and understand.  That P in Lot 49 seems to avoid the normal paths of inquiry  and has OM, with her Academic background push into seemingly esoteric avenues seems a bit unrealistic and it is not the norm after V and Lot 49. In later novels the obvious is combined with the circuitous, and I wonder if that accounts in part  for misgivings he seems to have about this novella.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 15:10:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3: 33, 34

I think this sums up the willed ambiguity very well.....Metzger can control all he can as a lawyer preparing contingencies to eliminate while he and Pierce have their way with Oedipa...

But the whole world is beyond his control....

And this is part of P's overall meaning.

Mark

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 1 15:55:38 UTC 2024

Poopoo

You are definitely right on Popov.  Mistake admitted. The article I read was guessing at Pynchon’s source and that source did not list Popov,  but others, like yourself, showed he is named in the records. I obviously also see Fallopian as unreliable with racist tendencies. I just listened to an episode of Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire about his grandparents part in resistance to Mussolini. One of the interesting things about Benito was his willingness to change stories/beliefs  in pursuit of more power. A supreme narcissist. The violence and internal warfare scarred an entire generation. 

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 1 17:34:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 Creeping Horror

Mark posted:

"Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror"
 
> What is the underlying truth of both of them? A theoretical abstractionism? ...is that the creeping horror?

Here we have Blake's contraries blending into synthesis. One ideology in antithesis of the other synthesizing into a creeping horror humanity continues to perpetuate through war, consumption, externalities. All our idealism oozing into degradation and corruption.Just a thought.

In solidarity,

James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 1 17:46:35 UTC 2024

Manny Di Presso

I realize there is no connection, but every time I hear his name it’s spoken/sang by Jimi Hendrix.

There is the fluctuation between actor and lawyer, scuba diving and climbing ladder, hiding under a ‘blue’ tarp and being chased by cosa nostra types in gray suits.

All indications of a bipolar disorder.

Manny di Presso is a frustrating mess!

Metzger not happy to see him. 

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 1 17:57:24 UTC 2024

Poopoo

Narcissistic behavior has a rather large effective casualty radius. Mussolini and recent felons included.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 18:02:12 UTC 2024

CoL49 Creeping Horror

This subject might have the folder heading as “Luddite” with many sub-headers such as “Anarchist” or “Cabayero.”  All *active* Christ figures, overturning the exchange tables in the Temple.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 23:30:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Creeping Horror

Theoretical abstractionism resonates with me in this way....The world moving away from the felt organic reality of the human community...
Lewis Mumford, with some circumstantial evidence that TRP read some of him, tackled this, I think.....and V becoming a non-organic being adumbrates it in V..maybe?

This interpretative theme, if correct, shows its thematic chops fully, almost fulsomely, in ATD I say.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 2 15:06:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Creeping Horror

Mark,
One of the joys of reading Pynchon for me has to be all the reading I find to add to my understanding of his work. Thanks for turning me onto Mumford.

This aligns also with Henry Adams’ the dynamo and the virgin construction of the forces behind human civilization and power.

In solidarity,

James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 2 16:35:02 UTC 2024

Oedipa’s Planetarium

Oedipa continues with Driblette's planetarium metaphor that he is creating universes, but she seeks to project a world that Pierce Inverarity left behind. Why a planetarium and not a movie to define a life? Did Pierce’s life have a “pulsing, stelliferous Meaning” that could only be projected as a universe? 

We know why Driblette makes the comparison, but that doesn’t make sense with Oedipa unless she is just enamored of the idea.

In solidarity,

James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 2 19:18:31 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

The "Shall I project a world?" line I have always read as a world beyond the one she lives in...
Beyond Pierce's esp now that the Trystero has entered. IS she asking herself to project Trystero's world?
And is the world a projectible one---like religions' worlds are?....she is asking herself that because no revelations beyond this world are happening and she is losing her world---her tower; Pierce's projections...

This IS a new cosmic vision....Pynchon's vision is not narrow, not simple, not quotidian....

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 2 20:13:24 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

Pynchon’s vision is cosmic, and I do think Driblette’s metaphor is Pynchon’s response to both critics and his readers. 

However, Oedipa says at the beginning of ch 4 that “it was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, a dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her?”

She then remembers the bond she posted with probate court, identifying it as a monetary valuation of the obstacles she faces. She looks at the notebook with the muted horn where she wrote “Shall I project a world?” Then she says: “If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among the constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.”

Who is the antecedent of “You”? At this point I think she still means Pierce. On another level, if Charles Hollander is correct, then is this Pynchon contemplating a vision of JFK’ assassination in all its complexity and uncertainty? 

I’m not sold on Hollander’s premise. I do find it interesting that the only other lead female character in his novels is in Bleeding Edge. 

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 2 20:19:07 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

Who is the antecedent of “You”? At this point I think she still means Pierce

I find no "You"....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 2 20:20:29 UTC 2024

CoL49 Creeping Horror

After reading Pynchon then retiring shaped more than half of my later life reading, I'd say. Yes.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 2 20:30:20 UTC 2024

COL 49 end of Chapter 3

What happens after the play, as CHAPTER  3 draws to a close, marks  a break between Metzger and Oedipa, and raises questions about Driblette’s nervous evasiveness, and  his passionate portrayal of the play as merely entertainment. 

HERE IS A not very condensed SUMMARY with comments

OM wants to go backstage with Metzger to question the director Randolph Driblette who also played Gennaro.

“Oh, about the bones.” He had a brooding look. 
Oedipa said, “I don’t know. It just has me uneasy. The two things, so close.”

It now becomes obvious that Metz’s urgent desire to leave is more than distaste for the play, In recent events Oedipa has found out that Pierce Inveraritiy’s holdings are quite vast and that there is very dark aspect to some of his business affairs including the purchase of human bones of american GIs from  an ex fascist mafioso,  aerospace weapons investments,  and the ability to run freeways through cemetaries.   The author has foreshadowed the way these shadows will come from Trystero and now in the play the Trystero  has begun to be named and identified in the center of a bloody power struggle. Metz himself may be the legal side of settling the estate but he is also an actor  who has already deceived Oedipa and must understand her “easy”ness may be in doubt. He turns to acting the macho lawyer scolding a ridiculous softheaded witness.

“Fine,” Metzger said, “and what next, picket the V.A.? March on Washington? God protect me,” he addressed the ceiling of the little theater, causing a few heads among those leaving to swivel, “from these lib, overeducated broads with the soft heads and bleeding hearts. I am 35 years old, and I should know better.
” “Metzger,” Oedipa whispered, embarrassed, “I’m a Young Republican.”
 “Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”

This is obviously more about fears in Metzger’s mind about where her questions might lead than the wildly overgeneralized  tough guy put down of her as an idealistic youthful female, which then  leads up to his dubious legal and moral argument over her required loyalty to what is quite likely a criminally acquired estate.

“It isn’t that,” she protested. “I don’t care what Beaconsfield uses in its filter. I don’t care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don’t want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pietà, or cancer . . .” She looked around for words, feeling helpless. “What then?” Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. “What?” “I don’t know,” she said, a little desperate. “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.” 
“Against whom?” inquired Metzger, putting on shades. 
“I want to see if there’s a connection. I’m curious.”
 “Yes, you’re curious,” Metzger said. “I’ll wait in the car, OK?”

In this exchange I am seeing the oft-noted pattern in Pynchon’s characters of the divided loyalties of a woman attracted in 2 directions- both toward the authority figure of the state (or estate), and toward truth that might question and undermine such loyalty( Frenesi, Shasta Fey, Katje, Maxine Tarnow). Her curiosity has been met with  insults. Her request for support can only be understood by Metzger as being “against” someone.  As we have seen earlier, the instincts of this lawyer are to close his eyes to the truth if he thinks it will serve even a potential client. 

OM makes a beautifully written entry backstage to where Driblette stands .”She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.” He discourages her from asking about the play elaborating an argument that it is a cheap horror flick with no meaning, but also, later,  that the words are not the important part but the life-giving vision of the director. She asks about a copy of the text.
“Why,” Driblette said at last, “is everybody so interested in texts?” 
“Who else?” Too quickly. Maybe he had only been talking in general. 
Driblette’s head wagged back and forth. “Don’t drag me into your scholarly disputes,” adding “whoever you all are,”
She asks about the chill silence in the 4th act and finds they weren’t in the original nor were the 3 assassins seen.
He goes on, under the assumption she is a scholar , saying you guys are like puritans about the Bible, hung up with words  and perhaps goes  a bit too far in dismissing the importance of words. His arguments much better crafted than Metzger describing himself as the projector in the planetarium procecting a world. 
He tells her “ you could could fall in love, talk to my shrink….
“Driblette?” Oedipa called, after awhile. His face appeared briefly. “We could do that.” 
He wasn’t smiling. His eyes waited, at the centers of their webs.
 “I’ll call,” said Oedipa. She left, and was all the way outside before thinking, I went in there to ask about bones and instead we talked about the Trystero thing. She stood in a nearly deserted parking lot, watching the headlights of Metzger’s car come at her, and wondered how accidental it had been. Metzger had been listening to the car radio. She got in and rode with him for two miles before realizing that the whimsies of nighttime reception were bringing them KCUF down from Kinneret, and that the disk jockey talking was her husband, Mucho.

Open to questions, theories, rants, whatever.
? “like a lab maze for studying intelligence in tears” ?

? we could do that?
Insolid  verity  and pierced arity. About the best I can do. JT

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jun 3 03:16:46 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

It’s implicit in “…and trace out your Dragon, Whale….”

It may refer to Pierce - or Driblette, or Wharfinger -

 my first impression was it’s a generic “you”:

Like a tour guide, or cab driver - here’s your Parthenon, here’s your London Bridge…

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 3 12:15:16 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

Mine too...generic that is,...

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jun 4 11:52:44 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Thanks for the summary!

Some not completely unrelated thoughts:

Zapf’s Used Books - Hermann Zapf was the designer of the Dingbat font, but also a bunch of other stuff, including the Palatino font and automated justification.

Also a calligrapher, in 1960 he did the Preamble to the United Nations Charter in 4 languages for the Morgan Museum.

https://www.themorgan.org/literary-historical/116614

He also was a consultant for Hallmark Cards in the 1960s and ‘70s, developing a style manual for their lettering artists.

—- regarding the anthology Driblette can’t lend her because somebody took it -

“There was another copy there. Zapf might still have it. Can you find the place?” Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went. “Are you putting me on?”

— does she say, “Are you putting me on?” in response to “can you find the place?” (Like, of course I can find the place?)

- but that seems too mundane to follow a feeling of something dancing in her viscera.

— so do all the other proximate possible meanings I can think of:

 a) she’s incredulous that he loaned out his copy to party unknown & didn’t get it back?

b) you’re putting me on - his name is Zapf?

c) it’s just a throwaway remark to a showering man?

d) an example of the “bad ear” Pynchon deprecated in the _Slow Learner_ intro?

- slowly it dawns on me that the dancing in her viscera is connected to the dance mentioned earlier in that bit about the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero:  “something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late” Which she has.

Maybe the reason Driblette can’t just ask one of the cast for the book back is because whoever he gave the book to is, like, a Man in Black.

Maybe they’ve put the frighteners on him and took his original copy, although that would seem an ineffective way of impeding him.

He seems loath to reveal anything about other interested parties - and imputes an unlikely “scholarly dispute” to explain her and their interest.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jun 4 12:06:28 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Who in the hell showers and talks from it in the visit of a new person, a woman? We have to explain THIS re TRP's story meaning...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 4 15:38:39 UTC 2024

Hap Harrigan

Strangely enough, while the cartoon series was Hop Harrigan, a movie The Hot Heiress with a character named Hap Harrigan exists. 
In a six degrees of Kevin Bacon-like moment, the actor who played Hap was Ben Lyon, who discovered Marilyn Monroe. A-and we all know with whom she had an affair and sang Happy Birthday!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 5 05:30:56 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

On Abbott Elementary (great show) one of the football players justifies to a teammate his doing favors for the teachers and students by saying, “my boundaries are porous” (which I guess is a thing; there’s even an article in PubMed about porous boundaries, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2633920 )

Except for the subject of the Tristero, on which he’s closed-mouthed, Driblette’s boundaries are porous - like Professor Bortz’s later, with the drunken students at his house, and showing the pornographic Courier’s Tragedy to non-credentialed Oedipa …

Plus, with Driblette, there’s also probably an attraction to Oedipa at play. That, and the sweat from the gray-flannel suit (which, isn’t there a movie by that name? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90886.The_Man_in_the_Gray_Flannel_Suit
 (1956)) which makes him shower-prone - I can buy him showering in front of the attractive paying audience member who just told him the play was great.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 5 10:08:26 UTC 2024

Re: Oedipa’s Planetarium

I had to check : who pays for the bond?
https://www.suretybondsdirect.com/blog/who-pays-for-a-probate-bond?campid=21002044922&adgrp=&locinrst=&locphys=9011742&extid=&targetid=&ad_id=&matchtype=&device=m&adpos=&keyword=&_siteentry=1&prtnr=Google&campaign=&adgroup=&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADg0_ytPN4af97Wes1pSYwbdMf7v9&gclid=CjwKCAjwmYCzBhA6EiwAxFwfgFKsbLFir7S7jioVmqaz0BalKn8mJb5mVnAcMQ64f8XOdbjQsc2keBoC3C0QAvD_BwE

“The bond cost is typically paid for from the estate assets.” (Way down the page)

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 7 22:56:47 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Sometimes The glass in shower doors is not see-through but highly textured. I can see it either way,  backstage culture being indeed boundary porous.

I think it is pretty obvious that she stirred up some anxiety with her question, “who else”, and that Driblette’s answer about texts is evasive. The copies of the play he has for the actors don’t have the line about Tristero and the theatrical chill around the unnamed assassins is his dramatic interpretation.  Somehow he had gotten hold of a very obscure version of the play which named the Tristero and likely inspired these effects but also brought some threatening questions and not about his creativity as a director. I personally find his arguments dismissing the importance of texts overblown. It’s all important and more than entertainment alone, we process life experience in art media, lose depth of thought and humane values without it. 

  The Man in the grey flannel suit seems to me a good catch and  likely intended  as a reference to the theme of functionary  corporate culture  displacing individuality, undermining  moral considerations  and obscuring unresolved struggles.  

         CORE SIMILARITIES OF COURIER’S REVENGE TO JFK ASSASSINATION.:

Clandestine European style assassination of rightful leader.
 1). Angelo’s pursuit of power has poisoned a neighboring royal and lured a company of  Faggian soldiers to their death. He has made 1 attempt to kill the heir and place another of his agents on the throne. When he finds the rightful ruler knows what’s up and  is on his way to bring him down he orders a hit. 1)  The CIA has hired Nazis  to gain US ascendance in Italy and Cold War. They planned to provoke a war with Cuba that would have regained it with Mafia help, but were stopped by Kennedy. It becomes clear that Kennedy is after Dulles and Angleton, and they hire their agents to kill him. 

The cover-up, emergence of grey functionary, continued slaughter. 
 2) In  Courier’s Revenge the actual assassins are never caught, the slaughter continues under Gennaro, and the mere use of the name Tristero causes trouble for Driblette, who along with several others ends up buried underwater. 2) LBJ, a powerful political force in the congress and VP, master of compromise but not charismatic becomes President places Warren against his will as nominal head for his credibility of Investigating committee which ends up managed by Kennedy’s enemy Allen Dulles. Problems abound in credibility of proceeding from conflicting eyewitnesses, Oswald claiming to be patsy, then getting shot on live TV in Dallas police station by mob associate Jack Ruby (Rubinstein). Transfer of body to be autopsied by Dr with no such experience. Multiple indices that Oswald was CIA from way back. (Later in 77-79) Congressional investigation admits all signs point to a multi-party conspiracy. ) Lyndon Johnson continues CIA plans for expanded war in Vietnam and cancels other Kennedy actions.  

3) The core power struggle over control of  communication systems: This is the most prophetic aspect of COL 49. The CIA’s greatest success has been  to achieve compliance  from the global media and limit, discredit or ignore dissident voices. They use this power to minimize  and excuse atrocities no matter how horrifying or blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, murderous  etc. This was screamingly obvious with McCarthy and Kennedy marked a change. That change showed up in the Vietnam war which the CIA, FBI and Johnson tried to stifle. Now we have massive government and press efforts to impose control of “misinformation” which amounts to claims of  a monopoly on truth. 

4) Other “coincidences”: The operation that kicked the Vietnam war into high gear in AUG 1964 was called Operation Pierce Arrow. (the Shadow was an aviator) Operational head of CIA JJ ANGLEtOn .  Angleton recruited fascists (including Klaus Barbie) who were  involved in fighting the partisans (who were often Communists) as key to the new war on communism. Angleton was extremely paranoiac. (Paranoids chorus) Governments and especially left-leaning leaders not informed of Gladio, so became secret with only connection to CIA. Angleton had small group of trusted CIA leaders called SIG. They were who opened Oswald CIA Files.Here are 3 lines from Wikipedia profile of Sydney Gottlieb( Hilarius?); 1) Dulles( head of CIA) and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum>", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services> but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol>, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline> before realizing LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
2)Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation>, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUATONE>, later known as the U-2 spy plane <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2>. In 1953, he arranged a safe house <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house> for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. 3)Gottlieb administered LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD> and other hallucinogenic drugs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen> to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson> LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. Hilarius is also the name of a saint from Arles who was demoted in a power struggle with the pope.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 8 05:39:45 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Did Pynchon use  Zapf fonts?  The books I have don’t have font notes , but ATD certainly looks like Patatino.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 8 12:57:38 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Couple more honest thoughts: The whole self exaltation of Driblettes direction is weird  for me on 2 fronts,  1) if the text is so unimportant why didn’t he write his own play ? And how/why did he choose this play in particular?  One possible answer is that he saw a correspondence in events that would speak to the audience or spoke to himself. The Paranoids  saw it as sick but were fascinated, and particularly by the similarity to story of the bones in Fangoso Lagoon.  Again that real story came from a particular incident of Jews murdered in Italy by Nazis.  The play itself sounds awful unless you like torture, and blood  which may be all that is left for America’s viewing pleasure in the following decades of endless war.  

In some ways I feel like Pynchon is showing a country in denial, or just the distance we put between ourselves and the horror that is not just the demonic other, but our unacknowledged deeds,  the bones we sunk into our subconscious and look at as the fascinated teenager staying up late to watch a horror movie with coffins, mutilated corpses and screaming women, the entertainment of imaginary survival. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jun 9 02:02:18 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Couple more honest thoughts: The whole self exaltation of Driblettes direction is weird  for me on 2 fronts,  1) if the text is so unimportant why didn’t he write his own play ? And how/why did he choose this play in particular?


I found it off-putting, but maybe like the shower it was a come-on directed towards Oedipa

He may have thought she would be susceptible because of the first thing she said to him (“it was great”) and she obeyed when he told her to feel his arm:

“she stood before Driblette, still wearing his gray Gennaro outfit. “It was great,” said Oedipa. “Feel,” said Driblette, extending his arm. She felt.”

(- so there are 2 things about which she’s been enthusiastic: the social hall on Lake Isle of Inverarity, and now the horrible play.)

One possible answer is that he saw a correspondence in events that would
> speak to the audience or spoke to himself. The Paranoids  saw it as sick but were fascinated, and particularly by the similarity to story of the bones in Fangoso Lagoon.  Again that real story came from a particular incident of Jews murdered in Italy by Nazis.

Wasn’t it American soldiers, rather?

“For weeks, a handful of American troops, cut off and without communications, huddled on the narrow shore of the clear and tranquil lake while from the cliffs that tilted vertiginously over the beach Germans hit them day and night with plunging, enfilading fire. The water of the lake was too cold to swim….”

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 9 18:21:44 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

> I found it off-putting, but maybe like the shower it was a come-on directed towards Oedipa

> He may have thought she would be susceptible because of the first thing she said to him (“it was great”) and she obeyed when he told her to feel his arm:

> “she stood before Driblette, still wearing his gray Gennaro outfit. “It was great,” said Oedipa. “Feel,” said Driblette, extending his arm. She felt.”

> (- so there are 2 things about which she’s been enthusiastic: the social hall on Lake Isle of Inverarity, and now the horrible play.)

Very interesting observation and almost irreconcilable. But makes sense to me in terms of the thesis that Pynchon has often used important women of his American fictional characters to represent the divided inner life of American popular political tendencies, attracted both to individual freedom and fascistic macho men. But here it is a subset of that division split  between a dream of community amidst a natural( seeming) island of peace, vs the excitement of a bloody  horror drama with some assurance of survival and  proper come-uppance for the monster. 

> Wasn’t it American soldiers, rather?
It is quite likely  based on a real historic incident that I mentioned in an earlier post: Historically this is a reference to the Lake Maggiore massacre  (also 1943) in which a Panzer division killed 56 greek and Italian Jews and threw their bodies in Lake Maggiore. The name of the lake is also from a real historic event( In 1957 an artificial lake was made in Pertulsillo province in Italy, finished in 1962) and called Lago di  Pietra.) ( both from Wikipedia)

It does seem odd that Pynchon is barely disguising a real incident by making the victims US soldiers but perhaps the real story would have been too inflammatory, too similar to Nazi gathering of gold fillings etc. Even though it seems like that is the kind of comparison he wants to make.   The connection to Italian fascism, murdereous  European powers struggles  brought home, and US mafia connections to Cuba and Jack Ruby/Rubinstein are more foregrounded.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 10 14:38:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Summary:

Chapter 4 begins with Oepdipa feeling that revelations pile on each other, each connecting more with the Tristero. She rereads Pierce's testament,trying to unify his life's work into meaning. She attends a Yoyodyne stockholders meeting in a pink quonset building, sitting among old men who all look alike. Black men set up a buffet lunch. The order of business is followed by hymn singing for an hour, two songs are given: the first uses Cornell's alma mater song, and the second uses Aura Lee (the melody for Elvis' "Love Me Tender"). The lyrics of the first proclaim their undying loyalty to Yoyodyne, while the second complains about competitors getting all the best government contracts. The songs are led by the CEO, "Bloody" Chiclitz. In military fashion they are placed into platoons and marched on a tour of the facility. Oedipa gets separated and finds Stanley Koteks, a disgruntled employee who is drawing a muted horn of the Tristero. Intrigued, Oedipa, feigning coquettish ignorance, tries to glean information about Tristero and W.A.S.T.E. He complains about patent clauses in his contract and then describes an invention by John Nefastis, a machine which uses 'sensitives' to run the machine with telepathy, violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. She suggests that she might be a sensitive and asks to get in touch with Nefastis but mispronounces W.A.S.T.E as a word rather than an acronym so Koteks is spooked and proceeds to ignore her. 

Back at the Scope, Fallopian acknowledges that it may be an alternative underground network. He and Metzger argue over whether opposing the patent waiver clause made Fallopian a Marxist. Oedipa thinks about how mail is delivered and a bronze historical marker that described a battle between Wells Fargo riders and mysterious, black-clad masked marauders who massacred them. The only identification being a cross or a 'T'. She goes to Zapf's bookstore where Zapf helps her find a copy of the "Jacobean Revenge Plays" paperback, hinting that there have been others showing interest in the book.

Questions:

Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament? 
Why does the Yoyodyne stockholder meeting and location have so much mundane military terminology? (quonset, gunboats, platoons, etc.)
Does Stanley Koteks name have any more significance or is it just another of Pynchon's more sophomoric names?
How does the Metzger/Fallopian argument about patent waivers impact the story?

Very rushed question development, so if you have others, please share.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jun 10 17:20:41 UTC 2024

Doors of perception COL49

Well we seem to have a bit of a slowdown in engagement with this Pynchon read. Not sure how I intend to carry on if that continues. Not even sure why I have given so much time to reading and re-reading his work. I think at core it is because it is closer than any literary attempt I have encountered to imitate or enact the array of experience and information from the senses , from patterns of behavior , from the larger social forces of myth, power struggles, desires, technologies. People live in narratives, live in breath, live on a planet, live in sounds and symbols, in large and small social patterns, repetition and novelty. We look for meaning, for foundations, for the rules of success, and causes of failure. We look for the aesthetics that give us pleasure and a way to harmonize, to soar, to return to zero. The origin of language is obscured like bones in an unreachable ocean, memories from ancient forests,  my intuition suggest a celebration of the voice itself, of the rhythms of wind and birds and insects, the howls and shrieks of predator and prey, the moonlit music of the earth. At first the many and the one are hard to distinguish but everything must eat, drink water, reproduce, sleep safely, and survival skills become word skills, story skills. Looking for durable technologies writing starts mostly as an accounting system, but becomes narrative, and becomes escape from narrative, word jazz, endlessness.

prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.   Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.  William Blake

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from?
Pynchon, Thomas. 

She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49

Love is a concept by which we measure our pain.   John Lennon

Who loves not, knows not God; for God is love.  1 John 4:8

Some see time as a great circle, when it comes to circles I prefer the wedding dance to the Mexican standoff.    Mojo Werkin 2024

On to chapter 4? Shall I project a world?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 20:32:27 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

TRP was deeply immersed in both Freud and Jung. Each had their own profound discoveries about the most basic components of personal identity, structures of thought and communication, the “meaning” of the “numinous.”

If COL49 explores the state of a world alienated from its “feminine” spirituality, V goes there in SPADES.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jun 10 21:44:01 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

> Chapter 4 begins with Oepdipa feeling that revelations pile on each other, each connecting more with the Tristero. She rereads Pierce's testament, trying to unify his life's work into meaning. She attends a Yoyodyne stockholders meeting ..

Pynchon has been telling us this ( about Tristero) instead of showing it by action.  It is a lot of foreshadowing  with only the stamps  as we move forward and the coincidences in the play to go onThe connection to Pierce Inverarity, his will ,or the nature of his business is never clear apart from the purchase of soldier’s bones  from the Mafia for personal profit and an interest in a secretive postal system with their own stamps,  until Bortz enters the scene with a more complete history of the Tristero. 

> Questions:
 
> Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament? 
That for me is the proverbial 50 thousand dollar question.  Because it is so hard to imagine making that connection from what we know. I begin to think the entire narrative is not meant to be read  as an unfolding event but something looked at in retrospect from the endpoint . Over the course of the novel she gets as far as the first major clue, goes paranoid with doubt despite being presented as the most level headed witness in the narrative,( also a  passionate human prone to lose it when she drinks  too much or is attracted to a man). But before she can move her inquiry further her most substantive lead is sold off in an auction. 
It seems to me that the only thing that makes sense of her passion is the unstated intuition that  PI was part of the new aristocracy who had first developed the Tristero; part of those  who inherited and kept alive a clandestine war over control of the global communication system. Maybe this can be seen in psychological or spiritual terms by returning to her role as Venus rising from the foam, at first perhaps bewildered and entranced by the Olympus scene but finding some some quirky mental diseases and intriguing if troubling  dominance games. You know, wickedly funny, as the critics like to say. Maybe, but for now, aloha.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 23:21:44 UTC 2024

COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

> Again that real story came from a particular incident of Jews murdered in Italy by Nazis.

> Oh, sorry, missed that the 1st time…

Same year, same lacustrine body disposal

Changed to GIs so that the revenge follow-up could involve the Mafia, leading to the aptonym Tony Jaguar chiming with DiPresso’s Jaguar automobile? (“…that XKE I bought while temporarily insane”)

Lake Maggiore - this article seems to indicate the 43 victims were “partisans” (in addition to hundreds of Jews killed)
https://www.summerinitaly.com/guide/museum-of-the-resistance

“To memorialize their lives and deaths, the Casa della Resistenza and Parco della Memoria e della Pace were established. The Park dedicated to Remembrance and Peace is located on the site of a horrible reprisal massacre, with a memorial erected on the spot that 43 partisan fighters were executed by the German Nazi occupying forces on June 20, 1944. In addition, a commemorative stone is inscribed with the names of 1200 Jews of this province who were killed by the Nazis. A granite urn contains ashes from the extermination camp of Mauthausen. And a monument lists partisans who were taken prisoner, refusing to surrender to the fascists. A copper sculpture was erected by the local partisan themselves following the war, in thanks to the Russian partisans who joined their ranks in international unity against Nazi-fascism.”

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 23:29:25 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024. MIsc. re Metzger and Oedipa

Philip Roth's 2008 novel called* indignation *is set in 1951. The protagonist is Marcus and he is 19......he is at college,
has a crucial first date and ells us of his couple earlier ones 

"Mainly there was no more than fumbling and groping thru layers of clothing."......

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 00:01:14 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Backfilling. Mine.

Someone asked "What about that text of (The Courier's Tragedy)?" or close.

I have always thought this about that text. The major Western 'text' is the Bible and since that book's revelations are shown to be ambiguously missing in the usual signalling way in Crying  what TRP gives us instead is a new, secular text.

First, reflect on Courier and its thematic connection to The Trystero. Then tragedy.

Think of this text as an artsy presentation of the meaning of history, as textual art does....(as we read novels and drama, from Shakespeare (and all the Jacobeans) thru *Middlemarch* and *Magic Mountain* and *Gravity's Rainbow and more, more) *
As text capturing history the meaning is that history is brutal, torturing and murdering and Revenge---the major theme of Jacobean
theater---the cycle of history as reaction and counter-reaction, attack and attack back, even JUSTLY but still the cycle of suffering and death. As we read though, we see what Historians say: the text of history is corrupted; we aren't sure of what exactly happened in lots of history; our reading of it changes; stuff we thought we saw is gone, there is new text, new missing text.....how do we see

History?

Is The Trystero responsible for the alternate readings of history in some ways. They do give us an alternative way of communicating; an alternative text ON PAPER, via universal alternative communication (and some actions) ......Later in this story we are going to actually read about another alternative communication. And we are going to read about a perfect anarchist's dance......

Anarchism as bits of something---grace?--alternative ways of being, yes, are elsewhere in all of Pynchon from this to *Against the Day (*and *Inherent Vice*? )

is he Trystero, a self-organizing mail service, an anarchist force in history? The anarchist force?...

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 06:59:51 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - procreational note

So while Oedipa is having sex with Metzger, she meets Fallopian.

After Metzger departs (“the big lummox, she’s glad he backed out” to quote sweet Betsy from Pike) having left her unimpregnated so far as any textual indication - Koteks enters the picture.

Could be a reference to egg cycle. Fallopian and Koteks both appear recurrently, don’t they?

Why would Pynchon choose these names?

A reminder of a monthly cycle she has to deal with while she is perambulating?

A way to underline her femininity?

I like and agree with Mark’s comment that we can’t insist that character names be excessively meaningful, so I don’t think it’s a way to connote the passage of time exactly - though of course if it were, it’d be about 2 weeks from The Scope to the Yoyodyne meeting.

I saw on Qi a bit where they said the Italian anatomist Fallopian actually named them “tubas” because of their shape, but the Italian plural was “tube” - so eventually everyone just called them tubes.

Almost a post horn reference…

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 09:18:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - procreational note

Character names with TRP are often just good for a quick one-off smirk. But I think that ALL of these names having to do with the female reproductive system is too much smoke to be smirked at.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 10:02:32 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Reading - procreational note

Yeah, so What is That about?....Oedipa's quest--and fate--is a woman's one? She is akin to V--the feminine principle in history?--with a new outcome? Maybe?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jun 11 16:35:43 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

I like this reflection. It seems astutely insightful.  I have even suggested in earlier writings that Pynchon is ambitious enough to have supplied an alternate text to the Biblical one that shapes so much western culture.. The difference is that he does not tell his audience what to think about the actions and ideas even of his nastiest characters. History and myth and human behavior and beliefs become the text. This wide open, interconnected musical form allows in experiences and stories as impossible as those from  the Bible, talking lightning, time machines, a hollow earth, worlds in sewers. The effect for me is to abandon safe roadmaps and connect dots for myself, always subject to new information. In this mode of processing language  and truth claims, deepest convictions get challenged and live or die only with profound inner change and genuine research. 

 The place where I question one aspect of your presented interpretation of the trystero/tristero  is something I have wondered about and part of why I wanted to re-read the novel. It is the transition from Tristero to W.A.S.T.E. The question is whether these are really the same or rather distinct  branches of the original phenomena and metaphorically represent very different historic or social  tendencies. The history as Bortz outlines it shows a divergence within Tristero between those who see it as a tool to control any incursions into the privilege and power of the elite, but by using it in populist causes it has led to a more anarchistic branch and that is what Oedipa witnesses in the W.A.S.T.E  mail system . Bortz’s overview includes a lot of real history. Only the Tristero itself  and its key players are purely fictional. The question of what the initials stand for is only given one explanation which is ambiguous . We await silent Tristero’s Empire. 

I would also say that Pynchon’s text is much more than the Courier’s Revenge but it is true that he is identifying a core pattern of political history and the pursuit of power.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 12 09:16:32 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Thank you both, for those wide-ranging thoughts.

It made something surface in my mind - I’m not real fond of Tristero, they seem to just be another faction with dubious claims and a propensity for violence.

WASTE, though, seems like a different group, and a little more likeable. Their use of the posthorn comes off as provocative appropriation, like a Che poster on a dorm room wall.

Oedipa doesn’t seem to be exactly lining it out that way, though, and continues to be fascinated with the historical Tristero.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 12 10:34:54 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

with the Word as text I agree with this:

> I have even suggested in earlier writings that Pynchon is ambitious enough to have supplied an alternate text to the Biblical one that shapes so much western culture..

I see them as the same, evolutionarily so. The Trystero is the anarchic force in history.

The question is whether these are really the same or rather
> distinct  branches of the original phenomena and metaphorically represent very different historic or social  tendencies

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jun 12 14:26:00 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

> with the Word as text I agree with this:
 
> I have even suggested in earlier writings that Pynchon is ambitious enough to have supplied an alternate text to the Biblical one that shapes so much western culture..

> I see them as the same, evolutionarily so. The Trystero is the anarchic force in history.

I guess for me that would depend on the way anarchy is defined, whether a chaotic and uncontrolled expression of will or a political philosophy favoring an absense of hierarchical power structures where decisions are either shared or individual choices. People use the word both ways and I don’t know how you are intending it.

The thing about the Trystero as presented in the  CR Play and later in Bortz’s research is that it can be an instrument to protect hierarchic power and privilege whereas Waste looks to be more about the subterranean communication of people cut off from power but retaining their own connections to each other, so I see Waste as more easily fitting into anarchism as self organizing resistance to rulers. 

Trystero in my thinking is more like the clandestine aspect of both the powerful and those resisting the powerful, from the Great Game or the Cold War to resistance movements in WW2, union organizers, dark web,  and the general resistance to being bossed around exercised by poets, children, feminists, activists  trysting lovers etc.  I see Pynchon using it here to suggest the  more hidden aspects of what people call the deep state, the kind of things uncovered by the Church Committee or the Nixon Watergate hearings. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 03:18:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - 4 brief notes from earlier chapters

1) Oedipa spread a blanket and poured booze into cups made of white, crushed, plastic foam.

—- styrofoam cups still kind of a novelty?

(Actually, styrofoam is a misnomer, I just learned: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/styrofoam-history )

2) Fellow who’s chasing me,” allowed Di Presso, holding the cup between his teeth so it covered his nose and looking at them, arch.

—— party behavior, confirming his goofiness

3) From the ad for Fangoso Estates - night 1, Echo Court

“One of Inverarity’s interests,” Metzger noted. It was to be laced by canals with private landings for power boats, a floating social hall…

—— floating! I didn’t catch that before

4) …in the middle of an artificial lake, at the bottom of which lay restored galleons, imported from the Bahamas; Atlantean fragments of columns and friezes from the Canaries; real human skeletons from Italy;

—— ooh, foreshadowing the skeletons!

Also, the list, which I never paid much attention to before, is almost a “spoils of colonialism” list

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 07:12:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 3 Re: Hap Harrigan & Metzger’s diatribe

So it was “Hop” not “Hap” - minor proofreading error, or intentional evidence of Metzger’s ballistic state: “he’s even mangling his words”?

Metzger: “Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”

Mansplaining, textbook.

He imputes all this from Oedipa’s wish to talk to Driblette.

Admittedly, he’s been sensitized by DiPresso’s threat of a lawsuit. But what a jerk!

She wasn’t joining in that action or any other, & even if she were, he’d still be getting paid.

She’s interested in the play. This is completely outside the scope of his objections, and presumably of his mental process as well.

He’s ridiculing her youth- but much older than she can he be?

The text says, “Some twenty-odd years ago, Metzger had been one of those child movie stars” - between 1934 & 1944 - if he was 6 in 1940, then he himself would be barely 30 in 1964.

(the Greek fisherman in “Cashiered” bears a lot of similarities to Zorba (1964) but that’s clearly not a timeline determinant)

- there was a thread on this list many years ago in which someone mentioned in a discussion of CoL49 that there were at that time such phenomena as liberal Republicans. Oedipa, like Hillary Rodham, identified as a “Young Republican.”

https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/september-2019/when-hillary-clinton-was-a-teenage-republican/

“[Hillary] was … spirited in her support of Republican presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater in high school, parading through the halls in a “Goldwater Girl” sash”

There’s no mention at all of the other political party in CoL49, is there?

It’s tempting to speculate about Pynchon grappling with a Republican family heritage, set against the panoply of loons exemplified by Goldwater - although Goldwater himself was far from the looniest - and how the conflict between Pierce’s Fangoso Lagoon vision of society and the “lived reality” of a lot of other people who by default and probably even by design were excluded or “disinherited” from it could’ve led to a re-examination of values that may have been as confusing to him as it was to Oedipa -

But even if that’s true, it’s intermingled with layer upon layer of other interesting stuff anyway, stuff that’s more explicitly mentioned in the text.

But on the same tangent, just poking around, this article
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/how-the-morning-news-helped-dallas-become-the-city-of-hate-6430851

Was pretty interesting - new to me:

Dealer Plaza is named after the George Dealey, founder of the Dallas News. The park, with a 12 foot statue of George Dealey, was a Works Progress Administration project.

Dealey’s son, Ted, had been an anti-KKK crusader in the 1920s, and a supporter of the New Deal, but by 1963, he famously ran a hostile ad in the Dallas News on November 22. The paper, like its publisher, had taken a far-right turn - the article details an earlier incident when Ted Dealey as a guest at a White House luncheon for publishers launched an intemperate diatribe.

Anyway, guys like that, displaying unremitting hostility, unsmiling rich dudes - nowadays the well-known face of Republicanism - Metzger & Dealey the larva and pupa, Trump, Abbott, etc the imago…

Crises of conscience among the more intelligent and less bellicose people under the canopy of the Republican tent…

My mom among them, it was clear in the 1970s the whole party was unreasonable & she switched.

My dad stayed a moderate Republican till he got dementia (correlation is not causation, though) but my uncle who was even farther right in the ‘60s (had a bomb shelter & worked for Dow Chemical) was disgusted by Bush 43.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 07:20:44 UTC 2024

What do you want, good grammar or good taste?

(Remember that Winston ad?)

Earlier:
“Dealey Plaza is named after the George Dealey, founder of the Dallas News. The park, with a 12 foot statue of George Dealey, was a Works Progress Administration project.”

Egads!

Maybe something like

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, which was a WPA project, boasts a 12 foot statue of George Dealey, founder of the Dallas News.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 13 09:01:15 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch 3 Re: Hap Harrigan & Metzger’s diatribe

Interesting enough, Hap Harrigan was a character in a movie named “The Hot Heiress”, and the actor who played that role, Ben Lyon, who became a movie executive and discovered, drum roll please…

Norma Jean Dougherty otherwise known as Marilyn Monroe. We know who she had an affair and sang Happy Birthday to.

A “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” moment. Still I don’t think that was accidental or a typo.

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 09:02:25 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch 3 Re: Hap Harrigan & Metzger’s diatribe

You said before - but I didn’t catch it (-;

Thanks!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 15:01:56 UTC 2024

very sideways--if at all---related to Thomas Pynchon

There was a 20th French intellectual who wrote some highly acclaimed books on subjects we know Thomas read about by others. His name was Jacques Ellul.
The most famous book is THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY. ...(no clue TRP ever read him, of course) but.........a couple connections.....He was a Christian and one of his last books, put together from some of his writings by others and after his death was called The Humiliation of the Word Paperback – October 14, 2021 by  Jacques Ellul
<https://www.amazon.com/Jacques-Ellul/e/B001ILM8UU/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1>
  (Author), Joyce Main Hanks
<https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2?ie=UTF8&field-author=Joyce+Main+Hanks&text=Joyce+Main+Hanks&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books>
  (Translator), Ted Lewis
<https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_3?ie=UTF8&field-author=Ted+Lewis&text=Ted+Lewis&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books>
  (Contributor), & 1 more
<https://www.amazon.com/Humiliation-Word-Jacques-Ellul/dp/1532642563/ref=pd_scr_dp_alt1_d_d_sccl_3_2/141-4957400-1644107?pd_rd_w=1gdZF&content-id=amzn1.sym.2518befe-f203-4b06-b73c-15190b673369&pf_rd_p=2518befe-f203-4b06-b73c-15190b673369&pf_rd_r=3Z2RXB3SYA7XPJKNDX2D&pd_rd_wg=I4WnD&pd_rd_r=fccc4fa9-d29c-40ef-b7c1-74df2ad4a5cd&pd_rd_i=1532642563&psc=1#>

A major theme of this book---*Propaganda* is his second most famous title---could be summed up by this P-lister as Pynchon's showing how modern media, American society, does humiliate the Word, which maybe isn't The Word any longer, so to speak.....

and he also wrote a book called *Anarchism and Christianity* in which anarchism---that strain of still-to-be determined meaning in TRP's work-- is (simply) defined as non-violent resistance to authority and which Jacques finds to be very strong in The Bible.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 15:05:06 UTC 2024

very sideways--if at all---related to Thomas Pynchon

I have only read some of the two major books and long ago.....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jun 13 22:05:11 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

> Back at the Scope, Fallopian acknowledges that it may be an alternative underground network. He and Metzger argue over whether opposing the patent waiver clause made Fallopian a Marxist. Oedipa thinks about how mail is delivered and a bronze historical marker that described a battle between Wells Fargo riders and mysterious, black-clad masked marauders who massacred them. The only identification being a cross or a 'T'. She goes to Zapf's bookstore where Zapf helps her find a copy of the "Jacobean Revenge Plays" paperback, hinting that there have been others showing interest in the book.

> Questions:
 
> Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament? 
> Why does the Yoyodyne stockholder meeting and location have so much mundane military terminology? (quonset, gunboats, platoons, etc.)
The War economy(WW2) was highly profitable for the US because we were selling to the UK. A large part of the Cold War was to retain that economic flow through military spending and some of the early economic boons like controlling Iranian Oil via a coup. The war with communism was also a war against former colonies controlling their own resources. This was spurred on by the loss of Cuba with its economic benefits both to the Mafia and several others and a powerful movement to  achieve rocket and nuclear weapons dominance to hit Russia with a first strike before they achieved parity.  Because the military budget was replacing a peacetime economy and Eisenhower warned that it threatened peace, those still not experiencing prosperity  and democratic process. The tendency of the lead contractors was ultra patriotic, militaristic and  hierarchical . Howard Hughes, who I see as a prime model for PI fit that model. I grew up in Silicon Valley and many friends worked for NASA, Lockheed Martin etc.
> Does Stanley Koteks name have any more significance or is it just another of Pynchon's more sophomoric names?
> How does the Metzger/Fallopian argument about patent waivers impact the story?
Continuing that theme of the military mindset of post war California capitalism, Metzger represents his late investor owner’s stake in the inter corporate competition and he resorts to extreme arguments and accusations of Marxism over what is essentially a traditional libertarian and american idea of benefiting from your own innovation. The New Deal is fading into memory, a college education for OM was compliant and patriotic to the point of thinking fondly of Joe McCarthy. Fallopian really is a bit ideologically inconsistent but the issue he brings up was real and even when independent inventors came up with highly effective technology more than a few were cheated out of the benefits by corporate power plays. Fallopian’s argument is that Metzger’s ideas sound like Biblical fundamentalism. 

The songs in Yoyodyne still made me laugh. Any thoughts on Clayton Bloody Chiclitz's name?

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 14 09:21:49 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch 4

Stanley Koteks name, a homophone for the sanitary napkin, has a military background. The cellucotton that provides absorbency came from WWI, where it was developed for bandages. The nurses recognized its value and began to use the bandages for themselves. After the war, Kimberley-Clark, the company who made cellucotton needed a market. A Winifed Heitmeyer designed the pad, but the patent was assigned to a subsidiary of Kimberley Clark, sort of the very patent theft that Stanley complains about.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 14 09:54:00 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch 4

Pynchon loves military connections.....

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 08:16:51 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

1) Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament?

Good question!
- what if Pierce didn’t leave enough to cover his debts - like that guy in “A Man in Full” maybe the whole empire was a house of cards
- maybe they are liquidating (selling the stamp collection, eg)
- anyway, if that’s the case, maybe she seeks meaning in non-financial terms and follows her liberal arts training to pursue the alternative post phenomenon
- or, maybe she sees Tristero as a/the wreaker of Pierce’s downfall, and is trying to figure out which of his activities brought on their wrath

 - if Pierce represents JFK - but his shtick is totally different - but if he somehow does anyway, maybe her efforts are linked to the idea of trying to keep the New Frontier vision alive?

2) Why does the Yoyodyne stockholder meeting and location have so much mundane military terminology? (quonset, gunboats, platoons, etc.)

- of all the Pynchon songs, imho, “Glee” is the least clever. It’s not bad, but it’s more MAD Magazine than it ought to be. However, it does display not just hardware names but company names as well, and positions Yoyodyne at the back of the line. Did Pierce bet on the wrong horse in the arms race?

- How about those preparations for the lavish feast, apparently a typical lunch for employees, going on in the background (“Around them all, Negroes carried gunboats of mashed potatoes, spinach, shrimp, zucchini, pot roast, to the long, glittering steam tables, preparing to feed a noontide invasion of Yoyodyne workers.”)

Paternalism?  Another demonstration, like the songs, of company esprit de corps?

Bigcos are still pounding out corporate anthems, but (as you probably know) IBM had them going way back, and on a Yoyodyne-tier scale (article first lists a bunch of 21st century ones)

https://blog.kickresume.com/worst-corporate-anthems/

OK, let's now shake off all you think of contemporary corporate anthems and time travel a bit to see what it was originally like to sing a song about your company.

Back in the days — in the first half of the 20th century — corporate songs were *meant to be sung on daily basis* and with all solemnity. And that's what was happening at the beginnings of IBM:

*“For 37 years, the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation of good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.”*

And then Harry Evans, a man who “loved to sing and enjoyed setting his own lyrics to popular songs” took it to another level in 1925. His love for singing was so contagious that he literally made the whole IBM sing:

*“If Watson sang, IBM would sing. As with the dress code, Watson did not order IBM to sing. That bit of corporate culture started with Harry Evans. Outgoing, attention-seeking, good-natured, wired with energy and shorter than every other man in the room, Evans was always the guy with a joke, or the guy willing to laugh at a joke. Watson liked him and promoted him.” *The IBM songbook

Evans went on to print a booklet of his IBM songs to make it easier for the employees to sing them at company sales conventions and other gatherings. The songbook, a thin paperback volume of 54 pages, entitled Songs of the IBM - Fellowship Songs of International Business Machines Corporation <https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/songs-of-the-ibm.pdf>
Served as a bible that packed all company songs.

The songbook included masterpieces such as “March On With IBM”, “To Our I.B.M. Girls” or “Our President's Motto: THINK”. If you want to get a gist of what the music sounded like, check out a tinny recording of Ever Onwards <https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/wav/everonward.wav> and Hail to the IBM
<http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/wav/hailtoibm.wav>.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 08:35:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

> 1) Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament?

It’s a very good question. In fact, why does she fuck Metz?  He’s a little bit of a turn-on, but sex (per se) is not her motivation. From the start, it is a battle of wits.  But WHY?  It’s almost as if she’s using her new “power” as a tool to dig into the “corrupt” world of REAL Estate!  (The ONLY “real” wealth).

Good question!

Yes!  BUT!  Are any of these “speculations” suggested anywhere in the text?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 09:38:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Peirce does not represent JFK. Period.

2) Because Oedipa cannot understand Pierce's "testament", his meanings and The Trystero needs understanding. As we read, she suspects some kind of elaborate hidden plot and The Trystero seems elaborate and mysterious---like good plots do.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 15 11:11:41 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Part of the reason that I've become intrigued with the use of military language/jargon is that Pynchon writes CoL49 with Eisenhower's Farewell Address fresh in the country's mind. From the beginning, Oedipa's reference to bathrooms as latrines rang hollow. What kind of Cornell graduate and housewife talks like that without having served in the military?

As I was rereading the farewell address, some of the lines below follow Fallopian, Koteks, and later Oedipa in San Francisco's thoughts:

"a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the people of this earth.”

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

“This world in arms …is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.”

“We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people….”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 12:19:25 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

> Yes!  BUT!  Are any of these “speculations” suggested anywhere in the text?

- it’s really just one speculation: that the estate was broke. The other ideas followed from that.

I mentioned it because it’s an intriguing possibility which never occurred to me before.

It’s suggested by Metzger’s grouchiness, by his quitting, by their selling Pierce’s beloved stamp collection, and by no mention of beneficiaries - the debts have to be covered first & if a shortfall were obvious, it wouldn’t matter who they were.

Then also the many different types of holdings suggest a business conglomerate, a phenomenon on the upsurge in 1964 but already headed toward a downturn later in the ‘60s - a well-informed author would’ve been aware of vulnerabilities in a conglomerate structure (and possibly objectionable things about them from ethical points of view)

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/11/the-forgotten-history-of-how-1960s-conglomerates-derailed-the-american-dream/

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 12:22:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

The implication, I think, in the book is that his estate is mucho wealthy, so to speak.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 15 12:52:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

"Pierce does not represent JFK. Period."

While I don't think Pierce represents JFK, I do think the book is a response to the Kennedy assassination. I don't have the New Frontier view of JFK as much as the Seymour Hersh, Dark Side of Camelot impression. Joe Kennedy manipulated the mafia, a closer stand-in for the Tristero than the CIA, and they had many reasons to hate JFK, especially after helping to fix Illinois and then having RFK as AG going after them full force. 

The speculation of the mob's hand in his assassination has significant support, and I can see them being lured into the job by a CIA who also hated Kennedy. Dulles then chaperoning the Warren Commission further supports that speculation.

I also think that the Military Industrial Complex's continued rise deeply impacted Pynchon's writing CoL49, and if the speculation is true that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam after his re-election (which I don't believe), then the MIC would also have it out for him, making their, not Pierce's, connection to Tristero more likely.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 13:00:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

no mention of beneficiaries

THIS seems to me the most OBVIOUS missing element of the story.  I can’t think of any inheritance stories that don’t involve intrigue and jealousy, revolving around the beneficiaries that will be revealed at the reading of The Will.  Like, who cares about what is being auctioned (an asset just changing its liquidity)?  We JUST WANT THE MONEY!!!

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 15 13:25:33 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

I'm with David, where are the beneficiaries? If Pierce had a wife, with or without kids, wouldn't that be a real poke in the eye naming Oedipa, a past girlfriend, as the executor? The sale of the stamps seems obvious: Oedipa doesn't want them, no one to inherit them, and as a plot device, it sets up the ending.

Pierce comes across more like Howard Hughes, no family, no beneficiaries, a possible stranger inheriting the fortune because he did Hughes a favor. Oedipa seems to have been the only meaningful relationship in his life. Metzger doesn't claim friendship or even close business relationships. When I think of Micky Wolffmann from Inherent Vice, I see the complete opposite of Pierce. Many of the other uber-wealthy men of the Pynchon world have families, usually ones they regret, ones they cheat, ones they despise. Pierce is a ghost, who tells no tales, only his business interests and Oedipa's memories speak about his character.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 15:08:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

I think The Crying is about America, with its recent (mostly) historical baggage, at the time it is set.

The Trystero goes back in history long before Kennedy's assassination and I see no connection myself.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 15:09:11 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

That is who/what the ending is about, yes?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 15:11:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

I do not see Mickey Wolfman as a complete opposite to Pierce. A different Secret Sharer, maybe.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 15:39:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Pynchon doesn’t write about current events or politics. He doesn’t even (just barely) write about historic events. His aim is much higher, and deeper and abstract and universal.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 15:49:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

If this is a difference between us, I think this and every novel is also about America....he is an American novelist...
and a world-historical novelist overtly in a couple of the novels...

He "lets it [America] unfold", with insightful originality in every book.....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 15 16:04:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

> Chapter 4 begins with Oepdipa feeling that revelations pile on each other, each connecting more with the Tristero. She rereads Pierce's testament,trying to unify his life's work into meaning.

I wanted to repeat an earlier thought that I feel more strongly about. The foreshadowing around Tristero and particularly its connections to the PI testament comes ahead of the evidence for Tristero or its connection to anything but the play, a drama which has no inherent relation to PI or the testament. Even looking back to Ch.1 and the malign external forces that keep her trapped, this foreshadowing sets us up to be confirmed by the unveiling of the Trystero question.  I think it is obvious that the narrative voice is looking at events in a kind of dark retrospective reverie rather than as they happen. 

Thanks for the Eisenhower speech details, even more relevant than I thought.  I think there had to have been some exchange between Ike and the incoming Kennedy that had to do with the content of this speech . Certainly Kennedy was seeing it in the budget and then confronted with it at the Bay of Pigs invasion originally endorsed with some qualifications by Eisenhower. This was as serious a  turning point as you get in US history where Kennedy stood against the CIA and later with the missile crisis against the entire Joint Chiefs to end things without going to either a conventional invasion or later to the nuclear first strike urged by the joint chiefs. 

I don’t think Kennedy refers to Pierce Inverarity but I see a psychological connection to the same world and mystique, and the central event of sudden unexplained death of a powerful character who seems to own half the town.  It  is just weird that while  OM refers to other political figures of the time, she fails to mention JFK at all.  It is an absence that begs to be filled. The ambiguity of the actual estate, and absence of any mention of the instructions about beneficiaries  is to my mind intentional. We ask the same kind of questions about P.I.  that are being asked about  the murder of the president; who assumes power, will his will be honored, how did he die?  Kennedy was also the kind of man who would go fishing for Marlin in Mazatlan with Hollywood types and a seducer of women, friend of some mafia, Vegas and LA entertainers. But while P.I. was connected to that circle he was a loner who hid beneath mask-like impersonations meant to entertain. It makes sense to see O.M. as  drawn to the biggest event in her direct experience, and to see a public parallel  which for a nation in love with the handsome youthful Kennedy was cut off in mystery and confusion by assassination.  The Couriers revenge acts as the substitute for the investigation of the assassination in Oedipa’s world which she is finding to be weirder, darker and more dangerous than she had understood. It provides a narrative with mysterious and unsatisfying gaps and resonates with questions that have already arisen about P.I. ’s world. Metzger, who willfully closes his eyes to the Paranoids minor shenanigans, just as the Warren commission seems to do over many significant questions, wants to suppress her curiosity and resorts to insulting her to stop her inquiry.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 18:09:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

I don’t think there’s any difference between us. Moby Dick is a high American bar to meet. American does not have to mean parochial.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 19:28:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Absolutely, and there is NOTHING parochial about Pynchon in his works, imo. I think you, David, are correct that this--he---is not about "current events"--that's almost too obvious to say---and, despite Jay Gould in this one, Nixon in GR, NY Trump in Bleeding edge, Ben Franklin a contemporary in M & D, none of them are about "politics"....but the deep patterns in America, from Christers--AtD--through Hofstadter's American conspiracy KIND of insights, he's there. Brilliantly...Originally. Deeply. I allude to his metaphors and shit all the time in discussion groups....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 19:49:44 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

Echo and Narcissus

Echo is forever, attempting to connect to her object of love. But she is cursed, gagged, able only to repeat the last words spoken by her lover. And Narcissus cannot see her as she speaks, captured himself with his own image.  And hearing only his own words of praise, he is locked in a sensory chamber, away from all troubles, LIFE, forever.

At one level, Oedipa is Echo, and Metz is Narcissus.  But it should be noted that BOTH of the participants are bound, restrained, locked away from the world *LIFE* that continues around and despite them. They are in a contract for mutual destruction. So the Echo Court playground is full of co-dependents.

But it might be noted that Echo is essentially providing Narcissus a continuous flow of heroin.  She could stop speaking to him, removing the chain of herself from Narcissus.

Not sure where this is going.

David Morris

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 20:02:44 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

In terms of the yin/yang of masculinity and femininity, This is an understandable pairing.

“The Receptive” and “The Creative” are the two primary trigrams of the I Ching.  Here, Narcissus spews forth self-praise into the world, and it is met with a purest reception possible: perfect mirroring of praise.  But the problem is that the input and the feedback are a closed loop, so ENTROPY is inevitable.

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 22:03:51 UTC 2024

Fwd: Gospel and Postai System

Gospel and Postal System

Initiated by Darius the first of Persia (  522-480 BC), the first known postal system was not for the benefit of the general populace. It began as a courier network, which was devised as a means of sending official documents to the various outposts of his empire. Later, the Romans created stations, or inns provided food and fresh horses for official couriers. Personal correspondence was for the most part sent from one location to another when a traveler happened to pass by. Letters distributed among the early churches were carried by the numerous missionaries who moved from city to city. These epistles helped to foster a sense of community among far-flung believers .---A History of Christianity, Collins and Price.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 05:23:38 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

There’s a lot in there, that’s for sure. It’s been said before, you’re both right - but wait, there’s more (-;

- not just American, but human nature
- multiple ways to interpret
- Easter eggs
- intertextual references (Dandelion Wine eg)
- intricate plotting
- callbacks
- links between works in the oeuvre (“yibble” et al)

Does anyone have an authoritative reading?
Do we even desire one?
- narrow it down like the cattle paths in Chicago in AtD? nah, not that much
- broaden it out to mean whatever one feels like? that’s obviously not right either

That’s what I like about a group read: I usually know what I think, to begin with, but reading other people’s ideas gives me new ideas. Between that and the new perspectives from rereading, it refreshes my experience of the story. So, thanks for that!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 05:59:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading chapter 4 - the mute

All that historical stuff is pretty factual: https://stampaday.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/thurn-und-taxis-northern-district-18-1863/



“If she’d thought to check a couple lines back in the Wharfinger play, Oedipa might have made the next connection by herself.”

Trying to unpack that. Back from what?

The “next connection” is probably the mute in the post horn, right? And all the Thurn and Taxis stuff.

In her meeting with Genghis Cohen, after he mentions dandelion wine, she has one of those pre-epileptiform moments which precede revelation.

The meeting wraps up chapter 4, it’s a pretty big deal.

Until then the couplet she’s been concerned with is “No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.”

Like, what is Trystero (with its languid, sinister blooming) is the question that drew her in.

So with Genghis Cohen she learns (or, confirms the exposition in the Courier’s Tragedy”) it was like a Counterforce to the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly.

And how it relates to the meaning of the odd symbol, which is what she was leading up to asking Stanley Koteks after she saw him doodling it.

“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it’s a mute.”

Going back just a couple (three) lines, conveniently provided in Chapter 3:

“He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,
 And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.”

She’d have to be pretty sharp to’ve gotten that from the play - but this is one of many “it was foretold” moments. And it did stick in her mind, which is pretty sharp after all. But it’s nice to have Cohen line it all out, adding historical perspective, in his comfortable, many-roomed domicile/office.

Even much earlier, there’s a teaser, not quite a hint: w/r/t Pierce’s stamp collection - “what after all could the *mute* stamps have told her?”

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 09:01:29 UTC 2024

Authoritative.....

Theiss: All first-rate novels/novellas have different ways of being read.
Authoritatively.

The Crying of Lot 49 has THAT as part of its subject and theme....

Does anyone have an authoritative reading?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 16 11:15:44 UTC 2024

Gospel and Postai System

Remarkably similar division for uses of a messaging system to what we see in  Lot 49’s glimpse into   WASTE vs legal mail in all its uses. The Tristero vs Thurn and Taxis  history points to similar divisions.  The issue of who has access to private communication is still with us and surely has profound implications.  Ever increasing state secrecy vs ever diminishing personal privacy of communication.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 16 21:21:21 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

What a writer writes about is what he writes about. As you admit Pynchon writes about many events in history, about individuals in history,  about real people imagined within his story, and in contemporary novels he writes about  events of his own time as you mention below.( “ despite" is your caveat and requires some rigorous defense, I for one tend to think he is multivalent and inclusive rather than putting forth gnostic secrets alone, though perhaps that too).

….despite Jay Gould in this one, Nixon in GR, NY Trump in Bleeding edge, Ben Franklin a contemporary in M & D,
none of them are about "politics"....but the deep patterns in America, from Christers--AtD--through Hofstadter's 
American conspiracy KIND of insights, he's there. Brilliantly...Originally. Deeply. I allude to his metaphors and shit all the time in discussion groups....

  I prefer not to overload the word “about” as I feel David M’s statement does when he says 

"Pynchon doesn’t write about current events or politics. He doesn’t even(just barely) write about historic events. “ 

 Pynchon obviously and demonstrably does include these subjects in his writing and we are invited as readers into a particular view of those things in his novels, often more than one view . What may be his " higher aim” in  including those things ( history, current events, social issues, political ideas, myth along with jokes, songs, human’s stuck and unstuck, humans  likable and loathsome, visits to alternate worlds)  has led to a whole academic and literary genre and hundreds of essays. Claiming it boils down to an unstated higher aim is likely to be a thesis with few takers and limited buy-in.  As soon as you or anyone tries to say what those higher aims are you are likely to find yourself  staring at your own image in the momentarily still waters. 

As Michael Bailey notes above

> Does anyone have an authoritative reading?
> Do we even desire one?
> - narrow it down like the cattle paths in Chicago in AtD? nah, not that much
> - broaden it out to mean whatever one feels like? that’s obviously not right either

Somewhere in between, with good attention to the text and a willingness to mine digressions, mythic patterns  and references there is plenty to write and think about and try to understand.

My current work in this read, that is, to bring out a coherent  argument about the way COL 49 refers  among other things to the JFK assassination, is not intended as a definitive or final reading but reflects my own growing sense that such a reading makes sense  of a novel that in many ways does not make a lot of sense without it. It is not the only intention of the novel, but part of a wholistic look at that time and what he saw in it. It is most likely to be acceptable only to those who see that  murderous event as the result of a profound power struggle , and as a turning point in America’s direction. The thing is, this is hardly an outlier viewpoint considering Pynchon’s overall development of  the nature of historic forces ( chronologically arranged)  from M&D ,through V, to ATD to GR, to the more contemporary work. They all posit powerful, violent organizations both political and private using technologies, money and political power for their grandiose aspirations. 

How is Pynchon’s description of the role of the Royal Society and the British nobility, and the Dutch East India Comapany and the Paxton gang not political? How  are these not the events of that time? How are the machinations  of the great game in V  and later in ATD  along with the role of anarchism, unions, the Robber Barons, Bankers, inventors, Pinkertons , the war between Germany and England  not  political? How are Pynchon’s non-fiction writings about Watts, about Luddism and CP Snow, about 1984 and Orwell, without political implications? Politics is hard to define narrowly since politics moves into every area of life, often uninvited, but always remarkably able to daw attention to  new proposals, no matter how terrible, or to defend nasty habits. 

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 11:57:34 UTC 2024

Authoritative.....

The myth of author authority.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 04:42:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Ch4 - who with

Who’s Oedipa with?
Just up thru chapter 4, as an exercise:

Ch1
Alone with memories - pp 6-8
Though she does go to “the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance….” Kind of a hippie vibe, that market

With Mucho - pp 8-12

Detail of Phone call from Dr Hilarius waking them both at 3am  pp 12-14

With her lawyer, Roseman - pp 14-15

Alone at indeterminate place with memories of Pierce & narratorial hints of
revelations to come - pp 15-16

Ch2

Bidding Pierce farewell - p 17

Driving to San Narciso, having a “religious instant”, passing Yoyodyne, settling on Echo Court, on her own - pp 17-20

With Miles - pp 20-21

With Metzger - pp 21-29

With Metzger, Paranoids intruding/serenading pp 29-30

With Metzger & the Tube, Paranoids & extras audible in the bkgd - 30-32

Ch3

Narratorial animadverting - p 33

With Metzger at Echo Court & the Scope - 33-35

With Metzger, bartender telling them about electronic music - pp 35-36

With Metzger, Mike Fallopian joining them (the saga of Peter Pinguid, mail call) - 36-38

Alone in the ladies’ - 38

With Metzger & Fallopian - 38-40
(Introduction to private mail delivery in the US)

Narratorial animadversion (the languid sinister blooming of the Tristero) - p40

With Metzger and The Paranoids at Mar a Lago - er, Fangoso Lagoon - pp 40-42

Joined by Manny DiPresso (and watched from afar by Tony Jaguar’s henchmen)
- pp 42-48
- Oedipa, interestingly, calls DiPresso a “selfish shmuck” for not lending money to Tony Jaguar
- this kind of sympathy sort of chimes with Maxine’s in BE, personal loyalty trumping the letter of the law?
- her immediate sympathy for poor Tony Jaguar the mobster, to the point of impugning the generosity & character of someone she just met, is kinda weird tho’ imho. Maybe she’s being sarcastic or facetious.

Anyways…

With Metzger at a staging of The Courier’s Tragedy, & braving his ire, directly afterwards - pp 48-57

Walking thru dressing room full of actors, then with Driblette - pp 57-60

With Metzger in the car, listening to Mucho’s program on car radio - p 60

Ch4

Narratorial animadversion - p 61

Alone, rereading Pierce’s will, drawing a W.A.S.T.E. symbol & writing “Shall I project a world” in her memo book - p 61

Yoyodyne interlude - sat between 2 old, somnolently handsy dudes / inadvertently separated from her tour group, meets Stanley Koteks / the tale of Clerk Maxwell & his Demon - 61-66

With Fallopian (and, “Metzger, who’d come along to The Scope this evening” indicating she’s probably been there without him, and beginning to edge Metzger out of center stage) - pp 66-67

Time-shuffled peregrinations to:
Lake Inverarity, with only the memorial plaque for company; 
Zapf’s Used Books, a brief exchange with Zapf; Vesperhaven House (senior citizen’s home), colloquy with Mr Thoth - I’d say “old Mr Thoth” but he’s really “young Mr Thoth,” and his grandfather was “old Mr Thoth”;
 a brief chat with Fallopian, who doesn’t know anything beyond the merest hint about the Tristero;
and a lovely meet-cute/pleasant interlude with Genghis Cohen - pp 67-74

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 10:15:58 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Ch4 - who with

Thank You, Michael....who woudda thought to do this? But you.

Hübschräuber huebschraeuber at protonmail.com
Mon Jun 17 13:57:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Following the discussion only sporadically. As regards JFK and COL49, surely Charles Hollander's essay has been mentioned?

https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/id/2621/

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 14:25:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Right. So THATS why people are trying to make it about JFK. Hollander. Not sure why he’s considered an authority, but I still know Python’s aim for this novel was not a “subversive” take on the JFK assassination.  Too limited (and parochial).

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 14:37:12 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Hollander was fully incorrect.....and I had interactions with Hollander and he saw me under conspiratorial eyes.... from what he found out about me online.....

He saw with his self-grooming mirror---a lot of the time..
 
J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 17 17:35:35 UTC 2024

CoL49

Why is the Egyptian god of writing, wisdom, magic the namesake of an old man who watches tv constantly and has trouble remembering anything? Also, as Michael points out, he's actually young Mr. Thoth, at the ripe old age of 91. 

The muted horn. Meant to be a silence of sound? The muted horn in jazz had created some amazing, subtle sounds from Miles Davis and others around the time Pynchon worked on this book. Could this be describing how the Tristero works: subtle and muted, not for all but for the aware?

Pynchon reduces his reliability by making this an old man's memories of hearing an old man share his memories to a child/grandson. Yet the signet ring seems to yield credibility. This level of detachment from the actual event reinforces Pynchon's paranoid, conspiratorial world.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 17 17:36:53 UTC 2024

CoL49 Current Events

My point about current events around the time Pynchon writes a particular book has to do with that event's impact on his thinking. After working for Boeing, he must have grasped the MIC's increasing power, acknowledged by Eisenhower, confronted by JFK, and aligned with LBJ. Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove in January of 1964, so these ideas are around and part of the zeitgeist.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 18:47:13 UTC 2024

CoL49

Two fathers and son Thoth's living to 91 totals living 182 years in America....182 years ago in 1966 was 1784… The Articles of Confederation ruled this America, which wasn't yet these United States....

   - April 23 – The Land Ordinance of 1784
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1784> resolves that the territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris, or by individual states, and that already purchased or to be purchased from the Indian inhabitants, will be offered for sale by Congress and divided into future states.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 18:51:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 Current Events

I really would not be completely surprised if Pynchon really does believe some seriously whack conspiracies… but if so, his lunacy is savant level with a Jewish skeptic always harping over his shoulder.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 18:57:01 UTC 2024

CoL49

I know nothing about the history of the mute Horn mute. But the mute “bends” the frequencies of the Horn, often making it sound like spoken words. It is quieter, but more expressive.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 19:00:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 Current Events

I would not be surprised if Pynchon loves---and believed. Believes---some highest kinds of 'theories", really unproveable patterns in history.....The Kondratieff Wave....the rise and fall of Rome reasons.....the rise and fall of civilizations.....Meanings of The Big Band and the arguments against.....some math speculations---see ATD---I have no idea of------I do think I know that in AtD he clearly thinks FOR THE FICTION imaginary numbers are bad shit......by their name and meaning they keep us from the real world......(I bet he's read Wittgenstein on mathematics which I couldn't).....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 19:03:39 UTC 2024

CoL49

We know about Miles Davis from opening Against the Day.....Pynchon likes him....

The horn keeps the sounds of history from exploding us?......The Trystero communicate history softly, quietly, yes, like the deaf mute dance?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 17 19:29:04 UTC 2024

Speaking of conspiracy theories unironically

“He was too tired to appreciate the irony, or coincidence, or whatever it was. There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.” — Don DeLillo, Libra

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jun 17 22:14:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Actually I am the one currently considering the sense the JFK assassination makes of the central quest of the COL  49.   I  usually do not read many other interpreters of Pynchon, preferring to get and follow my own ideas directly from the texts. But after seeing the title the essay you mention I vaguely  remember the magic Eye metaphor so I probably did read the Hollander essay, but it left little impression apart from the general idea and was not at the time persuasive and I had not read COL 49 yet. I read Pynchon’s work in an odd order, first Vineland, then V which is the first one I re-read and began to make my own notes.  And then essays, GR and COL 49.  I’m pretty sure I read the Hollander essay along with Pynchon’s own essay. When I 1st read COL 49 I did not see that angle at all.  I think I may go ahead and re-read Hollander’s piece again but have not decided. Maybe I will wait to the end of my own pursuits and then read it  and see if there is any overlap, but now I am curious. It was  later, with Robin Landseadel  in the group reading of inherent Vice that I had worked on the Idea that Howard Hughes was part of the rise of the California far right (Nixon Reagan etc. and possibly connected through Robert Maheu  with the Robert Kennedy killing.) It turns out Hughes was also a friend of J. J. Angleton who spoke at his funeral.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jun 18 06:52:00 UTC 2024
CoL49 group reading ch4 - time indications

I keep putting “group reading” in the subject line most of the time because I liked JK’s instantiation of this novel nomenclature - and it might make it easier to find in upcoming years (presuming anyone nutty enough to be looking for this group read (-; )

After the Yoyodyne meeting, we get:

1) jumping ahead “a few days later” - talking to Mike Fallopian in The Scope, “Metzger, who’d come along that evening“ also there, perhaps to argue with Fallopian

2) reaching back, “there had been” - the historical marker on the other side of the lake, whereupon she called Driblette but no answer, and went to Zapf’s, and then back to Echo Court to look at texts

3) “the next day” (after the historical marker, but still before The Scope, then) she goes to Vesperhaven

4) no time indication, but probably soon after, & therefore before the Scope visit with Metzger, she has another conversation with Mike Fallopian on her own (at least, no sign of Metzger in the text during this one), finding out how little he knows about the Tristero

5) then, “One rainy morning, with mist rising off the pool, Metzger again away, the Paranoids off somewhere to a recording session, Oedipa got rung up by this Genghis Cohen, who even over the phone she could tell was disturbed”

It seems that
1) with Fallopian and Merzger in the Scope is a landmark of sorts

2) from which we jump back to 2, 3, 4, and 5, which occur in succession

- and then, it seems we skip back past that evening in The Scope to the starting point of the sequence of events leading to, and including, the meeting with Cohen (to whom Metzger had, a week earlier than that, ferried the stamps in Oedipa’s rented Impala -

horrible liability problem potential in the event of an accident, not to mention loss/theft/damage of the stamps, unless they had put him as a driver (But I digress))

Why put The Scope out of order & flash back from that?

- at that textually earlier (but narratively, pretty firmly later) meeting, what Fallopian is “on about” is what a hellhole working for a company is, when teamwork is expected, and how that makes the individualists recognize each other & stick together (ironic Pig Bodine laugh, hyeugh, hyeugh, hyeugh)

- Oedipa doesn’t nudge him towards her interest, The Tristero, why? Because in the textually later (but narratively earlier) meeting with him, she’s already learned how little he knows.

- Why does she even bother to go back there? I think she likes him a little, with his drip-dry suit, his “slender build and neat Armenian nose, and a certain affinity of his eyes for green neon.” Plus maybe she digs the music, and a lady enjoys a libation at times.

- so like, “oh let me tell you about that night at the Scope when Mike Fallopian and Metzger had an argument apparently having nothing to do with the Tristero, but “Oedipa sat alone and gloomy. She’d decided to come tonight to The Scope not only because of the encounter with Stanley Koteks, but also because of other revelations; because it seemed that a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered.””

- “you will want cause and effect”: what were these revelations and how did she receive them? Thus the flashbacks, imho.

This is Oedipa’s brain on The Tristero; this is Metzger and Fallopian going off in an uninteresting quarrel, both uninterested in her preoccupation.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jun 18 06:56:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4: the quotable Fallopian

“I’ve had hints,” he told her, “sure. I wrote to Sacramento about that historical marker, and they’ve been kicking it around their bureaucratic morass for months. Someday they’ll come back with a source book for me to read.

“It will say, ‘Old-timers remember the yarn about,’ whatever happened. Old-timers. Real good documentation, this Californiana crap. Odds are the author will be dead. There’s no way to trace it, unless you want to follow up an accidental correlation, like you got from the old man.” “You think it’s really a correlation?” She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long. Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth. “Marauders, nameless, faceless, dressed in black. Probably hired by the Federal government. Those suppressions were brutal.” “Couldn’t it have been a rival carrier?” Fallopian shrugged. Oedipa showed him the WASTE symbol, and he shrugged again.

“It was in the ladies’ room, right here in The Scope, Mike.” “Women,” he only said. “Who can tell what goes on with them?”

Such dismissiveness!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jun 18 07:33:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - slight correction?/ a more interesting question

I put:
2) from which we jump back to 2, 3, 4, and 5, which occur in succession

- should it be “2,3, & 4 in succession & then we skip over to 5”?

The chat with Cohen could be before or after the Metzger/Fallopian argument, I guess

It’s “one rainy morning” & it’s a week after Metzger toted the stamps

Whereas the “alone and gloomy” visit to the Scope was “a few days” after Yoyodyne.

So how many is “a few days"?
- up to twenty, I’ve always thought

It could go either way, I suppose.

Another question - more interesting - is prompted by a scene in the Baby Igor movie:

“…back came Cashiered. The little submarine, named the “Justine” after the dead mother, was at the quai,

singling up all lines. [I set this separate because it reminded me of AtD]

A small crowd was seeing it off, among them the old fisherman, and his daughter, a leggy, ringletted nymphet who, should there be a happy ending, would end up with Metzger; an English missionary nurse with a nice build on her, who would end up with Metzger’s father; and even a female sheepdog with eyes for Murray the St. Bernard.”

- as an inveterate fan of Cupid’s machinations, I relate this to somewhat of a rapport I infer between Genghis & Oedipa.

If the book has a happy ending & the Men in Black at the auction decide Oedipa doesn’t pose a threat, then I posit that Oedipa will invite Genghis up (if not to Echo Court, then maybe they’ll drive up to that nice German-baroque hotel in Berkeley) for coffee.

And as George Costanza realized, coffee isn’t coffee - it’s sex!

https://youtu.be/TmMna1EwZ1E?si=ojLChrW8UeiXU9HL

Hübschräuber huebschraeuber at protonmail.com
Tue Jun 18 11:53:10 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

I thought Hollander's interpretation was too narrow and it did not convince me but I enjoyed reading it. Since you mention J. J. Angleton: I like to speculate that the subject of postal services in COL49 in some way has to do with the CIA's domestic surveillance programmes which were incorporated into Angleton's Operation CHAOS a few years later.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jun 18 12:17:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Well, I don't. Also too narrow. And drawn out of airlessness not the text....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jun 18 12:26:27 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

The Links to the IBM company song didn’t work, slightly bummed. As to selling off the stamps, I get the feeling that Metzger and other vulture types who could be managing the businesses are anxious to liquidate the personal stuff. But we also have the whole phenom of the mysterious buyer wanting to see the stamps anonymously. Also it is the one thing directly part of the estate that Oedipa has taken an interest in. 

The muting of the horn is being looked at as a musical enhancement and it can be that. It can also be an instrument for warning or announcement  in which case muting it would limit the effectiveness.  The context here is mostly ruthless competition. Suppressing the competitor to toot your own horn. The waste OM witnesses is more like mutual aid to use Kropotkin’s phrase.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jun 18 15:00:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4: the quotable Fallopian

> Such dismissiveness!

Brilliant insight and perfect neutral word.

The dismissiveness is a theme. In the most general terms it is kind of  power struggle mindset, a way of dismissing any claims on attention from non-orthodox points of view. It is culturally easy at this time to be dismissive toward women, but Fallopian and Metzger also use it against each other, PI used it against the anarchist Jesus Arabal in Mazatlan and showed little respect for Oedipa. Mucho’s boss directs it to Mucho and Mucho carries it home looking for support and missing Oed’s need for support. Later the founder of the group to break love-addiction dismisses an entire form of relationship based on his own bad experience. Angelo dismisses anything or human in the way of his consuming  ambition  and  even when his schemes are unraveling  and his power is clearly about to end he doubles down on violence Mussolini style until he is hanging from a meat hook.  Those who have given up on power games,  have a strong dose of compassion, like MR Thoth or Mucho  or who are secure in their world like Cohen show more respect and attentiveness to Oedipa. There is clearly in my mind a part of her that is divided between attraction toward the compassionate and dismissal of them for lacking the male power drive, between attraction to the power players and the realization that they are prone to disrespect her and others to the point of abusiveness. 

These mental habits have deep roots and latch on to larger social forces,  habits of interpreting history that justify disrespectful and insulting  behavior. They mask shallow desires, violence  and self interest with grand narratives. Koteks doodles and dreams of being an inventor but has no ongoing work, Nefastis “invention” shallowly  literalizes of Maxwell’s demon that dismisses the mental labor(labor he and Koteks want to be paid for) as not valid work.  Oed immediately sees through Nefastis’s' idea with basic practical science.  Metzger claims the status and “realism” of war vet because he played that role as an actor. But his concern for vets ends with bones in the lake bought by his client.  He aligns against any labor demands as being  Marxist despite a long US history of struggle for collective bargaining rights  and a large body of law  established in a legal system  which pays him well. Fallopian  not very secretly  aligns himself with the confederacy and its pre-industrial slave and land ownership based utopia. Undecided between war with Russia and war with other un-american Americans, his  ambition is to use racially toned middle class resentment to carve out his own John Birch style organization. He dismisses the criticism from other right -leaning persons as akin to biblical literalism. 

Some dismissals have the implication of violence, like Driblette, and violence lurks throughout the kingdom of Inverarity, (or is it now the kingdom of the butcher, lawyer, actor, or  is it now her kingdom, our kingdom?) : the monetized bones of  GIs,  Bloody Chicklitz and the MIC contracts,  Mafia and Mafia lawyers, Thoth and the night-riding ‘Indians’, Guns and Swastikas made by hired ‘niggers’, Hilarius going crazy, revealing his Nazi past  and shooting out the window, the  de-humanizing  implications of mass produced printed circuits as a model of the future.,  the man Oed meets in a SF gay bar who later when she calls, desperate to find if he was hired and by who tells her it is “too late for me”, Driblette drowned in his grey Genarro suit  in her once comforting and eternal Pacific.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jun 18 15:02:15 UTC 2024

CoL49

Gennaro is pronounced as JHehNNAA-Row †. Gennaro has its origins in the Latin language and it is used largely in Italian. It is derived from the element ianua which is of the meaning 'door, entrance'. The first name originated from the Roman nickname Januarius (Latin) meaning 'January'. The name of the month is from Janus <https://www.babynamespedia.com/meaning/Janus>, the two-faced god of doors, beginnings, and endings in Roman mythology. The name was also borne by Saint Januarius, the bishop of Benevento who was martyred under Diocletian in 305; he was famous for the reputed miracle of the annual liquefaction of his blood which has been preserved in capsules at Naples and Pozzuoli.

Stanley Koteks / looking for “surname Koteks” revealed a bunch of “Kotek” Several links, including
https://ourpublicrecords.org/lastname/kotek have info to this effect:

The surname 'Kotek' is of Polish origin. It is derived from the Polish word 'kotek,' which means 'kitten' or 'male cat.' The name may have originally been given as a nickname to someone who had characteristics associated with a cat, such as agility or playfulness.

I thought I saw another link which claimed Kotek meant “warlike” but now I can’t find it (Tristero at work?)

But up also popped a reference to the city of Novi Pazar (of GR fame)

“Volleyball clubs in the city are OK Novi Pazar (first league) and OK Koteks.”

- strongly doubt whether this would’ve been found in the research phase of CoL49, although one never knows, does one?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 06:15:29 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Nefastis - a Mark Kohut p-list post

https://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/2009-June/115879.html

- found this not on a p-list search, but a regular Google search. I didn’t think the p-list was on Google, maybe didn’t used to be? But with AI maybe it’s different now? I better watch what I say. (-;
- searching my full email didn’t turn up a slew of p-list posts, but amongst all the other Mike Baileys (I’m Mike Bailey, I’m the real Mike Bailey, all the other Mike Baileys are just imitating…) there is the odd post or so.
- it’s droll to think about some misguided AI training on p-list, isn’t it?

Anyways ——- Mark Kohut in 2009 quoth as follows: “p. 86 hc. John Nefastis still invents. [nefastis = unholy]

fasti, the name given to the old Roman calendar which originally indicated dies fasti and nefasti, the days on which it was or was not permissible to transact legal and public business. Later were included lists of consuls (fasti consularçs), priests (fasti sacerdotalçs), and records of triumphs. They were published in 304 BC by Gnaeus Flavius. Some fragments survive in inscriptions. (Compare ANNALS.)

Kinda an "unreliable type' in THIS fiction, yes? “

- I could run with that: whilst Oedipa is questing for Tristero, she’s not doing the legal business…so a lot of her days become nefasti / her sorting is going to create a hot spot around Tristero and drive as-yet unknowable engines / Metzger already peeved, because her sorting isn’t creating dynamism around Pierce’s estate business

- I think Stanley Koteks only shows up this once in the book (leaving only the link to Nefastis, and a decided lack of a Cheshire Cat smile, to remember him by)

There’s a little kerfuffle about where Nefastis is:

“Well this was invented by John Nefastis, who’s up at Berkeley now.”

- when you say someone is “at” Berkeley doesn’t that imply them being on the faculty?
- my search for cognates was as yet fruitless
- lots of Nobelists there
- also, 1964, the likely time of the events in the novel, saw the inception of the Free Speech Movement
- which would be a different kind of hotspot, people focusing on critiquing the status quo (analogous to Oedipa looking for Tristero)
- instead of conforming in aid of the business of victory in Indochina and growing the economy (analogous to the estate grindstone to which Metzger, Esq wants Oedipa to set her nose)

But when Stanley starts to write Nefastis’s address, he gives the WASTE (excuse me, W.A.S.T.E. - although not every reference seems to insist on the dots the way Koteks did) box -

“Box 573,” said Koteks. “In Berkeley.” “No,” his voice gone funny, so that she looked up, too sharply, by which time, carried by a certain momentum of thought, he’d also said, “In San Francisco; there’s none—” and by then knew he’d made a mistake. “He’s living somewhere along Telegraph,” he muttered. “I gave you the wrong address.”

- so by this, it seems Berkeley hasn’t got a WASTE branch?

Also, he rapidly shuts down the conversation.

János Széky miksaapja at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 07:18:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Doesn't it refer to the Kotex sanitary pad?

János

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jun 19 15:49:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 Chapter 4

Well curiosity got the better of me last night and I read the Hollander essay: Pynchon. JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of the Crying of Lot 49

I remembered that I had read part of it, felt it was too reliant on references to names without really giving logical flow to an argument and quit reading before finishing. A lot of the most interesting historical information was toward the end  and I have more historic contextual knowledge now in which to place it. I think the essay needed to be edited down and given more coherent flow.  Some of his ideas were things I had come to independently and  I think the basic premise, which is that the mystery Oedipa is following  is Pynchon’s way of invoking the JFK killing without drawing the heat , would turn up plenty of corroborating evidence for anyone who pursued the idea with reasonable effort.  I may follow some of Hollander’s research leads if I have the stamina to keep working on this. 

The essay did stir up many thoughts, from Bertolt Brecht’s take on the role of art, to the role of Porky and other pigs in Pynchon’s thinking and approach to satiric heroes, to the serious investment in names and wordplay and historic references in P novels. This group reading has had similar effects for me from an interest in reading some Jacques Ellul ( who sounds rather like a kindred soul) mentioned by Mark K to questions about my own artistic process.  I  am tending to think now of COL 49 as Pynchon’s least successful work in terms of accessibility and thematic development,  but the human interactions so narrowly contained in this slim volume feel very successful and speak volumes about the social dynamics of that period and how those flowed into our current moment. 

Thomas, as for myself as occasional participant in the P-list, you  are always welcome, and I look forward to any further thoughts you might have on COL 49.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:08:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

János Széky wrote:

Doesn't it refer to the Kotex sanitary pad?

That’s probably the primary connotation.

Besides bemused startlement, ive been trying to link the name choice along with Fallopian's as a reference to Oedipa’s menstrual cycle - but to what end?

To underscore her gender?
To relate her questing to some kind of biological clock?

Maybe just to hint these things in the background?

Since the spelling isn’t exact (the product is spelled Kotex) it seemed possible to impute a secondary possible connotation when “Kotek” isn’t any farther from Koteks than is “Kotex”

If Pynchon invents names in part to avoid using, & offending the owners of, conventional names, adding the “s” has that effect.

- however, again, to what purpose? There isn’t anything particularly catlike about him, & there doesn’t seem to be a Polish connection in the story.

Taking a liberty, one might suggest his name is really Kotek & she misreads as Koteks. Fallopian could be a similar Armenian sounding name misapprehended - by either the author or the character- for humorous purposes. (Tom Robbins has named an Armenian-American character “Buckaroojian”, eg)

If it’s meant as Oedipa humorously blurring the names because of her gender, that’s kind of sexist, but (imho) not unbearably so.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:10:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Oedipa's quest is a female/feminine/feminist one. It surrounds her....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:22:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Confession since I promised to tag team with Michael.

I cannot find my copy. Must have put it down where I did the current through read and

But I have found my Companion and I will get the book from the library on the morrow…

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:28:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Cool cool cool

I finally did buy a Nook copy, but frequently refer to my paperback anyway - more satisfying somehow

Looking fwd to your insights

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:43:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Have we spoken of* Dandelion Wine*? Connections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandelion_Wine

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:44:48 UTC 2024

All those bones

upon which the country to this point has been built....Nourished by.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:57:40 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

P. "the anarchist dressed all in black"....like Driblette's assassins and the Tystero Force....the main part--the essence of it?

Which is why it is disruptive but also sometimes violent?

I often think of Dylan's two men on horseback in *All Along the Watchtower*

and Pynchon's two riders in* Against the Day....*

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 22:40:27 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I guess we need to examine the convergence of anarchy and violence.  I tend to think that anarchy is nonviolent at its heart, because anarchy seems to place individual choice as sacrosanct. But I suppose one might need to consider violence as a means to carve out a space (GR’s “Zone”) to allow for the possibility of anarchy.

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 23:28:33 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Yes, anarchism in its origins is defined as nonviolent. Yes, the individual is sacrosanct, in fact may be said to be all. (this is a political limitation I would argue but that is a side bit). Anarchism in history is IDEALLY like the deaf-mute dance in this novel—a self-organizing movement.

If this is related to the blackest view of history as presented in *The Courier's Tragedy, *and I think it is, it is a vision of a kind of Disruption of the brutal order of things.  A disruption from the cycle of violence, of torture, murder and destruction.  As many anarchists say, the State is always a violent force in history.....then maybe, sometimes, violence is necessary; has been necessary--or if that goes too morally far---at least violence is, sometimes, an evil but real disruption too.

Fanon and others in P's time and ours?. The French Revolution? Or in the American context I keep speaking of. That sentence I first learned from the P--list I think, About Jefferson's "the tree of liberty being refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants".......letter by Thomas Jefferson to John Adams' son-in-law about Shay's Rebellion, which was a failed rebellion in which some rebels died:    and, of course, before the new constitution....

Here's from the letter:
"Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.[1]
<https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/#fn-1>
 The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."[2]
<https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/#fn-2>

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 00:07:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

There are two ways to look at anarchy, as has been pointed out by several posts. The bomb-throwing, black clad anarchist of the Porky Pig cartoon being a caricature of the anarchists that assassinated and bombed (or didn't, as the history of the HayMarket bombing reveals). This is the image of anarchy that the state and the corporate world wish to portray. Pynchon treats Web Traverse & family as noble dynamiters in AtD.

The other side of anarchy follows more what David described: a non-violent, consensus-based, voluntary action/organization of independent participants that relies on democratic processes and mutual aid. W.A.S.T.E may be an example of the 2nd, but the Zone in GR also represents the non-violent attempt to set up an alternative society.

The Occupy Wall Street encampment attempted to prefigure an alternative means of cooperation and community. It had failings, but it was smothered by the politicians before it could coalesce further.

While the majority of characters in the book seem to fear anarchy, they represent the portion of the population cowed by the threat of violence from which the police “protect” us.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jun 20 00:07:36 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

...
There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags 
Pick up the pieces and lower the flags...

They mutilated his body and took out his brain
What more could they do, they piled on the pain
But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that
Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me
Hate to tell you, Mister, but only dead men are free
              Murder Most Foul.     Bob Dylan

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 00:10:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

I do not think the Traverse family are noble dynamiters....Pynchon refutes this with every death of them...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 00:17:10 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Shay’s rebellion convinced many to accept the constitution. In the Debate on the Constitution (LOA), many of those supporting the ratification discuss Shay’s rebellion and the potential of anarchy as reasons to ratify.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 00:18:31 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

nice...nice....to learn.....

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 00:37:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

Webb’s death at the hands of Sloat and Deuce reveals what? They were hired by the mine owners. 

Any violence that the Traverses contributed pales in comparison to the mine owners, bankers, and railroad barons.

Did I read a different book? Noble may be hyperbole, but Pynchon seems more aligned with the Traverses than Scarsdale Vibe.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 00:40:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

Oooo!  Wrong book, but I like the start of this!  I did a Reddit read of ATD a year ago, so it is still fresh(ish).

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 01:33:08 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

The 2 volume documentary history titled Debates on the Constitution by Library of America provides a well-rounded view of how the new nation saw the constitutional convention, process and the text itself. 

The idea of presidential immunity and presidential power were debated in terms of holding a president accountable. One prescient argument, paraphrased here, considered the difference between a mistake of decision-making as unimpeachable if it was about making a thinking error but quite impeachable for an emotional action. 

Also they repeatedly stress that the president could be tried in criminal court after he leaves office. 

Some of the back and forth are quite amazing. They generally refer to Shay’s Rebellion as the incident in Massachusetts rather than the historic name.

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 05:10:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

It’s been noticed but not expounded on.

I thought Mr Thoth related to that one story in DW about how talking with an old person is like a Time Machine.

But that’s the only story I remember from DW (-;

Do you have some more correlations?

János Széky miksaapja at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 05:39:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Maybe these have something to do with giving birth/not giving birth as a metaphor and the theme of fertility/infertility. It might be a spoiler, for which I'm sorry, but do so remember Oedipa meeting Grace later on, who says she thought only kids can cause that "harassed" look.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 08:52:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Pardon my ignorance, what is DW referring to?

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 20 09:10:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Also why does Oedipa visit Vesperhaven? She wasn’t going there to meet Mr. Thoth specifically. He’s the first person, beyond the fly obsessed nurse, she meets. Is she making rounds of Inverarity holdings or just bored?

A church father named Clement equates the Egyptian god Thoth with Hermes, the messenger god. Mr. Thoth discusses the Pony Express as well as giving Oedipa a “message” about the Tristero.

Why the knitting bag with blue yarn? 

The comparison between the black clad anarchist in the cartoon and the black feathered, fake Indians makes the overwrought evil anarchist fooled by Porky into a truly threatening violent organization. Yet the Pony Express riding grandfather Thoth proves to be not only up to the challenge but capable of defacing the dead for a trophy.

Who really is the more evil?

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 10:14:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

> Also why does Oedipa visit Vesperhaven? She wasn’t going there to meet Mr. Thoth specifically. He’s the first person, beyond the fly obsessed nurse, she meets. Is she making rounds of Inverarity holdings or just bored?

If it were Maxine, in BE, maybe her bladder signaled her…here, it’s one of those curious coincidences

But yes, boredom, possibly; also Metzger hasn’t bothered to try to interest her, & even blew up at her, so, rebelliousness;

Also, the historical marker…although the incident it described had no survivors, maybe Mr Thoth had known some of them? Before she met him, though, she still might’ve thought someone local had gotten it put up, as a reason for her to look for oldsters.

Then too, as you say, investigating Inverarity’s holdings, with an eye to seeing constellations: she has just started that notebook with the phrase borrowed from Driblette. “Your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross” - seems like a stretch to try mapping these - but, Yoyodyne (fire-breathing death from above), real estate (where Pierce was a whale), Tristero stamps (Southern Cross a symbol of resistance in Australia*)?

* from Wikipedia
“Since the 19th century, the Eureka Flag [featuring the Southern Cross] has achieved customary use as a general-purpose symbol of protest….”

> A church father named Clement equates the Egyptian god Thoth with Hermes, the messenger god. Mr. Thoth discusses the Pony Express as well as giving Oedipa a “message” about the Tristero.
>

A little further afield, probably even less likely than mapping constellations, but 
Kotek - Polish
Fallopian - Armenian
Toth - popular Hungarian name

All part of USSR in 1964, could this be a languid, sinister crypto-motif featuring the totalitarian status of Eastern Europe? (As something faced by “Pierce-as-JFK”, debatable as that is)

> Why the knitting bag with blue yarn?

no idea

> The comparison between the black clad anarchist in the cartoon and the black feathered, fake Indians makes the overwrought evil anarchist fooled by Porky into a truly threatening violent organization. Yet the Pony Express riding grandfather Thoth proves to be not only up to the challenge but capable of defacing the dead for a trophy.

> Who really is the more evil?

Well, they were out to kill him, weren’t they? He was just trying to deliver the mail. But, yes, even young Mr Thoth deplores old Mr Thoth’s salivating blood lust.

- who told him about the black feathers, though?

I mean, he would’ve seen the feathers, but where did he get the lore about burning bones for black charcoal?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 10:23:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

To be "more aligned" with the Traverses, which of course he is, is not to justify their violence.

Violence judged morally is not done with false equivalencies. I was justified because you were worse. Not an argument. To get simplistic; Two wrongs, etc....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 10:29:34 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I have those volumes.....a gift to my significant other whom I live with....have only looked up a few things… The Constitutional Convention, for example, which is an interest.......by the weekend, I will make time to read on Shay's Rebellion.....and a town discussion group is all over the immunity decision....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 10:32:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - Koteks/Nefastis

Ray Bradbury's *Dandelion Wine...*

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 10:36:11 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

If the three bums in this great song are loosely associated with the anarchists in black then that's yours.

They are not to me.....Dylan's bums here are not even close to the anarchist associations in Pynchon or his own
Watchtower song imo.......

These bums are us.....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jun 20 14:02:43 UTC 2024

CoL 49 group reading ch 4 Cohen, Dandelion Wine

Ghenghis Cohen  seems pretty harmless and sincerely interested in the  muted posthorn and other forgeries related to WASTE/ Tristero.  Could hardly be more unthreatening 
Oedipa feels “motherly” toward him. But why does he have so many rooms , this long train of doorways soaked in rainlight? Classic dream imagery reminiscent of PIs stamp collection: thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time: savannahs teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons sailing west into the void, Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon, allegorical faces that never were. Is his house a museum of stamps, tiny images of wonders quickly disappearing? He offers her dandelion wine, flowers gathered from the cemetery conveniently made to vanish for the Aren’t I Beautiful free way.  The name Cohen derives from temple priests giving the wine a sacred touch. Ghenghis puts a question mark of whose temple. 
  At the end of the open informative conversation there is a turn in Cohen’s demeanor, particulalry when she asks “Do we tell the government, or what?” 

“I’m sure they know more than we do.” He sounded nervous, or suddenly in retreat. “No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t our business, is it?”   

   It is hard here not to imagine that Cohen knows more than he is letting on, knows this is dangerous terrain. He may be more interested in those valuable forgeries and finishing his work for the Inverarity estate than wading deeper into this mystery. 

 He says of the wine,

“It’s clearer now,” he said, rather formal. “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.” 

No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Oedipa  is asking the uncomfortable question of  what is lost in the accelerating pursuit of fortune, whether this trail of sacrificial bones foretells a good future? Do the  quickly forgotten dead have anything to tell us? Should we be listening?

 One of the mysterious lines in their conversation is Cohen’s rhetorical answer/question “An 800 year tradition of postal fraud?”  What is Pynchon getting at? Perhaps no less than the ancient struggle over who is shaping our histories, our information, our logos. What is reliable as public truth? Who is monitoring our private truth? Who can we trust when some questions are off limits?

This novel is taking place after a war presented then and now as preserving the rule of law, saving our traditions of open debate on public issues, freedom of thought and speech. In truth the war was far from over, the fascistic addiction to power and wealth, using anti- communist rhetoric was tearing at fundamentals of constitutional rights and also  opposing aspirations of former European and US controlled colonies. The increasingly secretive federal agencies  engaged in everything from the FBI’s cointelpro to operation Gladio or its variants in Europe which recruited fascists for political assassinations and false flag killings of civilians to be blamed on leftists. The leaders of  the CIA tried to sucker Kennedy into a war with Cuba, Both Dulles Brothers and JJ Angleton had large financial investments in US economic colonialism; they helped former fascists retain their wealth. When Kennedy set out to end their power he generated a great deal of hatred. 

 Journalists dedicated to historic truth have uncovered much of this history, but the mainstream press avoids it or couches it as the necessities of fighting communism or as ancient history, now reformed. To think that these men who hired nazi intelligence officers,  killed elected foreign leaders and innocent civilians would stop at a US president is naive.  Pynchon knew enough about the history and details of the historic and political situation to think twice before directly writing a novel that would be easily interpreted as questioning the official story of the Kennedy assassination or pointing to secretive intelligence commanders and Mafia figures. The dangers were hardly imaginary, with several mysterious deaths of investigators and witnesses. 

  Wine is usually best as  a shared pleasure. It can summon memories, can carry the smell  and taste of sunlit vines, the blood of transforming love, but mostly it is a celebration of the moment we are in. What keeps seeming to prevent such moments of human connection for Oedipa is her search to know what the tristero of the muted horn is all about. It is like asking about the shadow self, seeing it lurking beneath our comforts and securities, our identity is at stake, it is dangerous ground. A chill comes, sadness, the connection is broken, healing becomes more distant as the distance between us grows. 

rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 14:23:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

Reef is a perfect example of the not-so noble dynamiter. He, for the most part, just likes blowing shit up.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 19:30:25 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Mark Kohut wrote:
I love the scene where a new guy in AtD coming to work in the mines is told to pick out a T--shirt from the pile..."Closest you'll come to pure (real?) anarchism", says his handler)....


- had to find that. It was Root Tubsmith helping Kit find a dinner jacket for the Quaternioneers’ Convention in Ostend.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 20:21:32 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Not exactly close enough for lit crit, was I? LOL...

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 03:39:11 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers who had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 03:55:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

> I do not think the Traverse family are noble dynamiters....Pynchon refutes this with every death of them...

 Pynchon doesn’t do a lot of refuting. So that would be you, not Pynchon. They do lean anarchist in pursuit of freedom and opposition to murderous big shots. "To live outside the law you must be honest" , at least with yourself. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 04:27:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

Anarchists are a pretty good source on anarchy. Surprisingly, JRR Tolkien said he favored anarchism as a sociali/political ideal. Couple of my favorites are Peter Kropotkin and David Graeber who has some excellent articles online. He died recently, pretty young, after co-writing an excellent  book called The Dawn of Everything, which looks at the remarkable diversity of  early human communities , based on research from recent archeology. It starts with  a wonderful examination of the non- hierarchical Wendat (Wyandot) tribe of northeastern North America and a spokesman of theirs named Kandioronk. Turns out there were quite a few non hierarchical societies all around the world and some still exist.  

I think nonviolent is not the best term, non-coercive is probably more universally accepted.  Self defense is allowed and personal martial skills are often respected and taught. Humans living in practical cooperative societies are not so purist; the boundaries vary. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 04:50:57 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

You’re talking about the dudes on the Grassy Knoll, right?

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.200814.html

I found an article with new (to me) details, from one who, unlike the Peter Pinguid Society, takes the “lone assassin” theory as Holy Writ…

https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/the-fourth-tramp/

There was a 4th arrest of a man who claimed to’ve been Oswald’s cell mate, & heard him say he knew Jack Ruby.

But also, the arrest records for the 3, along with the names they gave, are (or at least in 1992 were) available, and the Church Commission tried with ‘70s era computers to match them with any known individuals.

(Still, that’s even before the 386 (-; )

To share the flavor with a longish excerpt is beyond my ability to resist:

“[3 others were arrested the same day, including a John Elrod] Nine months after the assassination, Elrod appeared at the sheriff’s office in Memphis looking for help. Elrod was an alcoholic and now, though he was trying to dry out, he had been drinking and contemplated killing his wife. At the sheriff’s office, he confessed to something else that was bothering him. He said that while he was in a cell with Oswald the day of the assassination, a prisoner with a battered face had been brought down the corridor by guards. According to Elrod, Oswald had said he knew the man because he had seen him in a motel room a few days earlier discussing selling stolen guns with four other men, including Jack Ruby. The Memphis sheriff contacted the FBI. Agents interviewed Elrod and filed reports of his statements. They sent to Dallas for his arrest records, but the reply came that there was no record of Elrod’s being arrested on November 22, 1963. The FBI assumed Elrod’s tale was the fantasy of a drunk and proceeded no further. Now Mary [a researcher] had found proof that he had been arrested that day after all.

That would not amount to much if there weren’t a few other tantalizing facts the [researchers] La Fontaines found to support Elrod’s story. Oswald was put in a cell at some point during the afternoon of his arrest. A log prisoners were required to sign to make telephone calls showed that Oswald was in cell F-2. The F cell block was a corridor with three small, adjoining cells. No known record shows what cell Elrod was in, but in 1993 he told the La Fontaines that “a kid from Tennessee who had stolen a car in Memphis” was also in the cell. The same phone log shows that Douglas, the confessed car thief, was in cell F-1. And there really was a prisoner with a battered face in the jail that day. He was Lawrence Reginald Miller, now dead, who on November 18 was the passenger in the front seat of a blue Thunderbird carrying guns stolen from a military arsenal. The car crashed along Hall Street in downtown Dallas while being pursued by the police. Newspaper stories the next day refer to Miller’s injured face. And, to
complete the circle with exactly the sort of fact that could mean everything and could mean nothing, the driver of the Thunderbird, Donnell Darius Whitter, worked in the garage where Jack Ruby took his car. Indeed, he had personally worked on Ruby’s car.

This is the kind of tale that makes wading through assassination literature rewarding. And isn’t it a great story! The three prisoners watching the convict with the bloody face paraded before them, the meeting in the motel room with Ruby, the stolen guns, the chase through downtown Dallas in a blue Thunderbird with Jack Ruby’s mechanic at the wheel…not that I believe that all this proves anything. Elrod’s story may be true, but there is no proof he was in the cell with Oswald. He could have, for instance, been in a cell with the man with the battered face and learned his story from him. And, even assuming Elrod was in the same cell, there is no proof that Oswald said a thing. Indeed, why would Oswald, who was smirky and elusive in everything he is known to have said after the assassination, who was smirky and elusive during his time in the Marines, in Russia, in Dallas, and in New Orleans, suddenly start talking cordially and intimately to a teenage car thief and a drunk. Surely, whether Oswald was part of a plot or
not, he would have suspected that anyone put in a cell with him was there to inform on him to the authorities and thus would not have volunteered that he knew Ruby.

By discovering the identities of the three tramps, the La Fontaines have made a real and important contribution to the history of the assassination. Few books on Kennedy can make that claim with justice. By discovering Elrod, they have made an ingenious story based on a few related or unrelated facts. Most books on Kennedy can make that claim. Oswald killed Kennedy all alone, but people will never believe it in their hearts. There are too many bizarre facts, too many deep and foreboding characters, and
too many hypnotic stories to weave around them.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 05:09:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 - anarchy

This would be the moral teaching of Jesus, Gandhi, Tolstoy, King.  One has to believe that this is the knowable will of God to accept this ideal. It is not self evident to most people.  The law of Moses was quite different as were many other moral and legal codes. What is pretty clear is that violence tends to beget more violence.  Whether Gandhian non violence can end that cycle  is hard to prove by example. People traumatized by violence can sometimes forgive, but there is a logic also to ending the life of a person who is a perpetrator of violence.  Then there are the cases where someone or some army or…. Is trying to kill you and/or your family, community… Here is where you get a lot of waffling on non-violence as the best tactic.  Disdain and judgement are forms of violence. Moving toward an inner peaceableness is certainly one of the hardest inner struggles.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 05:45:43 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Joseph sez

 The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are 
> conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers 
who
> had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.

The text calls them assassins. nothing about being "hired"...in fact, Oedipa asks this look:
"Was it written in as a stage direction?"....in this deeply uncertain, willfully uncertain text, all we know is they are assassins.....lots of historical movements, even those abusing the anarchist tradition had assassins who did not need to be hired and weren't.

I'm not wasting my time on the great Dylan song, where bums supposedly don't mean what they always mean in Dylan, and/ but 'bearing a remarkable likeness to CIA agents' is another Tracy---and Huebschrauber's---dustbin of history fantasies.....

Pynchon would not have bothered with such cheap conspiracy theories and didn't. The text shows it.

"Dylan told his early biographer Anthony Scaduto <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Scaduto>, however, that he wasn't
particularly devastated by Kennedy's assassination <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy>: "I didn't
feel it any more than anybody else. We were all sensitive to it. The assassination took more of the shape of a happening. I read about those things happening to Lincoln <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln>, to Garfield <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield>, and that it could happen in this day and age was not too far-fetched. It didn't knock the wind out of me. Of course, I felt as rotten as everyone else. But if I was more sensitive about it than anyone else, I would have written a song about it, wouldn't I? The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is overplayed".

Read the next paragraph in the wikipedia entry where he famously said in public, "I felt some of myself" in Lee Harvey Oswald...

Learn enough Dylan to know how identifying with everyone is a key theme....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 05:55:12 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Hubschrauber's CIA conspiracy fantasy world around Pynchon and Tracy's worse so took over their minds---invasion of the body snatchers---that they became who Pynchon was writing about--and not in a good way.....in our last reading of Lot 49, I and I believe Laura showed the reality behind the conspiracy confusions, so we will do it again. Oedipa is not projecting the Trystero world we already know....despite some questioning...

Hubschrauber might be worth responding to--but I insulted him once (for which I did apologize)  if he did follow Morris's suggestion and clear his eyes and confess......same with Tracy but he has NEVER been wrong even as he lives in it.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 06:16:11 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

I offer this all....

"Hush, little children, you'll understand 
The Beatles are comin', they're gonna hold your hand
Slide down the banister, go get your coat
Ferry 'cross the Mersey and go for the throat
There's three bums comin' all dressed in rags
Pick up the pieces and lower the flags
I'm going to Woodstock, it's the Aquarian Age
Then I'll go to Altamont and sit near the stage"

I feel sorry for you sometimes, Joseph.......As that great favorite writer of Pynchon wrote: "Sometimes the hardest thing to see is what is right in front of your eyes"....

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 06:47:12 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

>From the same AtD passage:

“Well if Heaviside’s the Whitman,” remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, “who’s the Tennyson, you see?” “Clerk Maxwell, wouldn’t you say?”

Just thought that was interesting because of the Clerk Maxwell reference.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 10:06:05 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - tidbit from Chapter 1

Anorak fare (-;

Whilst trying to remember anything about Pierce that might’ve led to him naming her, she does a bunch of stuff, including

“reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American”

June 1964 -
Long review of a book on cybernetics
Short reviews of, among others
- CP Snow book on 2 cultures, expanding on his 1959 lecture
- Mushroom hunter’s guide
- A book of biographical essays on Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin
- Oceanic Sculpture, Melanesian carvings & masks, “some are almost overpoweringly grotesque and terrifying, [like Doc Hilarius’s Fu Manchu] some subtly sinister, some brilliantly humorous…”

July 1964 -
Long review of a book on human behavior
Short reviews including:
- The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, a Protestant clergyman, first to use psychoanalysis to help his parishioners
- “Architecture in Transition” by Constantine Doxiades, who suggested that “[the] solution for the expanding metropolis is to build it like a strip development along a central traffic artery and call it a ‘dynopolis’”

August is almost autumn but -
Long review of a book on decision theory in government
Short reviews
- Lectures on gas theory by Boltzmann
- The World of the Past by Jacquetta Hawkes
- Mocrographia by Robert Hooke (illustrated)

- I was wondering if there’d be anything on postal systems, but tbh, mention of this pursuit seems more to establish Oedipa as capable of serious thought than to point to any particular book

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 11:24:42 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - tidbit from Chapter 1

Michael!---

This is wonderful...no one has done this ever that I know of...
June 1964 is a gold mine of Pynchon relevance....cybernetics.....the two cultures....Maxwell...

And to point to the culture of the time....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 13:20:29 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

"Angelo flies into an apoplectic rage, and orders Niccolò’s pursuit and destruction. But not by his own men."

There is a hush, everyone knows who will be sent, "Angelo knows but does not say,”  What he does is,

"Enlist the poniards swift of those who, sworn To punctual vendetta never sleep, Lest at the palest whisper of the name Sweet Niccolò hath stol’n, one trice be lost In bringing down a fell and soulless doom Unutterable. . . ."

Then we see the 3 assassins dressed in black approaching Niccolo who is left dead and mutilated.  And the key line is spoken about Tristero.

In short the 3 Tristero agents were hired by Duke Angelo to murder Niccolo , the rightful heir. 

The attention in the novel then turns to who the hell is the Tristero and we begin to build a sense of their role in a long history of power struggles, postal and political, and while the Tristero and WASTE are fictions,  much of that history of violent Machiavellian  power struggles is accepted history.

As to what Pynchon thinks about who killed Kennedy and how it was done,( The congressional committee to investigate assassinations said it was a conspiracy in the late 70s,) those exact details are not critical to COL 49. The 3 bums as gunmen was one theory which was widely held, which Pynchon could have chosen to use in his Courier’s Revenge play as a question mark  and dramatic scene supplied by Driblette, and which in relation to JFK  points out that  there were many reasons and witnesses putting doubt on the lone gunman theory. I see other ways Pynchon points to the Kennedy assassination and leaves a large gap in the novel that is best filled by that event and those who investigated it. 

I know I am not going to convince you but your pronouncement about what Pynchon or Dylan mean strike me as only having a basis in your own beliefs since you are not any more privy to their thoughts than anyone else.  Nobody can stop you from making your pronouncements of definitive truth about Pynchon’s work , and maybe you think you have somehow proven your expertise and all will yield before your words but I truly doubt that is a valid premise.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 13:34:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - tidbit from Chapter 1

Very cool research.  Pynchon seems to be telling us some of what he was reading. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 21 20:15:11 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

So instead of admitting that the text on who the 3 killers were In the play is really quite clear and that there is no indication that wandering noble anarchists killed Niccolo or that they murdered him for Angelo for free to save the good duke because they are always looking for opportunities to serve their fellow man, you go an a snit about me because it is your notion that anyone who thinks the CIA probably killed JFK is someone to feel sorry for. How many ad hominem attacks are coming or can you make your arguments based on respectful disagreement and evidence from the novel?  Is this the way you talk to everybody you disagree with? This is your version of non-violence?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 02:41:58 UTC 2024

Clarifying (-;

If I have any more insights or doo-dads before midnight *tomorrow*, I’ll post them (-;

Cheers!

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 22 02:50:01 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

> I apologize and won’t do it again. But I will also say you don’t know the meaning of non -violence either.

> What I wrote about the text(s) has nothing to to with my beliefs about the CIA and Kennedy’s death. It has to do with what the text says and does not say. 

That is a reasonable stance though I  doubt you or I are immune from the influence of our own beliefs, especially  in interpreting a writer who has been interpreted in many directions and seems to invite that diversity..  I have heard some of what you think the text says and does not say but would like to hear more development of what you think about the overall intent of how Pynchon structured this novel. My main disagreement so far is not that you see no room for the possibility of a connection to the JFK assassination, but rather is what seems to be your idea that The Waste encountered later in the novel by OM is the same entity as the Tristero of the play and of the history that Bortz unfolds and that she glimpses in Mr Thoth’s testimony.  I think the waste is a branching into a more self organizing anarchist communication system adopted by what P has called the preterite. The idea of an alternate means of expressing and moving information has wide appeal and shows up in both positive and negative ways in the internet, in alternative journalism, letters, books, the pamphlets of Tom Paine or the abolitionists, grass roots labor organizing, direct action  etc. 
I think it is hard to deny that the reaction to such grass roots dissent or calls for change even when the actions are non-violent, has often been extreme violence, even to the point of criminal spying, persecution and murder, and not in keeping with citizen’s  legal constitutional rights. One of the questions that runs through Pynchon’s work is why this is and whether all large states and technological systems gravitate towards the abuse of power in an almost unstoppable delusion of control. He also stories how people refuse to be bullied,  or look for meaning outside the jaws of mortal history. We all, on some level or another struggle with these issues in effective and ineffective ways, but respectful disagreement seems the best  path to a non-coercive exchange around the writing of Thomas Pynchon. That is all I want.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 03:02:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - a dreaded meta comment

Well, I dunno if this is really meta, but -

It’s like the main McGuffin of the whole book could spring from like, Pynchon walking around San Francisco and sees a garbage can labeled WASTE.

So he does a little humor experiment, like what if that was a secret mailbox - and then that germinates in the fertile soil of the “meta” idea that was going the intelligentsiary rounds as of 1964 with Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” -

Which I interpret (mangle) thusly: That when you bundle up the meaning of a work or a war or a life into an interpretation, it’s like a lossy compression algorithm…

You unavoidably throw out things - so the artist, eg, may be like a WASTE courier picking them up and shunting them back into the community communication system. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 22 03:12:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - a dreaded meta comment

Surely a fair amount of fiction and humor starts that way, he could even have been wasted when it all began.. Shall I project…? 

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 10:41:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

Yes, I have the next two weeks. I’ll post tomorrow. 

By the way Michael, great research on Scientific American. What doesn’t Pynchon read!?! The “Architecture in Transition” article summary describes San Narciso too closely not to be a source.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 11:06:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

Also did you get that from the Scientific American archive? I’ve been updating the CoL49 Pynchon Wiki, and this should be an entry.

Full disclosure to all, I’ve been creating a document of all our group reading posts. My goal is to make it part of the Pynchon Wiki as other group reads of MD and GR.

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 11:36:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

Thanks, yes I did.
Although I renewed a long-lapsed subscription to get access to it, I’d been wanting to for awhile anyway.

One can also look in their archive via a college library - as a sporadic senior auditor I get a card, or when not auditing, it’s just a few bucks for a card.

That’s a good idea, updating the Wiki.

I think you asked me about putting in that info about Popov? If I forget to answer then, I’ll tell you now I’m all for it.

Appreciating your diligence!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 11:49:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

*Scientific American* at this time was at a peak of its new life best magazine self; a new golden age---ii was started in 1848--because of its owner and publisher: Education and career[edit
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerard_Piel&action=edit&section=1>]

Piel graduated from Harvard University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University>, magna cum laude, with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in 1937. He was the science editor of Life Magazine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Magazine> from 1939 to 1945. In 1946 and 1947, he worked at the Henry Kaiser Company <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Aluminum> as assistant to the president. In 1948, in association with two colleagues, he launched a new version of Scientific American
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American#History>, to promote science literacy for the general public in the postwar era. In January 1957 Piel hired the then unknown Martin Gardner <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner> to write the Mathematical Games column <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Games_(column)>, a feature that became one of the most popular parts of the magazine, lasted for 25 years, and produced almost 300 columns.

Piel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Academy_of_Arts_and_Sciences> and the American Philosophical Society
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philosophical_Society>.[3]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-3>[4]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-4> He held a number of honorary degrees and awards, including the UNESCO
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO> Kalinga Prize
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalinga_Prize> in 1962.[5]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-5>
Global policy[edit
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerard_Piel&action=edit&section=2>]

He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_constitution>.[6]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-6>[7]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-7> As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constitutional Convention <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Constitutional_Convention>convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_for_the_Federation_of_Earth>.[8]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Piel#cite_note-8>

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 12:58:11 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

Strangely enough, Jay Gould is listed as a contributing writer for the magazine according to Wikipedia.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 14:02:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch4 - winding up

And not Stephen Jay Gould, another eminent scientist of the times who had a different mag as his regular publisher of pieces..

I want to CONGRATULATE again, Michael and all of us. I have read too much stuff on Pynchon and even just this novella and IN NOTHING I'VE READ has any scholar explored that* Scientific American *seemingly thrown-away line...LOOK what it reveals!

And the scholars who should have known that Pynchon willfully used science in his books because as he said in an early letter, unless I am making shit up again, that the modern novelist trying to capture/illumine/ see the world whole MUST know and use science because it pervades our modern world. The Tower is everywhere.....

Michael and JK, I think this great stuff could be a short, "Just the Facts, Ma'am" piece in Orbit or somewhere else.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 14:11:11 UTC 2024

Trivial, sub species aeternitate, example of the Tristero concept in current history.? So to stretch and say. Always in black, of course.

Secret meeting, alternate communication system, of Repubs about the Repub convention.

"The instructions did not come from “Never Trumpers” hoping to stop the party from nominating a felon when delegates gather in Milwaukee next month. They instead came from avowed “America First” believers hatching a challenge from the far right — a plot to release the delegates from their pledge to support Trump, according to people present and briefed on the meeting, slides from the presentation and private messages obtained by The Washington Post.

The delegates said the gambit would require support from several other state delegations, and it wasn’t clear whether those allies had been lined up. One idea, discussed as attendees ate finger-foods, was for co-conspirators to signal their allegiance to one another by wearing matching black jackets."

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 14:23:23 UTC 2024

Trivial, sub species aeternitate, example of the Tristero concept in current history.? So to stretch and say. Always in black, of course.

OMG !!!
SQEEEE !!!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 16:14:18 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 tangential remark

Delillo: “I think we’ve all come to feel that what’s been missing over these past 25 years is a sense of a manageable reality. Much of that feeling can be traced to that one moment in Dallas. We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then.”

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 16:40:14 UTC 2024

Bet DeLillo liked The Crying of Lot 49 better'n Tom does.....

“We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.” — Don DeLillo, Libra

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 17:13:43 UTC 2024

Pynchon Knew, didn't he?, FELT, that women were the ones to be attacked "all around us"--last phrase Dylan....

https://x.com/JaneotN/status/1803928940198679001

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 18:46:40 UTC 2024

Pynchon Knew, didn't he?, FELT, that women were the ones to be attacked "all around us"--last phrase Dylan....

Very nice! That’s one of my favorite books in the Bible. LOL!

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 23 11:32:12 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

Oedipa decides to go to the Bay area to get a copy of the Wharfinger text at Berkeley and possibly visit John Nefastis. Like Mucho, Metzger seems indifferent to her leaving, and she passes Kinneret before she realizes it, so she doesn't visit her husband. On reaching Berkeley, she checks into a German-baroque hotel that his hosting a convention of deaf-mutes. The hotel is silent but lit up brightly, and Oedipa falls asleep, waking up to find she is looking at herself in the mirror.

She goes to the campus, but they don't have a copy at the library, so she must go into Oakland and get it from a warehouse. The quotation of Trystero has been altered and doesn't mention Trystero or any other version with a Trystero in the verse. She goes back to the campus to meet the Professor Bortz who edited the text, but he has moved to San Narciso University. 

Oedipa wanders through campus as a protest of the students occurs. She thinks how her Republican heroes have been left to a different time. She has no use for the protest. She goes to see John Nefastis, who is watching cartoons. He shows her the Maxwell Box and explains the concepts of entropy. She attempts to be a sensitive and move the pistons but fails. Nefastis soothes her and then suggests they have sex while watching the news about China, which gets him horny. She leaves disgusted and drives into San Francisco.

She begins her evening walking down Broadway and is encircled by a group of tourists going into a gay bar, the Greek Way. There she meets a man with a muted horn pin. She asks him several questions, trying to learn about Trystero and W.A.S.T.E., but he is an Inamorati Anonymous, or someone who has given up on love.

Questions:
   
   - Why are Mucho and Metzger compared by both not "being desperate" to see her leave?
   - When Oedipa walks through the protest, she thinks of three anti-communists from the Eisenhower administration era. Why does Pynchon use the term "numena" to categorize these three together? Why are they "In another world."?
   - Why does Nefastis' certainty about his Maxwell Machine make her feel like a "heretic"?

If I come up with more, I'll add.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 12:14:35 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

You have focused me more than ever on this: ..There are no strong interpersonal emotions in this novella; not even the hint of romance It is just sex....

None of these guys would ever climb her hair to Rapuzel's hideaway tower....

America then, or suburban married America then?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 14:31:38 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

“The Numinous” is a core concept of Jungian Psychology. https://jungiancenter.org/jung-and-the-numinosum/

It is a concept that is only “real” because of the “uncanny” feeling associated with it. Very closely related to the concept of Intuition.  Both are a kind of non-verbal “Knowing.”

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 14:34:43 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

Applied to these 3 Guys, I think “Spooky” (they’re spies/spooks) would be a perfect description.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 23 15:15:10 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

I agree Mark. This time reading CoL49 really has me looking at all the men in Oedipa’s life. Is it the time? Reminds me of trying to watch Mad Men and not wanting to see men behave so glandularly driven. 

Benny Profane didn’t do well with relationships, but he did care about each of the women he had relationships with. We really have a surface view of all male characters in the 3rd person limited. We have a narrator who comments on Oedipa’s inner world, but he doesn’t comment or explore any of the inner worlds of the males. Does that help the reader to see/empathize with Oedipa’s character more? I think yes.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 23 15:24:45 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

This aligns with Otto’s idea of numinous as well. He points out its ecstatic awe in the face of a “wholly other”. Which is why the phrase “In another world” feels like more than just a nostalgic moment for her. 

These three seem to be her former guiding lights, but they don’t explain what she sees anymore.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 16:37:14 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

Great stuff, David.....they are numena in the old tower is everywhere world....A world of Republican--and national---anti-communism....I mean Goldwater has just been blown out of the water, so to speak with that famous ad n min....a year or so before.....

but *Crying* is about a new world being born:Oedipa is having a rebirth ....the lifeless sex is now being changed by the music group, etc.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 20:03:39 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

Few miscellaneous things in Chap 5..

line on 81...dream: Mucho "making love to her on a soft white beach that was not part of any California she knew"
another indication of a new world of Oedipa's......wakes up exhausted,,,,,which is NOT the usual way one wakes up
from an erotic dream.....but maybe as a woman it can be?     BUT, it seems it was not erotic then.....

p. 81......$12.50 in the mid-sixties would now be about $125.....inflation is about ten times.....pretty expensive book....
comparable books of plays like that in paperback in the sixties when I was a bookseller were under $2 to maybe $2.50

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 20:20:50 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

.."young Oedipa...unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins"....

Give me 500 words on the similarities between Oedipa and Maxine Tarnow....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 20:39:16 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 84   "I like to watch young stuff"....." So does my husband" she said. "I understand"...

There was at least one whole book published about *The Lolita Complex *in men. (loosely understood as an attraction to young women----but not TWELVE, which was Lolita's age).....

I remember driving and talking with some of my male buddies after first year college....guys from high school, since we had all gone elsewhere for college......and I said, joking (and choking with young male stupidity) that I thought I had a Lolita Complex--having read the book in my first year of college but not in any class--because I wanted to "date" high school girls--
dating did not mean what it means now---again, LOL.....

The woman at college I wanted to go out with was "won" by my best buddy and a possible other was a sophomore, rumoredly brilliant because she was in a highly selective advanced class reading *The Recognitions--*which is how I learned of THAT book--and she was the best in the class of older students (even grad students, dunno) one guy told me, teaching me she was out of my league....

Back to the point.....P saw that immaturity in many older American men...a real Psychological-social thing, I say....Psych 101.....afraid of a real equal woman.....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 20:48:52 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Why do we not explore the word 'demon' n Maxwell's Demon"...that was Lord Kelvin's naming and it comes from the Greek
Daemon, with only positive life force meanings in Greek my greek scholars tell me,,,,so it is, as we can sorta read and see
a force against entropy......and here is another implication, meaning...

   - In aphorism 341 of *The Gay Science    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gay_Science>*, Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche> puts forth his eternal recurrence <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_recurrence> concept. In it, he employs a demon with special metaphysical knowledge as an agent for forcing reevaluation of perspective on one's own life.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 21:00:25 UTC 2024

CoL49-Revelation & chapter 5 beginning

p. 82.....J--K Sale is a buried Pynchon homage to his old Cornell buddy Kirkpatrick Sale, a guy who REALLY did seem to believe wholly in antistatism, anarchism/libertarianism and maybe the secession of California and a couple other Western states and whose wife Faith became a NY editor and became Tom's ...after Cork Smith I think...(that is I'm not sure of the chronology but I am sure she became his editor)....

"She should have remembered the date on the book---1957. Another world.

Another statement of a new world.

There is a famous quote that went around in the sixties about the birth of a new world but I can't find it. It isn't Arnold's I don't think which is the only one I can recall....Hesse or Heine, I'm thinking, esp Hesse.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 21:05:58 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 88.....:"serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion"....or.....

????......sex again.....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jun 24 00:46:42 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

From Hesiod also, the people of the Golden Age <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age>were transformed into daimones by the will of Zeus <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus>, to serve mortals benevolently as their guardian spirits; "good beings who dispense riches…[nevertheless], they remain invisible, known only by their acts".[8] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#cite_note-8> The daimones of venerated heroes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_hero> were localized by the construction of shrines, so as not to wander restlessly, and were believed to confer protection and good fortune on those offering their respects.[6] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#cite_note-Burkert1985-6> One tradition of Greek thought, which found agreement in the mind of Plato <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato>, was of a daimon which existed within a person from their birth, and that each individual was obtained by a singular daimon prior to their birth by way of lot <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy>.[6] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#cite_note-Burkert1985-6> The evil demon was a transformation of the concept by Christianity drawing on the idea of  the serpentine  deceiver spirit in Genesis, and a couple other bible stories.

The most interesting idea I have heard on entropy was from Buckminster Fuller, who suggested that life itself (which he also identified as intelligence) is anti- entropic. Probably the greatest unresolved mystery of science is the question of how non-life spreading in entropic and random motion guided by inherent physical restraints/habits/ becomes self-reproducing life forms that have endured for millions of years and transformed into various forms and degrees of consciousness which evolve to fill various niches via genetic coding. Life defies the extinction of intelligent consciousness but at the expense of individual mortality. And humans have always suspected and now claim to scientifically establish a beginning for everything, so how is that not an anti-entropic mystery; everything from nothing.. The thing about life and physics is the constant change which is a kind of constant death and rebirth moment by moment. Life as we know it needs death, and every energetic system we can prove or manipulate runs down. But something wound it up.  So universes may come and go but why not enjoy the ride rather than fight a losing and frequently vicious battle for control. 

Pre-monotheist cultures seem to be much more comfortable and interactive with non-human intelligences.  Pynchon summons them regularly( conversational ball lightning, an ice monster with X-ray eyes, conscious light bulbs, talking dogs, underground worlds)   but not in COL 49, Oedipa wants that contact but it seems to flit by like a "nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her bed. Nothing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see.” or like Maxwell's momentary smile, or the visionary tears from Varo’s painting. The only solid form of such contact  focuses her attention on the  Tristero " in magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her ( and not just her) from outside and for no reason at all".  But Pynchon is about to break that spell, if only for  a few days through OM’s compassion arising from her contact with the preterite, the non-owners.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 24 10:04:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 - New World

Some thoughts:

Mark, could this be the Hesse quote?

''Who would be born must first destroy a world. '' from Demian

Oedipa desires to be born anew, whether she realizes it or not. She needs to destroy the patriarchal society that keeps her in the "tower is everything" world.

The more these men become less "desperate" to keep her nearby, she becomes more capable of establishing herself in a new world. Back to the Rapunzel story, the prince doesn't rescue her, he uses her hair to climb up and develop their relationship, keeping her there, getting her pregnant with twins, until the witch discovers the love affair and banishes Rapunzel into the 'wilderness'. There she creates a "new world" and raises the twins until the blinded prince finds his way to her. Only then do they return to his kingdom, and her tears actually give him sight again!

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 24 10:11:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 - New World

No, that wasn't it but I like this post using it..

In Solidarity,

Mark

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 24 10:27:45 UTC 2024

V. V. V. endlessly recursive

https://x.com/kvtp11/status/1805003517641310550

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 24 12:38:36 UTC 2024

Since we've been talking anarchy...a brilliant aphorism by a good writer and filmmaker.

https://x.com/DannyDrinksWine/status/1804999120555483376

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jun 24 17:00:00 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Google N—Gram of "a sensitive"...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22a+sensitive%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jun 25 10:52:44 UTC 2024


The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Yes, I too have heard from other scientists what you heard from Fuller. Scientists know that life itself is anti-entropic.

Which can lead us to ask why the concept, a self allusion to his most famous story, right? shows up here again?

Let's try this notion on: TRP has the time of Oedipa's time (so far in her life) now in America be linked to that dead world
TRP wrote of in his story. .....

But now the emphasis is on life breaking through the entropic tower which is everywhere....Oedipa's quest, unknown fully to herself yet.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 25 10:57:41 UTC 2024


Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

This would align with the Fallopian and other reproductive imagery.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue Jun 25 11:07:59 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

I think we’ve arrived at the most important of all things NUMINOUS: “Life itself”

Science resists it kicking and screaming (Freud? Einstein?), but Jung decided to ALLOW into his consciousness EVERYTHING that is observed.  And Freud quickly kicked him out of the Club.

David Morris

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jun 25 15:33:26 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

The problems with Nefastis’s “invention”?
Nefastus
Adjective
nefāstus (feminine nefāsta, neuter nefāstum); first/second-declension adjective
(of a day) on which judgment could not be pronounced or assemblies of the people be held
(figuratively) contrary to the sacred rites or to religion; irreligious, impious; wicked, profane, abandoned; unlucky, inauspicious; 

1) it is not an invention at all but a literalization of Maxwells supposition, his imaginary demon, his proposition that only a helpful spirit operating outside the limits of our perceptions could reverse entropic energy norms and re-route random molecular motion to supply endless free energy for human technological designs. (what would we do with free energy, would it end greed, deception, war? Oil and coal seemed like such a ‘boon’ when energy out exceeded energy in and atmospheric/toxic load consequences were not so obvious. 2) what it mainly seems to be is a small-time scam to attract wannabe sensitives for sex 3) It uses an imitative method of trance induction to get the ’sensitive’ to “share his hallucination”. Is this the nature of all techno power struggles? 

Is Maxwell’s Demon Clerk Maxwell’s joke solution our power quests made to suggest our dependence on a divine creative life force that is not about to serve our technological appetites, but is giving us the mysteries of life and death in the guise of a demon as the guiding wisdom, the legitimate rites of passage into cosmic harmony. That no system derived from clever monkey logic can, as it were, bully God or control life and death.

False promises based on false premises. OM has moved through a series of relationships based on an internal myth of princely rescue, and an external sense that her entrapment is large, malignant and impersonal. She bares her soul in peeled back layers, but is still not free, not the naked Venus risen from Pacific foam into a joyous new world unable to constrain her. The layers are reviewed in semi-allegorical characters as she follows that life principle of curiosity like Alice in Wonderland. (to be continued)

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jun 26 17:47:34 UTC 2024

This piece made TRP furious. Then. He's younger than that now.

https://x.com/kvtp11/status/1806018023628722276

https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-no-return-on-the-v-mail-book-week-1964/

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 28 11:17:39 UTC 2024

Think Sorokin has read Pynchon? I do.

*Red Pyramid* is, surprisingly, the first collection of Sorokin’s short stories to be published in English. It presents work from the beginning of his career up to 2018, and from the first story, “Passing Through” (1981), the reader is held in the vice of Russia’s feudal power vertical. A visiting head of the regional committee, welcomed into a subordinate’s cosy office, is asked to approve a document; he responds by climbing onto the desk, squatting and defecating, as the hapless colleague, wanting to protect his document, catches the excrement in his hands. Repellent and blackly irresistible, the story stakes out Sorokin’s early territory of
realism fused with nightmarish phantasmagoria, a combination he has called “little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts”, which gave him, in the USSR, “a little spark of freedom”. Later work such as the copiously inventive and prescient *Day of the Oprichnik* (2006; 2010 in English translation) draws on a deeper well of extravagant dystopianism, and his most recent writing has moved into more minimalist space, perhaps out of a desire to offer a more simplifying commentary on the multiplying folly and brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In *Red Pyramid* this evolution is on fascinating display. In “A Hard-nosed Proposition” (1981), a gay office relationship is underpinned by grotesque gifts (including a severed chunk of a man’s face), while in “Obelisk” (1986), a recollection of violent family abuse is framed by a commemoration of Soviet heroism. Several of…

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jun 28 16:36:39 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH5 notes

Notes from the first part of Chapter 5 with other ruminations on novel as a whole

In the 1st line of ch 5, who is saying what her next move “should have been”, and why, and how can she or the narrator know this and from what place in time? Again we have an indication that the entire novel is a reflective review of either OM or the narrator or both. It’s almost all past tense and we have this and other insights or value judgements which come as truth statements without clarity of where they came from. 

Do we eventually find out ”where Richard Wharfinger had got his information about Trystero.” ( We have to wait for her time with  Bortz to answer that)  Why is the tristero reference only to be found in a  secret Vatican porn text of Wharfinger’s play and is there some indication of how it came to Driblette. Is that why he is dead? Also one wonders how the vatican version could have been much  more pornographic ? The play seems as pornographic as the director and society would tolerate.   “  Incest is a favorite theme of pornography. It is not elaborated in the Driblette play , but  is prominent enough in the play to make one wonder if P probing at something about the political incest that would have been necessary to organize the murder of Kennedy . 
She does find out how the inventor Nefastis picked up his mail, or at least that Nefastis is on the Waste mail route even though she at this time had only the potsmaster letter to indicate that such a mail system might still be active. The false stamps and postmark seem different from the WASTE mail which does not mention such details.

Adjective
nefāstus (feminine nefāsta, neuter nefāstum); first/second-declension adjective
	1	(of a day) on which judgment could not be pronounced or assemblies of the people be held
	2	(figuratively) contrary to the sacred rites or to religion; irreligious, impious; wicked, profane, abandoned; unlucky, inauspicious; hurtful quotations 

Why/How is the beach she where she dreams of making love with Mucho not part of any California she knew?  There is every kind of beach imaginable along the long coast of California, and Carmel has the softest , whitest sand i’ve ever known. 

tristero - latinate  ero as spanish suffix = holder of, manager of  , yielder of , which leads to begetter of sorrow, or  begetter of secret meetings/joinings
tryst-ing president has tryst with death, becomes sadness of nation and turning point of coup against the people.
tryst-eros

Black clad= black operative Mafia or CIA

Is Maxwell’s Demon in fact  Clerk Maxwell’s  joke science to suggest our dependence on a divine creative life force ?

False promises based on false premises. OM has moved through a series of relationships based on an internal myth of  princely rescue, and an external sense that her entrapment is large, malign and impersonal. She bares her soul in peeled back layers, but is still not free, not the naked Venus risen from Pacific foam into a joyous new world unable to constrain her. The layers are reviewed in semi- allegorical characters as she follows that life principle of curiosity like Alice in Wonderland.  ( to be continued)

 Every plot, every character, every allegorical claim of princely promise  and manly assertiveness that  she puts on, she seems destined to shed starting with P.Inverarity representing the Gouldian American dream of material acquisition and conquest at any cost, but he is so confused and  un-appealing in his multiple personality masks it is like making love with someone who isn’t  real. She leaves

Her failing connection to Mucho Maas is more ambiguous, both contributing to the lack of genuine attention to building an authentic relationship.  The isolation involves  personal choices as well as social pressures.

Next the peeling back is ritualized and involves the magic potions of liquor, fame, war heroics, and law- law both incarnate in Metz and broken in adultery , she wins the bet but has not bargained for any prize,  she  weeps , perhaps at how easy she has been or perhaps that she is naked but still not free. Metzger+Butcher Butchers separate the meat from the bones. 

The paranoids become a muse-like chorus observing her affair , serenading,  direct her attention to the odd similarity between the Couriers Revenge and the story of bones bought from fascist mobsters. They seem to bring out a feistiness in her that shows up in her questioning of Metzger , just as the play they recommend brings out his inner control freak and determination not to look where she is looking. We know the  Metzger relationship won’t last and another separation is coming.  

 Another layer gets peeled away by the play in an encounter with an artful projection whose more than entertaining power cannot be negated by Driblette’s arguments agains the importance of text. She needs to know some things, sees something he is anxious to negate. 

For my thinking the only satisfying explanation to the mystery in the play that draws her like a moth to the flame is that it conjures the recent un-named murder of the President. She lives in the real world of her time, the growth of the MIC, she  passes through real student groups in Berkeley in 1965,  she once revered  James Forrestal, John Foster Dulles, Senator Joe McCarthy and clearly would have been affected by and wondered about the horrifying assassination in Dallas, site of one of Fallopian’s PPS mail systems. Nixon goes unmentioned but makes a major connection to Southern California and the characters in 49. ( 49ers) 

The recall of the Ike-era figures in Chapter 5 seems another shedding: she asks where were ”those dear daft numina who’d mothered over Oedipa’s so temperate youth? In another world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who’d thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again.”  It was Kennedy, youthful artists, a more open media  but Kennedy as much as anything  who swept the McCarthy out of favor, Kennedy, now “ dead, impossible to find ever again”. 

Fallopian is another driven, success oriented male working in the MIC that Ike warned about. He wants to hook into the right wing sentiments which are an inherent part of militarism and his green-light-catching eyes point, as does his Peter Pinguid society to a jealousy of those who have succeeded in this goal, like his prime competitor, founder of the Birchers, candy magnate Robert Welch. Fallopian’s ideas and his hero, PP, are laughable but his confidence invites her to stay in touch and  later to …confide. He encourages her most paranoid interpretation of her experiences and sends her to buy guns from a man who sells Nazi armbands..  Again she cannot wear what he offers and she remains in limbo, evidence of the findings of her quest about to be sold off.

Hilarius is another layer of the culture of the time, in this case with a hidden ‘face’ . Freudian psychiatry was a new secular religion among the middle and upper classes with a promise of liberation from past traumas, from false social constraints, bad relationships, and anything blocking personal ‘fulfillment’.  It was also of high interest to those wanting to go further with Edward Bernays’s work in mass psychology to shape desired social attitudes, and had entered very dark terrain in the mind-control work of Sydney Gottlieb and MK Ultra.  Pynchon has been interpreted as a Freudian  but in Hilarius  he is pointing toward the potentials for abuse reminiscent of similar themes in GR.  Oddly Bernays went( much earlier) to the same high school and college as Pynchon. When OM seeks his help sorting out real from unreal, the old nazi has gone batshit crazy and she gets him into the hands of the police. One more layer discarded.

There are characters who don’t seem to so easily fit this pattern, particularly Mr Thoth, Genghis Cohen, Mucho Maas, Driblette the artist, the alcoholic sailor seeking forgiveness,   and Emory Bortz.  They are all non-aggressive, though affected by varying degrees of fear. Bortz is the least fearful,  perhaps because his focus is on the history of disagreements and power struggles with all its juicy stories safely behind. He has an interesting cult of student followers which echoes the 60’s academic re-consideration of historic forces like patriarchy, racism, revolutions  and empire building ( Kirpatrick Sale, a friend of TP, is an example of that trend and is slyly mentioned in Bortz’s notes found in the copy bought in Berkeley).

FSM= Free Speech Movement- 1964-65 Berkeley  
YAF= Young Americans for Freedom- Conservative group founded 1960
VDC= Vietnam Day Committee Formed Berkeley 1965

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jun 28 19:18:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 - did someone already share this link?

Looked familiar but just in case:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2437141-maxwells-demon-charges-quantum-batteries-inside-of-a-quantum-computer/

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jun 28 20:17:43 UTC 2024
 
COL 49 CH5 notes

Vatican porn is the worst porn....I've read....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 00:12:57 UTC 2024

The Peace Prize

https://www.threads.net/@earlofdadjokes/post/C8x0B_mSbYV/?xmt=AQGzzW845Gc2JQOTHPchWmywxHJjLSLJzz0lXSX1IoVAJw

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jun 29 13:54:03 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH5 notes

> Hilarius is another layer of the culture of the time, in this case with a hidden ‘face’ . Freudian psychiatry was a new secular religion among the middle and upper classes with a promise of liberation from past traumas, from false social constraints, bad relationships, and anything blocking personal ‘fulfillment’.  It was also of high interest to those wanting to go further with Edward Bernays’s work in mass psychology to shape desired social attitudes, and had entered very dark terrain in the mind-control work of Sydney Gottlieb and MK Ultra.  Pynchon has been interpreted as a Freudian  but in Hilarius  he is pointing toward the potentials for abuse reminiscent of similar themes in GR.  Oddly Bernays went( much earlier) to the same high school and college as Pynchon. When OM seeks his help sorting out real from unreal, the old nazi has gone batshit crazy and she gets him into the hands of the police. One more layer discarded.

One more layer discarded. OM is clearly perceptive,  intelligent, competent enough in basic physics to smell bullshit when that is what is being sold, has an instinct for an important line of inquiry and where evidence is pointing, a journalistic willingness to seek out witnesses, and  remains logical and meta-cognitively  deliberative despite the very startling evidence of her direct experience  with WASTE,  and finally more psychologically stable and willing to question herself than the supposed expert. She handles fear, the crazed arguments of Hilarius, the questionable competence and procedural delays of the police with a steady courage, perception and skill.  What? Pynchon asks, is the standard of sanity in a society engaged in MK ultra mind control experiments reminiscent of Nazi German? 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 16:29:17 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH5 notes

Great affinity with Maxine Tarnow, imo. ...Crying of Lot 49 is also a detective novel; and a quest novel....

"One more layer discarded. OM is clearly perceptive,  intelligent, competent enough in basic physics to smell bullshit when that is what is being sold, has an instinct for an important line of inquiry and where evidence is pointing, a journalistic willingness to seek out witnesses, and  remains logical and meta-cognitively  deliberative despite the very startling evidence of her direct experience  with WASTE,  and finally more psychologically stable and willing to question herself than the supposed expert."

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 16:33:51 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH5 notes

Yes, Freudian psychology took over the middle class, the high middle class in America in the 50s.

It itself is a form of social control by its narrow Freudian mind set. It's societal belief system....

Remember TRP gave the OED the first printed use of 'shrink" and

I think Dr. Hilarious is Pynchon's self-named joke on the pervasiveness of Freudian 'treatment' to do what it was purported to do....THAT is a joke, he sez....

jody2.718 jody2.718 at protonmail.com
Sat Jun 29 17:51:28 UTC 2024

The second law of thermodynamics underlies nearly everything. But is it inviolable?

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/disorder-thermodynamics-second-law

Don't hold your breath...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 29 18:35:14 UTC 2024

CoL49 - numinous

Joseph sez: that Nefastus' second definition entry:
> (figuratively) contrary to the sacred rites or to religion; irreligious, impious; wicked, profane, abandoned; unlucky, inauspicious; 

There is a certain humor in the fact that Oedipa cries (an indication of being sensitive) when she fails to be a 'sensitive', John Nefastus watches cartoons and uses news about China to get erotic stimulation, quite profane, insensitive. His efforts to achieve something from nothing indicates a desire to manipulate the numinous, the non-rational, the life-force itself through 'sensitives'. 

In contrast, Oedipa seeks to understand/comprehend/find meaning in the numinous, the 'life-itself' as David identifies it. Her search is for the sacred/sublime/numinous or 'life-itself', which can never be brought under one theory or idea.

In solidarity,
James 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 18:43:54 UTC 2024

CoL49 - numinous

YES!

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 18:56:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 - numinous

Oedipa does not yet know that it can't be brought under one theory or idea....hence her exploring the "meaning' of the Trystero....

The ending will SHOW her that, if she listens....when she "listens"....because she has to....

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 29 20:41:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Harnessing Power

Joseph Tracy sez: 

> Is Maxwell’s Demon Clerk Maxwell’s joke solution our power quests made to suggest our dependence on a divine creative life force that is not about to serve our technological appetites, but is giving us the mysteries of life and death in the guise of a demon as the guiding wisdom, the legitimate rites of passage into cosmic harmony.

Not only is it not going to serve "our technological appetites", but we will abuse whatever finite and fractional part of that energy creating the "sin" of unforseen, damaging externalities and typical, greedy abuse. We may think we have garnered/harnessed a new energy source, but we only begun to slice off a veneer of power that we don't completely understand or comprehend how to utilize without waste, abuse, and division.

In solidarity,
James

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 29 21:11:40 UTC 2024


CoL49 - Entropy

Mark sez: 

> Let's try this notion: TRP has the time of Oedipa's time (so far in her life) now in America be linked to that dead world TRP wrote of in his story. .....

> But now the emphasis is on life breaking through the entropic tower which is everywhere....Oedipa's quest, unknown fully to herself yet.

At the end of “Entropy”, Audabe smashes a window to let in the world, essentially speeding up the balancing of temperature that will result in entropy. She is a morning song of lovers departing, based on her name. Callisto's contained, moderated world that he controlled will be destroyed. She must overcome his Tower is Everywhere conception of the world in order to be the morning of a new world, which we see Oedipa take to the next level. Maxine's observing the golden trees again at the end of Bleeding Edge might represent that new understanding as well. Three female characters that Pynchon links over time?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 22:43:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 - numinous

  1. Here's the thing (maybe): Aubade is leaving this party--some getting it on of course---as a signal/ example to her lover to leave speedily
   2. AND she has let entropy begin, per TRP, the end of all 'getting it on" soon enough....a wasteland (Eliot's sense) being made....
   3.
   4. One of the few books TRP has actually referenced as being influential is Helen Waddell's *The Wandering Scholars.*
   5. *https://www.amazon.com/Wandering-Scholars-Vagantes-Medieval-Traveling/dp/B0BT6V58KW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LOG8I0UKTZV6&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YRvM-4k_bbcQQzSQCnxnABFU3SXSbqNNL6GeGAoi87KNQkBoA6-4gnNVzPWsRjzGGcVzbRhgzwy73g6oPikgIUIYAm-r7QjtO_2f7dLEGFvwFIdl8DIW-d0cubErGFpzdRn_q3Y9FNNHJ2jOHWiLbeSdLgL5f2regs_aHJIYK7IKr7KEVQUZN3fYxQRSBS_L3qTdPzQJLNg0nVpu1Gd8NYeMlysXUzx2iDLNrWVoB3s.vK2sz-xtWkOd6TPgCmYgxQsWq_TSz1efnHszC6CgDC0&dib_tag=se&keywords=wandering+scholars&qid=1719700445&sprefix=wandering+scholars%2Caps%2C89&sr=8-1
   <https://www.amazon.com/Wandering-Scholars-Vagantes-Medieval-Traveling/dp/B0BT6V58KW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LOG8I0UKTZV6&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YRvM-4k_bbcQQzSQCnxnABFU3SXSbqNNL6GeGAoi87KNQkBoA6-4gnNVzPWsRjzGGcVzbRhgzwy73g6oPikgIUIYAm-r7QjtO_2f7dLEGFvwFIdl8DIW-d0cubErGFpzdRn_q3Y9FNNHJ2jOHWiLbeSdLgL5f2regs_aHJIYK7IKr7KEVQUZN3fYxQRSBS_L3qTdPzQJLNg0nVpu1Gd8NYeMlysXUzx2iDLNrWVoB3s.vK2sz-xtWkOd6TPgCmYgxQsWq_TSz1efnHszC6CgDC0&dib_tag=se&keywords=wandering+scholars&qid=1719700445&sprefix=wandering+scholars%2Caps%2C89&sr=8-1>
   7.  Fauriel, Claude Charles <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Charles_Fauriel> (1846). "The lyrical poetry of the troubadours". In Adler, George J. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Adler> (ed.). *History of Provençal Poetry* <https://books.google.com/books?id=V24Y8XYWM2AC>. Translated by Adler, George J. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Adler> New York: Derby & Jackson (published 1860). p. 412. Retrieved 2020-06-01. [...] the aubades of the Troubadours were intended to wake up at the dawn of day the chevalier who had spent the night with his lady, and to admonish him to withdraw speedily, in order to escape detection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubade

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 22:53:03 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

In the closed loop, ECHO CHAMBER prison, both characters are hooked, addicted to the poison of information control: filtering/eliminating out CHAOS to sustain the illusion of ORDER.

But ONE of the characters is aware of her plight.  And she has the power to STOP her contribution to the loop-system.  Stopping the machine by REMOVING one’s contribution/role to sustaining the system.

————————

*It should be noted: * *BOTH* of the [*Echo(she*) & *Narcissus(he)] *are bound, restrained, locked away from the world **LIFE** that continues around and despite them. They are in a contract for mutual destruction. So the Echo Court playground is full of co-dependents.

*It might be noted: * *Echo* is essentially providing Narcissus a continuous flow of heroin.  She could stop speaking to him, removing the chain of herself from Narcissus.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 23:14:29 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

Continuing the  information loop metaphor:

The postal service is a Communication system.  It is an information infrastructure. As far as I can tell, it does not control the content of communication.  It is also a public utility available to all.  So it’s a bit hard to say how it might fit into the echo chamber myth

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jun 29 23:29:35 UTC 2024

COL49 Group Read - Echo and Narcissus

The Trystero is an alternative information system...

Those caught in the Echo/Narcissus loop are caught in the old communication system.

Maybe?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jun 30 02:33:57 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 - did someone already share this link?

> if you’re hitting a paywall -

A 19th-century thought experiment, considered for decades to break the laws of thermodynamics, has been brought to life inside a quantum computer and used to charge a quantum battery.

 Physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined his demon in 1867 while thinking about how to cheat the laws of thermodynamics. He considered two boxes of gas separated by a weightless door and a tiny demon that controls which particles can go through it. The demon uses this control to make one box hotter and the other cooler, contradicting the thermodynamic edict that heat must flow from the hotter to the colder box until they eventually even out.

 Later, physicists realised that the demon could not break thermodynamic laws “for free” because it would spend energy during its particle selection process, but the idea remained of interest because it can naturally occur in biology and has uses in chemistry.

“The exploration of Maxwell’s demon in a quantum setting forces us to think deeply about what’s behind the fundamental laws of quantum information, thermodynamics and especially their combination – quantum thermodynamics,” says Bill Munro at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. He and his colleagues used a quantum computer comprising 62 quantum bits, or qubits, made from superconducting circuits to explore such “demonic effects” – more qubits than have ever been used to implement Maxwell’s demon before.

 Munro and his colleagues divided the qubits into two groups within a quantum computer, with each group representing one of Maxwell’s boxes. Then they implemented a demon-like procedure that used pulses of microwaves to force one group to contain more energetic qubits, and the other to contain far less energetic ones.

 In this way, the researchers effectively built a quantum battery, or a device that uses quantum processes to fill up with energy.

Quantum batteries are thought to be a promising, fast-charging energy technology of the future, but have so far only been explored in theory and modest proof-of-concept experiments.

 Here, the researchers could evaluate the effect of the demon on their actual battery. They found that the demon was much faster at changing the temperature – which points to a change in energy – of the two subsystems than a more conventional battery charging protocol. They also verified that their experiment followed a modified version of the second law of quantum thermodynamics that explicitly accounts for the qubits’ quantum nature.

This quantumness is the key novelty of the experiment, says Mauro Paternostro at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK. The experiment included enough qubits to exhibit so-called quantum many-body effects, which are thought to fundamentally affect how qubits can, or cannot, reach a state of equilibrium temperature.

 The other exciting feature, he says, is that this version of Maxwell’s demon performs quantum measurements in order to sort qubits, and “the act of measuring something quantum mechanically is so violent, so strong, that you really fundamentally affect its state”. In other words, the new demon does not just measure qubits to sort them, but changes their states in the process, which improves its ability to charge a quantum battery. “This was not anticipated by James Maxwell back in the 19th century,” says Munro.

 Journal reference: Physical Review A DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.109.062614

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 30 13:35:50 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Echo & Narcissus

David sez:

> Continuing the  information loop metaphor:
> The postal service is a Communication system.  It is an information infrastructure. As far as I can tell, it does not control the content of communication.  It is also a public utility available to all.  So it’s a bit hard to say how it might fit into the echo chamber myth

The way that W.A.S.T.E. is described by Fallopian as a closed information loop that keeps going by people writing to each other to say nothing.

Echo continues to provide the heroin to Narcissus. She's there to keep him believing that he's as desirable as he thinks he is. Oedipa is breaking free from that closed loop as she continues her search and moves past all the men who see her only as confirmation of their desirability. 

As bell hooks has pointed out, some of the most viral promoters of patriarchy are women.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 30 21:16:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Echo & Narcissus

It certainly a legitimate question Morris brings up. My thoughts on it go beyond the Echo and  Narcissus metaphor, but I think they show how deranged a Narcissistic world view can go in separating the Narcissist from human connection.

We think of postal systems as personal letters, private and of little interest to anyone but the sender and receiver. But postal systems are also the precursor of news distribution; the more societies moved to written communication like legal codes, ledgers, books, couriers, the more authoritative signed written documents are. A state is largely a system of authoritative  communication.   Organizing opposition to the legitimacy of a ruler or system  often involves  using mail that is truly private or creating an alternate communication system and authority structure, or publicly publishing a dissenting idea.    News media that primarily serve state interests, (which are usually married to commercial interests)are in effect  letters informing citizens what the concerns , decisions and goals of the state are and what the  parameters of social behavior and thought are. I see the media and  postal wars we find in COL 49 , which in Bortz’s exposition have a politically charged history, as an excellent disguised metaphor for the media wars which the CIA kicked into high gear in the 50s and 60s, and which the fascists had used to powerful effect in their propaganda.  When the secret communication system is also an assassination service, watch out.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jun 30 22:11:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Echo & Narcissus

The Trystero is an alternate communication system. Outside of the official post office. The official post office carries citizen communication which is overwhelmingly personal mail. It is, in one sense, the most democratic system of government.

When that official system is 'in trouble"--the Vietnam lies; America divided; the bad news of draft notices one could add
straightforwardly, the democracy is in a communication crisis.....the citizens' voices are not being heard.....it is that narcissistic loop Morris writes of....our mail echoes circularly.... 

So, the Trystero can now enter....as Joseph even said, the assassins get orders, verbal orders....the Trystero enters to blow
things up anarchically....the Trystero enters because communication is clogged and new ways need to enter.....

So, it does......glimpses of that other world (of communication) as gets said.....no indication with this appearance of The Trystero
that there are assassins.....the possibilities presented are good this time...

Mark

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jun 30 22:24:26 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 - did someone already share this link?

Interesting. My first thought is how much do qubits run on the open market( I know that is a meaningless question, but I had to look it up to even know that)?  Second, how closely is the energy in vs energy out being counted? It’s all theory and math, right? 
 In 2019, Google AI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI> and NASA <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA> announced that they had achieved quantum supremacy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy> with a 54-qubit machine, performing a computation that is impossible for any classical computer.[27] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#cite_note-27>[28] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#cite_note-1910.11333-28>[29] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#cite_note-29> However, the validity of this claim is still being actively researched.[30] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#cite_note-30>[31] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#cite_note-31> But not by me

Oh them noisy qubit gates, 
Almost worse that the quantum rates
That superposition of multiple states
Has got my noggin reeling

It used to be gases in their running shoes
Like Noahs ark goin 2 by 2
But lately I got my eyes on you
Cuz that’s when I get that feeling

I gotta cohere my superposition
Whether B Beaver or sweet Om mission
Come on lets make some brand new fission
Lets rob each other blind today 
Of that thing that we both like stealing
And swing with the physics of healing

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 1 18:46:35 UTC 2024

Entropy. Gaddis not Pynchon.

“Problem Bast there’s too God damned much leakage around here, can’t compose anything with all this energy spilling you’ve got entropy going everywhere. Radio leaking under there hot water pouring out so God damned much entropy going on.” (William Gaddis, J R)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 06:43:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 5 - depressing / babushka?

It gets pretty depressing.

I’m interested in relating to the (simulacrum of a) lived experience of the characters, Oedipa in particular.

We’ve all had days like that…

Here’s something I was puzzled by:
“…she pattered down the steps into the street, flung a babushka over her license plate and screeched away down Telegraph.”

This is right after old Nefastis tries to get her to have sex with him.

But why does she put a babushka over the license plate? Just planning to drive dangerously? Confident she can elude pursuit?

Anyway, whatever bubble or tower she’s been in, she’s essentially now facing the world without her customary filters and there’s a lot of experiences that she’s now filing under the rubric of “Tristero”.

As the narrator says, “…there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much.”
 
Some kind of unsatisfying metanoia has enveloped her and she walks and rides around the Bay Area for 24 hours, apparently able to elicit confidences from strangers, whether they be children, alcoholics, the suicidal lovelorn, or “Negroes”, without breaking her stride.

Dickens used to take long, long walks & isn’t there some lore pertaining to the same tendencies in “OBA” (who was the p-lister of old who coined that abbreviation for “our beloved author”? Robin Landseadel?) - although, was that the disavowed Japanese Playboy interview?

Anyway, the unheralded but ever-present denizens of San Francisco and their experience of the city open up to her in her state of mind, which is destined to be temporary but (italicized) “She was meant to remember.”

The state of mind is unsustainable; if and when she later remembers, it won’t be with any Proustian longing to recapture it. But that may be because it’s firmly lodging itself, unforgettable.

It may be that, as suggested in the _Slow Learner_ intro, one “mature fictional” theme here is she’s coming to terms with death? Pierce’s, and death in general as a relief from, a hypothetical final point in the trajectories of, all these unsatisfying lives?

“In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns
and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.”

It’s one of the more pleasing images from the chapter.

I wonder, is it a faint echo of Kerouac’s Mexican girl? Mike Heron wrote a song about her and the _On the Road_ passage:
https://youtu.be/VGYZW32mxUY?si=n3ohnzpcWbv1AS8c

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 07:17:16 UTC 2024

Do I contradict myself?

Earlier -

The state of mind is unsustainable; if and when she later remembers, it won’t be with any Proustian longing to recapture it. But that may be because it’s firmly lodging itself, unforgettable.

It’s unsustainable, so how can it be unforgettable?

The memory of it, I guess.
She’s not in the same place mentally afterwards - that’s what’s unsustainable.
But the impressions remain.

The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walked on at the wind's will,--
I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was,--
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.

My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one.

>From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me,--
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 10:07:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 5 - depressing / babushka?

Other questions: How does a Young California Republican come to have a "babushka"? A thing then? always associated wth older women in my neck f babushka wear---and from ethnic PA, I saw a lot of them....

I think, paranoid, she just did not want her license plate to be traced by......Tristero OR the cops...They could learn her identity.......

Thinking on it, another little bit of text evidence she was fleeing it......

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 10:14:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 5 - depressing / babushka?

MB quotes...“In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.”

Like Mucho's memories of those who bought/needed used cars..

These are the Preterite kinds of songs, so to speak…

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 10:19:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch 5 - depressing / babushka?

"Anyway, the unheralded but ever-present denizens of San Francisco and their experience of the city open up to her in her state of mind, which is destined to be temporary but (italicized) “She was meant to remember.”

She was meant to remember the Unheralded. Those denizens ens beyond her privileged elite education and comfortable young Repub life.....the preterites.....

TRP's incredible compression of things in this whole novella.....this is how many of the privileged did find their wider conscience......I think of young Hilary Clinton here.........

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 2 10:37:13 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

Greetings,

Sorry this is late. 

Summary:

Oedipa's conversation continues with the Inamorati Anonymous gentleman. He explains their purpose and also the story of the founder, who contemplating suicide after the loss of his job and marriage has a revelation. The story of how the muted posthorn symbol became a for the group involves a Yoyodyne mid level administrator who loses his job, his wife, and his reason to live and just as he is about to kill himself in the same form as a Buddhist monk protesting Vietnam, he has a revelation that love is the problem. The gasoline has soaked a series of letters that he received (presumably) through W.A.S.T.E. which wipes the ink to reveal a watermark with the muted posthorn. He forms the IA and uses the muted posthorn as its symbol. The Isolate leaves her to go to the bathroom and never returns. She leaves the Greek Way and wanders the city, finding the posthorn symbol everywhere. She finds children dreaming that they are playing together, In a Mexican restaurant, she meets Jesus Arrabal, a Mexican anarchist she had met in Mazatlan with Pierce. He describes Pierce as the reason he has stayed with anarchy, as Pierce represents everything he despises. He describes a miracle as 'another world's intrusion into this one. She continues through the 'infected city' where she sees more examples of the posthorn, finally finding an old drunken sailor with the posthorn tattooed onto his hand. She comforts him, and he asks her to mail a letter to his wife through W.A.S.T.E., which she says she doesn't know how to use. He tells her she can find a location under the highway. She helps him to bed and imagines that he will die by having his cigarette ignite his mattress when he falls asleep.

Questions:
Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?
Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?
Why does Oedipa feel despair when she realizes that "nobody around her has any sexual relevance" to her?
How does the founding story of the Isolate at the gay bar compare with the drunken sailor grieving his wife? Why is that important?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 10:48:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

1) Questions: Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?

Because the tower of capitalism is everywhere; he makes his living within it and it cost him Love.....

2) Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?

Wants to get drunk and meet no one to tempt his commitment...

3) Why does Oedipa feel despair when she realizes that "nobody around her has any sexual relevance" to her.

Because in a "normal" world/ environment there is always ...some chemistry between the sexes....but not here… She doesn't feel like a woman, a major part of her identity.

4) How does the founding story of the Isolate at the gay bar compare with the drunken sailor grieving his wife?
IA founder lost her without being able to grieve her....rejection....so the normal human grief of the sailor for a wife he loved and lost is lost to him.....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 2 16:03:50 UTC 2024

Do I contradict myself?

Beautiful choice of poem.  Even the woodspurge  works like the muted horn.The end of this chapter is one of the stranger and more haunting passages in fiction. I can only say for myself it actually reminds me of a very lonely period of my life , partly in Chicago, and partly in San Francisco and Berkeley, wandering at night , alone or with a friend and often marked by  coincidences. I think the kind of metanoia OM is having is more common for  the young newly on their own but OM is older, financially comfortable  and brings a kind of stable self awareness into this awakening which makes it both more troubling and calls for more of an explanation within her . Experience has more powerful effects than evasive explanations. 

The posthorn is everywhere, but 3 or 4  of the evenings events have stronger internal affect: 1)failing as sensitive despite rational understanding that it is absurd(feeling the malign magic, is she seeking her own counter-magic) and returning to nefastis apt bldg( house of the profane)  at end of waste postal route. 2) encounter with I.A. character who makes case against love 3) encounter with Jesus Arabal of counter -CIA whose anarchist news comes via waste 4) helping the old alcoholic sailor send his sad letter and giving him comforting human touch. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 2 16:07:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

Good summary and thoughtful responses all have my wheels turning. More to say later.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 2 19:45:07 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

In a materialist, competitive society there is a fair amount of confusion between love and capital assets. Miles, Dean Leonard and Serge have names but their companions are “their chicks”. The confusion is a marketing bonanza for capitalism.  But the net effect on marriage  is that a better position is offered and the acquired partnership fails while the abandoned partner may have seen love and meaning and a human sanctuary where there was really  only a contingency. This is echoed with the drummer when his girlfriend still called only "Serge’s chick" leaves him for Metzger. The reaction of the jilted can be cynicism about love or a search for the real thing in self and relations. Of course there are many versions of what is real, and it is hard to see Pynchon taking this topic over seriously apart from OM’s intense pursuit of what is real in both love and capitalism, good faith and foul play, law and truth, the lives of the powerful and the powerless. 

What I mean is it is hard to take seriously the problems of either the paranoids shallow youth culture and art; or the problems of weapons and aerospace  executives, who don’t know what they are signing, getting replaced by a computer; or lawyer/actors  like Metzger  going for easier prey.  What I take more seriously  is the IA, the rejection of love that grows out of and is really essential to Yoyodyne policies and is a powerful force in the dark satiric vision of America Pynchon is elaborating. Money from violence or deception is real and highly desired, and human commitment and shared values are slogans for productivity and sales tools. That this IA organization is followed in O.M.’s next personal encounter by the CIA seems no accident to me. Claims of clandestine intelligence  instead of love, secret power vs local post colonial collective decision making, coercion versus anarchism, Angelo/Angleton versus Niccolo/Kennedy. Cities designed like printed circuits with fake lagoons vs (Arrabal arable) land from Mazatlan still connected to its own history, where the CIA is not shaped by fascists but anarchist collectives as they resist becoming another plaything of rich gringos.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 2 20:50:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Circuits & Printed Developments

Joseph sez: 
"Cities designed like printed circuits with fake lagoons vs (Arrabal arable) land from Mazatlan still connected to its own history"

I really love this line! The massed production of purchased ownership vs the multi-generational evolution of earned space.

In the same way that the 'chicks' are possessions that can be 'stolen' or 'purchased' with wealth, the neighborhoods created by developers are plots to be purchased with loans or wealth rather than earned by effort of developing the land, making the land 'arable' rather than in need of nourishment.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 21:53:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

All too much for me to 'swallow"....to me, much of this is like the "false consciousness" that Marxism named....
but in reverse....I see TRP simply accurately saying how many young men of the time, any time, thought of their female get-it-on-with friends..as "chicks"...the word is of the time.....read a history or memoir of the time, see how most of the women were treated....read memoirs even of Leftists ....women, esp and how they were seen and treated by these men/boys for good societal change...anti-capitalist, anti-war and, unfortunately---hardly aware enough of women to be anti-women....Metzger's crude sex wants are as bad as he musicians.....and with one leaving for Metzger TRP shows the equivalence....TRP working this awareness into this novella which attitude--a little of--he apologized for in Slow Learner, from his early stories and V...

I see TRP taking this issue as seriously as all the others....He satirizes and makes us laugh as seriously as he explores, plays with. Inserts the "numinous' into his fictions...

Arrabal (arable) doesn't work for me...Spanish/English non-association for one reason.....but look up the meaning of Arrabal and it means an area outside of a city, an area around a city......fits very nicely into TRP's vision of anarchism I suggest......just the occasional area in our world......

And then THIS association: ...coupled with JESUS, jesus!....a glimpse from another world, right?

In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Movement> with Alejandro Jodorowsky <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky> and Roland Topor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Topor>, inspired by the god Pan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(mythology)>. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de  Pataphysique <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics#The_Coll%C3%A8ge_de_'Pataphysique>  in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp>, Eugène Ionesco <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ionesco>, Man Ray <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray>, Boris Vian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian>, Dario Fo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo>, Umberto Eco <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco>, and Jean Baudrillard <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard>. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Breton>'s surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol> and Tristan Tzara <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Tzara>.

Writer and critic Javier Villan <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Vill%C3%A1n> wrote of Arrabal:

Arrabal's theatre is a wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative world. It is a dramatic carnival in which the carcass of our 'advanced' civilizations is barbecued over the spits of a permanent revolution <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution>. He is the artistic heir of Kafka <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka>'s lucidity and Jarry <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry>'s humor; in his violence, Arrabal is related to Sade <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade> and Artaud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artaud>. Yet he is doubtless the only writer to have pushed derision as far as he did. Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve. [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Arrabal#cite_note-1>

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 22:05:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

But, of course, Joseph could be all correct....as a reading...

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jul 3 15:00:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

In my experience in the 60s chick was something men called women when the women weren’t there and not very commonly. Otherwise everyone had names, particularly in a small group . Not saying that these young men are anti—woman, but their language easily fits with the women as status symbols, acquisitions and Pynchon is not unconscious of the implications of this language and how it reinforces a not -so -subtle status distinction and objectification, or how easily habits pass from one generation to the next. Culture is powerful and often caters to biological realities. My main point is more about the culturally shaped self centeredness  that appeals to and profits from everything  but real mutual shared relations, real connections to the land that sustains us, to the memory of  and respect ( or intelligent disrespect) for those who shaped our world( the cemeteries, and GI bones), and how the disappointment of personal fulfillment within that materialist culture translates into a violent loveless ideology of power.

False consciousness  is not a term I use or am familiar with as integral to Marxism, not being drawn to marxism or  isms of any stripe. Some of Marx’s ideas about how exploitation works are persuasive and logically elaborated, but are not, in my view, peculiar to capitalism, which like marxism, seems as a whole, more like a religion than a sound economic or social understanding. I just read in Wikipedia that upward mobility is a named component of "false consciousness" that prevents effective resistance to exploitive practices. The real question is not the reality of upward mobility , but its  cost, and the methods used to achieve it regardless of  espoused goals. Mussolini started as a leftist but was essentially a ruthless narcissist. The modern religion of upward mobility gets linguistically pretty weird. Obama talked about how everyone wants to “get ahead”. Linguistically this is like saying the King had 3 daughters and each grew to be more beautiful than either sister. Therecan be no more without less,;no ahead without behind, no upward without downward. The mythologies of love promoted by commercial culture are advertising functioning as well payed  reinforcement  for a cultural religion. This re-examination of sacred myths  is what Oed M. was referring to in her thoughts comparing student activism in third world countries to what she saw at Berkeley.


I like the Arrabal information for the artist. Interesting that the surrealists were a group that Remedios Varro was part of, but turned away from because of sexism. The tower she paints is as strong a vision of the exploitation  of the creative power of the feminine as anything  I can think of. The Spanish  translation seems about the same as my loose use, which is only the way an English speaker might hear the word,  something P has been known to do but not at all an attempt at the definitive.  Oddly , or not, all definitions and the artist work similarly to support the themes of the novel. Arrabal, Spanish with Arabic roots,  can also mean slums, poor neighborhood. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 06:49:35 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

Questions: Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?

The plot of his life has included career, advancement, and marriage. All these things have been bestowed on him and his habits have been formed around them, but he doesn’t really know how any of them work.

Not surprisingly, his response to losing his job and wife and finding the posthorn is a non sequitur:

“Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the watermark. “A sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.” If he’d been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: “My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.” And he did”

- a) there’s a lot about his job but almost nothing about having any feelings for his wife

- b) confronting wife and her new lover actually perks him up

- c) so how is his one mistake love?

- d) he reads an arbitrary meaning into the muted posthorn, showing the same lack of understanding with which he used to read the specialized memos

- e) he founds an organization based on a made-up interpretation based on *nothing*, and in reaction against a feeling of love, when in all of his words or actions there’s no sign of it

- f) leaving unaddressed the only real fly in his life’s ointment: the computer taking his job, which I guess you could blame on capitalism, but wouldn’t it make as much sense to blame the computer?

The question arises - is this meant to be a “scherzo” sidelong view of AA? 
- like some of the over-the-top satirical exploration around AA a few years later in _Infinite Jest_?
- no, not for me anyway: yes, Oedipa does enjoy a drink and no, there’s not a lot of condemnation of her for it, but rather the use of brand names and drink names seems to imply an acceptance of drinking as a social ritual.
- but there’s no denying the “scared-straight” potential of the imagery around the drunken sailor
- hence I see no sign of attempts to do any kind of a take-down of AA
- I think maybe taking AA principles and applying them to love tickles the same sort of mordant funny bone as putting mail in a waste can.

— what it might be a takedown of, though, is specious “great moments of insight”
- always reminds me of Kerouac in “Desolation Angels” where he has the bogus satori “you can’t fall down a mountain”
- patently untrue
- unimpressive movements to this day grow up around a charismatic leader with some “great realization” and people retelling the tale

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 07:03:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5 - whoops, it was _Dharma Bums

https://the-adventure-travel-network.com/adventure/2020/3/10/you-cant-fall-off-a-mountain

Climber breaks it down, schooling me:
A) I misquoted & misattributed
B) have been snickering at that Kerouac quote for years but I guess what he said was sort of true:

The quote, “Ah Japhy [aka Snyder] you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain…” said Kerouac to Snyder on their way down the Matterhorn in Northern Yosemite. While this quote shows the playfulness of Kerouac trying to understand there is meaning in every moment of life if you are willing to listen. While scrambling to the top of the Matterhorn is a physical accomplishment, the quote takes the physical and becomes metaphorical. Once you have reached a goal or the top of a
mountain, it can not be taken away from you.

Just for fun, I am going to poke some holes in the quote. It is true, you can’t fall off a mountain, but you surely can fall down a cliff. Once we reach a goal, we can choose how we share our accomplishments. There is a right way and a wrong way, which has to do with our ego and how we accept/reject society's norms. If one decided to leap off a cliff, they would surely fall and… yup. Think about the people who accomplish something and take their sharing to far, the essentially jump off the cliff. A perfect example of the wrong way to come down the mountain. The irony in jumping off a cliff is the quote remains true, you can’t fall off the mountain because a mountain continues even after the cliff. Getting to the top of a mountain is only halfway, you still need to return safely.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 11:00:08 UTC 2024

Why?

MB "Not surprisingly, his response to losing his job and wife and finding the posthorn is a non sequitur:

“Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the watermark. “A sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.” If he’d been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: “My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.” And he did” 

Understanding is a non-sequitur when you can't understand. He loved her, wanted to stay married to her. So, he finds his blame....very normal for many who give up "relationships' after a major one fails.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 11:02:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5 - whoops, it was _Dharma Bums

I remember that quote as though I had just fallen. One falls down on a mountain.
Sometimes one then rolls...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 11:23:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

https://x.com/14JUN1995/status/1808629365338476896/photo/1

Darah Kehnemuyi darahk1 at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 4 11:59:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5 - whoops, it was _Dharma Bums

So then we have to understand hubris and dramatic tragedy.                   D.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 14:46:10 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

If we reasonably want to extend the meaning of USPS to other things besides letters that go by mail, as Joseph nicely suggested, then I think THIS American context is also relevant. The Stamp Act and The revolutionary ideals of America assumed and embedded in Pynchon's work.....I might argue that this is another time when the Tristero entered Western history.

>From Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American substack column:  "In 1765 they enacted the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on printed material in the colonies, everything from legal documents and newspapers to playing cards.

The Stamp Act shocked colonists, who saw in it a central political struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century: could the king be checked by the people? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental liberty as Englishmen to have a say in their government. They responded to the Stamp Act with widespread protests. "

"In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but linked that repeal to the Declaratory Act, which claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament. It also imposed new taxes."

as she goes on to say, led right to the tea party acts in Boston Harbor, Paine's pamphlet and the beginning of the war with the Brits shooting and killing first, of course…

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 4 19:00:07 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> f) leaving unaddressed the only real fly in his life’s ointment: the computer taking his job, which I guess you could blame on capitalism, but wouldn’t it make as much sense to blame the computer?

The computer did not shape his existence, his mind, his corporate world, It merely replaced him as a capital investment, but he was as embedded in a capitalist culture as one could be and obviously so was his wife as she competes for upward mobility. That culture is all he has. The phenomena has nothing to do with love. This guy does not have a clue what love is. He only understands his perceived needs and his hurt at rejection and the loss of ego inflation of a high paid job. This IA  phenomena is all around us in misdirected anger and scapegoating. Without love  there is only power.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 4 21:12:29 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Of course we do not agree that Tristero as presented in COL 49 is a consistently freedom-loving force or anarchist force, but probably are in agreement that revolutionary action requires a system of communication free from imperial control. And that the rebellion against the stamp act reflected the need for freedom of communication. . We are back to a system where most printed material is taxed in various ways, and the new target for censorship is the internet. I would prefer strict libel laws ,  and more range of public debate. 

Common Sense is way more revolutionary, anti-empire and anti-authoritarian than anything I see achieving major influence in today’s America.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 22:35:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

All right, if I don’t deny he’s experienced love - say his love for his meaningless job and marriage is genuine enough - Then why would that be the thing he renounces?

That’s the non sequitur.

With AA, alcohol is the thing that fucked them up. Making a big deal out of renouncing alcohol makes sense, because that’s what harmed them

But love isn’t what fucked IA founder up. It’s the thing he lost.

So is his renunciation more Buddhist (like the self-immolator, news of whom inspired him to imitate) in renouncing desire and attachment  - or like Simon and Garfunkel, “I am a Rock” “I have no need for friendship , friendship causes pain”?

Or just non sequitur imho.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 22:52:07 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

I don’t think you’re paying attention to the whole Narcissist NonSequitor
theme which seems to be permeating it incessantly.

Narcissus is ONLY interested in his OWN version of reality.  In his
version, the entire universe is only relevant for its praise (in  ALL
possible media) and support of the WORLD AS HE SEES IT - with HIM as its
ultimate object of desire.

Sometimes life and love are not cooperative to his BREAK from REALITY.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jul 5 03:50:06 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

I tried writing something about suicide and man that is a tough one; couldn’t do it.  I do not see Buddhist liberation from desire or illusion, or any real reckoning with where he is. I see something more like Adam blaming Eve instead of taking responsibility, or as David suggests, a variant of narcissism. But I also think my earlier response lacked compassion, and the problem with that is maybe not seeing that there is some compassion in creating a support group to not be destroyed by the loss of love, but IA seems to be offering only a new addiction, a protective shell  or a cast or bandage that  never gets removed so does not air and heal the wound. 

Here is another Paul Simon song
Love.    By Paul Simon
Cool me
Cool my fever <https://www.definitions.net/definition/fever> high
Hold me when I cry
I need it so much
Makes you want to get down and crawl <https://www.definitions.net/definition/crawl> like a beggar
For its touch
And all the while <https://www.definitions.net/definition/while> it's free as air
Like plants <https://www.definitions.net/definition/plants> the medicine <https://www.definitions.net/definition/medicine> is everywhere

Love
Love
Love

We crave <https://www.definitions.net/definition/crave> it so badly
Makes you want to laugh <https://www.definitions.net/definition/laugh> out loud when you receive <https://www.definitions.net/definition/receive> it
And gobble <https://www.definitions.net/definition/gobble> it like candy

We think <https://www.definitions.net/definition/think> it's easy
Sometimes it's easy
But it's not easy
You're going <https://www.definitions.net/definition/going> to break <https://www.definitions.net/definition/break> down and cry
We're not important
We should <https://www.definitions.net/definition/should> be grateful
And if you're wondering <https://www.definitions.net/definition/wondering> why

Love
Love
Love

The price <https://www.definitions.net/definition/price> that we pay
When evil walks <https://www.definitions.net/definition/walks> the planet
And love is crushed <https://www.definitions.net/definition/crushed> like clay
The master <https://www.definitions.net/definition/master> races, the chosen <https://www.definitions.net/definition/chosen> peoples
The burning <https://www.definitions.net/definition/burning> temples, the weeping <https://www.definitions.net/definition/weeping> cathedrals

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 04:14:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5...."You're gonna want cause & effect"--GR

That does seem to be a good guide to a lot of things in the novel.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 06:59:50 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 / IA in gay bar / Zippo / The Stack

Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?

Maybe he had just concluded a session of sitting with a fellow IA member.

After suggesting she write the founder:
“Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling…

He knows but he isn’t talking. What is love anyway (defining that’s beyond my remit, I think) & what do you do with your time when you’ve renounced it? Probably go looking for happiness, until somebody founds a happiness-seekers anonymous? Have a lot of hobbies?


Noticed something I hadn’t before about the founder:
“He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful Zippo, which had seen him through the Normany hedgerows, the Ardennes, Germany, and postwar America,”

- so he was a WWII veteran
- subject to the more real traumas that Oedipa had thoughtlessly, facetiously, wished on Wendell

Curiously absent from the initial curriculum was basic or any other martial training:

“Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him….”


Also had to look this up:
“…he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The Stack into rush-hour traffic….”

What is the Stack?

The first 4-level expressway interchange - in Los Angeles - Google Maps said it’s permanently closed but I haven’t found any articles about its closing.

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/l-a-s-famous-four-level-freeway-interchange-the-stack-turns-58

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 11:44:41 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 / IA in gay bar / Zippo / The Stack

Also folks, let's try to see what is in front of our eyes and the humor.

To fail at suicide and not to keep trying and form a group is some kind of joke. it is also some kind of statement about that life force we spoke of. If death is our ultimate entropy then this is beating Maxwell's Demon....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 13:43:47 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch5 / IA in gay bar / Zippo / The Stack

re: humor....Nazis aren't funny so Pynchon laughs at them in a pointed way; adultery is not funny either yet...we have it; suicide isn't funny yet....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODV6mxVVRZk

PS: when you put the words 'suicide is painless' into the YouTube search engine....you get a Crisis hotline first!

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 5 20:32:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

Another example of Pynchon minor details that lead down rabbit holes but also have links to previous moments. Charles Hollander says that Pynchon uses multiple allusions and proper names to hide and confirm at the same time (not a great paraphrase).

The founder of IA choses a Zachary All suit, which would have come from the Zachary All Clothing store on Wilshire Blvd. The founder of the store, Edward Nalbandian, an Armenian-American (like Fallopian) made commercials on local Los Angeles stations, one of which inspired Frank Zappa's song "Eddie, are you kidding?". 

Relevance? I'm not sure, but the idea that Pynchon mixes allusions across the book to point and verify is an interesting concept, and one that we see often in CoL49.

In solidarity,
James 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 20:37:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

"to hide and confirm at the same time (not a great paraphrase)."...I'll say....having it both ways is a cliche comment.....having it both ways is usually not good criticism.....one can't be wrong therefore can't be right....

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 5 21:08:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

The quote from Hollander: "Mixing lightweight allusions with more heavily weighted ones, this overt/covert, public, yet secret integration creates distinct levels of meaning, like the overside and underside of a tapestry or the two distinct patterns the eye must focus on in a Magic Eye print." 
and...
"Pynchon sometimes uses seemingly casual names, like Peter Pinguid" "Then later in the text, Pynchon might frame the causal name or character in a context that allows it to be understood." He offers examples of this with Pierce Inverarity and Wendell "Mucho" Maas.

Just so my bad paraphrase doesn't negate his argument, which is that there are multiple ways to perceive the story. It reminds me of a literary criticism of Blake as a poet against empire, which he does with allusion and allegory.

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 23:36:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

Fun!
https://youtu.be/uxr9VJ_qKPI?si=k9Bkr1rXs4SMopBI

“I’m coming over shortly
Because I am a portly
You promised you could fit me in a fifty dollar suit”

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 6 10:39:15 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

below related methinks to our ongoing discussion. AND, if--when--I get it together Morris's narcissism insights combined with another book I'm reading reminding me of others I've read---Lasch's *Culture of Narcissism*--may be a good post......

Jung said you can cure a psychotic patient if you can make him creative. In other words, if what is destroying him from within can be brought forth in writing or painting or some other form, then he can be cured. What we try to do is to help people bring forth the Self.~von Franz <https://x.com/SophiaCycles/status/1809324873900077197>

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jul 6 13:08:58 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

Essentially, this “bringing forward” is an ACTIVE method to facilitate Freud’s “return of the repressed.”  You address IT (repressed shadow) before it catches up with YOU.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 7 06:37:37 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

I am not sure any weaknesses in Hollander’s approach can be summarized as “trying to have it both ways”. His arguments, with whatever problems they may have, are clearly stated. In this case the hiding has to do with his argument, reasonably persuasive, that Pynchon was quite nervous about a direct approach to making the Kennedy assassination and power struggle with the CIA and cold- warriors central and obvious , as say the parallel to 1984 in Vineland or the various theories around 9-11 in Bleeding Edge. Because of this apprehension about becoming a political target  Hollander argues Pynchon hid the core historical parallel, but used multiple allusions and names to point the careful reader to that core theme. My own problem with Hollander’s arguments has to do with how heavily it relies on a presumed outrage over the dispossession of the Pynchon family by the Rockefellers and  an implied energy investment and Bank war between war between the Rothschild’s and Rockefeller, then resumed in the Rockefeller connected Dulles allied with Angleton.  Maybe. Not impossible. Others have mentioned this family history,  but it implies a personal motive that is tenuous and unprovable and only remotely relevant or explanatory IMO. 
   On the other hand The essay bristles with telling connections between fascists and Nazi loot and Dulles, Angleton and others that has much stronger references in the text. It  is a tour de force of interesting historic references drawn from serious research, and all drawn from the names and events in the COL 49. Whether any reader would go to such lengths to get at these references the way Hollander does seems unlikely. But I can say honestly that referring to the text and names before reading his essay, I also made several of these connections and a few of my own and derived the same basic theme.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jul 7 20:52:26 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

James got the exact quote which is more nuanced, as he admitted, than his quick sum-up and I would not describe that as having it both ways.....I would just describe it as fan-like lit criticism that goes way beyond the text as written......a gloss as it were that is glossolalia. so to speak...

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jul 7 23:27:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

Why the reverence for an old P-list dude of no particular relevance than some tired old paper he wrote ages ago about this “subversive twist” on the JFK assassination conspiracy's?  Who TF cares?  And at least Mark doesn’t serve us a 500 word rambling (BUT IMPORTANT!) response, which I suspect nobody else (definitely NOT EVER me) is ever going to read?

Does anyone read JOEYT’s p-list glossolalia?

David Morris

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 9 02:15:49 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Responses to last week’s questions

Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?
His choice demonstrates his indoctrination to corporatocracy and the vision of how success is measured in a capitalist/materialistic society. When he no longer has status, even if that status involves ignorantly signing paperwork that implicates him, he can only look outside the structure/Tower, because as Mark says, the Tower is everywhere. I agree with Michael that he doesn't understand love and never really expresses that his wife's leaving isn't just the result of his loss of status. His wife is another expression/symbol of his status, and when she leaves him, this is just another symbol of his loss of status. Perhaps he sees love as the distraction that led to him losing his job.

Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?
Wearing the pin would obviously create curiosity in those around him, just as it did with Oedipa. Could he be proselytizing? If he sits around in various bars where lonely people might need consolation, could he interest them in the IA? He has no problem discussing the concept with Oedipa, but beyond offering that she use W.A.S.T.E. to contact the founder, he doesn't offer the phone number to call.

Why does Oedipa feel despair when she realizes that "nobody around her has any sexual relevance" to her?
I think this says something about Oedipa's sense of self which she is overcoming (in the Nietzschean sense). She considers her sexuality to be valued/desired by men, and this impacts her sense of self to have no one interested in her who would be a viable sexual partner.

How does the founding story of the Isolate at the gay bar compare with the drunken sailor grieving his wife? Why is that important?
I think this gets to the heart of the founder's lack of love. The drunken sailor, while certainly not a model lover, grieves the loss of love rather than choosing to reject love and blame it for his losses.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue Jul 9 02:35:40 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 - Responses to last week’s questions

——————————
Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?

Wearing the pin would obviously create curiosity in those around him, just as it did with Oedipa. Could he be proselytizing?
——————————

Maybe he is trying out his version of “California IA Sober?”  Do IA members keep track of days since their last indulgence in Love?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 9 17:23:14 UTC 2024

More ch 5 COL 49 group reading

The muted posthorn CH 5 notes

 Why the divergent post-horn usage by Inamorati Anonymnous? Does this confirm that what OM sees are just random connections? Could the account of the IA founder be another deception? Or is it just the nature of any organization or expression of social/political discontent to morph and branch, or even be adopted by random accident?  Similarly what is the connection between the Tristero history unfolded by Bortz and the Waste postal system  or post-horn image? Is it a random side shoot, a side shoot of a side shoot?  

Dream or searing memory? She is first afraid, runs from man in black who may be priest, but then the City becomes hers , she goes where she will, enters a dream gathering, sends sailor’s letter by waste and follows delivery person.  In the following passage “She was meant to remember” appears in italics like a compelling truth.   

“The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.”

What I think a close reading reveals is that she is conflicted over both the meaning and the very reality of these clues. She feels compelled to remember what she sees, but faces that urge as an internal death wish, or descent into madness, but also “lovely beyond dreams to submit to it;...”

 For me that seems over-dramatic for a suspicion of alternate postal system competition. On the other hand, If I look at this in allegorical mode, where OM represents a nation jarred into a nightmare of confusion over the JFK murder, followed by the Oswald murder, and the subsequent confusion over changing stories including the “laws of ballistics”, I see a reasonable parallel to the choice facing the American public, particularly skeptics who see a story with many clues pointing away from the Warren Commission narrative, and dubious about a commission led by fired political enemy Allen Dulles.   

The public doubts were in many ways confirmed by the Magruder film, and over 10 years later by the Congressional investigation which concludes that the killing was not by a lone gunman but part of a conspiracy, but then proceeded to put off a complete disclosure of documents which continues to this day. 

My point here is that a public faced with an event of such enormous impact had a similarly intense and conflicted  reaction comparable to  Oedipa’s feelings being describe in this paragraph, and faced with such doubts people long  for the direct soul-seizing Word, the cry that might abolish the night and tell the truth. This public cry was far more relevant at the time of publication than the crying of a stamp sale. 

That question of relevance and authorial intent was part of critical reception.  Was the novel a critique of the search for meaning,  a parody of post-modern literature,  a satire of California narcissism. Or did it fall short of Pynhcon’’s intent on some other basis, as in not being more direct, too elusively allusive. Why did Pynchon discredit it? 
 Wikipedia: Pynchon described, in the prologue to his 1984 collection Slow Learner <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Learner>, an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of The Crying of Lot 49, "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then".[7]

How would Pynchon have marketed it or changed it? What did he forget as a writer?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 9 18:31:08 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

More relevance to some themes, I hope.

I spoke of reading a book that I thought had perspective, very relevant stuff to show insight into Pynchon's novella… to bring a certain slant of light onto P's genius. Which perspective he had in 1965! Since these books mentioned are all much later, yet
the prompting phrase and much intellectual ruminating goes way back to discussions of modernity: "Round about 1910, human nature changed"---V. Woolf

The book I was referring to was *The Ethics of Authenticity *by Charles Taylor, google him, I'm gonna read more of him. The book is from 1991.

Here is his thrust (and I hope I do not kill his meaning with a reductionist oversimplification.)

This: the modern world has lost its enchantment. (This, in a famous quote from Weber, a Pynchon fave, we know). That enchantment held all of us in a spiritual/religious chain of being, so to speak. [See The Great Chain of Being book or concept]
Wherein we were all connected beyond our {puny) selves. That great chain bound us in communities of all kinds. Basic earthbound communities as well as others. In which we defined ourselves. (PS, this organic community concept is what I would argue is Morris's fingering of Pynchon's Garden of Eden nostalgia, but in history not myth. P shows and says so in *Against the Day, imo. *And it is in another P fave, Henry Adams*)*

Losing that connection in modernity, we are thrown back on our individualism. THAT is the problem Taylor tackles. Such individualism, he sez is psychologically grounded in nothing beyond itself, (as the word kinda implies. I have ordered his* Sources of the Self)*) Such individualism is self-grounded, kind of like Morris's loop analogously and therefore is wholesale pervasive narcissism. --(He uses others here; he says this is seen everywhere by some, such as Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism. Which I read but while not fully "woke", so am looking at again) The whole rootless culture echoes it--allusion to Echo Court intended. This reflection tower is everywhere, is also a mirror. Seeing the men wanting Oedipa can be seeing full-blown narcissism in all of them. (Oedipa not feeling any sexual relevance in her situation may be a way of saying she ISN'T narcissistic anymore.)

All of the religious-like signs Oedipa sees that are signs that do not lead to religion as known are like the disenchantment of the--her--world. (This, from Weber, seems very likely to me as part of Pynchon's intent.)

Taylor works hard in the rest of his book to show how individualism can overcome itself, he thinks.....(an authentic connection to the polity of one's country is one way---Taylor is Canadian and near the end he contrasts his Canadian readers with "the country just south of us" )

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jul 10 16:21:34 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

Interesting thoughts for me up to the weird idea that a nation would be any better at shaping a self than a private individual process. My feeling is that nations have proved too big and warlike and individuals have proved to small and malleable to inauthentic values and connections. I got a book by Jacque Ellul, whose ideas sounded  interestingly contrarian. The book is the Technological System and I was surprised at  how unimpressed I was. He puts the technological system developed by what he calls The West as positively driven by individualism as opposed to what he calls collectivism which is an industrial rather than technological model. The definitions and distinctions seem self-serving and dishonest , and only touch on moral questions where he has a religious issue. He spends an enormous amount of time on definitions and his efforts seem riddled with obvious flaws. His ideas are not deeply affirming, visionary or contrarian in such a way as to differ dramatically from the results we see. Cheap fossil fuel energy is unmentioned as the core driving resource of western notions of technology and that is just unacceptably narrow and cultural as opposed to a realistic understanding of how technology has worked historically and its current negative consequences for life forms  dependent on their  biological context.

My own feeling is that Pynchon is descriptive rather than prescriptive in weighing these things. The villains are as much addicts whose poisons are self-destructive as  they are successful managers of the levers of power: inherited wealth, real estate, ruthless employment practices , extractive technologies, etc. The search for  meaning by individuals is always a kind of war against a rising tide, but that struggle  can lead to an authentic self if also a humanly flawed self. The visionary insights of great minds of science are applied in ways opposite to their intent. There is a what goes up must come down kind of karmic common sense ( cosmic comic sense?) that prevails.

Is there in P’s world an antidote for the self destructive madness of violent competition for control and dominance? I don’t know. There is local  cooperative spirit that also informs his more likable  characters. They are far less connected to big ideas or organizing polities, and the best aspect of their anarchist tendencies is this egalitarian local friendliness and affinity. Could that cooperative and self reflective  mindset become an alternative basis for a large enough scale as a social model to offer a new and compelling alternative to nuclear brinkmanship and ecological catastrophe?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 18:00:04 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

Damn! I’ve only just now tried reading this email, and it has definitely sparked my attention. I’m going to dive in to the points that I think are interesting from your synopsis in a bit. I’ll get back to you soon.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jul 10 18:14:50 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Zachary All suit

Why? Because he attempts and achieves a persuasively supported argument. You might try it some time. It is one of the reasons we have language. The fact that you seem to prefer repeating yourself in short sentences, and respond to differing ideas with insults is not for me the best thing about the list.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 21:45:54 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

*1. Modern world has lost its: “enchantment [ ] spiritual/religious chain of being”*

A?) How/Why did “it” get lost?
B?) Shall we try to define “it”?  Or should we assume it is ACTUALLY ineffable?

*2.  Losing that connection in modernity[…]*

A?) What? Big jump of assumptions (see 1.A? above)
B?) What about “Modern” makes it the change-maker?

*3.   **individualism […] *
*therefore is wholesale pervasive narcissism.*

A?)  I don’t think individualism is the core of the problem (or Modernism)

B?)  I don’t think  individualism is even remotely connected to narcissism

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 23:04:42 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

“The disenchantment of the world” is a phrase that I take from Max Weber, who spoke of the eclipse of magical and animistic beliefs about nature as part of the more general process of “rationalization” which he saw as the defining feature of modernity in the West.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 23:16:06 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

Many cultural historians and social psychologists have written of the movement toward greater individualism in Western history.
Many say it parallels the growth of democracy in the West, which is a logical connection. The American Revolution, The French Revolution at least partly born from the Enlightenment, which started the disenchantment, Weber and others would say.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 23:58:48 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

Modernity and the Loss of [Endless List of Valuable Things attributed to EFFECTS of the ADVENT of Modernity]. Picking nits, but chicken/egg questions arise here: Did we of actually lose the essence of the VALUES these things, and THEN seek their  replacement with the new creation of MODERNITY?

But we can prioritize the importance of the “valuable things lost” and see a cascade of losses stemming from a MOST VALUABLE (or most CAUSLE) of things lost in the cascading conflagration.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 00:01:23 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

You've got some typos I think but all I can say is It was all more gradual than your questions seem to imply, to me..

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 00:13:21 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

I’m getting all picky, because one of the Chief Players in this discussion is inherently controversial (because of the “S” word: SPIRITUAL) definition of REALITY

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 11 05:36:35 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Arrabal

When OM stops believing in the children dreaming the gathering, she enters a Mexican restaurant and meets  acquaintance Jesus Arrabal, an anarchist she met at a beach in Mazatlan. This is Pynchon’s way of doing a  multilayered dive into anarchist history revolutionary power struggles of the past, and associating it with the muted posthorn. 

layers

1) The reverse CIA: Conjuración de los Insurgentes Anarquistas, conjuracion means conjuring or plot as in secret plan. This obviously moves both ways. The real CIA at that time is operationally led by James Jesus Angleton who has a very dark history including recruiting ex axis fascists who killed many civilians and blamed the terrorism on leftists. Many think he was involved in the plot to kill JFK.
2) Arrabal’s Conjuracion is described as” traceable back to the time of the Flores Magon brothers”. There were 3 Magon brothers: Ricardo Flores, Enrique, and Jesus. Flores became a key intellectual voice of Mexican Anarchism and a revolutionary against dictator Porfirio Diaz, publishing for the IWW and editing the Regeneracion that seems to have arrived from 1904 at the same time as OM, with no stamp but a muted horn. In 1904 Flores Magon fled to the LA area when his writing was banned in Mexico. He was arrested in the US and died at 48 in Leavenworth. He regarded Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread as a kind of Anarchist bible.
3) Fernando Arrabal is a famous Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, writer, poet known for radical critiques of civilization, fascism, and as an exponent of anarchism. The arts are given a key part of social transformation. 

What OM and Arraball  have in common is Pierce Inverarity, and for both the meeting was a turning point. He renews his dedication to anarchism by seeing how shallow this real specimen of the rich obnoxious gringo was, so perfect a stereotype that “Arrabal asked her if he was real, or a spy, or making fun of him. Oedipa didn’t understand.” For Oediapa this is when she leaves Pierce and later  realizes that Jesus had seen and characterized the basic nature of PI that she, until then, had not clearly seen.

The mysterious arrival of the 1904 edition of Magon’s Regeneracion has Arrabal say I am a foot soldier. The higher levels have their reasons. OM carries the thought with her.

This is one part of her night which P. Inverarity cannot have arranged and it marks out an underlying power struggle that comes from recent history and includes the dangers of revolutionary communication. It also carries a warmth of personal contact, and coffee and sympathy. 

So in this episode Pynchon has conjured up the CIA, Indigenous people’s struggle for liberation, mostly opposed by the US, the power of the arts and artists to expose the nature of oppression, further confirmed that there is resistance and an underground network of communication, and summoned the cost and dangers of that resistance. Yet far from being didactic or contrived it feels like one of the more human and natural episodes so far. She leaves feeling there may be a higher level guiding her quest.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 11:35:43 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

I don't think TRP put all of that into his Arrabal...it kills the story; it adds meaning that distorts the story. It buries his narrational meanings....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 11:46:34 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Who CARES about the story or the text, if it GETS IN THE WAY of blathering on endlessly to let EVERYONE (all the people who are NOT going to wade into this mess) how INTELLIGENT you are?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 12:47:24 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Abebooks has a copy of “Regeneracion!” but it’s from 1937.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 11 17:47:37 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

So the question becomes why did Pynchon include these references which are certainly part of the text and must have some purpose. Isn’t Pynchon pretty regularly adding meaning with names, digressions, historic reference, etc? Finally what is "the narrational meaning" you are referring to?

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 12 10:07:24 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Joseph's research is interesting at least. How much of this Pynchon explored and implied is debatable, but much of it agrees with his oeuvre's attitude about anarchism and revolution/resistance. 

I don't agree with Mark when he says: "I don't think TRP put all of that into his Arrabal...it kills the story; it adds meaning that distorts the story. It buries his narrational meanings...."

How does it "kill the story"? It is a moment that takes up 2 pages, which makes a connection with Pierce and provides us with Arrabal's view of him. We get some history/snippets of Mexican anarchism and a strange resolve from Arrabal: "I'm just a foot soldier. The higher levels have their reasons." Anarchism opposes hierarchy, so who would be the higher ups? 
Where is the distortion? There are many rabbit holes in Pynchon that lead nowhere or to information that doesn't contribute to some interpretations, but that is a characteristic of Pynchon's writing. It's hard to imagine that Pynchon randomly chose Jesus or Arrabal. Investigating possible links is part of reading Pynchon. Should we not investigate Gould because it would distort the narration Mark? Forrester? Dulles? McCarthy?

What are these narrational meanings being buried? I'm curious, because I don't see that at all.

I also disagree with Joseph when he says:"For Oedipa this is when she leaves Pierce and later realizes that Jesus had seen and characterized the basic nature of PI that she, until then, had not clearly seen."

I can't make that inference that this beach discussion with Jesus enlightens her about Pierce. It may be a link in the chain, but it is not the "moment". For me this brings Pierce's Gould-like capitalism into glaring clarity for Jesus, which affects her perception as well.

"She leaves feeling there may be a higher level guiding her quest." 

The text is deliberately ambiguous here. "She carries this thought back out into the night with her." It's there; it may be germinating, but she expresses no specific feeling of being guided by it. There are points where she feels guided by something, by a higher force, but she doesn't specifically relate them to this discussion.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 13:21:28 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

I like this and I may be wrong, as James stated....but I do remember an early letter of TRP's which said something like my allusions are clear on the page. I don't overpack them.
CIA Angleton, per Joseph, is nowhere in this Arrabal allusion I still say....and so much that that drags in. Which would, I maintain, change the whole meaning of the text which is what I meant.

And, again I argue, yes, his fiction is full of allusion but most of it IS RIGHT THERE in the context of the story. Look at Rapunzel here in LOt 49......all the variations of the original story do not seem to matter as does the basic myth–let down your hair and escape that tower...(by the way, speaking of letting down one's hair, I now think of Solange again and her "Change your hair; change your life"....ask a group of smart women of an age about that line AND off to the felt races.....I brought it up in my Phlip Roth class when, in a late Roth, INDIGNATION, Roth spends words on a woman who does that…who has been bisexual........the identification with hair styles and change was all over the class........

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 12 15:07:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

Sorry for the delay. I'm taking up the hosting for the week.

Summary:After helping the sailor up the stairs and onto his "Viking funeral" bed, Oed gives him money and takes his letter to mail. She heads down under the freeway where she eventually finds a trash can labeled W.A.S.T.E. She hovers and watches until a young man drops in a bundle. She puts the letter inside and returns to her observation point until a young wino gathers the contents. She follows him and his successor whom he hands the bag off. She follows this wino as he delivers around Oakland. Eventually she returns to her hotel, where the deaf-mute association is having a silent dance where every dancing pair dances to their own music. She is waltzed around the room until the synonymous break, when she flees to her room. After sleeping she drives the Impala down to Kinneret, deciding to visit Dr. Hilarius, who takes pock shots at her as she enters. His assistant lets her into the office, where she learns that Hilarius has a psychic breakdown, believing the Israeli's are after him. She tries to talk him down from the precipice, but he considers her to be an enemy. He relates his history as a psychiatrist in the Nazi death camp, Buchenwald. He was in charge of 'faces' that would have psychotic effects on the Jewish prisoners. He describes one face that can create immediate and irreparable psychic damage,  which he used on one Zvi. The sirens of the police can be heard, and Hilarius pulls Oed into his office, where he tells her the details, including his efforts to pay 'penance' by attempting to become a believer of Freud. 

Questions:
Although she learns much about W.A.S.T.E., Oed leaves the Bay area without finding a source or definitive W.A.S.T.E. facility beyond the bin and the currier's route. Why does she think that Dr Hilarius will help her?

How does Hilarius' crimes in Buchenwald move the plot forward or help to understand either character?

Is Oedipa Jewish? How does her response to Hilarius' revelations expand her character?

How does Hilarius' explanation of LSD and blending of individuals into one compare with Oedipa's efforts to understand W.A.S.T.E.?

In solidarity,
James

Mike Weaver mike.weaver at zen.co.uk
Fri Jul 12 15:51:12 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Anarchism opposes hierarchy, so who would be the higher ups?

In theory anarchism opposes hierarchy, in practice any active group will sort itself out into an informal hierarchy. In the best the appropriate person will take the lead for particular tasks and take direction at other times. Key organising skill - knowing when to be an indian and when a chief. In the worst it settles into unchanging hierarchy until the group blows apart. Arrabal is clearly content to leave the decision making/organising to others.

Cheers Mike

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 15:59:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

James took up the hosting because I did not--and can't at the moment. Salute him.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 16:08:10 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

As does all the riffing on the text.

I am trying for a text-based "Reading" on a text that does not change. Hollander had his. as does Joseph. I didn't/don't buy it.

Empson's *Seven Types of Ambiguity--*which TRP surely got assigned at Cornell and is a modern, modernism classic-- allows lots of readings of such ambiguous texts, but Empson clearly shows how some are surely wrong because beyond ambiguity and
the meaning of the text....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 16:10:53 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

yes, I agree.....this is good but isn't one question about Arrabal's line whether the anarchism that he beleives in, is living, is pure enough, like that dance and yet exists in a larger world WITH HIGHER-UPS?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 16:41:05 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

Q: Although she learns much about W.A.S.T.E., Oed leaves the Bay area without finding a source or definitive W.A.S.T.E. facility beyond the bin and the currier's route.

Trystero has no location, definitive or less than. That is part of its connection to the anarchistic incursion into history....

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jul 12 17:44:04 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Arrabal
Mark:
The CIA is in the text. And since there is no actual historic Mexican anarchist CIA and since the CIA itself was active in Mexico against leftists I think its use is not without suggestive intent.  Angleton has the same first name as Arrabal, and a similar last name to duke Angelo.  If the reader has begun to suspect that the novel is not about curious CA housewives and a rich man’s stamp collection, and has thought about the political murder story of the Courier’s revenge, and has picked up on the references to Dulles, Dallas, Mafia, WW2 profiteering, the beginning of an anti-war movement in 1966, right wing movements, and rampant corporatized militarization, well it does not seem like such a stretch to feel the CIA reference used as a joke has serious undertones. 

James
As to the exact moment when OM decides to leave PI, I’m just doing my best to get the implications of the beach story. Decisions usually build up over time  and there are other hints about this decision, but this appears to be close to her leaving and obviously contributes to that decision. As to the exact wording of how Arrabal’s parting words are to be interpreted I am not trying to imply more than what is said, I agree that, as in many Pynchon lines, there is ambiguity; but there is also basic intent and specific word choices. I probably should have said she leaves carrying Arrabal’s thought that there maybe a higher level  guiding him and  this night could confirm such a possibility for her.  I was trying to summarize the implications of the parting feeling more than make a definitive statement. We know OM is deeply conflicted over how to make sense of this night and keeps looking for a satisfactory explanation. 

COL 49
P-list
I am not claiming a definitive interpretation of COL 49 or Thomas Pynchon. That is a presumptuousness I do not embrace.  I have set out my intent to follow both the human story and a more allegorical (for want of a better word) layer implying the impact on the American psyche  of the JFK assassination and the suppression of research and evidence-gathering around that event. This intent on my part formed in the weeks leading up to the start of the group read by reading and listening to the novella several times and feeling there is an empty space at the middle of this work set in 1966, 3 years after JFK’s murder and yet with no direct  reference to that event despite other political and cultural time signatures. I have read all of Pynchon’s work multiple times and part of my picture of COL 49 has come from patterns I have observed from V to Bleeding Edge. I believe my methods and interpretation falls well within the bounds of well reasoned essays and literary criticism of Pynchon and like any good writing about this writer whose  scope is so large, I try to narrow the focus to a manageable level and the layer that speaks to me..  

I have known from the start that my ideas and possibly even my participation would be rejected by Mark and David who often make clear that they reject the socio-political spin I find in P’s writing. I believe this limitation puts them in a small minority of Pynchon readers,  a large number of whom I have engaged with in several other reading groups with whom there is much shared understanding with myself. And while I do not read P crit extensively, there was a time in past decades when I read more of that,  and found  political interpretations are not uncommon from astute academic writers. I welcome reasoned criticism and find value from the give and take of that process that is part of group  book read. I work at being  respectful in those exchanges even when not treated that way myself.  

Right now I am a bit disappointed that there has been no discussion of the failings of this novel, since Pynchon himself criticizes it in Slow Learner’s intro. It seems a bit weird not to consider this. I suspect that the biggest reason is that I am the only one to suggest it. Oh well. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 18:51:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

Louis DeJoy shut down that facility, among others (-;

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 12 20:28:04 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

 I find the Angleton allusion interesting and plausible not certain. While I like Hollander’s & your layering effective for reading at multiple levels, and I think TRP had both the Kennedy assassination and Ike’s farewell address on his palette, Hollander’s essay comes up short of convincing me.

As to critiquing the whole novel, I thought to do so near or at the end. I did discuss how immature and cringy the Metzger sex scene was, which I meant as a critique of a young writer who’s learning how to describe sex scenes. While the parlor trick of the last line of the book felt like closure the first time I read it, it feels more just a way to end an unsuccessful quest that found nothing. Compared to the end of 100 Years of Solitude, it’s pale.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 20:35:51 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

I am caught out on my use of "buy". I usually don't use that but I did...

I take it back. Apologizes.

I am not trying to set the limits of conversation, however. Hollander and Joseph are all here, and others, aren't they?....

I am trying for a text-based reading that illumines *The Crying of Lot 49*. Hollander and much of Joseph does not. IMO.

My opinion. My sensibility. My arguments. My "Reading"....

Hamlet is not about King Henry V and the conspiracies around him. What Hamlet is about is as rich as 400 years of exploring. What I believe...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 20:44:51 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

I differ majorly....I think, as I argued, i think, that the Metzger sex scene is EXACTLY what TRP wanted.....not at all a real "sex scene', one that might win that bad Sex in fiction annual prize.....but not even the same contest.....Point to the "realism' of this novella to serve as the way one critiques that sex scene?

(I think that why TRP does not like this story, marketed as a novel in his maturity is, as he wrote, it started first as idea(s) and not with real "felt life" as some Lit Crits quote...and artists like D.H Lawrence and others....

The last line of this novella is genius....the themes it fulfills so surprisingly is sublime....It enwraps all the meanings of this novella which is not about the CIA....that was Mailer, later....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 20:50:08 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

The novella was conceived and written in 64-65.....Yes, the CIA is a joke in the text; tell you anything? Does me.

I can riff on how the novella is about Psychiatry and is Hilarious....

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 12 21:40:00 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Like I said, the JJ Angleton is interesting, plausible but not convincing. 
What at first angered me about BE but by the second reading pleased me more was the lack of conspiracy theories taking center stage. It’s all hinted and alluded to but not the story, and hitch remains about a New Yorker’s experience living through 9/11.

How dare they not include AtD in that list!!! Another reason that I don’t value lists beyond the opportunity to find something new to read or music to hear.

Mark, you keep adding to my list of books to read. Thank you!

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jul 13 02:26:57 UTC 2024

COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

Mark
 I appreciate the respectful reconsideration of the topic.  And I really do sincerely want to hear more of how you characterize the overall arc of this book.
Hamlet is an interesting choice. I never heard that Hamlet might be about Henry the 5th, and it is clearly not a veiled historic event.  The story is about a prince returned home from a theological center to find that circumstances and troubling dreams pose existential questions and point to the murder of his father.   So what Hamlet is about, at least in part, is how do we respond when we have a very strong belief that serious foul play has stolen something central to our picture of the world and disinherited ourselves or others. What is the import of a violent coup for those directly affected.? It is a theme that runs through history and fiction from Hamlet and Lear to Hitler, Dag Hammeschold and  Star Wars. At one point in COL 49 which I recently mentioned, OM entertains a death wish like Hamlet. 
  JFK? Once the myth of the lone gunman, and the communist agent  was discredited  as happened for many serious investigators, and once CIA and Mafia fingerprints are revealed, a chasm opens that for those truly thoughtful and skeptical of the reliability of government to investigate and disclose truth, is as serious as anything one might consider. Essentially a GIANT SOUL RENDING WTF similar to what Hamlet faced . It is far more unlikely to me  that Pynchon did not have a serious enough reaction  to write about it than the possibility that he did write about it via an indirect work of fiction which deliberately avoids the potential dangers of something more pointed.  Plausible deniability is not strictly limited to politicians.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 13:41:01 UTC 2024

Trystero courier?

https://x.com/_ryanruby_/status/1812116765129761199

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 20:25:20 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

JK: Why does she think that Dr Hilarius will help her?

A: He is her psychotherapist, her shrink. Upper middle class folk like her then had faith in psychotherapy, the new cure for unhappiness, uncertainty about life decisions, life events. He had wanted her to be part of a mind-expanding experiment, be in the new psychedelic wave of experience but she declined. Maybe she felt he could now help her expand her mind. An expanded mind might "get' the Trystero? Know whether real or she was paranoid. Much she was trying to understand newly, so why not?....

But he's bat-shit crazy, TRP on the mind cures of the time maybe? Crazy shrink leaving her, like Alice still alone on that quest to understand what is happening.

Has any scholar plotted Alice's Adventures against Oedipa's? Margaret Atwood did in part of her first novel.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 20:30:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

JK: How does Hilarius' crimes in Buchenwald move the plot forward or help to understand either character?

Tough one. His participation in the horrors of the 20th Century made him crazy. "When you have looked into the abyss,
beware of becoming a monster"---Nietzsche. ....

Like ALL THE MEN so far, he is helpless to help Oedipa. Oedipa is a free new woman of the 60s.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 20:32:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

JK: How does Hilarius' explanation of LSD and blending of individuals into one compare with Oedipa's efforts to understand W.A.S.T.E.?

No idea....all individuals merging int sounds like another bat-shit idea....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 21:58:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

Pynchon could hardly pass up a Jester in that perfect role: Mind-Doctor. The possibilities abound, but it is not coincidence that this medicine man is offering Oedipa a psychedelic journey.  This is her vision quest.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jul 14 19:30:16 UTC 2024

Not P but DeLillo

<https://x.com/AngletonOrchids> Angleton’s Orchids
<https://x.com/AngletonOrchids> @AngletonOrchids
<https://x.com/AngletonOrchids> “American Blood,” Don DeLillo’s 1983 Rolling Stone essay about the JFK hit & Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan, is mostly scrubbed from the internet but was transcribed by a kind MA and can be read here. Worth a read these days. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzhzPmI-F13452jco1YU9KSVmWSuKyQwwqEh8krXF_I/mobilebasic 
<https://x.com/AngletonOrchids/status/1812468003998445575>

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 14 22:33:36 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

She seems to b moving around SF a lot, first by beach then in Fillmore  black neighborhood and sees posthorn scratched in back of a bus seat( impossible for PI to have set up) with DEATH as acronym DON’T EVER ANTAGONIZE THE HORN. That message  returns to what I am seeing as the back and forth between a sinister and Dangerous Trystero and the less scary idea of un-monitored communication at the grass roots (WASTE). The airport is even further away. ACDC with posthorn claims to be death cult. Basically one seriously weird person after another.  "She busrode and walked on into the lightening morning, giving herself up to a fatalism rare for her. Where was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery. But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. This night’s profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.”

She pondered this  refusal of the government postal service.

"It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."

But something changes in her through her encounter with the alcoholic sailor where she acts directly to comfort and help him send a letter to a long separate wife.  Not the only time Pynchon has observed  that there is something about the courage to act from compassion, no matter how seemingly trivial that often marks a change and frequently leads to larger actions, deeper courage. She uses her letter delivery to follow the WASTE  mail carrier back to Nefastis’s  Ap. ???That is weird to me and I would be very curious if anyone sees a particular meaning there? ??

She moves through serious doubts about her sanity as she returns home( to Galilee in the Pines; with the name Kinnaret taking on intensity  as though an ancient question of truth and faith were at play) with the hope that Hilarius will be able to resolve the question of her sanity.  This is a reflection and question and self doubt that is both normal and healthy and also holds the potential for a dark turn toward authority as the voice of truth. How much should a sane person who is confronted with evidence of something that does not fit her picture of the world relinquish the direct evidence of an honest inquiry to a psychological or politically comforting  explanation.?

More later, which I know D Morris will be looking forward to anxiously or amusedly or some somethingly.  I aim going out to play music and dance.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 05:03:18 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

Yeah, it’s weird.

IMHO, none of those things are impossible for old Pierce, given enough money, an undying passion, & an imaginative trusted factotum willing to farm out tasks. Especially with the partial disclaimer that maybe she didn’t see as many post horns as she thought.

The man in black, for instance, might not have been Johnny Cash, but could easily have radioed ahead to a crew who would then follow her - and by covert suggestion, not a hard task given her state of mind, lead her onto specific buses etc.

And so on & so forth.

There’s a certain amount of willful & wistful romanticism required to prosecute this viewpoint, and I don’t think that’s my main angle anyway. But ijs…

What stood out recently for me is the action spreading over time with references to a panoply of plotting and evildoing - and a great many references to WWII, from the bones, to IA founder’s time in service, to Oedipa’s lightly almost wishing wartime military on Wendell as an alternative, more serious trauma than the used car lot, to Metzger’s contemptuous imagining of Oedipa’s war, to Hilarius’s role in the most horrific scenes thereof.

It’s a glimpse of a mindset that I’ve read about, people whose viewpoints and planning were molded in wartime, shaping all their future actions, making it easier than it ought to be for them to perpetuate offensive acts in the name of  defense and security.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 08:56:09 UTC 2024

it is America, it has and is unfolding...

MB:  "What stood out recently for me is the action spreading over time with references to a panoply of plotting and evildoing - and a great many references to WWII, from the bones, to IA founder’s time in service, to Oedipa’s lightly almost wishing wartime military on Wendell as an alternative"

Yes, the great American novelist's relentless focus on the unfolding of America, here looking backward.

The bones that go back to the first congress; America's role in the War that saved the world from Nazi Germany (and imperial Japan) and more....what the discipline of military service taught so many men (as many vets will tell you)...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 09:15:21 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

And, on the simple level of socially observant (and a bit prescient) fiction, TRP foretells another real change in the America of the sixties. Hallucinatory Doors of Perception-opening drugs, the psychedelic experience....think of that so-loved psychedelic cover---the first copy of *Crying* I had–of the paperback of *The Crying of Lot 49...*.which did signal early the colorful swirl of events that were America changing then....Oedipa was changing, right there on the cover. Oedipa was us. Oedipa was America.

Does anyone know whether Pynchon had anything to say about that cover? Whether he “approved" it if his editor asked? (I am pretty sure his agent–Candida–would not have had cover approval rights back then–esp for the paperback, which deal is done by the hardcover house anyway.....(they sell 'paperback' rights and the split is 50-50....half to the hardcover house and half to the author/agent.) This was the edition that first sent his sales into the stratosphere.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30964570421&dest=usa&ref_=ps_ggl_18382194370&cm_mmc=ggl-_-US_Shopp_Trade0to10-_-product_id=COM9780553106206USED-_-keyword=&gbraid=0AAAAAD3Y6gv5myUqi21pNj3VmCzrZ2Ujs&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkdO0BhDxARIsANkNcreV1aoywi4GNIbWsgrstFM8UuuJSt6IiN43aYT3tJxW0dg90lUcL4gaAh_DEALw_wcB

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 15 10:28:47 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Hilarius’ confession

Just before the police arrest Hilarius, as Oed points his gun at him, the Nazi war criminal tells her to hold onto her fantasy, not to let the Freudians "coax" it out of her or the pharmacists "poison" her fantasy. He discusses his attempts to be a Freudian "believer" in an act of penance for his crimes at Buchenwald. It's been suggested in this group reading that Pynchon may be critiquing or joking about psychiatry and its influence in the post war era. Why does his critique come from a Nazi doctor? How does this amplify or negate the critique?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 10:51:12 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 - Hilarius’ confession

even the best psychological understanding does not explain the inexplicable...does not explain the mystery of life...(the Trystero is a mystery. ) Does not explain the anarchic entrance into Oed's life and the world of America what Jesus Arrabal defines as   “You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one"...

By the way, with all of our Jesus explication, did we mention THE Jesus H. Christ as Albee initialized him. This allusion placed her by the writer who used to go to mass almost every day when he was hardly younger than he is writing this. And there is this quote...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 11:05:50 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

That fuckin' Iwo Jima-like photo of Trump after he hurt his ear.

A Legendary American Photograph

The photo of Trump after the attempt on his life is a badly needed window into the MAGA mindset.
By Tyler Austin Harper
<https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/>
[image: Donald Trump with blood on his face, raising his fist, after an assassination attempt at his rally]Evan Vucci / AP
JULY 14, 2024, 2:17 PM ET
SHARE & GIFT
SAVE

Donald Trump raises a fist. Blood streaks his face. The sky is high, blue, and empty except for an American flag caught in a hard wind. A Secret Service agent has her arms around his waist. The former president’s mouth is open, in the middle of a snarled shout. We know from video footage that he is yelling “Fight!,” that the crowd is chanting “USA!”

The photograph <https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/13/politics/gallery/in-pictures-trump-injured-at-pennsylvania-rally/index.html>,
by the Associated Press’s Evan Vucci, became immediately legendary. However you feel about the man at its center, it is undeniably one of the great compositions in U.S. photographic history. Although I am deeply relieved that Trump survived this assassination attempt, I am no fan of his. But the first time I saw the photo, I felt an emotion that I later recognized, with considerable discomfort, as a fluttering of unbidden nationalist zeal. What encapsulates our American ideal more than bloody defiance <https://x.com/EsotericCD/status/1812289350865948960> and stubborn pride that teeters just on the edge of foolishness? No hunkering and no hiding—standing undaunted and undeterred, fist-pumping your way through an attempted murder. It was a moment when Trump supporters’ idea of him—strong, resilient, proud—collided with reality.

I can’t help but be moved by this remarkable image, taken by a Pulitzer Prize winner
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/ap-photographer-evan-vucci-spills-on-historic-trump-rally-shooting-pic>  who ran toward the danger <https://x.com/RonenV/status/1812282594584916108>, camera in hand, rather than away from it. There is a perverse and
paradoxical disjunction between Trump the man, who many argue is a threat to American democracy, and this image of Trump, which seems to capture that same democracy in all its pathology, mythos, and, yes, glory. The *Compact* editor Sohrab Ahmari tweeted <https://x.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1812275114580509145> that Trump’s instinct—to reflexively gesture in rebellion after being shot at—is “evidence of a truly extraordinary man.” He is more than a little right. Extraordinary, after all, is not so much a moral descriptor as an aesthetic one.

David Frum: The gunman and the would-be dictator <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/donald-trump-democracy-dictator/679006/>

The image of Trump, bloody with a raised fist, is destined to adorn T-shirts, magazine covers  <https://x.com/yashar/status/1812513859690999941>, full-page spreads in history books, campaign ads. I do not think it is an
exaggeration to say that the photo is nearly perfect, one that was captured under extreme duress and that distills the essence of a man in all his contradictions.

Many commentators have already surmised that this image alone will cost our current president his reelection bid. Some rushed
<https://x.com/ritaresarian/status/1812267751471460831> to juxtapose pictures of Joe Biden, staring awkwardly and looking frail, with an angry, almost-assassinated Trump. One writer took to X to place the Vucci photo side by side <https://x.com/mannyfidel/status/1812278618019803593> with a still from the film *Oppenheimer*, implying that the photographer, like the inventor of the atomic bomb, may one day come to feel that his greatest achievement slipped out of his control and ushered in a darker world. The left-wing political commentator Cenk Uygur summarized <https://x.com/cenkuygur/status/1812386902236160373> things more simply still: “Trump sticking the hand up and saying, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ while the crowd chanted ‘USA, USA, USA!’ was bad ass.”

All of these reactions, whether fear or resentment or grudging admiration, are understandable. But I wonder whether they miss the point. The real subject of this photograph is not Donald Trump but his supporters. Many of us have mocked Trump stans—their ridiculous fan art <https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/8/17376824/trump-fan-art-maga-dinesh-dsouza-jon-mcnaughton> that 
reimagines him with bulging muscles or fighting in the Revolutionary War <https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-mocked-bizarre-july-4-133353095.html>; their unshakable and cultish belief in his vigor; their desperate desire to see him as he wants to be seen rather than as he is. Yesterday, for a few moments at least, the Trump of MAGA’s imagination and reality became indistinguishable. Not even the most slavish devotee of the former president could have dreamed up a more iconic portrait. 
RECOMMENDED READING

   - [image: A human caregiver uses a laptop to operate a robot caregiver    in the hallway of a nursing residence.]
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/ai-keeps-mastering-games-but-can-it-win-in-the-real-world/554312/>
   AI Keeps Mastering Games, But Can It Win in the Real World?
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/ai-keeps-mastering-games-but-can-it-win-in-the-real-world/554312/>JOSHUA
   SOKOL <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/joshua-sokol/>
   - [image: A woven bag containing carrots, apples, two oranges, and some
   greens, against a lavender background]
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/04/rules-eating-fight-climate-change/618515/>
   Your Diet Is Cooking the Planet
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/04/rules-eating-fight-climate-change/618515/>ANNIE
   LOWREY <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/annie-lowrey/>
   - [image: a chimpanzee covering its eyes]
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/cringe-culture-everywhere/621272/>
   How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?
   <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/cringe-culture-everywhere/621272/>KAITLYN
   TIFFANY <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/kaitlyn-tiffany/>

Today, Americans are not unified. We are not “All MAGA,” as a viral headline this morning suggests
<https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/today-were-all-maga-trump-shooting-assassination/>. We are angry, bitter, and divided; paranoid and afraid; governed by two parties that seem constitutionally incapable of putting America above their own interests. What happened yesterday does nothing to change that. Nor do a few seconds of real bravery absolve Trump of his sins, or make his political platform more palatable. But I would suggest that Democrats and anti-Trumpers take a break from contextualizing and problematizing and hypothesizing and worrying, and instead spend some time contemplating, if only for a minute or two, this photograph. The man, the flag, the blood, the fist.

Pete Wehner: The power of restraint
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-pennsylvania/679004/>

It is often difficult for Trump critics to inhabit the mind of one of his supporters, to understand Trump’s appeal without immediately defaulting to simplifications like racism and misogyny, explanations that have become less of a skeleton key and more of a shibboleth, particularly as the former president continues to see his support among minorities swell. Vucci has provided us not with an alternative theory of the case but with a badly needed window into the MAGA mindset, allowing all of America, and indeed
the world, to see Trump through the eyes of his devotees, people we share this country with.

If Democrats hope to beat Trump and Trumpism, they need to understand the appeal. Which means they need to be able to look at this image and see a promise—one I do not believe Trump can deliver, but a promise nonetheless—of toughness, vitality, and unbowing resolve at a moment when we are wavering, weak, and irresolute before a graying future. The photograph is not a portrait of a man but a through-the-looking-glass vision of America as she would have herself and as many in this country would have her. Our oldest myths briefly became real one bright evening in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Tyler Austin Harper
<https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/> is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at *The Atlantic*.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 11:11:32 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

It was STAGED. No coincidence, its Iwo Jima composition.

But, practically speaking, I don’t think it moves the needle, even a smidge. It only excites the base which Trump was needing badly at that point. His polls were starting to sink. All kinds of questions are being raised about why the Secret Service would allow him to be so exposed immediately after having been shot once. No indication that they expected a second or third shot from anywhere. Like they were confident it was over already.

And a rooftop with a view directly to the stage where Trump will be speaking would be the first place. The Secret Service would stage protection for Trump. It would not be left exposed with a direct line to Trump. These people are stupid and they’ve been protecting people since, Bobby Kennedy. They check for everything.

Anyway, these are some tidbits that I’ve been leaning from the Internet. I hate conspiracy theories, but I admit this one looks staged. And if so, two people died for their dramatic production.

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 11:19:30 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

It was found in the moment by the war photographer [Iraq] who ran to position himself. (He is also the photographer who caught moment right after the shoe left the hand--all fingers spread--of the guy who threw his at President Bush back when.

Remember 'the tower is everywhere" is, in* Lot 49 *about a 'bad' America that Oedipa flees.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 11:39:17 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

The pose. The area for photographers directly in front of the stage (in front of the front row).  Fits all the definitions of “staged.”

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 15 12:35:55 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

I'm not convinced that former President Trump, or any politician, would agree to have someone shoot at him and nick his ear. When the shooter appears to be a 20-year-old with no military training, I really question the 'staged' concept. 

However, I do agree with David that the Secret Service (SS) should and would have had someone on that roof, have considered that roof a viable position for an assassin, and they would have covered it by protocol. Why didn't they? Did the former president tell them to stand down, as he did on January 6th? It reminds me of their failure to whisk GWB out of a classroom that had been published as his location. That would have been standard protocol I would think with an actual attack occurring. I do think the candidate made lemonade out of the situation by being so "defiant", but I don't think this was planned or staged.

I'm less concerned about its impact on the election than on the violence that this act unleashes. 

As to the "bad America"/tower is everywhere premise, I agree that this represents the darkest nature of our collective soul.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 12:43:21 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

But this photographer was NOT THERE---do the good ones stay in their pen???---he was way to the left of Trump via the TV cameras and the video footage shows him running to the right after the first shots and noises where he stationed himself where he knew from the moment Trump went down where he and the SS would be and the direction---to the armored vehicle stage right---they would go.

If you want to argue that and the whole thing was staged, I am not going to argue out of principle and time-savingness...MINE.......

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 12:46:23 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

As someone has already predicted......there will be the most extensive range of conspiracy theories since JFK's assassination.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 13:37:00 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

The biggest tell is the *direct line-of-sight rooftop position *being left OPEN (normally a cop would BE THERE), AND being totally ignored/not even being watched.

Security Planning for these events is NOT a casual thing.  It is normally extensively and thoroughly examined and details locked down weeks before

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 13:42:05 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

Have you ever been to a rock concert? Are you familiar with the area normally fenced off and left open for photographers in front of the stage? And on/off the stage, the photographer was in an area made accessible for
only the select few.  He was there to take photos

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 15 13:50:44 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

Then suddenly, about a quarter of an hour after the shooting,  an Alex Jones army of dybbuks invades the minds of thousands of paranoid Democrats as they bleat “staged” in stirring choral unison. Whereas sensible fascist Christians know that Jesus sent a special angel to divert the bullet from Trump’s precious high functioning( he said so himself) lie manufacturing device, so that the shooter could only kill a churchgoing Christian who is now safely in heaven watching tenderly as Trump moves toward finishing the job in Gaza that good old AIPAC Joe helped along but may be faltering over as the marbles drop out and some remnant of childhood humanity leaks in.  And so the divine plan, carefully forged with the aid of God’s special hit men proceeds toward the final glorious conclusion and the arrival of the extra terrestrial landing crafts.  Meanwhile the pundits and noble speech writers of both sides of something we can all be proud of as these United States, call for a return to last week when all Americans got along and nobody was shooting anyone else and there was no mass slaughter anywhere and we all were still living in the good old days with plenty of despicable but reasonably priced Chinese made consumer items for all to enjoy.  Ah men.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 15 14:31:04 UTC 2024

Fw: Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

The photographer being in the photographer section happens at every event, so how does that lead conclusively to being staged. 

The security failure brings up questions, but there are many answers to those questions depending on whom you ask.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 17:29:22 UTC 2024

Fw: Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

1. This particular photographer is incidental.
2. The tableau on the stage was set.
3. The most adventurous spot to photograph the tableau was prepared and filled with photographers.
4. One photographer(in the prestige tv-camera area) heard the shot, and had time (while Trump was on the ground looking for his shoes) to get to the best spot to photograph the tableau.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 15 17:36:34 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

I guess I just don’t see how anyone could predict or stay ahead of her enough to know what bus she would take or where she would sit on the bus. Her pattern of movement was crazily erratic or arbitrary. Also what would be PI’s motive in all this? I see this whole line of thought as the kind of paranoia that is desperate and illogical and ascribes an impossible level of power and manipulative skill to the presumed controller of events. Once a person sees any such deception in a powerful person or organization it is hard not to wonder how much of that is directed at you.  It seems rather to me that Pynchon is carefully presenting a story where the protagonist is stirred to investigate something that looks highly unlikely but is found to be so real and troubling that she can barely cope, and looks for any possible explanation.

Also if we assume that PI did set all this up and also made sure that the evidence of this large secret network would be made to disappear early in the disposition of the will, I would argue that this leads to something very much resembling the course of events following the Kennedy killing and the scope of the efforts to prevent contrary evidence and testimony to the magic bullet riddled narrative of the Warren commission, including the high likelihood the Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered and her files stole. Maybe a plausible for-instance type explanation of what PI could have been up to and why he would have set up this elaborate and expensive illusion, would give more credibility to this idea. I honestly can’t think of how that would work to explain the events of the story. P does not have human villains without human motives. Is it really a parable where PI is the Devil(Ala the world the flesh and the devil)? What is his goal as a devil? I’m really trying to think this through with everything on the table so far. 

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 15 18:10:52 UTC 2024

Fw: Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

David,

Even if the staging occurred deliberately, this implies that whoever staged this KNEW that the shooter would be there and miss or tag the candidate's ear. 
Why would they choose a 20-year-old inexperienced man to fire at their candidate? 
Did they tell the candidate about this?Who would authorize this below the candidate without telling the candidate?
Would a candidate trust a 20-year-old, inexperienced shooter to graze his ear just for a photo op?

Putting the photographer aside doesn't do anything to convince me. I don't buy that former President Trump would ever agree to such a risky thing as being shot at by an amateur or even a professional. Way too many things can go wrong.

I can see the former president waving off concerns about the location because "these are my people", as he did on January 6th. 

Even if they let this kid take a shot at the candidate, how long before the event did they know? How choreographed did the candidate's movements have to be in order to prevent a fatal shot instead of a graze? I'm not convinced.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 18:20:44 UTC 2024

Fw: Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

Lots of good questions

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 15 18:41:48 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

It was staged because good photographers take good photos? And what, the secret service agents who are not exactly personal employees of the Trump campaign all practiced this ahead of time like a wedding rehearsal?  I predict that won’t stand up in court or anyplace else, just as I predicted the Muller investigation would not find collusion, and that the recent trial of Trump would find him guilty. I hate to give you good advice Morris, but it might be smart to try waiting for a shred of persuasive evidence before embracing this paranoia that so closely imitates the Sandy Hook-was-staged nonsense, pizza gate and similar theories of those you hate. 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 19:03:05 UTC 2024

Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

This is all so Hilarious on the Plist again. So Hilarious I want to reach for my machine gun and stutter-laugh

I just want to say that although the Mueller Report did not find collusion because Mueller followed the President-protecting guidelines for indictment re Trump it did find this:

<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-muellers-probe/story?id=61219489#>
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Here's a breakdown of indictments and cases in Mueller's probe

Here's what you need to know about the cases in the special counsel's probe.
By ABC News
November 15, 2019, 2:24 PM

   -
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2:38
Ann Mueller and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, March 24, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Special counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to Attorney
General William Barr.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Over the course of his nearly two-year-long probe <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/russia-probe-timeline-moscow-mueller/story?id=57427441>, special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors have now indicted 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to conspiracy and financial crimes.

Those indictments have led to seven guilty pleas and five people sentenced to prison.

Here's what you need to know:

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort <https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/russia> faced charges in two separate federal courts on a slew of financial crime charges related largely to his lobbying work in Ukraine.

A jury found Manafort guilty on eight of 18 counts 
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jury-reaches-verdict-counts-manafort-trial/story?id=57243333> he was tried within the Eastern District of Virginia, with the judge declaring a mistrial on the other ten. The guilty charges included multiple
counts of false income tax returns, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud.

Manafort was charged with an additional seven counts in the District of Columbia and pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the D.C. case. As part of the plea agreement, Manafort also admitted his guilt on the remaining counts in his Virginia trial. He was sentenced to 81 months in prison for both cases and is currently serving his term. Read more here.
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/indictments-paul-manafort/story?id=61147118>

Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign official and longtime business associate of Paul Manafort <https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/russia>, was charged in two separate federal courts in connection to financial crimes,
unregistered foreign lobbying and on allegations that he made false statements to federal prosecutors. Gates pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C. in February 2018 on counts of conspiracy against the United States and lying to federal prosecutors. As part of his plea agreement and cooperation with the Mueller probe, he avoided a slew of financial charges in the Eastern District of Virginia that included assisting in the preparation of false income taxes, bank fraud, bank fraud conspiracy and false income taxes.His charges are intimately tied to those of Manafort. In the Eastern
District of Virginia, the two were indicted jointly. He is expected to be sentenced in December. Read more here.
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/indictments-rick-gates/story?id=61148967>

The special counsel issued three separate indictments against Manafort. In the third, prosecutors implicated Kilimnik for the first time, charging him with conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.These charges concern communications between Manafort and Kilimnik regarding messages they exchanged with two journalists who were potential witnesses in the case against them.Though Kilimnik has been indicted, he remains outside of the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Read more here.
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/indictments-konstantin-kilimnik/story?id=61148969>

In his dramatic and surprise guilty plea in U.S. District Court on Dec. 1, 2017, early in Mueller's investigation, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn acknowledged that his false statements and omissions in FBI interviews a few days after Trump was sworn in "impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election," which the statement of offense he agreed to said.

He specifically admitted to lying about asking the Russian ambassador to refrain from responding to Obama administration sanctions against Russia for its election interference and further requested Russia help block a
United Nations vote on Israeli settlements which the incoming administration didn't agree with. Flynn also agreed that he lied about his lobbying activities in federal filings related to work on behalf of the Republic of Turkey throughout the 2016 campaign. Flynn is awaiting sentencing.
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn-set-sentenced/story?id=65514053>
 Read more here.
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/indictment-michael-flynn/story?id=61147177>

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 19:59:09 UTC 2024
COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

I am I think In agreement with the first para from Tracy's post. Peirce could not, when one gets granular with the details, have set everything up.....Just look at page 65 when she got up early to go to a Yoyodyne stockholders' meeting.....And s what happens was unset -up...

Misc. on page 65, you will notice the word Negroes.....which will fade from American books starting sweepingly in 1968. Replaced by African-American and then Black overwhelmingly....remember Black Power, etc?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 20:08:43 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

I have a question. This Chapter 5, p. 98...What does this mean?

'The dead man, like Maxwell's Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence"

??????

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 15 20:29:39 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

Pierce, the dead man, obviously connects Oed and Jesus, but Maxwell’s Demon sorts information, connecting the higher pressure chamber with the lower pressure chamber, moving faster moving molecules together and slower moving molecules together. 

The coincidence is their meeting again, but besides being part of her quest to understand his will and the Tristero, I don’t see how he links the coincidence, except that Pierce is why Jesus recognizes Oed when she walks into the restaurant.

Just an inconclusive brainstorm.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 15 21:18:35 UTC 2024

Fw: Current possible meanings of "the tower is everywhere", I offer boldly while trembling....

On Jul 15, 2024, at 3:03 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

This is all so Hilarious on the Plist again. So Hilarious I want to reach for my machine gun and stutter-laugh Bit extreme, no?

I just want to say that although the Mueller Report did not find collusion because Mueller followed the President-protecting guidelines for indictment re Trump it did find this: 

NO EVIDENCE OF TRUMP COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA. It was a delusion. Get over it without the aid of machine-guns. I despise Donald Trump but the idea that Russia decided the election or had control of this narcissistic creep was a Hillary Clinton fantasy purchased from Mr Steele. Corruption is everywhere in both parties and Trump also has gotten caught in some tax fraud. He certainly earned that.  This stuff you are citing was not what everyone was looking for from Mueller, was not what produced the outraged screams from the media and true believers and has nothing to do with what I predicted.  

You want to look for foreign corruption of US politics? Try AIPAC. Try a genocidal war criminal coming to the congress for multiple bipartisan standing ovations as the IDF murders doctors, children, and noncombatants in numbers the lancet estimates to be 180,000,  all paid for by hard working US citizens' tax dollars.  And boy does he love Trump.

Still, I think you are right about as much as possible keeping US politics off the p-list.  I have done so up to now and did not introduce this topic. I have said what I think of Morris’s ideas and have nothing to add.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 15 21:26:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

That seems like a plenty sufficient explanation to me.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 22:07:15 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

The dead man, Pierce...   "Like" (equals?).....Maxwell's Demon....????

'linking features in a coincidence'....

So, the coincidence is OED meeting Jesus A again?

So, is the coincidental meeting between them different from when she met him with Pierce because the sorting of information from higher to lower is the transmission of Pierce [associations; money? ] toward entropy?....
.....transmission of Pierce's higher level robber baron self toward entropy?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 22:12:27 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

So,  I may be seeing---reading---TRP tell us robber baron $$$ are dissipating....moving toward entropy as
this book's America unfolds?..........

"the dead man, like Maxwell's Demon"

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 23:50:00 UTC 2024

COL49 - Group Read p 139-145 (H&R)

This section is focused on Oed’s return to Mucho immediately after the Dr. Hilarious psychotic breakdown. [After this post, I will return to this episode with Dr. Hilarious, and specifically the Freud/Jung references]

After she’s released from being held hostage at gunpoint by Dr Hilarious, Oed Is interviewed by Mucho in the radio station mobile Van. And gives her a new name on air.

They return to KCUF studio. Mucho’s boss, Caesar Funch, tells Oed That he’s concerned about Mucho:  “Wendell is less himself and more generic. He is […] full of people, you know? He’s a walking assembly of man.” [not  “of men”?] I don’t know what he means when he says, “They’re calling him the Brothers N.”

At lunch Mucho asks her directly, “ How are you getting on with Metzger?” And with the Equanimity of Buddha, he says he already knows the answer.

He fixates on the sound of one violinist in a symphony playing on Muzak. The Quality of the sound which demands his attention is its REALness. The question of whether something is REAL is foundational in this book. Here the “real” is contrasted with “synthetic.” Many other conceptual dualities for questioning what is real are explored in this book and in other Pynchon works.

Mucho tells Oed that he is able to “Listen to anything [real/heard sounds], and process/synthesize them in his  mind, break them down to their “Pure“ tones. His mind purifies the LIFE out, leaving eternally dead/preserved basic frequencies.

****OR****

Is it possible that he is removing his own interpretations…. His own baggage, his own prejudices, and actually hearing what is real for the first time?

Mucho expands “Rich, chocolatey, goodness” into a mantra, then transforms that sound frequency, through non-dualism, into becoming ONE with the Universe.

In short: Does the mind take “raw” input and then purify it?  or pollute it?

Then Mucho smiles, and pulls out his Magic pills, compliments of Dr. Hilarious.

Mucho reports that he is now free of nightmares. He is now full of the abundance of the world, and he is able to expand his consciousness, so that he can absorb even more.

Oed believes the pills have artificially altered Mucho’s interactions with the world. In her mind, his connection to reality has dissipated, and “she’d seen Mucho for the last time,” as she declares she is leaving “Tonight,”

David Morris

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 06:44:33 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

Nice breakdown. Respectful response:

My theory of the novel is not to take it too seriously. 

Primary goal of CoL49: to be a novel, in the  novelistic tradition. An entertainment.

Everything between the covers serves that end.

For me, it was entertaining earlier to speculate that the estate might be broke & try to prove it (came up pretty short but it was a learning experience.)

On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 1:37 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I guess I just don’t see how anyone could predict or stay ahead of her enough to know what bus she would take or where she would sit on the bus. Her pattern of movement was crazily erratic or arbitrary.

Exactly when people are easiest to manipulate.

Also what would be PI’s motive in all this?

The hypothetical Harlequinish novel that I was projecting would have Pierce intensely loving her, and putting her thru all this so she would go to the auction, where he would have his hand-picked new love interest for her declare himself and Oedipa find him acceptable.

I wouldn’t necessarily prefer, after reflection, such a plot, but I did like that episode of (Cumberbatch) Sherlock, where one watches as Watson enacts every single thing just as Sherlock had planned, unlikely as it seems - that’s part of the enjoyment.

I see this whole line of thought as the kind of paranoia that is desperate 
> and illogical and ascribes an impossible level of power and manipulative skill to the presumed controller of events. Once a person sees any such deception in a powerful person or organization it is hard not to wonder how much of that is directed at you.  It seems rather to me that Pynchon is carefully presenting a story where the protagonist is stirred to investigate something that looks highly unlikely but is found to be so real and troubling that she can barely cope, and looks for any possible explanation.

Yes, but is that fun?

I agree that both the “broke PI” and the “lovelorn puppet master” aren’t very satisfying theories

But bouncing around, using those now proven-wrong deviations to get off the beaten path - because I’m not enchanted by the sort of grim conclusions we seem to be heading for - I like the idea that Oedipa uses the executrix gig to skive off from Wendell’s pointless drama and infidelities - then uses the Tristero as an excuse to skive off from boring estate duty - then skives off from diligent sleuthing - to a stamp auction where maybe Genghis (or maybe even Pierce himself, in rags or a sari & turban, behind a Bertie Wooster kind of glue-on beard, having faked his death) will show up & turn out to be a gratifyingly adept hair-climber.

Because I’m yes, earnestly reading and not rejecting other interpretations, but essentially I dip into a novel in the first place as a way to skive off from grimness, to receive both “sentens and solas” - and never stop looking for that.

There’s a tension between the desire to be responsive to the text as it is, and the desire to find the specific things I want to read about, which is enjoyable.

The many quite good comments here I’ve been reading are undoubtedly more responsive to the text than the ideas I’ve been floating!

But I keep wanting to read this as a fun book without completely ignoring its contents.


> Also if we assume that PI did set all this up and also made sure that the evidence of this large secret network  would be made to disappear early in the disposition of the will, I would argue that this leads to something very much resembling the course of events following the Kennedy killing and the scope of the efforts to prevent contrary evidence and testimony to the magic bullet riddled narrative of the Warren commission, including the high likelihood the Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered and her files stole. Maybe a  plausible for-instance  type explanation of what PI could have been up to and why he would have set up this elaborate and expensive illusion, would give more credibility to this idea.

Love; crazy love

I honestly can’t think of how that would work to explain the events of the
> story. P does not have human villains without human motives. Is it really a parable where PI is the Devil( Ala the world the flesh and the devil)? What is his goal as a devil? I’m really trying to think this through with everything on the table so far.

I think - I hope - that positing PI as a devil is tongue-in-cheek, he’s just a rich dude with his flaws, nobody’s perfect

And although Oedipa’s anguish is real, her situation within the spectrum of human experience is enviable - she’s a modern embodiment of one of the Aristotelian ideas about having the characters be of high social status or something like that…she’s got internal class to move in many circles & think worthy thoughts even in her confusion while she keeps moving (and skiving)

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 16 12:20:30 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

Mark sez:
The dead man, Pierce...   "Like" (equals?).....Maxwell's Demon....????

Rather than equals, perhaps more simile, comparing unlike things. They both manipulate information but for different reasons. Maxwell's demon to create energy, Pierce to create wealth. Again the coincidence of seeing Jesus after having learned about entropy and Maxwell's demon, Oed begins to relate how Pierce has used money to create power with how an idea can create energy or lead to entropy. The demon can no more escape entropy than the wealthy man can escape death.

On another note, since we are discussing Pierce's ability to curate Oedipa's experiences, it is worth asking to what extent Pierce knew about his death. Was it a surprise or was it expected? In order to curate on any level we're discussing means that he must have known his death was imminent. Is there any textual evidence to answer this?

In solidarity,
James 

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 12:41:10 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

The text reads  'The dead man, like Maxwell's Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence"

My thought experiment here is to ask if "like" sorta states an equivalence with Maxwell's Demon...

A lose "therefore' to connect entropy....??

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 13:00:29 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

I look at episodes like this Maxwell's Demon play, and see an extended joke-riff. Serious around the edges, filled with role reversal and pun, crazy logic… and I think they’re mostly stand-alone chapters.  Comic relief sideshow.  ATD has a few LARGE sections that are like this.  And I think TRP would have benefited from a tough editor in that case.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 13:06:11 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

I want to reverb Morris's fine words in those first two sentences....

But I see many of them---as notions, as ideas, as, yes, "crazy" associational "logic" as pervading all over the place .....oftentimes.....

I always see him as "All together Now", as a novelist of ideas...

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 16 14:45:39 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

Well there is always that entertaining quality in P’s novel’s and he clearly wants his work to entertain, but for individuals like myself the entertainment has always had something to do with how the satire is directed, because it seems to be directed at targets which not so many are willing to prod and while usually everyone in his books  makes a fool of themself in some way, the weirdest evil ( there is a fair amount of that) characterizes things that I have strong feelings about and if it is  part of state machinery will usually have a parallel in the opposing state. I find his humor to be unusual in that it keeps working. Like the big Lebowski or The Holy Grail, it’s good for more than one laugh.  I do tend to think that P’s intentions are very large and entertainment and humor are as much tools as goals. I like the word skive and never use it so had to look it up. Perfect. 

   I think PI’s most logical motive with O.M. as executrix is to say here is everything you could have had, with Metzger as insurance that she would be distracted and wouldn’t look in the wrong places. Of course she does. I see this motive with the deep state machinations toward the public, here is everything you get if you just don’t look in certain places.  

Thanks for a thoughtful and real response. 

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 16 17:40:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 Ch5 third section Weekly Reading

> How does Hilarius' crimes in Buchenwald move the plot forward or help to understand either character?
I think we need more than Hilarius’s face-making activities (more like cover -up lies about the death camps than what nazi scientists were really doing)  at Buchenwald to understand his role in the story.  What was an ex nazi doing conducting a commissioned LSD experiment in a comfortable California college town? The likeliest explanation lies in a range of well documented LSD experiments conducted by the CIA as part of MK Ultra. Here are some notes I wrote earlier :

Hilarius is part of a landscape  we find throughout the novella of activities more sinister than we or Oedipa know- I hear him with the voice of Henry Kissinger. He is conducting an experiment he calls 'the bridge' on housewives using LSD. He scares Oed and she does not trust him or want his drugs( tanquilizers or LSD).  Later it turns out he is an ex Nazi scientist. As soon as WW2 was over, there were numerous Nazis recruited into various endeavors of the US government. One recruiter of ex nazis was  James Jesus Angleton, a senior figure in THE CIA( Duke Angelo?), who specialized in Nazis with anti-communist background or from unique research fields. There is a reasonably high probability  that Hilarius is one of these, willing to do questionable psychological research.  In its early phase(50s-60s) MK Ultra was interested in the possibility of  reconfiguring the human mind by wiping clean previous conditioning and then reconditioning the person( You know, to preserve our freedom). It was well under way under way in the 60s and using LSD and Curare under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, or Donald Cameron out of Toronto branch of MK ultra. We can only imagine the purpose of his housewife experiments but it is not at all implausible for that secretive government program. Hilarius clearly regards Oedipa as a particular challenge and he is right. How Pynchon knew about these things so early, while they were still wrapped in secrecy is hard to fathom, but quite common for him.

Here are 3 lines from Wikipedia profile of Sydney Gottlieb; 1) Dulles( head of CIA) and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum>", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services> but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol>, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline> before realizing LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
2)Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation>, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUATONE>, later known as the U-2 spy plane <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2>. In 1953, he arranged a safe house <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house> for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. 3)Gottlieb administered LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD> and other hallucinogenic drugs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen> to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson> LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. Hilarius is also the name of a saint from Arles who was involved in a power struggle with the pope.

So Hilarius is an extremely conflicted person who seems to be most fascinated and seduced by the power of masks or faces, perhaps best suited for anthropological research into what is called primitive magic, shamanic masks, theater etc. with a Jungian bent.  But he ends up contributing to state projects of interrogation, mental breakdown, and the idea of wiping clean of  the minds and social -conditioning of ordinary people.  It is dubious that his reactions to, or descriptions of the LSD experiments are accurate descriptions of what happens when relatively comfortable stable  people  or probably even "nutty housewives" take the drug in a safe environment. We have clinical data about that from many sources including the wide range of clinical psychologists were send high quality LSD by Sandoz. (Michael Pollan’s book covers some of this) .  The whole episode and conversation between Hilarius and Oed is to my ear, top quality Pynchon writing;  funny, intriguing, active and effective within the plot. It reminds me of ATD. And there is plenty to mine there about both OED and H. She is cool as a cucumber under this potentially  hight stress weirdness, with her “just marv” to the cops, engaging H enough to grab the rifle, etc. .  

I have a dear friend who got out of a very tough social situation where she was achieving fucking remarkable positive results with a severely disabled child, truly amazing, but was not getting paid for that despite the wealth of the child’s mother. She used a feigned mental breakdown to move out of that and went on to a well paid position that honored her abilities. I can see that  kind  of thing as an explanation of Hilarius’s breakdown, where he combined actual fear of a Wiesenthal type exposure with his honest conflicted revulsion at his own past and current work to choose  either death or rehabilitation within the clinical world he knows. 

>>>> Is Oedipa Jewish? How does her response to Hilarius' revelations expand her character?
Judaism does not appear as a strong identity for Oed. And Oedipa ( with the Greek myth baggage) is not a likely name for a Jewish or any other daughter. But when, on page 1, she is informed that she is named as executor of PI’s estate, "Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.”
The name of God is seen as a powerful invocation in Judaism, even physically impossible to pronounce, guarded by divine barriers. The name of Jesus is the name of power in Christianity, with God referred to as Father( or parent in Aramaic ). Her "I should kill you” remark could also point to Judaism. I feel these hints are intentional but not a defining aspect of her character and self identity. There is not a word about her home life or spiritual beliefs. The sentence ”But this did not work.” Could point to every aspect of the preceding sentence: the TV, the name of God, and the attempt at numbness via alcohol.  If so, neither faith, cultural propaganda, or the communion of the tipsy seem to promise any aid toward a decision. 
With this Hilarius episode we can also eliminate a desire for revenge and the offerings of psychology as guides for her search. She is Oedipal only in the sense of rejecting the cultural 'adults -in-the-room', the pseudo parental guidelines of the modern soul. She is on her own: a combination of remarkable tenacity and courage balanced by deeply embedded met-cognitive checks that want more data. I want to invoke again the name of Dorothy Kilgallen and the many investigative reporters in US history, women among the very best of them, who from Washington Irving to muck rakers to I.F. Stone to Palestinian and Mexican journalists  today have looked into dangerous territory to tell truth that is unwelcome in mainstream media. How many such searches have led to death or undeserved rejection and obscurity. How much we need them for an open society with open discourse and true information whether it flatters those we think it should flatter or not.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Jul 17 14:14:51 UTC 2024

COL49 - Group Read p 139-145 (H&R)

*Dr Hilarious, Jung, and Freud*
(Not “Dr Hilarious, Nazi”)

I think the focus Pynchon really had in mind was the *difference of approach to the mind* that these two GIANTS ended up taking. The old man, Freud, was initially just that: the father of MODERN *psychology*.

Jung was Initially Freud’s student and colleague, but then became his APOSTATE. Freud was looking for pure science, because that’s what Modernity IS. Jung Got bored, and peaked behind the curtains. He SELF-dove deeply
into psychosis, his own personal variety, willingly voluntarily. He was a true Pre psychedelic day tripper. And what he discovered was a world of spirituality that had long been practiced by indigenous people all over the world.

Mort to come…
Google Freud versus Young, and you will see a hell of a lot to sift through.

David Morris

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 18 01:18:13 UTC 2024

COL49 - Group Read p 139-145 (H&R)

Another aspect to this meeting is the initial and various impressions Mucho makes that don’t seem problematic at all. 1) His Smile (can they hear it, not considering that he is smiling at her) 2) His pronunciation of her name that she questions but sounds correct on the sound equipment of the mobile van 3) there is "a serenity about him she’d never seen. He used to hunch his shoulders and have a rapid eyeblink rate, and both now were gone.” 4) his directness which she has said she wants, and which direct without being judgemental. 5) His correct discernment from her voice  that her affair with Metzger is over 6) he is free of his nightmarish worries. Here is a man who is now confident, relaxed, acutely discerning concerning his craft, not cheating on her, and, albeit in some ways rather weirdly, exploring a kind of universal language he is perceiving in sound and music. I am reading a book called Zen and the Brain and Mucho Maas at this point has many resemblances to early stages of advanced Zen meditation abilities. I like the way David Morris put it here about input to consciousness  and whether we hear it accurately or distorted by inner noise, and Pynchon’s interest in whether we  assess information for authenticity or fakeness.

Mucho may no longer carry the personality profile of the person who Oedipa married but it is very hard to see how LSD has done serious damage or made it  impossible to reconnect to Mucho as the person he is becoming and to invite him into her changed picture of the world.  The main problem with Mucho as this meeting plays out is that he is so enthralled with what he is discovering that he fails to try to find out the rather darker material that she has been looking into and struggling with herself.  But my own sense is that she is also afraid of this less binary  way of dealing with the kind of complexities they both face, and going to Mike Fallopian to share her fears is far less sensible as a choice than it might have been to see if Mucho and her might have more to give each other.

Interestingly Pynchon felt interested enough in this relationship and to continue with more of where Mucho was headed that he picks it up In Vineland mentioning an amicable divorce, Mucho as a successful record producer working with the Paranoids. He recounts how Mucho  had turned down the damaging path of Cocaine use and come out of that living on “the natch” with an attractive younger woman, but also sharing a sense together with Zoyd of psychedelics freeing them both from the fear of death.  

If my sense that OM plays a dual role as herself and the conflicted post JFK soul of America here is another place where the paranoia about psychedelics unfortunately eclipsed their potential for therapy, inner exploration and problem solving. So often political battles have pushed us to the war paradigm instead of a true pursuit of understanding.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 18 11:17:59 UTC 2024

COL49 - Group Read p 139-145 (H&R)

Another aspect to this meeting is the initial and various impressions Mucho makes that don’t seem problematic at all.1 )His Smile ( she wonders, can they hear it? not considering that he is smiling at her ) 2)His pronunciation of her name that she questions but sounds correct on the sound equipment of the mobile van 3) there is "a serenity about him she’d never seen. He used to hunch his shoulders and have a rapid eyeblink rate, and both now were gone.”  4) his directness which she has said she wants, and which is direct without being judgemental. 5) His correct discernment from her voice  that her affair with Metzger is over  6) he is free of his nightmarish worries.
Here is a man who is now confident, relaxed, acutely discerning concerning his craft, not cheating on her, and, albeit in some ways rather weirdly, exploring a kind of universal language he is perceiving in sound and music. I am reading a book called Zen and the Brain and Mucho Maas at this point has many resemblances to early stages of  advanced Zen meditation abilities. I like the way David Morris  put it  here about input to consciousness  and whether we hearth input accurately or distorted by inner noise, and Pynchon’s interest in whether we  assess information for authenticity or fakeness.

Mucho may no longer carry the personality profile of  the person who Oedipa married but it is very hard to see how LSD has done serious damage or made it impossible to reconnect to Mucho as the person he is becoming and to invite him into her changed picture of the world.  The main problem with Mucho as this meeting plays out is that he is so enthralled with what he is discovering that he fails to try to find out the rather darker material that she has been looking into and struggling with herself.  But my own sense is that she is also afraid of this less binary way of dealing with the kind of complexities they both face, and going to Mike Fallopian to share her fears is far less sensible as a choice than it might have been to see if Mucho and her might have more to give each other.

Interestingly Pynchon felt interested enough in this relationship and to continue with more of where Mucho was headed that he picks it up In Vineland. There he mentions an amicable divorce, Mucho as a successful record producer working with the Paranoids. He recounts how Mucho  had turned down the damaging path of Cocaine use, and come out of that living on “the natch” with an attractive younger woman, but also sharing the conviction together with Zoyd W. of psychedelics freeing them both from the fear of death.  

If my argument that OM plays a dual role as herself and the conflicted post JFK soul of America here is another place where the paranoia about psychedelics unfortunately eclipsed their potential for therapy, inner exploration and problem solving. So often political battles have pushed us to the war paradigm instead of a true pursuit of understanding.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jul 20 02:50:47 UTC 2024

COL49 - Group Read p 139-145 (H&R)

The fact that there is a religious movement upon which many brilliant minds have worked over a period of many centuries is sufficient reason for at least venturing a serious attempt to bring such processes within the realm of scientific understanding. 
 Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion
 
Problem with the idea of pure science is the problem with pure anything. You end up having a pure white priesthood with  genetically engineered white mice for proof and with instincts for white self preservation deciding what is sufficiently pure and possible. The problem with the Modern is that it keeps slipping into the ancient past, just as we moderns shall do, just like Yermojo and Yermojo’s mama before him.  
 Yermojo Werkin,  Funky Meditations of a Traditional Contrarian.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jul 20 20:51:53 UTC 2024

COL49 End of CH 5

The last thing Mucho tells Oedipa before they part is how he no longer has the nightmares that startled him awake screaming. His dream was of a real sign with initials for the National Automobile Dealers of America, N.A.D.A.. Nada, nada, nada, creaking against the clear blue sky. The thing being offered, the car, a symbol of freedom in American culture its really nada, nothing, a false promise.  This shows a large and liberating  change in Mucho’s subconscious, but the only thing Oedipa can see is that he isn’t the old Mucho. Frequently in successful psychedelic and similarly envisioned  therapy there are confrontations with serious internal terrors and the person is encouraged to let go of the fear response and talk with or even enter the source of anxiety This can lead to amazing inner transformations.  We can see that Mucho has been seduced and oversimplified his experience to LSD = liberation and a renewed contact with the abundance of the universe. He later, as told in Vineland, finds there is no magic cure-all  and serious dangers to drug use. Here, he is not getting through. Oedipa has, for reasonable causes,  put up barriers to this oversimplified message  that won’t allow her to see anything positive in the new Mucho despite her own observations.

One of the funny and loaded riffs, which reappears in their parting kiss, has to do with the Cartesian self vs the Zen no-self, or mindful awareness that makes no distinction between outside v. inside, mind v. body , self v.  other. 

This becomes  explicit here:  “Is this what Funch means when he says you’re coming on like a whole roomful of people?” 
“That’s what I am,” said Mucho, “right. Everybody is.” He gazed at her, perhaps having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face now smooth, amiable, at peace.”

To some the ease of Mucho or say, someone like  Alan Watts with this larger  less  conceptual self is scary, and contrary to our social orientation. But without the vast input from outside an individual body and mind what is a self? What in our experience of “I am” is verbal noise and what is real? It isn’t so obvious in an honest reckoning.  This is a brief but powerful glimpse into a profound split in the American vision stretching back in obvious ways to  the expansive inclusiveness  of Emerson and Whitman vs  the outwardly combative  visions of  G.Washington and Andrew Jackson. 

I don’t know about other readers, and Pynchon, as usual, does not tell us what to think,  but I see profound and indispensable value on both sides of this unfortunate division.  For me Oedipa, with a beautifully credible feminine practicality represents the demand of the household, the ecosystem, of concern with  the details of where the local meets the larger social direction. She wants to understand and fix the mess she feels responsible for. She also is repeatedly struggling against and succumbing to a naive myth of  beautiful princess saved by handsome, kind, powerful prince( external salvation). As she struggles to free herself from that restraint she is shocked at the pervasiveness of dishonesty, game-playing, cowardice and narcissism. Where are the princes? Mucho feels trapped and constrained in a different way. He is good as a salesman for American culture and well rewarded, but wants to believe in what he does of living and can't. Where Oedipa searches externally his struggle is internal and he finds a breakthrough in LSD and a rather Zen approach to union with sound, a medium which is abstract and through which he connects to others in a less judgmental or agonized way, even imagining a universal  choral union of rich chocolatey goodness. Whether the peace he has found with himself and the world can help forward that choral union is questionable without practical changes.  The more I look at these poles the more I see a spectrum of overlapping potential that is greater than either alone. 

So when, "At the station they kissed goodbye, all of them.” It is laugh out loud  funny and immensely sad because we really all are part of each other and divorce from that reality can only invite self righteousness and dangerous anger. But life is bigger than the individual and so far anyway, life goes on.

On to the last chapter.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Jul 21 11:19:53 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

Let me ask my question more open-endedly......premise, every metaphor, analogy etc a writer uses....could have been made another way. Why did TRP link dead Pierce with Maxwell's Demon?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jul 21 11:28:07 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

“Either Tristero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed”

Dead Pierce is/was obviously REALLY (estate) behind(inside?) the black box…or

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 21 16:34:59 UTC 2024

COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

The dead man, like Maxwell’s Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesús would be exactly here, exactly now.
Fangoso-murky, muddy, covered up    The golden Fang- the ship of state powered by Nixon bucks, racist real estate practices, a rentier society, and global extraction 

The only thing that is clearly being said is that Maxwell’s Demon is a linking feature in a coincidence. What that coincidence is and whether it has to do with PI is not implicit. The role of coincidence could be the emphasis of this thought rather than a link to PI. . The problem time-wise is that a coincidence is not yet evident . Later we find that the waste mail carrier ends his route at the apt. of Nefastis and that is the only coincidence linking Maxwell's Demon to Tristero strong enough to grab my attention as a reader. I do not know about the Tristero per se because the only thing that clearly carries over to WASTE from the European Tristero is the posthorn. But it puts the narrator  both outside of the time of the events ( “was the linking feature”)  and inside the time of the events ( exactly here, exactly now.”    

I tend to think it is a way of cluing us to the contingencies which are growing in OM’s mind and which the reader should consider: Is PI behind the whole experience?, Waste looks real and operative, is it?  And if so, is it part of the still active Tristero? Why is PI obsessed with this postal system power struggle as evident in his stamps? These questions become clearer in her mind as the story progresses.

Many of these contingencies  are refrains which relate to PI’s voices in the phone call. Who was this dude? It is almost as though he is not a person but an entity possessed by several ’spirits’,   Vigilantism, fascism,  the shadow self, racism, power struggles, competing threat, lurker in the dark of night.

To  continue this thought and get really speculative I think we have to consider that PI was an early silicon valley type spook, set up through his own affinities and paranoia to consolidate power on behalf of larger organizations. And one distinct possibility is that Michael Bailey was right, that Yoyodyne was failing to get contracts, that his empire was in trouble, possibly at the  direction of somebody more powerful, and that he was always disposable, especially if he knew something that was considered unspeakable. Perhaps his middle of the  night call to OM  was something like her call to  the IA person , for whom it was too late, that PI knew this and his appointment of OM as executor  was a hope she might expose the kind of power plays taking place in very high places.   Unfortunately , to my thinking, such basic plot questions seem to be implied in several directions but unresolved. 

Possibly this unresolvable murkiness is deliberate.

Another way of looking at these questions and the unresolved murkiness might relate to a kind of comparison of imperial patterns of implosion and realignment. P has in V. just finished a novel about the spooks, and power games of Europe and the dark trend toward a kind of mechanized simulated woman, an anti-Beatrice,  which seems to draw the powers and players of the time with powerful allure. Her machine fecundity  promises endless growth, everything organized by battles over resources and  infrastructural systems of control. GR brings this struggle forward even further as the pursuit of rockets, atomic weapons, war profits  and behavior control coalesce and do battle with the last remnants of the human. Again, secret police take a central role, as do pockets of resistance.  So if phenomena in the US like the CIA power struggle with Kennedy, or the growth of the Military industrial complex, or the advertising for suburban heaven have reached an existential question mark( as many think they did with the killing of Kennedy) and nobody can safely look into this secretive power struggle and the presumptions that drive the quickly  growing  US empire, Pynchon is in my mind making a powerful comparison to earlier empires, marked by machiavellian power games, grids  and secret police, but always at odds with nature and the wisdom of the human, the tribal and the geographic  scale. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 22 03:01:13 UTC 2024

John Baez on Entropy

Cousin of Mimi Fariña and Joan Baez, he’s a mathematical physicist

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/what_is_entropy.pdf

Aspirational reading

The bits I understand are in a very enjoyable style

The other 99% probably is also

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 22 07:03:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

The Nook edition had the “b” pagination for the part of Ch3 I hosted, but chapter 6 is quite different.

The “b” pagination division James suggests is from 120 to 152, or 33 pages inclusive, with each host working on 11 pages.

The Nook edition I have puts chapter 6 from page 109 to 136: 28 pages inclusive.

A third that would be 9 pages & a skosh: thru 117 & a third of 118.

109 is a short page, so to even it up I’d like to go more than 1/3 into page 118, and end my tenure after
“…Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began:”

If I’m shirking or hogging, I'm sure someone will let me know, and I’ll be happy to change (within reason)

brief summary:

The Paranoids burst into song with a lament - Metzger has stolen one of their “chicks”

Metzger breaks up with Oedipa with no notice, just a fair accompli

She learns, via a note on top of the TV set in the room at Echo Court, of his quitting as co-executor

She tries to call Driblette but his mother answers & tells her that their attorney will be reading a statement the next day at noon

She calls Emory Bortz at home, reaching his wife Grace, who invites Oedipa over

On the way to Bortz’s, she passes the charred remnants of Zapf’s Used Books.

She inquires of the neighboring surplus-store’s owner, and learns that Zapf had torched the place for the insurance. She also gets an earful of racist and opportunistic Nazi-sympathizing.

Remonstrates with herself for not assaulting that person for his contemptible views and actions.

At Bortz’s she takes in a lovely domestic scene with Grace and some children on her way to the backyard, where Emory and some of his graduate students are drinking a lot of beer.

She joins in the drinking, bandying words with the grad students, especially w/r/t different versions of the “Courier’s Tragedy” text.

During the course of the conversation, she also learns that at least part of the drinking is by way of a wake for Driblette, who’d walked into the Pacific (and drowned)

Bortz shows Oedipa into his study to view some slides  of the pornographic illustrations in one of the variant texts.

They lapse into near-scholarly discourse. Oedipa inevitably introduces the topic of The Tristero, whereupon Bortz unlocks a bookcase containing his “Wharfingeriana.”
 
Evidently Bortz had found in Wharfinger’s “commonplace book” (which is apparently a fancy term for “diary”, and which he does not show her, at least not in this scene) a reference to yet another text: the wonderfully-named Diocletian Blobb’s travel journal, wherein Blobb describes an encounter with The Tristero.

He gives her a copy of the travel journal printed in antique style to read.

Sure enough, Blobb and his companions, while passengers in a Thurn and Taxis mail coach, witnessed the theft of the mail and a massacre of all the T&T personnel at the hands of The Tristero.

Blobb et al loudly proclaimed their English citizenship, dissociating themselves from Thurn & Taxis, and even singing hymns - The Tristero spared them.

A gap of several days is noted but not described, before Oedipa and Bortz discuss the passage.

Oedipa wonders why spare Blobb; Bortz reads the passage where the Tristero leader “in perfect English” exhorted Blobb to spread the word of The Tristero in England, speculating that part of their plan may have been to lay the groundwork for expanding their organization there.

Oedipa collects some more fragments. From these sources she pieces together a rough chronological narrative of The Tristero, beginning in 1577.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 22 07:03:45 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

1) The Paranoids burst into song with a lament - Metzger has stolen one of their “chicks”

“Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard” scans like “John, Paul, George and Ringo”

I couldn’t find an album cover with musicians & instruments arrayed around a diving board, but it would make a good photo imho

One almost compulsively thinks, doesn’t one, of:

Miles - Miles Davis, edgy like John

Dean - Dean Martin, a crooner like Paul

Serge - Serge Gainsbourg, attractively louche like pre-Krishna George (plus both names end in “rge”)

But

Leonard - ?

Or not; never mind

I haven’t yet come up with a hummable song this could be a parody of…

Has anyone?

& I cannot recall any song specifically on that theme of “older men, younger women” although “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” touches on it (“what he knows you ain’t had time to learn”) & there’s a country song with a chorus that goes “faster horses, older whisky, younger women”

“Serge’s Song” is a reductio ad absurdum on that theme - like The Paranoids are a reductio ad absurdum of the British Invasion-inspired bands beginning to proliferate in 1964?

2) Metzger breaks up with Oedipa with no notice, just a fait accompli

“No word to recall that Oedipa and Metzger had ever been more than co-executors.

“Which must mean, thought Oedipa, that that’s all we were. She should have felt more classically scorned, but had other things on her mind.”

It was just one of those things…

Sex - especially the first time - with Metzger was a landmark of moving away from Mucho, affection-wise. Now, any potential for something between her and Metzger recedes in the aftermath of her SF sojourn. It’s hard to say who means less to the other.

Is it meaningful that Metzger leaves the note on the TV? As being someplace she’s bound to see it right away?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Jul 23 14:17:54 UTC 2024
CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

Why did Pynchon call this Beatles-like, Gerry & the Pacemakers-like, British Invasion Group, The Paranoids?...

Cause all of established society was out to get them?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Jul 24 15:52:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

Chapter 6

The scene and story with the Paranoids seems pretty loaded, considering the possible influences of Nabokov on Pynchon, and the idea of Lolita justifying or creating allure around sexual predation. The lyrics of the song feels deliberately cruder than others and needs reader’s sarcasm to be funny. I don’t get Nabokov at all and find his writing very dull and obsessive, whereas it was high alert and delight from the first paragraph I read of Pynchon (no warning that he was a big shot writer, just I might like it because I had lived in Arcata near Trinidad)
   Humbert Humbert reminds me of A. Eichmann, a colorless functionary obsessed with following the commands of a consuming eroticism of control.  Ok, probably way too heavy for the way the reference is being used , but how lightly can we pass off Serge’s claims to be hanging around playgrounds.  Interesting that he has a Russian name and some see Humbert as an incarnation of Stalinism.
  The net effect for Oedipa is practically nothing, Metzger is simply dismissed from her mind, and the reader left with a picture in Metzger of a manipulator who can’t handle any real human emotion that might inhibit his control. Who and what aim he was serving as executor remains inscrutable. We only know he was extremely defensive against her questions . Perhaps OM would find out more  concerning the larger picture if she looked into that question. But Pynchon seems to be narrowing our options for any trustworthy voice. 
    
   She already seems more intent to check in with Randolph Driblette than Metzger in  what seems a constant succession of potential male princes to free her from her malign captivity.. In my proposed understanding of her as allegorically representing a nation confused by the killing of a leader and looking for answers, this  succession of men seems like the nation’s attempt to find some narrative to break the spell and reveal what has happened, why, how. ( The coercively assembled Warren commission, The Magruder Film, Oliver Stone, Dorothy Kilgallen and Ruby, the magic bullet)

 Even without this historic question her search  takes on a gnostic quality; is there a way past the demigod to revelation  and would that revelation change anything? 

 There was a question about what Maxwells Demon was linked to as coincidence. The funeral gives another link , though not a coincidence, in OM’s desire to contact the dead Driblette, similar to her desire to contact Maxwell’s Demon. She wants a  transcendent break in entropic limits, a Claudius type ghost to clue her in, but again Pynchon does not open this door. 

Returning to allegory it seems as though Pynchon at the start of the chapter has OM looking to the arts, the muses: the Paranoids music, Nabokov’s novel,  Driblette the director of a play about the killing of a king and the king's heir. Together with Varro, a full range of muses has been summoned. All speak to the situation. All affect her.  

The menace represented in Winthrop Tremaine, Hilarius, the Peter Pinguid aka John Birch Society, Yoyodyne , the nazi psychiatrist, and the IA story are still fresh in her mind and to my mind Pynchon is using these dark forces to cast her quest in stark and highly consequential terms. 

As options close she returns to research into  the stamps and history of the Tristero and Wharfingerania. Everything that might be solid evidence is soon to be auctioned off, the windows into a colliding universe slammed shut.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 25 11:14:51 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

The sexualization of young girls has been an obsession in the United States for some time. Nabakov's Lolita brought it to light, as did Kubrick's movie version, and Pynchon takes it to another level of absurdity. Still this end of her relationship (superficial as it was) brings up another aspect of the patriarchal society that Pynchon continues to expose with his use of a female main character. Now we see that her "freedom" or "escape" leads to other limitations, as she ages, she becomes less desirable in a patriarchal society, where men leave their wives for trophy wives, and boys compete with grown men for the affections of their female peers.

The TV brought Metzger and Oedipa together, as they watched his child star movie, and the further away from it they get, the less he seems interested in her interests.

I find the scene with Winthrop Tremaine to touch on another American negative social ill, racism. He uses the N word with alacrity and has blacks making swastika bands for him to sell. They are both essential to his business plan and worthy only of contempt from him. The name is interesting because Winthrop is a name associated with colonial America and Tremaine, minus the e, alludes to Johnny Tremain, the novel about a boy during the American Revolution. Again hinting at the deep-seated social ill of racism and treatment of blacks in America. It also points to the California that has a racist history often belied by its supposed liberal status.

Two of America's social ills brought forward with two short scenes. Why is this brought up now?

Children and raising children get a brief play with Grace Bortz and her brood of malicious imps. A vision of what Oedipa might have become? Why does Grace recognize "a certain harassed style" in Oedipa?

More later.

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 25 11:19:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

F'in great stuff...

more from me later too...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Jul 25 11:52:52 UTC 2024

No Subject

Five of the best books about conspiracy theories
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/25/five-of-the-best-books-about-conspiracy-theories?CMP=share_btn_url
Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jul 25 14:57:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

> The sexualization of young girls has been an obsession in the United States for some time. Nabakov's Lolita brought it to light, as did Kubrick's movie version, and Pynchon takes it to another level of absurdity. Still this end of her relationship (superficial as it was) brings up another aspect of the patriarchal society that Pynchon continues to expose with his use of a female main character. Now we see that her "freedom" or "escape" leads to other limitations, as she ages, she becomes less desirable in a patriarchal society, where men leave their wives for trophy wives, and boys compete with grown men for the affections of their female peers.

I also see the infantilization of adults into a controllable means of satisfaction for the predatory and powerful. Both the control and the passion are hugely fantasy, paranoia, ego.  When the predator begins to lose control, violence  against a rival is likely, as with Humbert.

> The TV brought Metzger and Oedipa together, as they watched his child star movie, and the further away from it they get, the less he seems interested in her interests.

> I find the scene with Winthrop Tremaine to touch on another American negative social ill, racism. He uses the N word with alacrity and has blacks making swastika bands for him to sell. They are both essential to his business plan and worthy only of contempt from him. The name is interesting because Winthrop is a name associated with colonial America and Tremaine, minus the e, alludes to Johnny Tremain,
Agree
> the novel about a boy during the American Revolution. Again hinting at the deep-seated social ill of racism and treatment of blacks in America. It also points to the California that has a racist history often belied by its supposed liberal status.

> Two of America's social ills brought forward with two short scenes. Why is this brought up now?
As I said earlier I think the menace represented in Winthrop Tremaine,  Hilarius, the Peter Pinguid aka JohnBirch Society, Yoyodyne , the nazi psychiatrist,    and the IA story, ( all of.which point toward a loveless, violent and repressive vision) are still fresh in her mind and to my mind Pynchon is using these dark  forces to cast her quest in stark and highly consequential terms. The implications grow  larger than the resolution of a will. Something is happening all around her which is not on TV, and following her inquiry into PI’s will has exposed it. 

> Children and raising children get a brief play with Grace Bortz and her brood of malicious imps. A vision of what Oedipa might have become? Why does Grace recognize "a certain harassed style" in Oedipa?

The whole house is structured around a kind of indulgence of the male “intellectual” as he competes in a probably not widely followed area of research.The household responsibilities fall to Grace. The children’s misbehavior reflects that indulgence; they are not too different in their competition for attention and dominance from many of the adults in the story.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 26 01:53:40 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

"This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens."

This quote, after Oedipa leaves Winthrop Tremaine's government surplus and racist memorabilia store, responds to her calling herself a chicken for not hitting Tremaine over the head with a blunt object. However, the first two sentences speak to what America represents as a "free" nation, that we swim among vile attitudes that we allow to exist because we are "free" to think as we please. Their hatred will unfurl, bringing to the light of day what would otherwise remain in the festering darkness. To accept this, she hunts Volkswagens in order to relieve her distaste for this reality.

Three short sentences that capture so much.

In solidarity,
James

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 26 06:09:47 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 - (3) skimming lightly

“First thing after unpacking she was on the horn to Randolph Driblette”

- on the horn - subtly tying this phone call to “the horn”


Next calling Bortz, “…a wife named Grace answered, backed by a group of children.”

“backed by a group of children” - quietly suggests a phone call as a kind of performance

Is this a subtle comparison to the Paranoids? More of a contrast, I guess: these kids are in the age group among which Serge’s ostensibly seeking a rebound chick. They don’t seem likely prospects, thank goodness!

“Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student like twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz’s response, or Grace’s, but of The Trystero’s.”

So now she’s dressing to impress The Trystero.

After leaving Winthrop Tremaine to gloat among his hoard of horrible costumery,

“She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens.”

Why Volkswagens? The Hitler connection? What does she plan to do with them? Or to them?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 26 06:39:18 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 (4) cherry picking

“Bortz’s subdivision, a riparian settlement in the style of Fangoso Lagoons”

- Bortz has it pretty good, and he’s living inside a dream or bubble similar to PI’s concept of the good life

- the division of labor with Grace resembles that for which Oedipa was trying with Maas

- this section at the Bortz’s flows really well. Maybe because there’s so much dialogue, and Bortz is mannerly, erudite, and secure in his personhood?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 26 06:09:47 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 - (3) skimming lightly

“First thing after unpacking she was on the horn to Randolph Driblette”

- on the horn - subtly tying this phone call to “the horn”

Next calling Bortz, “…a wife named Grace answered, backed by a group of children.”

“backed by a group of children” - quietly suggests a phone call as a kind of performance

Is this a subtle comparison to the Paranoids? More of a contrast, I guess: these kids are in the age group among which Serge’s ostensibly seeking a rebound chick. They don’t seem likely prospects, thank goodness!

“Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student like twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz’s response, or Grace’s, but of The Trystero’s.”

So now she’s dressing to impress The Trystero.

After leaving Winthrop Tremaine to gloat among his hoard of horrible costumery,

“She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens.”

Why Volkswagens? The Hitler connection? What does she plan to do with them? Or to them?

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jul 26 07:13:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (5) Scurvhamites

Nice breakdown of the Scurvhamites

Bortz really explains things well - he’s not for sure the Vatican “Courier’s Tragedy” was a Scurvhamite project, but he makes a good case - or, rather, he states the reason his colleague D’Amico (Italian for “friend”) sees the Scurvhamites’ hand in it.

If it is, that’s an interesting example of a religious system judging an artistic work by their own inflexible terms of good and evil, mistaking the map for the territory (it’s only a play; all the actors - even in roles where they “died” - when it’s over get up and go about their business) and overemphasizing the evil so as to “damn it eternally.”

The Scurvhamites’ dwindling-to-extinction was due to each individual’s inability to cling to the concept of salvation in which they’d placed their hopes:

“…those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship’s master, had been last to go.”

That’s another instance of Goedel’s Theorem, isn’t it: a philosophical system failing under stress? Also Original Sin, “you’ll be fine, just don’t do thus-and-such”

It bears some resemblance to aspects of some of the less reasonable interpretations of Protestantism as well.

Specifically, on the pornographic “Courier’s Tragedy” project, they themselves exaggerated things they abhorred in the name of abolishing them.

Which is ironic, since holding up great evil for people to deplore presumably would have also been Wharfinger’s intention in writing the damned thing!

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jul 26 14:16:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 - (3) skimming lightly

> “Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student like twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz’s response, or Grace’s, but of The Trystero’s.”
I completely missed this line. Wow, have read it several times.  No memory.  

> So now she’s dressing to impress The Trystero.
Does she want maybe to be identified with the students at Berkeley. Signaling to Trystero a resistance to deception.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Jul 26 14:54:52 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (5) Scurvhamites

Recall that the historical war that first deposes Thurn and Taxis’s  postmaster is between extreme Calvinists and the declining Holy Roman Empire. I think Calvinism begins, and inevitably ends up with warlike and colonialist political results. There is a desire to mechanize divinity  toward a kind of predestined sorting along doctrinal lines in which Christianity is the army of the Lord of Hosts. The Scurvhamites take the dividing line to the point of dimininishing returns.  The Tristero can perhaps see the seeming  inevitability of that trend and hope perhaps to divide and conquer both Catholics and Calvinists in a more straightforward machiavellian approach.  

Most of the players are still around: Calvinist religions, machiavellian coups  and money games by secretive agencies, and the royal remnants of the Holy Roman Empire….

"Rainer Maria Rilke <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke> wrote his Duino Elegies <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duino_Elegies> while visiting Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis (née Princess of Hohenlohe <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohenlohe>, wife of Prince Alexander) at her family's Duino Castle <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duino_Castle>. Rilke later dedicated his only novel (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Malte_Laurids_Brigge>) to the princess, who was his patroness <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patron>. Her son Prince Alexander (1881–1937) became an Italian citizen named Principe della Torre e Tasso and was raised in 1923 by the Italian king to Duke of Castel Duino. Today Duino Castle belongs to his grandson, Prince Carlo della Torre e Tasso, Duca di Castel Duino (b. 1952). The Duino branch is part of the family's Czech branch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Branch_of_the_House_of_Thurn_und_Taxis> that in the early 19th century settled in Bohemia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia> (now the Czech Republic <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Republic>). 
Several members of the family have been Knights of Malta <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta>.

Until 1919, the titles of the head of the princely house were His Serene Highness <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serene_Highness> the Fürst <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrst> von Thurn und Taxis, Prince of Buchau and Prince of Krotoszyn, Duke of Wörth and Donaustauf, Princely Count of Friedberg-Scheer, Count of Valle-Sássina, Marchtal, Neresheim etc., Hereditary Postmaster General.[13] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis#cite_note-13>
The current head of the house of Thurn and Taxis is Albert II, 12th Prince of Thurn and Taxis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_II,_Prince_of_Thurn_and_Taxis>, son of Johannes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes,_11th_Prince_of_Thurn_and_Taxis> and his wife, Gloria <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria,_Princess_of_Thurn_and_Taxis>. The family is one of the wealthiest in Germany. The family's brewery was sold to the Paulaner Group <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulaner_Brewery> of Munich <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich> in 1996, but it still produces beer under the brand of Thurn und Taxis. “  wikipedia

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 06:15:08 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

There was a game called “punch-buggy” I heard of second hand, in which the older sibling would spot a VW and say “punch-buggy” & punch the younger sibling. Seemed kind of mean.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 06:56:12 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

Thanks for that - it’s a more rational and detailed explanation of the points I was trying to get at.

A few light brushstrokes it makes me want to add -

Oedipa is having a bit of an Odyssey, touching on many sectors of society…feelingly and also thinkingly having what seem to me to be the reactions of the prototype “reasonable person”

Not explicitly homing in on Bortz and Cohen as bastions of rationality, but it’s clear she takes comfort from them. Rather than rushing into battle, taking sides with or against Fallopian, Koteks, and Tremaine, her continuing emphasis - like theirs - is on learning more.

 They’ve found niches for themselves, so they don’t fall prey to accidie or second-guessing themselves the way she does. When with them, she's less plagued with that. Tho’ it never completely goes away, their company enlivens her and helps her focus.

She’s examining the heck out of her life. Socrates would be pleased with her.

Tremaine with all his racist talk still is comfortable enough with black folk to hire them - maybe more comfortable face to face than people with more exemplary liberal notions. He still upsets Oedipa; obviously his motives and the trends he’s riding incite deep abhorrence, and one cannot really endorse the pride he might feel at being a “job creator.”

Also, I tried to conflate the contradiction in Scurvhamite thinking with Goedel and with Original Sin; going for the trifecta, it also reminds me of Maxwell’s Demon in that division of the world into 2 parts and choosing one, with Entropy finally winning, one believer after another ceasing to choose the preferred chamber.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 09:26:34 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

Volkswagen was talked of---see the name---as the People's Car. She hunts for it in America now. Hunting to see if postwar America is rid of bad shit (like Nazis) as postear Germany was. I have always, after my first reading of Lot 49, seen the Volkswagen as the car Mucho finds all the human pathos in, in his sad reflections in that scene...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 27 11:44:44 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Scurvhamites

Perhaps it is just a weak thread, but I can't help but dissect Scurvhamite. My first thought was scurvy, the disease/condition that results from a lack of vitamin C, which to play with the analogy with the Protestant sect would be their lack of compromise, which as Michael pointed out with Goedel's theory of incompleteness/completeness, leads to a stress on their structure of truth that can't be maintained. Then there is the 'ham', which is usually an ending in England for towns/cities. Robert Scurvham leads a diseased hamlet that literally loses its teeth/members because of its inflexibility.

Riffing that may mean nothing, but the Scurvhamites definitely represent the ad absurdum extreme of the Protestant/Puritan belief system.

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Jul 27 14:11:36 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 (4) cherry picking

Just a note on the chuckle when Bortz says I’ve been Bowdlerized in reverse or something, and looking for the Publisher finds it's K Da Chingado , Mexican Spanish meaning what the fuck? Or What a pile of shit.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 27 19:24:47 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Scurvhamites

On Saturday, July 27, 2024, 08:02, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

Related, somehow, I think:
Whenever I hear 'amites' as here I always hear Benthamites,,,and, yes, scurvy clearly hereof Bethamites without Vitamin C. ???   Or, maybe better Benthamite's utilitarianism as like Vitamin C to prevent scurvy....

Benthamites   
   - a person who supports the philosophical system of utilitarianism proposed by the English philosopherand jurist Jeremy Bentham."for the Benthamite a natural right was both false and meaningless"

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 27 20:38:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch6 part 1

Two quick thoughts about Oedipa. First, why does she describe Metzger's new flame as "depraved" instead of him? Does she fall into the blame the woman trap? 

Second, when she says she is being "stripped" and on the edge of an abyss, with all her male figures leaving one-by-one, a page later, we get the description of the Scurvhamites slowly having the "glamorous prospect of annihilation" coaxing them over. Is there any connection between these two images? Has Oedipa become too obsessed to be objective?

In solidarity,
James

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 20:43:04 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch6 part 1

Oedipa has been, as with getting all her clothes off, now internally naked and almost clairvoyant...

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 21:04:17 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch6 part 1

*Annihilation and the Abyss* are almost the same thing. *Annihilation* implies Cessation of existence. *The Abyss* is also a place of nonexistence of everything, except the continued existence of the Consciousness of the individual.

This novel is concerned with the question:  “*Of What Does Reality Consists*?”

That question Starts with an examination of consciousness (Which also requires examination of the SAME QUESTION pointed towards the person asking the question).

Nihilism is one answer. Or maybe it’s an experiment with a hypothesis.  It is the option chosen by the Herrero tribe in Gravity, Rainbow.

David Morris

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Jul 27 23:58:44 UTC 2024

CoL49 ch6 part 1

Depraved as an adjectivication of the infrequently seen verb “deprave”

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/deprave#google_vignette

Deprave - to lead into bad habits https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/habit>; make morally bad; corrupt; pervert <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/pervert>

She’s the “depravee” - ie the depraved person is the victim (although there are those who blame the victim; haters gonna hate)

Metzger, the “depraver,” has depraved her (although the Paranoids probably started the process)

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jul 28 01:26:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Scurvhamites

So, how does “sodomites” fit this logic?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 28 04:00:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Scurvhamites

The Scurvhamite ideas are in some ways not all that unusual in their extreme division of spirit and flesh and could easily be extrapolated from the apostle Paul’s teaching just as Calvinism was.  It doesn’t seem to emphasize the idea of punishment or Hell but has the majority of  a predestined universe simply moving in machinelike inevitability toward dissolution as the final result of entropy. It is not so different from certain modern scientific understanding. The hard part for the sect would inevitably be to discern any sign they were in the blessed part of the divine will.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jul 28 07:16:59 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

https://www.berfrois.com/2020/03/albert-rolls-pynchon-in-the-low-countries/

“Blobb” inquired around about the Trystero organization, running into zipped mouths nearly every way he turned. But he was able to collect a few fragments. So, in the days following, was Oedipa. From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, an 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb’s brother Augustine also among Bortz’s Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb’s original clues, Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began:”

- Blobb and his brother are obviously fictional. There’s some grist for speculation in the names “Diocletian” - Roman
emperor from 284 to 305 who even has a persecution of Christians named after him - and “Augustine” which strongly connotes the Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430, an era in which Christianity rose in ascendancy while the Roman Empire was disintegrating. As wealthy Britons, Blobb père et mère may have wanted to render unto both God and Caesar.

- “Obscure philatelic journals furnished by Genghis Cohen” not evidently meant to be traceable (but indicative of yet more friendly contact with Cohen)

-  “an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic” According to Albert Rolls, Pynchon’s account departs from the main thrust of that extant book

- “An 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of anarchism” would put its publication at 1884. One could speculate but nothing stands out in my cursory search.

Among the many points in Albert Rolls’s fine article, “The unrecognized source for Pynchon’s construction of that historical context seems to be Adrien de Meeüs’s *Histoire Belgique *(1928), which was published in an English translation as the *History of the Belgians* in 1962. Knowing Meeüs’s historical account not only helps explain some of
the choices, as well as errors, Pynchon made but also helps one better characterize the Tristero’s place in history.”

- trying to recap Oedipa’s account more succinctly than the text:

1577 - “In late December, Orange, de facto master of the Low Countries, entered Brussels in triumph, having been invited there by a Committee of Eighteen. This was a junta of Calvinist fanatics….”

Rolls points out that Motley correctly placed the event in September 1577, but Pynchon used Meeüs’s incorrect date of December.

Also, Motley states that the Committee of Eighteen included many Catholics, and “attributes Brussel’s invitation to Orange to the Estates General (3:171) rather than the Committee of Eighteen,”

- for my purposes:

The King of Spain, Phillip II, was trying to make the Low Countries more subservient. He was an actual dude.

William of Orange (and his armed forces), invited by influential Brusselaars, came to Brussels to lead the resistance

For Oedipa’s & Pynchon’s purposes, this was a Calvinist and localized resistance to a Catholic and ultramontane monarch

William of Orange was an actual dude.

The Committee of Eighteen* displaced many functions of the Estates General*, disrupting the status quo by appointing new people to hold important positions

* actual dudes

Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohain, became postmaster, & displaced “Leonard I, Baron of Taxis, Gentleman of the Emperor’s Privy Chamber and Baron of Buysinghen, the hereditary Grand Master of the Post for the Low Countries, and executor of the Thurn and Taxis monopoly.”

Jan Hinckart was an actual dude. Ohain is a Belgian town and district.


“At this point the founding figure enters the scene: Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera, perhaps a madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist.”

Tristero does not seem to be an actual dude. No references online except CoL49 ones.

- Tristero claims to have been disinherited by Hinckart, whose cousin he claims to be
- he claims to hail from the “Spanish and legitimate branch of the family”
- his forces harry and harass the Hinckart post from 1577 to 1585

- so Hinckart represents the Calvinist rebels
- while Tristero represents a revanchist Catholic and monarchist faction
- however, his fealty to Phillip II is nominal, or nil, or at least not mentioned



- Alexander Farnese in 1585 took back control of the Low Countries and reinstated Leonard
- Farnese was an actual dude, Duke of Parma in fact
- but here he was acting in his capacity as a general of the Spanish Army
- which of course answered to Phillip II
- who Wikipedia says was a Habsburg


- so that’s how Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, got involved
- miffed by all the Protestantism in “the Bohemian branch of [Leonard’s] family” Rudolph withdrew support of the postal monopoly
- hard times for Thurn & Taxis

- in essence, we are inserting into all this historical data an invented character


Trending trends:
- The Roman Catholic Church, not content with the moral high ground, sought influence thru armed might, investing “Holiness” in a temporal power

- other entities went contrariwise, with temporal powers such as Henry VIII establishing by armed might a Church of their jurisdiction in order to claim a state-sanctioned moral high ground

- meanwhile, Tristero, apparently a charismatic leader and strategist, foments rebellion, seeks and finds recruits, and envisions a larger network

- rather than challenge all facets of the current power structures in the world, he confines his efforts to the postal sector

- this is similar to later rebellions taking over radio and TV stations, but much slower

- he doesn’t seem to link up with any kind of Catholic/monarchist network

- but seeks sovereignty over “the communications sector”

- “He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes.”

- this would seem to detach his claims from his original Holy Roman Empire affiliation


What to make of all this?
- harkening back to Diocletian & Augustine, where the names of the brothers refer back thru the centuries to a time when there was a clear distinction between Empire and Church, and their parents choice of names as recognizing
both trends?

are we supposed to see a similar distinction between William of Orange and Rudolph II, Catholicism and Calvinism, local leadership vs transnational hegemony?

Where does Tristero fit?
His presence is disruptive. His “…iconography [,] the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air…” is catchy enough to remain viral for centuries. His program is personal, reactive - He doesn’t really fit in anywhere.

Is Pynchon suggesting that a feeling of being cheated is the basis of Tristero - and that this feeling is prevalent enough to result in a lot of movements that never come to much in the grand scheme, but cause a lot of weirdness all over the place, throwing off enough discontent that it has never been extinguished?

Oedipa herself is discontented. Is she so interested in the Tristero as a Platonic ideal of her own discontent?

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 28 14:20:23 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Scurvhamites

Had similar thoughts. A group not getting enough vitamin C, not enough acidic resistance to their own disconnection.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 28 15:10:05 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

Another element of the hunting Volkswagens is probably a kind of late reaction to, and  a reminder of,  Metzger’s earlier comment on how “most people” have put WW2 behind them, are ok with VWs and Sony radios. She is not so sure anymore it’s that simple, not everything should be forgotten. It  seems odd to me that a certain basic trend in historic events, which follows the same tendency in human behavior is rarely mentioned in our too narrow public discourse. What I am talking about can be characterized in 2 ways:1) the abused becomes the abuser, 2)  in any protracted fight enemies often become more alike and gravitate to similar tactics. Wisdom requires that we recognize this and examine our own behaviors in light of this tendency. Via OM P is reminding us of the appeal and strength of this unacknowledged reactionary tendency as it showed up in the booming postwar world of California. We may also be reminded of how it contributed to the social formation of Oedipa herself in her unexamined regard for ‘protective’ authority figures like McCarthy, and Dulles. 
  
 The tristero is in many ways a fictional metaphor for how some groups or individuals, ambitious for power, wealth and personal status will take advantage of this reactionary tendency to direct that historic.reaction to their own interests, from Lenin or Stalin’s vanguard authoritarianism to the CIA machinations on behalf of the elite. Such machinations produce unexpected consequences and off shoots( I see this in WASTE), and  we can observe this in history in anarchism, anti-war  libertarians, radical environmentalism, the Arab league, or the current break with the West of African, central and South American and Asian peoples and nations.  Just when some big shot says history is over, the shit hits the fan, lawyers guns and money start moving and new departments of Hell are opened for business.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Jul 28 19:16:44 UTC 2024

The Blobb brothers: a transition to the next section of Chapter 6

DIOCLETIAN AND AUGUSTINE BLOBB CONSIDERED AS SYMBOLIC VECTORS FOR STATE , CLASS AND IDEOLOGICAL POWER STRUGGLES AND FOR THE MYSTERIOUS EMERGENCE OF THE TRI(Y)STERO

So these are not obscure first names.  They are famous figures who appear in time on either side of The Nicene Council ( Constantine) that redefined European and Mediterranean History for close to 2 millennia. 

Both figures attempted to outline a kind of bureaucracy, one for the state and one for the church. In the center of this timeline  is Constantine who united church and state making Christianity the religion of the empire. The unity was always dubious and marked by power battles between church and state, but  each needed some version of the other. The secular rulers needed/wanted divine authority,  the church needed/wanted  the states  to conquer or forcibly convert  non-Christians and keep authoritarian governance in place. 

Diocletian tried to purge the empire of Christianity in a campaign of destruction, killing and torture and ultimately failed, being followed by Constantine. Augustine, the 1st major post-Nicea theologian  used a passage of Paul’s teachings on the role of the state to outline his extremely loose Just War theory.  ( neither idea has any reference to the teachings of Jesus presented in the Gospels ,or the Book of James, or the earliest church records, all of which present non-violent persuasion and non hierarchical sharing  as the methods  to initiate a new way. ) 

A narrow version of Augustine’s City of God, and Augustine’s sharp distinction between spirit and flesh can be found in the Scurvhamite ideas, and the ruthlessness  and practical organizing of Diocletian can be found in the wars within Christianity culminating in the end of the Holy Roman Empire. That battle is where OM’s historic  picture of the origins of the tristero comes from . And this is where my hosting section of Ch 6 begins. I thought this brief look at the Blobb brothers might be clarifying. Their amorphous last name recalls a classic 1958 paranoid movie about a carnivorous amoeba like blob from outer space, something we should all be concerned about, it was part of double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space, also a growing international problem.

I will try to have a summary and questions for the next section  posted  by  sometime this evening.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jul 28 19:57:30 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - “calavera”

https://www.alexandani.com/blogs/the-wire/history-and-symbolism-of-the-calavera

Tristero’s surname means skull or skeleton, and can also refer to Day of the Dead confections

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Jul 28 20:10:28 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

Big Question:  do you know how to read?

If you are following clues laid out by a fictoon author of character(s) acting as detectives in a POSSIBLY of the EXISTENCE Of a bizarre and complex political situation…

1. Do you have a strategy for “processing” the text presented by the author?

2.  Do you think the author had a strategy for laying out the clues that you’re now following?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 00:33:54 UTC 2024

Not P but T. Monk...a magnificent line. IMO.

https://x.com/SVG__Collection/status/1817515391922352202

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 29 03:40:19 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

"From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic,
	 an 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb’s brother 	Augustine also among Bortz’s 
	Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb’s original clues, Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began:” 

1577    The 1st of several Williams of Orange, fighting to free the Low Countries from the Catholic Holy Roman Empire unites Calvinist resistance and skilled workers to take control of police, the governors, and others including the  T&T Postmaster and replaced him with Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohain. ( all accepted history)

"Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera, perhaps a madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist. Tristero claimed to be Jan Hinckart’s cousin, from the Spanish and legitimate branch of the family, and true lord of Ohain—rightful heir to everything Jan Hinckart then possessed, including his recent appointment as Grand Master.”  For 7 years J. of Tristero and Calavera fought a guerrilla and propaganda war to take control of OHain's inheritance and position. ( pure fiction)

Hinckart was fired by Alexander Farnese, a skilled military commander of the Spanish led empire,  and the T&T postmaster reinstated..( historic) 
 
The political fights were bad for T&T business( could not yet verify) and Joaquin Tristero decides to make a competing postal system symbolized by a post horn and dead badger. He styles himself the Disinherited, dresses followers in black and "began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes."( fiction.)

OM, Emory and Grace Bortz,, and grad students attend Driblettes burial and return at night to sit and drink Driblettes’ Napa muscatel. OM tries to psychically contact R.D. hoping to learn how he died; she wonders if the grieved female grad student was his lover. "But as with Maxwell’s Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

 She wonders how the name of Trystero had gotten into the Vatican version of Wharfinger. To find more about Tristero she needs to find more from the T&T side. Bortz’s speculations seem like a cute game to her.  One T&T heir dies 1628 , a woman becomes unofficial  postmaster, retires in 1645 next male heir assumes power in 1650 but Antwerp and Brussels shut down T&T offices in favor of local postal service.( this shift to national and local service  was the historic pattern that finally ended T&T’s monopoly. )

Bortz speculates more about attempts by  a guy with a name like Konrad( can’t find historic correlate) to use postal monopoly to quell rebellion, OM points out it didn’t happen and Bortz moves on to speculate that the  Tristero attacks might appear to T&T as Scurvamitish automatic anti-God but they then discovers actual secular Tristero . Bortz says "it is even suggested that Tristero has staged the entire French Revolution, just for an excuse to issue the Proclamation of 9th Frimaire, An III, ratifying the end of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly in France and the Lowlands." “Suggested by who, though,” said Oedipa. “Did you read that someplace?” “Wouldn’t somebody have brought it up?” Bortz said. “Maybe not.”

OM is discouraged, goes to see Mike Fallopian at Scope, who deflects a question about WASTE and suggests it is all a put on orchestrated  by Inverarity and she should write down what she clearly knows, what is speculation, verify sources.. She feels hated. He laughs at idea, knows Tremaine.

G Cohen shows up with dubious stamp ( because it is addendum)"bearing the device of the muted post horn, belly-up badger, and the motto: WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE.” She doesn’t trust it looks at Invererity’s assets and finds "the whole shopping center that housed Zapf’s Used Books and Tremaine’s surplus place had been owned by Pierce. Not only that, but the Tank Theater, also. She realizes " OK. It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? Every access route to the Tristero could be traced also back to the Inverarity estate. Even Emory Bortz,”

She does not know if she is caught in a deceptive plot or has stumbled into a secret organization with roots in ancient power struggles  and offshoots that include anarchists , a postal system for the preterite, and an anti-love support group. Either way she frames it she will appear crazy. 
??????

Does Bortz appear to be misleading her or merely too willing to speculate on this narrow area of academic expertise?

Why  might Pynchon lead us to the Protestant v Catholic wars and the end of the Holy Roman Empire, which had its own numerous internal wars.?

Why the Disinherited? Is that notion still popular for organizing people?  

What I feel compelled to ask again is why has Pynchon directed so much attention to a fictional secret organization and its efforts to either control international communication or make an alternate system that includes assassinations? Where does that idea fit into his larger historic interests? The Pinkertons were real historic private police, the Great Game was real, the union busters, and the Main Core plan to incarcerate US dissidents was real, the German war on the Hereros was real, V2 rockets,  the CIA violence in Guatemala, the Yakuza, the revolutionary wars in Mexico. The fiction in these cases is individuals and their stories, or clearly symbolic entities like the anarchist golfers or the Thanatoids, the robotic V or the talking heartsick  Duck.. But in COL 49 Pynchon creates a secret organization with historic roots going back to the 16th Century and then suggests it may all be a paranoid delusion or deception. Why?  And why does it all come out of a fictional murder mystery about killing the rightful leaders of Faggio.

Faggio is Italian for Beech tree, a symbol of resilience, wisdom and connection to the divine.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 29 04:43:41 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

What in standard English is a " fictoon author of character(s)acting as detectives in a POSSIBLY of the EXISTENCE Of a bizarre and complex political situation..”?  And how is anyone supposed to read that?

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 05:03:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

Does “ POSSIBILITY “ typo correction help? Probably not

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 05:15:05 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading - “calavera”

To run with that a little -

Calavera as skull reminds me of cognate Calvary, ie Golgotha, the place of the skull, and of Jesus’s crucifixion, where the Roman soldiers acted as executors for His estate, casting lots for his garments

- Emperor Hadrian had a temple to Aphrodite built there or nearby

- Helena, Queen Mother of Emperor Constantine (“in hoc signo vinces”) claimed to have discovered the True Cross there

- Constantine had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre built there

- there is of course dissent as to the location

Another cognate from great American Literature:

- “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) was Mark Twain’s first majorly successful story

>From Wikipedia:
“The narrator is sent by a friend to interview an old man, Simon Wheeler, who might know the location of an old acquaintance named Leonidas W. Smiley. Finding Simon at an old mining camp, the narrator asks him if he
knows anything about Leonidas; Simon appears not to, and instead tells a story about *Jim*Smiley, a man who had visited the camp years earlier….

(Tale of two frogs ensues)

“At this point in the story, Simon excuses himself to go outside for a moment. The narrator realizes that Jim has no connection to Leonidas and gets up to leave, only to have Simon stop him at the door, offering to tell him about a yellow, one-eyed, stubby-tailed cow that Jim had owned. Rather than stay to hear another pointless story, the narrator excuses himself and leaves. He muses that his friend may have fabricated Leonidas as a pretext to trick him into listening to Simon's anecdotes.”

- Is The Tristero a shaggy dog story?
- Bortz appears to be willing to add more anecdotes, tying it to the French Revolution etc

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 05:34:12 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

Who, me?

1) I’m an amateur; I write about the parts I like, mostly - every so often I even refer to specifics in the text (-;

2) I’m pretty sure he did have a strategy, or numerous strategies, which plenty of folk, you & I among them, here and elsewhere, attempt to elucidate, recreationally or professionally, for amusement and to the lasting benefit of all.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 06:40:09 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - the Bortz household

Joseph wrote:

“The whole house is structured around a kind of indulgence of the male “intellectual” as he competes in a probably not widely followed area of research.The household responsibilities fall to Grace. The children’s misbehavior reflects that indulgence; they are not too different in their competition for attention and dominance from many of the adults in the
story.”

There’s certainly a division of labor.

But do we want to get judgy about the kids, calling for a sterner paternal presence in order to fit them for lifelong quiet obedience?

Bortz specializes in drama; the immoderate content of the plays, on top of the usual tv etc, is seeping into household conversations, leading to some rude talk but also developing concepts &; the kids aren’t completely insulated from the sadness and drinking surrounding Driblette’s suicide - Maxine (shades of BE) threw a bottle through a window (shades of “Entropy”) but discipline was forthcoming via Grace - less of a physical disparity than from Emory, almost certainly, and less likely to cause lasting trauma.

Also, Grace accompanied Emory to the Vatican Library -

“Illicit microfilms of the illustrations in that Vatican edition. Smuggled out in ’61. Grace and I were there on a grant.”

 - from stories I’ve read, I’ve gotten the impression that it wasn’t uncommon in the ‘60s (& not unknown even now) for professors to marry bright students - or they could’ve been students together. ‘61 was only 3 years prior. Grace seems to’ve been important enough to the endeavor to include her on a lengthy trip, during very early childhood of their 
offspring. Helpful & sympathetic relatives? Anyway, she’s not been totally locked down at home.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 29 11:22:24 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Abyss

With the repeated use of abyss and annihilation, Oedipa confronts an existence that can't be explained by what she has accepted up until now. She feels that she stands on the rim of an abyss that has swallowed the men in her life (annihilation). This sense of dread and looking deep into the void represents the realization that any system of understanding, any belief was based on ideas and ether, not substance. The realization that the belief wasn't fact led her to the abyss, where she realizes she knows nothing; she exists in a world that can no longer be explained by her previous worldview, in this case patriarchy. She is left to realize nol only has that belief-system failed her, but there is likely no replacement, except what she creates herself. Nothing from outside herself can truly replace the comfort of assurance, and she is left to face the void alone.

The men, some of whom were seen as prince's to rescue her from the Tower, have not been able to do so. They have failed, as has her dream that she could simply be part of patriarchy as a loving wife and mother, as she sees in Grace Bortz.

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Jul 29 11:29:56 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (6) - with help from Albert Rolls on sources

Thanks!

And, I didn’t mean to direct that question to you specifically. With any puzzle, These are the very basic questions to start with. Otherwise, we just read Willie Nelly and follow the latest hint of a “clue” Willy-nilly. The author is almost always playing with the Slueth he’s recruited/duped. Pynchon does so while raspberrying and farting and begging to NOT be taken seriously.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 29 14:25:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - the Bortz household

Joseph wrote:
> 
> “The whole house is structured around a kind of indulgence of the male “intellectual” as he competes in a probably not widely followed area of research.The household responsibilities fall to Grace. The children’s misbehavior reflects that indulgence; they are not too different in their competition for attention and dominance from many of the adults in the story.”

> There’s certainly a division of labor.

I really don’t see good things coming from kids with so few boundaries. BUT I’ve seen some pretty disastrous results and we only get a partial picture here. Parenting includes a transfer of  social responsibility from parent to child, and children and really everyone needs help with that process.  For me it isn’t about exactly where the Bortz’s are setting the boundaries but Emory’s role as almost absent, not reinforcing Graces boundaries or stepping into their lives in his own role. Yes the trip speaks to spousal respect and shared interests and Bortz is very respectful, helpful and sympathetic to Oedipa and his students. It is just my experience that when kids are acting this way they are asking for attention and limits. Limits not necessarily as hard laws, but as activities or games with reasonable rules, and inclusion in the life of the parent.  Getting good at that is no easy task, but avoiding it or indulging angry, bullying or other bad behavior is usually  a worse problem than making mistakes.  It is fiction and what Pynchon is saying about all this is not super obvious. Sometimes things get crazy in the best homes. So being judgmental is dangerous. But in COL49 everything seems pared to the essence so my remarks came from that way of looking at it.

 It is interesting that several of his acquaintances noted that P liked and was good with children. One can see his Simpson’s style sense of humor playing a role. Maxine and Horst  are both involved, boundary guarding parents who have very warm relations with their sons and other folks’ children. Talk, sharing time and feedback are part of their fundamental commitments and we see the same in Maxine and her Father.  Zoyd sets very loose boundaries but he is there for Prairie and they stay connected as she matures, he does not interfere as she connects to her mother’s story and that looks pretty wise..  Webb Traverse tries to teach his children what to think instead of how to treat others and his boundaries are not coming from the core instinct of parental love but hard cultural rules. It sounds like his love for Mayva was a break from those rules, but he clearly misses the mark with Lake. 

   I wonder if anyone has written a paper on  family/parenting as seen in Pynchon’s novels.   Pynchon likes lowbrow art with a satiric edge and he has parents and children bonding around that in BE.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 29 14:25:22 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading - “calavera”

Good insight. My check says Calavera does derive etymologically  from Calvary.  The place of the skull, rather than just Calva or skull. *  Tristero as a person wants to be identified as the disinherited and to draw others to a resistance of the disinherited. This had organizing appeal both religiously and politically: the just restoration of rightful inheritance.It has echoes in the sermon on the Mount : “woe unto you rich, blessed be ye poor; the meek shall inherit. A core message of calvary or at least the theology derived is that Jesus as spirit made flesh offers  the lost and all humans disinherited through sin a way  into divine  communion by offering himself in a redeeming act of sacrificial love.* In life this was conveyed through healing and sharing food and teaching non-violence   which is also a kind of loss for the benefit of others but also a bonding of friendship. The fact that in this reformation period of history and with this use of power it translates into wars and endless argument makes a large question about the sincerity of the various messengers who mostly seem little concerned with healing, reconciliation, and sharing, and very concerned with getting positions of power and wealth.( The more you search the links in this period the worse it seems to get, check out the 30 years war) 

Of course any literalism of the Tristero really is a shaggy dog story since it is pure fiction and there is no specific origin or conspiracy that is the origin of all other conspiracies unless you are willing to see the world as a battle between good and evil with a Devil conspiring in the fiery bowels of evilness cent-com. The thing that is weird is how dangerous that delusion is and how enticing in all its forms.  But because of that delusional thinking  and its role in human affairs, the tristero is also as real as it gets and this brief glance into European history and art, with all the intrigues and wars, is also a look into current events and the pure horror that humans are capable of. There is also a tendency for bigger and more comprehensive and effective conspiracies to dominate lesser conspiracies.( So far in human history conspiracies are as common as shit; they happen regularly, like imperial clockwork). OM will never resolve what has happened to her or explain with certainty what she has seen  but she has seen much that is profoundly real and threatening and she is permanently changed. 

There is a way to use comedy to puncture our delusions, but it gets used in the opposite direction too. To my thinking Pynchon tries to use comedy to get us to lighten up and ask questions  but also gives full weight to the tragic dangers  that follow when we don’t. Kind of shaggy doggish but with real teeth, or maybe even  shaggy hyena.


*In Mexico it can also mean playboy/libertine, perhaps because the root calva can also mean bald,  or a smooth nut or maybe because calvary implies penetration and the cross implies union. ( those are guesses).

**as far as I am concerned this kind of love has many examples and often costs loving and brave people their lives. These qualities and their opposite run through all communities and cultures. To challenge cruelty, murder and theft is often to set one’s tryst with Trystero.  The word seems to combine the  secret meeting, tryst, or triste( sad, or (Scots)an appointed place in hunting)   with stere or stero, meaning in Indo European something solid, hard, dimensional . We all face a meeting with death in our own secret space, few things are more solid, hard or multidimensional, and few things affect us more.  

I  know my constant responses to the good quality observations get wordy. I am caught up, for good or ill, in treating this novel like a Zen Koan by using writing to clarify my own response. My thoughts shift around and parts seem different as I read and re-read., but I want a record of where the search took me.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Mon Jul 29 20:10:22 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Abyss

Yes , yes, yes. She may not be that much more reliable or together than men are, but she left her comfort zone, went where few were willing to go, often moved by compassion, and in standing at this abyss she is together, whether she knows it or not, with many others, both men and women. I think she does sense that kinship in certain moments and her compassion shows through when she feels it. It is a hard thing to remember the light when you feel the dark alone aspect of this departure from the given because it is hiding within. The arts are part of the re-connecting, as are acts of friendship, love, enjoyment of life’s bounty, all that good stuff. 

Hübschräuber huebschraeuber at protonmail.com
Tue Jul 30 20:52:07 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

> But in COL 49 Pynchon creates a secret organization with historic roots going back to the 16th Century and then suggests it may all be a paranoid delusion or deception. Why? And why does it all come out of a fictional murder mystery about killing the rightful leaders of Faggio.

Despite using much verifiable history in "V." and COL49, P is still concerned with the philosophical notions of conspiratorial thinking (cf. Fausto Majistral). Either everything is connected, or nothing is. 

In reality, of course, some things are connected, others are not. There are conspiracies, and there are theories about conspiracies which may be proven right or wrong. P becomes much more interested in real political conspiracies (COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra) with "Vineland".

More to the point perhaps, whether invented or not, this is some marvellous writing.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Jul 30 23:52:48 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

> On Jul 30, 2024, at 4:52 PM, Hübschräuber <huebschraeuber at protonmail.com> wrote:
 
> But in COL 49 Pynchon creates a secret organization with historic roots going back to the 16th Century and then suggests it may all be a paranoid delusion or deception. Why? And why does it all come out of a fictional murder mystery about killing the rightful leaders of Faggio.
  
> Despite using much verifiable history in "V." and COL49, P is still concerned with the philosophical notions of conspiratorial thinking (cf. Fausto Majistral). Either everything is connected, or nothing is.
I agree that he is interested in that philosophical question or at least with the ease with which it flows into self deluding paranoia. But mostly on that topic  he is showing how paranoia is prevailing among the power players of various forms of imperial ambition and driving their pursuit of dominance and  various schemes. Some branch into entrepreneurial criminality On the other hand, the fear about conspiracy at the base level is usually correct or understated as with Slothrop, Maxine, Doc Sportello, Zoyd and Prairie, where the dimensions of  connected conspiracies grow through investigation.  

> In reality, of course, some things are connected, others are not. There are conspiracies, and there are theories about conspiracies which may be proven right or wrong.
Totally agree. But as you know  there is dark twist of obfuscation that happens when Media, Governments and Intelligence agencies/ military interests dominate the organs of information and direct peoples attention away from the ability to expose unlawful conspiratorial actions by those powerful entities. One could list dozens of examples costing many lives. Honest grass roots journalism has become extremely dangerous.
> P becomes much more interested in real political conspiracies (COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra) with "Vineland”.  
Possibly you are right. But I have been working on the premise that the fictional conspiracy in 49 is a stand in for what I believe was obviously a CIA led coup against Kennedy. Of course the major public assault on questions about the JFK  murder was to call it a paranoid conspiracy theory. If you can get people to question their common sense and question whether they are  kooks and even manage to ignore a Congressional investigation saying it was a conspiracy, you can manage to put yourself beyond the reach of law.  That is a pretty strong parallel to what happens with Oedipa Maas. All tracks seem to lead to Pierce Inverarity and his controlling interest in so many things, I think the idea that he has set up all these clues  and people to delude her in such quotidian detail  really is delusional,  but the resulting confusion and doubts  over her sanity  stymie further inquiry as  the evidence moves out of her reach. In short I am skeptical that the dangers of personal paranoia explains TCOL 49.  

Regardless of the exact nature and details of the Kennedy assassination, CIA media influence and  Government secrecy moved to a dramatically new layer afterward and continues to grow, along with extreme reactions when state crimes are exposed. 

 I suggest Pynchon was very nervous about a direct approach  and that those concerns were well founded. Every student of history knows the dangers of tangling with empires.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 06:40:27 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 7:53 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>  I suggest Pynchon was very nervous about a direct approach  and that those concerns were well founded. Every student of history knows the dangers of tangling with empires.

You make a good case - I have some elaborate pseudo-biographical points of agreement, and a few mild differences

In agreement -

Rev’d Cherrycoke in M&D had to ship out after becoming known as a writer of pamphlets critical of the Establishment at that time

His career thereafter took a different course, and perhaps his experience changed his viewpoint to one more like that AA prayer about learning the difference between things he could or couldn’t change.

It’s easy enough, and not immediately dismissable as fallacious, to see Cherrycoke’s evolution as an expression - maybe even a recommendation - of the author’s “attitude journey”

If so, it’s but one step beyond that https://youtu.be/SOJSM46nWwo?si=rk3g2mVjw_p4TYYL to imagine that, emboldened by lack of negative consequences, indeed, plaudits and dinero, for 49, and an antiwar/counterculture groundswell in society up and into the ‘70s, & also steeled in resolution by his friend Richard Fariña’s death, GR became a more overt, passionate statement

But then, his alarms set to clanging by the Pulitzer Board’s refusal to award GR a prize - and other cultural changes starting to be documented by the efforts of writers like Hunter S Thompson - he took a lower profile for quite awhile, and no doubt had time to think deeply…while writing VL about the ins and outs of the right wing response to, and the roots and shoots of, the Movement which Thompson had called “the crest of a high and beautiful wave”

By the time M&D came out, having looked at “both sides now” and then some, he was seeking a place in the culture like that of Rev’d Cherrycoke.

The slight differences I offer are more of emphasis:

Pynchon was never a pamphleteer (afaik) - always consciously a litterateur

As an artist his emphasis would be closer to that William Carlos Williams quote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
<https://quotefancy.com/quote/39722/William-Carlos-Williams-It-is-difficult-to-get-the-news-from-poems-yet-men-die-miserably>”

In addition to any topical references, I want to see broad narrative aims: Oedipa’s individuation & blossoming of maturity; the enlargement of her POV with a growing awareness of dastardly plots all around, and of other human
realities besides her own; her twin impulses to pursue the trail, but also not to; a truly generous helping of her introspection, served up adroitly and sympathetically; & enough real history to serve as a crèche for the nativity of the fictive “Tristero y Calavera” which serves to connote sadness, the Day of the Dead, the sweet treats of that commemoration, and a multitude of reactions to Pierce’s death (and Death in general & also personal, “it is Margaret you mourn for”)

Going yet one step beyond that, speculatively, the author at this point in his career having attempted marriage once - could he in Oedipa be trying to imagine a more compatible woman with a sensibility akin to his? If we liken novels to stamps, a woman who attends an auction of those items would be like a literary agent in some respects

I find it pleasing so to muse - ymmv

And in conclusion:

> On Jul 30, 2024, at 4:52 PM, Hübschräuber <huebschraeuber at protonmail.com> wrote:

> More to the point perhaps, whether invented or not, this is some marvelous writing

Yes indeedy!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 07:21:40 UTC 2024

Calavera - long quote, couldn’t resist

https://www.alexandani.com/blogs/the-wire/history-and-symbolism-of-the-calavera

*History *These beautiful skulls were first seen in the 17th century in a traditional fashion. Created to honor the dead on DÃa de los Muertos (happening this year on October 28th-November 1st), the "Day of the Dead," they have roots in Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec cultural celebrations. You can see them in ancient art as well as in graffiti and art being sold today.

They have many forms, one being made of sugar, called *calavera de azucar*. The sweet treat is given to someone living, usually with their name on the top in icing. The other forms include any artwork, like jewelry, porcelain, clay, a painting, etc… which are used on the home altars of people in Mexico. The DÃa de los Muertos is spent in reflection, honoring ancestors and those who have passed, and experiencing the healing of reminiscing with family about them. This sacred day also involves many flowers that have popped up in the marketplaces, streets, and homes of people. People also adorn their home altars with photographs of the deceased, candles, and maybe even the favorite food of their loved one. This time is not to be confused with Halloween, as they are separate holidays and traditions.

Finally, Calaveras are seen in political cartoons and poetry. These serve as a reminder that those in power won’t be there forever, and a way to poke fun at those in charge.

*Cultural Meaning and Symbolism *Calaveras are so deeply entrenched in Mexican culture, and it is important to honor its roots and the sacred and deep-rooted history. It ties into the way the culture sees life and death and how that impacts their daily lives.

Calaveras are a potent reminder of our own mortality. It sounds morbid or macabre, but in actuality, it serves as a statement that death is just as powerful and sacred as life, and that it is bound to happen, so have a little light hearted look at it. This sugar coated (pun intended) way of approaching death takes the fear out of what is inevitably going to happen, and tell us to live life to the fullest. It also serves as an important reminder to honor those who have passed with love, light, a smile, and courage, and that we will be honored too. Calaveras serve as solid proof of faith in the afterlife.

When you see a calavera, smile and dance with joy. It is a reminder that you are alive, breathing, and although life is fleeting, there is no fear. Live each moment like it is your last, freely and deeply, and never forget the support of your ancestors around you and honor them. This makes you, and everyone you love, eternal.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 08:35:48 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

Pynchon is an artist....the "direct approach' is almost never art....the 7 types of ambiguity are erased......a "direct approach' is a dead polemic....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 10:25:13 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

page 106...Harper Perennial edition.

....."into the great empty glare of the Oakland afternoon".......along streets she never knew, across arterials that even with the afternoon's lull nearly murdered her....up long hillsides jammed solid with tow-or-three-bedroom houses:....

Oedipa follows the Trystero postman through the land where the preterite live....
Pynchon connects the Trystero to them, those who do not communicate via the USPS, the overt national  communication system....

The Trystero is real; it is in touch with the real. This is part of what Morris means in his perspective on What is Real in this novel, I want to say....(He means more than this, but this too, right?)

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 11:55:55 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Don’t you mean “potsman?”

I think you’re onto something. That does sound like a Pynchon twist.  And if it’s included in what Oed discovers to be REAL (no quotes), then it’s safe to conjecture that her discovery is a microcosm of “source” REAL.  The Root of Reality.

David Morris

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 14:29:00 UTC 2024

p.. 111...."Accept the Reality Principle" Oedipa tells Dr Hilarious hilariously. Freud's phrase for getting mature...

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 15:35:00 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 112......Dr. Hilarious: "But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi, I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr?"

 This article is more than *13 years old* 
Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis
This article is more than 13 years old
On the 50th anniversary of Jung's death it is time to put accusations of him collaborating with the Nazis to rest
Mark Vernon <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/markvernon>
Mon 6 Jun 2011 06.03 EDT
Share
<?subject=Carl%20Jung,%20part%202:%20A%20troubled%20relationship%20with%20Freud%20%E2%80%93%20and%20the%20Nazis%20|%20Mark%20Vernon&body=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis?CMP=share_btn_url>

Jung's relationship with Freud was ambivalent from the start. First contact was made in 1906, when Jung wrote about his word association tests <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/30/carl-jung-ego-self>, realising that they provided evidence for Freud's theory of repression. Freud immediately and enthusiastically wrote back. But Jung hesitated. It took him several months to write again.

They met a year later and then it was friendship at first sight. The two talked non-stop for 13 hours. Freud called Jung "the ablest helper to have joined me thus far", and spoke of how Jung would be good for psychoanalysis as he was a respected scientist and a protestant – a dark observation that was to haunt Jung three decades later when the Nazis came to power.

For now, different tensions persisted. A request Jung made highlights one axis of difficulty: "Let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son," he wrote. The originator of the Oedipus
situation, in which murderous undertones supposedly exist between a father and a son, was alarmed. Freud did anoint Jung his "son and heir", but he also experienced a series of neurotic episodes revealing the fear that Jung was a threat too.

One such incident occurred when they travelled together to America in 1909. Conversation turned to the subject of the mummified corpses found in peat bogs, which prompted Freud to accuse Jung of wanting him dead. He then fainted. A similar thing happened again a while later.

A different sign of conflict came when Jung asked Freud what he made of parapsychology. Sigmund was a complete sceptic: occult phenomena were to him a "black tide of mud". But as they were sitting talking, Jung's diaphragm began to feel hot. Suddenly, a bookcase in the room cracked loudly and they both jumped up. "There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon," Jung retorted – referring to his theory that the uncanny could be projections of internal strife. "Bosh!" Freud retorted, before Jung predicted that there would be another crack, which there was.

All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth. And behind that lay deep theoretical differences between the two.

Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed.

Jung also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material. Rather, the unconscious resources an individual's life. A human person is built up of layers. The conscious aspect is the psychosomatic whole that comprises the body and cognisant mental life. Beneath that lies a personal unconscious, a supply of material from the life of the individual. And beneath that lies a collective unconscious that is inherited. Jung believed he had objective evidence for this common heritage from his studies of schizophrenics, who apparently spoke of images and symbols they could not have discovered in their reading, say, or culturally.

It is a contentious proposition to which we will return. For now, it's worth noting that again Jung anticipates post-Freudian theories, this time about the nature of the unconscious. In his recent book, The Social Animal,
David Brooks observes that 21st century sciences are showing how the unconscious parts of the mind "are not dark caverns of repressed sexual urges." Jung wrote precisely that 100 years ago, and neuroscientists, psychologists and economists of today might find parts of Jung a highly suggestive read.

For Freud, Jung was becoming a highly uncomfortable read, and by 1913 their friendship was at an end. Jung maintained his respect for Freud though: when he wrote Freud's obituary in 1939, he observed that Freud's work had
"touched nearly every sphere of contemporary intellectual life". However, the betrayal that Freud felt has arguably spoiled relationships between the two schools of psychodynamic thought to this day. I was recently speaking with a Freudian analyst who quite casually referred to Jung as a womaniser and Nazi. We considered the first accusation last week <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/30/carl-jung-ego-self>. Now, we should consider the anti-Semitic charge.

The evidence is carefully weighed in Deirdre Bair's biography <http://amzn.to/kNsYhP> and, in retrospect, Jung could be accused of making mistakes during the 1930s. However, other actions he took clearly rescue his reputation.

The accusation that he was a Nazi fellow traveller stem from evidence such as a magazine article he had written 1918. Jung drew distinctions between Jewish and German psyches to illustrate the variety of heritable elements
of the collective unconscious. When Aryans reread the article in the 1930s, they distorted it out of all proportion. Further, they glossed over another observation, that the German psyche had "barbarian" tendencies, Jung's
reflection on the 1914-18 war. They also missed his main point that the unconscious should be taken very seriously. It can drive the death of millions.

Jung is also accused of complying with the Nazi authorities, in particular with Matthias Göring, the man who became the leader of organised psychotherapy in Germany, not least because he was the cousin of Hermann Göring. In fact, Matthias put Jung's name to pro-Nazi statements without Jung's knowledge.

Jung was furious, not least because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals. And that was not all. Bair reveals that Jung was involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by
having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.

It has also come to light that Jung operated as a spy for the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA). He was called "Agent 488" and his handler, Allen W. Dulles, later remarked: "Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war."

After the war, Rabbi Leo Baeck, a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, confronted his friend about his involvement with the Nazis. Jung admitted failings, though perhaps also had the chance to tell a fuller story. Baeck and he were fully reconciled. Fifty years after Jung's death, the anniversary that falls today, it is time that casual Nazi
accusations ceased too. Explore more on these topics

   - Psychology <https://www.theguardian.com/science/psychology>
   - Cif belief <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief>
   - Sigmund Freud <https://www.theguardian.com/books/sigmundfreud>
   - Second world war <https://www.theguardian.com/world/secondworldwar>
   - Carl Jung <https://www.theguardian.com/books/carl-jung>

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Aug 1 15:49:18 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

It’s a rich story of two great men, the Founder and the Usurper of Psychology's Soul. Willingly or not, grappling with the greatest questions of all eras.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Aug 2 09:53:00 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 118...."The songs, it's not just that they say something, they *are *something, in the pure sound. Something new.
And my dreams have changed.'---Mucho

LOOK at TRP!....this is about the Beatles and a few others. Which 60 years on, everybody now agrees IS the case.
They, and Dylan for example, were a whole new sound; a whole new art in sound. "

p. 118......."So much of him {Mucho] already had dissipated.".....Mucho foreshadowing Slothrop.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Aug 2 11:59:00 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

p. 117....."you're coming on like a whole roomful of people"....Oed about Mucho...
p. 119......."   at the station they kissed goodbye, all of them"

Mucho, feeling himself dissipated earlier now merges into ..a whole roomful of people"...

Pynchon sees the counter-culture, Haight-Ashberry, hitching and hanging together....living in communes---new communities......

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Fri Aug 2 14:21:10 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

This is true. I did not mean direct as in non-fiction or even straight ”historic fiction”. I like the way Pynchon tells  entertaining and tragic and crazy stories and asks us to think about the historic references in many different ways. What I meant was more akin to other work where the V type forces were often historic or fairly obvious references. : the V2 rocket program in Nazi Germany, Big tech firms and 9-11 in BE, Nixon and the California far right in VL, and IV,  the Paxton gang  and Slavers along with the actual M&D-line in M&D.  What I meant was COL49 has a lot of plausible deniability regarding any reference to the JFK killing , but also builds around a power struggle  with and murder of the lawful ruler within 3 years of that event, and that this extra measure of  built-in deniability came from a reasonable fear on P’s part. There are other biographical facts that point in this direction, so it does not seem an unreasonable possibility.

I try not to reiterate a definition of every term and certainly do not mean or want a polemic alone. But polemics are not always dead IMO.   P's essay on the Luddites had a strong polemical quality and I do enjoy that; same with the intro to 1984. The famous quote from GR about "the real business of war..." is a polemical argument.   
Or this:
“It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite..”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/866393>

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri Aug 2 16:53:19 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

I just reread the section starting around page 109, in which OED consciously throws herself to the winds of fate, vowing to offer NO RESISTANCE against any Answer, as revealed in her observations of life as she floats Through the night. SHE HAS BECOME THE LITTLE BLACK BALL ON A SPINNING ROULETTE WHEEL.

The first answer to her question reveals Mostly her mind to US THE READER. We see how she experiences events, and processes her “free” experiences, now that she’s decided to be ruled by an invisible force.

David Morris

Hübschräuber huebschraeuber at protonmail.com
Fri Aug 2 19:15:26 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

“It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite..”
> ― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/866393

A favourite quote. Reading it again in 2024, I couldn't help but think of gain-of-function research and mRNA "vaccines".

Your mileage may vary, of course.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri Aug 2 19:30:35 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

Wow! Vaxxer hybrid-human programmed-memory electric zombie orbiters come from all corners!

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 03:59:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading backtracking - Finocchio’s

When Oedipa visits The Greek Way after being re-tagged as Arnold Snarb, the tour guide says, “Two drinks and when you hear the whistle it means out, on the double, regroup right here. If you’re well behaved we’ll hit Finocchio’s next.”

According to Wikipedia, “finocchio” is Italian for “fennel” but is also a slang term for homosexual.

However, in the next paragraph, the article also notes that the club was owned and operated by Joseph and Eve Finocchio.

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Finocchio%27s,_a_Short_Retrospective

The article has photos, too.

“One of the most interesting things I've done recently was prowl around the premises of Finocchio's, San Francisco's fabled female impersonator club, which closed November 27, 1999 after 63 years in the same location.

The club's history actually began back in the Roaring '20s, when founder Joe Finocchio opened a speakeasy on Stockton Street on the edge of the seedy Tenderloin District. The place featured female impersonation even then. The club went above-ground with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and moved to the trendy North Beach nightclub district in 1936. Most gay men and lesbians today don't think of professional female impersonator clubs as being particularly queer, but in the days before gay liberation they provided valuable semi-public social spaces for sexual minorities to
congregate.

For decades, Finocchio's was a world-renowned venue. Hollywood stars frequented the club, flying up to San Francisco from Los Angeles to see themselves being impersonated -- as Tallulah Bankhead did in the accompanying photo. Ms. Bankhead is joined by members of the show, including Elton Paris (left) and Lucian Phelps (3rd from left). It's worth noting the mixed-race audience, a rarity in the era of segregation.

Well aware of its former glory, I was a bit sad to see Finocchio's look so down at the heels last week as GLBT Historical Society staff members carted away a truckload of memorabilia. The drag club business just ain't what it
used to be, and it hasn't been for a good long time. It felt like a piece of old San Francisco -- and old gay life -- had quietly passed away. Joe Finocchio's second wife Eve, a feisty grand dame well into her 80s, sat in a chair in the middle of the room and watched her grandson, the club's manager, box up the liquor stock as we historians circled like buzzards around ratty dressing room fixtures, odd scraps of cast-off costumes, a pair of false eyelashes stored in an empty Premarin prescription bottle, and other detritus that had accumulated over more than half a century.

At one point, Eve Finocchio motioned for me to come to her. "Here, honey, why don't you take this, too," she said, handing me an exquisite ermine stole. "I once gave it to a queen who worked here, but he doesn't need it now. He's a Catholic priest. Anyway, I might as well donate it to history – you just can't get away with wearing fur these days.

Another article has a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Howard Hughes:

https://hoodline.com/2022/10/remembering-finocchio-s-the-north-beach-club-that-arguably-gave-birth-to-american-drag/

Over the years, Frank Sinatra, Tallulah Bankhead, David Niven, and Errol Flynn would all be noted guests at Finocchio's. And according to one legend Hoodline's Art Peterson relayed, "When Howard Hughes saw the show with his then-girlfriend Ava Gardner, he returned to the club and whisked away one of the performers for what turned out to be an extended relationship."
Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 04:32:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading “The Greek Way” / Oedipa stares into the void

No nightclub by that name, afaict, but a well-known book offering a “straight” historical study drawing parallels between Ancient Greece and modern (1930) ways:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129494.The_Greek_Way

This is tangentially topical if we consider all the parallels suggested in the book between modern society and Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Civil War

In The Greek Way, the IA member’s posthorn insignia catches her eye:

She sought to bug him: “If it’s a homosexual sign or something, that doesn’t bother me.” Eyes showing nothing: “I don’t swing that way,” he said. “Yours either.”

- then a few lines later,

“She met his eyes’ void for a second after all, and shrugged.”

It’s like at first she looks for any signs of human affection in his eyes (reminding me of that passage in VL where the narrator laments the breakdown of a “network of loving friends” under stress from all the snitching going on) and accepts that there’s nothing there.

Then after telling him all about her experiences with the muted posthorn, she looks at him again and really takes in the nothingness.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 11:01:56 UTC 2024

More Jung for the Read....

https://x.com/QuoteJung/status/1819496163705282846

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sat Aug 3 11:31:10 UTC 2024

CoL49 Group Read 2024

If you take the scene on pg. 132-134 (Harper Perennial) where Oed attends the funeral and then returns with Bortz, Grace and the graduate students to drink Muscatel in the night, there are several examples of David's "What is Reality?" question. The fresh grave, the cold, hard ground mix with her attempts to conjure even a "coded tenacity of protein" of what is left of Driblette to rise out of the grave and answer her question about why he added the lines in the performance she attended. She cries his name through the brain's circuitry, only to end with the same conundrum: was she not capable or did he not exist?

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Aug 3 15:52:00 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Could you give 3 words of a sentence? I cannot find anything very like this. The closest I found was below, which does not have the same implications. Definitely not the 'no resistance against any answer'. 

"Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix."

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 16:06:15 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

I can do it in four words....(and why is the question framed this way anyway?)

 "only to drift tonight,"

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Aug 3 18:23:49 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

I am re-considering Bortz’s idea that the uniqueness of the Vatican version of the Courier’s Tragedy is that it is a Scurvhamite version of Wharfingers play, because that makes little sense to me. Oedipa is also clearly skeptical. Hollander’s essay proposed that the reference to the Vatican was about how nazi treasure was routed through the Vatican with the help of Angleton and Dulles and ended up in the laundered US bank accounts of the German industrialists, just as many ex-nazi scientists and military leaders ended up in the CIA. I’m not willing to discount this particular Vatican angle entirely but it is a large gap away from the text.  I would suggest something simpler than what  Bortz and D’Amico came up with. I am thinking out loud here, The Vatican would by all logic favor the Thurn and Taxis postal control and their dependence on the Holy Roman Empire. They might simply be motivated to keep a copy of the original Wharfinger play both for their secret records and their porn collection, and change the words to place all the guilt in the story on the incestuous, priest-torturing Duke Angelo and  would also obscure the very existence of a competing postal system.  This seems a far more logical ( Occam’s razor)explanation.

The advantage of the Scurvhamites  is to have fun with the bizarre extremes of Calvinism,  and to shift focus to the universality of personal ambition and scheming within both religion  and secular aspirations to rule. Pynchon is pointing out that the same interdependence of church and state that passed from the Gods and Ceasars and then moved  to  the interdependence  of the Vatican  and the emperor Charlemagne ( beginning of Holy Roman Empire), had then passed  in the reformation to the interdependence of nationalism and various Protestant sects. There is no return  in this progression to the nonviolent healing and sharing of the Galilean except in non-state affiliated  religious communities  and independent thinkers( the anabaptists, Franciscans, Quakers, ). There is also a challenging  secular version of this pursuit in people like Tom Paine, Galileo, Copernicus, enlightenment figures etc.)

To look at this history from within the good guys v. bad guys culture wars of the 60s or now is startling in the arbitrariness and the  sheer violence of dueling doctrines, movements of people,  technological changes, intermarriage, language wars etc. How do we frame  our cultural and personal  struggles within this confused history and what is the role of communication systems, or what we now call media in that  conflicted landscape? Who should decide?

To be continued.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 20:24:38 UTC 2024

CoL49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 7:20 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why did TRP link dead Pierce with Maxwell's Demon?

My guess: the simile links 3 pairs of things:

A) a container of gas molecules to a landscape of investment prospects;

B) 2 instances of a selection process with a goal;

C) a monitor able to identify and direct items within each of the 2 types of system

Maybe another connection: that Oedipa hadn’t been able to figure out either Pierce or the Demon?

Although she does seem to be mildly attracted to Maxwell himself, or at least interested in him:

“But had Clerk Maxwell been such a fanatic about his Demon’s reality? She looked at the picture on the outside of the box. Clerk Maxwell was in profile and would not meet her eyes. The forehead was round and smooth, and there was a curious bump at the back of his head, covered by curling hair. His visible eye seemed mild and noncommittal, but Oedipa wondered what hangups, crises, spookings in the middle of the night might be developed from the shadowed subtleties of his mouth, hidden under a full beard.”

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sat Aug 3 22:43:18 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

2nd try

I simply could not recall what David is describing and so I looked for it and the only thing I found, which apparently is the correct reference, does not say the same thing to me at all. I doubt most readers would derive the same meaning as David offers. So I thought maybe it was a different passage.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 23:49:31 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

“Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man’s estate. Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix.”

She’s sort of “laying down a fleece before the Lord”

Leaving it up to chance as to what she will see - 
She thinks if it is a Pierce plot, SF is far enough from his core holdings that she will see none of the Tristero/WASTE insignia

- However, like Gideon when the fleece got wet, events seem to show that Tristero/WASTE does have an existence of its own ——- but it could also mean that Pierce’s estate was more capable than she thought - that was a problem with her experiment’s design: the results weren’t clearly interpretable (Gideon’s design was better)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 04:41:07 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

Joseph Tracy wrote:
 ….

The Vatican would by all logic favor the Thurn and Taxis postal control and their dependence on the Holy Roman Empire. They might simply be motivated to keep a copy of the original Wharfinger play both for their secret records and their porn collection, and change the words to place all the guilt in the story on the incestuous, priest-torturing Duke Angelo and would also obscure the very existence of a competing postal system.  This seems a far more logical ( Occam’s razor)explanation.

However, the Scurvhamite edition did contain the Trystero reference:

[Oed] “But the line about Trystero isn’t dirty.”

[Bortz] scratched his head. “It fits, surely? The ‘hallowed skein of stars’ is God’s will. But even that can’t ward, or guard, somebody who has an appointment with Trystero. I mean, say you only talked about crossing the lusts of Angelo, hell, there’d be any number of ways to get out of that. Leave the country. Angelo’s only a man. But the brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well.”

I’m in full accord with the rest:

> The advantage of the Scurvhamites  is to have fun with the bizarre extremes of Calvinism,  and to shift focus to the universality of personal ambition and scheming within both religion  and secular aspirations to rule. Pynchon is pointing out that the same interdependence of church and state that passed from the Gods and Ceasars and then moved  to  the interdependence  of the Vatican  and the emperor Charlemagne ( beginning of Holy Roman Empire), had then passed  in the reformation to the interdependence of nationalism and various Protestant sects. There is no return  in this progression to the nonviolent healing and sharing of the Galilean except in non-state affiliated  religious communities  and independent thinkers( the anabaptists, Franciscans, Quakers, ). There is also a challenging  secular version of this pursuit in people like Tom Paine, Galileo, Copernicus, enlightenment figures etc.)

> To look at this history from within the good guys v. bad guys culture wars of the 60s or now is startling in the arbitrariness and the  sheer violence of dueling doctrines, movements of people,  technological changes, intermarriage, language wars etc. How do we frame  our cultural and personal  struggles within this confused history and what is the role of communication systems, or what we now call media in that  conflicted landscape? Who should decide?

To be continued

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 04:55:31 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

Oh, I see - you’re saying that Wharfinger wrote the Tristero in, & the Vatican suppressed it - no need for Scurvhamites.

That does fit with Bortz’s tendency to embellish. His Konrad and the cold-conking waitress is straight outta his drama-prof mind, eg. (and yet, Cohen has a friend who finds something rather similar later on)

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 06:05:31 UTC 2024

CoL49 2024 group reading ch6 - Fallopian encounter

Fallopian has changed his look, attracting a bevy of “broads”

She’d found him amusing before, but here she rapidly develops an antipathy.

It’s understandable that his Castro getup repels her, and even more so when she finds out he’s already in touch with Winthrop Tremaine.

But in the text, the gradations of her dislike occur in step with his entirely reasonable suggestions as to how she should proceed with respect to the Tristero.

“She gave him a quick status report. He kept quiet while she talked, his expression slowly changing to something she couldn’t recognize. It bothered her.”

What is she looking for from him? Some kind of human comfort, or at least a willingness to humor her, one surmises. In vain.

This is the part I find it hard to grok:

“I knew you’d be different,” she said, “Mike, because everybody’s been changing on me. But it hadn’t gone as far as hating me.”

 “Hating you.” He shook his head and laughed.

He’s gone all rational & unsympathetic, true - but hate? Laughing at the notion is insensitive but not indicative of hatred.

He doesn’t care about her, & never has, is maybe what she’s clearly perceiving for the first time - or rather, allowing herself to perceive, having avoided that perception as also she’s avoided the thought that The Tristero might be a put-on, and also the thought that someday she herself “would have to die”

Absent the semblance of personal connection which they’ve been enacting, the façade which he’s dropped in favor of an overtly violent revolutionary persona, she sees the fanatic in his true nature embodying a philosophy born of hatred & realizes she’s not in any circle of people whom he doesn’t hate?

She sure does immediately drop him off her Christmas list! Which, he has it coming…n’est ça pas?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 07:55:34 UTC 2024

COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

The ‘hallowed skein of stars’ equals 'The great Chain of Being"....

The natural universe, the clockwork universe, is secular, soThe Other is that force...

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 4 11:09:29 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

We've come to the last section of the book and the group read. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Summary:
Oedipa wonders if she is pregnant but after making an appointment to get tested as Grace Bortz, she skips the appointment. Ghengis Cohen brings her materials that include an article plausibly explaining how the Trystero left the European continent and began to set up shop in the U.S. Several examples of Trystero subtle stamp alterations are mentioned. Bortz thinks that the article is possible, considering the way the USPS had monopolized by lower prices the postal business. He tells her to find out its legitimacy. She continues to have toothaches and strange dreams. Cohen calls to say that Pierce's stamp collection will be auctioned off, and the Trystero stamps will be part of Lot 49. he says a mystery book bidder had signed up for the auction and asked to see Lot 49. They were denied because they refused to identify themselves. Cohen believes that this is Trystero, attempting to reclaim the stamps. Oedipa gets drunk on bourbon and drives through the night without headlights. She finally comes to a stop, and uses a payphone to call the Greek Way, asking for the IA. He finally comes to the phone but leaves her with a cryptic "it's too late". While walking along a RR track, Oed considers that Pierce has actually died, that his efforts to use the will to extend his life or harass her have failed, and he is gone. She goes over the whole period since she first began to unravel Pierce's will and legacy. She compares it to America and thinks that if that is America, that she will feel like an alien. The next day she calls the firm that is representing the mystery bidder who informs her that the buyer will now be attending the auction. She meets Cohen there, who wants to try to buy some Mozambique triangles. He notes that a premier auctioneer will be crying the lots. He explains that crying of lots is how auctioneers describe the process of auctioning. She goes into the auction room, wondering how she'll respond if she sees the Trystero representative, hears the doors locked and watches as the auctioneer prepares to cry the auction.

Questions
At one point in her walk along the RR tracks, Oedipa discusses the "excluded middle" where she knows "bad shit happens". How does this relate to David's premise that the book is about "What is Reality?"?

Why does Oedipa consider Pierce's empire and the will as America? Why does this make her feel like an alien?

What has been revealed by Oedipa's efforts?

Why does the IA say that he is the one who's time is up?

In solidarity,
James

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Aug 4 14:47:58 UTC 2024

CoL49 2024 group reading ch6 - Fallopian encounter

Excellent. Brings out the nuance of this encounter nicely.  Perhaps Fallopian also sees that if the Tristero is real, then the real terrain is not as simple as his map and so he reinforces the idea that the big shots are in charge, have played her, and it’s time for a right wing revolution. 

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 18:13:41 UTC 2024

CoL49 2024 group reading ch6 - Fallopian encounter

Joseph Tracy wrote:
Perhaps Fallopian also sees that if the Tristero is real, then the real terrain is not as simple as his map and so he reinforces the idea that the big shots are in charge, have played her, and it’s time for a right wing revolution.

Fallopian, Koteks & Metzger are all right wing I think.

Metzger’s behavior after the play resonates in tune with (or sets the scene for) Fallopian later - he’s much ruder than Fallopian, rails against “lib, over educated broads” (there’s that word again)

(oh, hey, he gives us his age in his screed: 35 - how did I miss that before when trying to guess it? He’s old enough to be President!)

Although Metzger is confrontatory, in contrast with Fallopian’s more  conciliatory words & actions, it’s Fallopian she decides hates her.

Maybe it’s because so much has happened before that last meeting with Fallopian, maybe because Metzger is still operating within “civil society” while Fallopian has gone troppo…

Anyway, she tolerates a lot of guff from Metzger, who blows up at her, mischaracterizes her, refuses to accompany her back to see Driblette, and even insults her: “I want to see if there’s a connection. I’m curious.” “Yes, you’re
curious,” Metzger said.

What does she want?

“It isn’t that,” she protested. “I don’t care what Beaconsfield uses in its filter. I don’t care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don’t want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pietà, or cancer . . .” She looked around for words, feeling helpless. “What then?” Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. “What?” “I don’t know,” she said, a little desperate. “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.”

 “Against whom?” inquired Metzger, putting on shades.

It’s a flippant comment, but I take it to mean that for him, right away to be on her side, they have to be against someone or something.

Whereas I think she’s looking for something more companionable than that, especially since they’ve been intimate & so forth. Just showing a modicum of interest in her thoughts for instance, but apparently that’s more than what Metzger has on tap.

For that matter, Maas, who is probably not a right wing butthead like those other guys, has a history of not listening to her either. So it isn’t necessarily political, I suppose.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Aug 4 18:41:51 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

> At one point in her walk along the RR tracks, Oedipa discusses the "excluded middle" where she knows "bad shit happens". How does this relate to David's premise that the book is about "What is Reality?”?
RR tracks- opposition: The trains on this track can only go north. Negation: the trains on this track do not only go  north, they go south excluded middle: the trains go both ways. Whatever.
I would say that all Pynchon writing concerns the question of what is real, and sometimes with the question “What is reality?”. He wants to think about those questions and seems to want his readers to do so. In the latter question he gives us a picture of human reality and civilizational reality in which there is much deception, theft, exploitation, war and lust  operating as key organizing principles of the modern world. He seems to point to routes of escape or awakening from that deceptiveness and violence also. Picking heroes gets tricky as all humans seem subject to the same forces and tend to pick their own favorite routes. My own feeling is that most P characters who pursue this question end up closer to knowing more about reality in the end, but rarely very comforted or comfortable apart from maybe the Chums of Chance.
   My problem with David’s question is what does he mean by it?  What is either Python or  David Morris saying is reality, and is it to do with the realities Pynchon turns  into his multilayered stories and CoL49?  

> Why does Oedipa consider Pierce's empire and the will as America? Why does this make her feel like an alien?
"...what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that? T Pynchon

She has seen, felt and absorbed deeply the situation of the alienated, she can see that the people called "great Americans" have a dark and self serving legacy. She sees that the comfortable middle shrink from the dangers of asking the wrong questions. In some sense she has within her both ends and the middle of America but after setting up for a pregnancy exam she now knows that she is “unfurrowed", is virgin to all the princes and yet  is part of the mystery of life woven from the looms and wombs of motherhood, that tears have filled and cleansed her eyes to look out for the real creative forces in her world.  Grace looked into her as no other has, seeing the tears behind the beauty.

> Why does the IA say that he is the one who's time is up?

Opposition proposition: it was not too late ? How long would it take to say I fooled you, or I was paid to mislead you. The line is kind of a classic mystery trope meaning I’m done for. It’s hard to imagine a better way of interpreting it other than he had deceived her on somebody else's behalf.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 20:18:48 UTC 2024

CoL49 2024 group reading ch6 - Fallopian encounter

Along this fine reading, I do not think Fallopian has any idea of "a right-wing revolution" he just knows the tristero will emerge again...its history "Trystero enjoyed counter-revolution in those days" shows it is both.....[see the supposed history of The French Revolution here]...

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

She is pregnant with what a gynecologist cannot detect.....What?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 20:28:39 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

JT:  "At one point in her walk along the RR tracks, Oedipa discusses the "excluded middle" where she knows "bad shit happens". How does this relate to David's premise that the book is about "What is Reality?”?"

Reality is not binary in its choices, its explanations, its mappings. Logic, where the excluded middle comes from, does not show reality either… "bad shit happens' where it can not be explained....bad shit cannot (always) be explained....THIS IS REALITY....

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 20:31:02 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

It’s hard to discuss a book with someone who doesn’t want to read what’s on the page.

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 20:32:03 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Group Read End of Book

Especially when he can’t see himself in the mirror.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 21:08:33 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

They say it’s different every time you read a great story. I came into this reading thinking that Oedipa had slept with at least one other person besides Metzger, but it doesn’t seem she did.

I also never noticed this paragraph before:

“Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace Bortz and didn’t show up for her next appointment.”

 She picked a female doctor, that’s interesting, & in the early ‘60s would’ve been slim pickin’s.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7784804/

Waves of nausea could be morning sickness though not just in the morning, but menstrual pains? That’s interesting and ambiguous.

Good Housekeeping says they can occur in the absence of a period: 
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/a41340417/cramps-but-no-period/

Giving her name as Grace Bortz - that’s also interesting. Almost as if a paucity of identity-affirming relationships in her own name has driven her to try to take on Grace Bortz’s.

One good reason for not showing up for a next appointment would be the arrival of her period. But that’s not specified explicitly.

- when she gets drunk and drives, probably that shows she knows she’s not pregnant?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 21:15:17 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

The Crying of Lot 49 is one of the earliest feminist masterpieces of the second half of the 20th Century...re; this para

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 4 22:58:59 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

This reader does, more or less.....and there is lots more but Oedipa seems to me to clearly be offering little resistance to any answer....she is so innocently open to.....any answer....she articulates in multiple ways wanting answers......

This is her quest.

J K Van Nort jkvannort at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 5 14:12:01 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Feminist novel

The book is feminist, and Pynchon captures that perfectly with Oedipa's experience as she discovers the "reality" of the patriarchal system that she thought she was comfortable within. Coming from the Tupperware party attending wife with an herb garden and a life of preparing her husband's dinners and drinks to the confident woman who can face a Nazi shrink, spend a night wandering the Bay area feeling safe, and by the end, ready to face the representative of the mysterious Trystero head on.

The excluded middle, while it is where "she has been told" bad shit happens, is the new reality that she has discovered outside the binary track of the patriarchal system. 

This reality isn't necessarily more comfortable, in fact she feels waves of nausea, but it comes closer to reality, one that has many directions for her to discover, even as the patriarchal system no longer provides the comforting answers. Like an existential moment, when the ground has fallen away revealing the void, she must now discover her own reality. 

In solidarity,
James

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 14:15:26 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Feminist novel

I think that’s a good synopsis. One could proceed to various other depth levels of discussion. And TRP is very much interested in those also. But this is a good Concritization of the concepts.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 14:15:55 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Feminist novel

JKVN: "This reality isn't necessarily more comfortable, in fact she feels waves of nausea, but it comes closer to reality, one that has many directions for her to discover, even as the patriarchal system no longer provides the comforting answers. Like an existential moment, when the ground has fallen away revealing the void, she must now discover her own reality. "

This is what she is pregnant with and TRP presents it like that....nausea, loss of self, etc...

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 14:17:16 UTC 2024

CoL49 - Feminist novel

Yes!

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Wed Aug 7 04:01:44 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

Of course there is the possibility that she was pregnant and had a miscarriage. We really don’t know. Some of the ambiguities bother me and feel oddly unlike other Pynchon novel’s where those kinds of details are part of the narrative. There is part of me that thinks we are being led into unresolvable competing narratives because we are asking the wrong questions, questions that  Pynchon never intended us to take too seriously. 

The question is who is the rightful prince and heir:  a prince of the power of the air, or a prince of peace? 

Who does this proposed American legacy of freedom and abundance belong to? Who will have access to it?

And who is America, what kind of life will she give birth to? Is she an illusion of unity concealing unscrupulous criminal power struggles , an illusion of law and justice concealing racism, exploitation and sexism?

 Or is some kind of disrobing of false appearance needed, love that is not a b movie performance, not a drunken contest, but  naked love, the deepest of shared affinities,  love freed from the gravity of the past, where mercy kisses truth.  

Oedipa takes off layer after layer, leaving behind Young Republicanism,  dropping millionaires with too much power and too little  humanity,  dropping cute actor lawyer fakes,  dropping  militarism, dreams of technological magic, self righteous nuts who’s eyes are green with envy for fascist power, living behind the insanity of fascism,  leaving behind experts who invent facts , leaving behind a friend so wrapped up in the universal mind he can’t see the needs of the woman he married; but Oedipa is also finding along the way new affinities with those who refuse to be ruled,  a women painter, a Mexican anarchist, an old alcoholic sailor, young musicians looking for a vision and a voice, peace activists making a ruckus.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Aug 7 05:29:53 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

My personal, idiosyncratic, non-authoritative take, at least for this rereading, has 3 main features:

A) I seem to have landed on a postmodern interpretation having to do with my settling for the meaning of Tristero y Calavera as primarily an obvious intrusion of the author, and Oedipa fascinated with so many synchronicities (who wouldn’t be?) asymptotically approaching the realization that she’s a fictional character

To calculate the area under that curve, we can use a process of (secret) integration to define an infinite series of authorial/Calaveran delta-t insertions driving Oedipal attempts at realizations, which sum up into a status where she will be “in on” the symbolism - will be aware that her primary struggle is in coming to terms with difficult-to-assimilate facts of life: Pierce’s death in particular, and death in general - and as we provisionally accept her reality, we are increasingly sobered/enlightened by her experiences, encouraged by her perseverance, and buoyed by sharing such consolation as she finds.

Oedipa lives in a world she didn’t make, as do we; her experiences are relevant, even if they don’t map exactly.

B) A slight detournement of one of the symbols suggests itself: Muting a horn doesn’t actually silence it - it changes the tone as when Miles Davis plays a muted trumpet, makes the sound more pleasing, less blaring.

C) In choosing to project Oedipa, I think Pynchon was (consciously or unconsciously) delineating a female character whose charms - and flaws - he could relate to, & love.

I like to see Pynchon as similar to Genghis Cohen, serenely collecting his stamps & sharing homemade dandelion wine while doing so; “once so shy” but now coming up with “new goodies every other day” and beginning to find a
place in Oedipa’s affections, paralleled in real life by the author gradually weathering life’s buffets, finding true love, flying towards grace type of thing.

I’m aware & respectful of other interpretations -  the book obviously means a lot of things to different people, a banquet for thought.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Aug 7 07:00:59 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

Line 1...No....what she was pregnant with no gynecologist could know, or close to that....is the text...

I can't read any more.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Aug 7 21:23:28 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Yesterday I had a long lunch with a couple people, one of whom was an amatuer but not superficial Jungian....we got to talking Jungly and she spoke of a book called *The Pregnant Virgin, *and as she adumbrated the whole  psychological truth-filled myth–of readying for a spiritual rebirth–I said *The Crying of Lot 49...*

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Aug 7 21:43:41 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

I’m not sure the source of this, but I’ve been told that the HERO QUEST MYTH can be reduced to three/(or 4) sentences:

1. Journey to a dark place.
2. Drink a potion.
3. Be CHANGED.
(4.) Return (reborn).

Think of the end sequence of 2001 a Space Odyssey.  For obvious reasons, the potion is often psychedelic.

David Morris

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Thu Aug 8 05:30:27 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

It’s an Oedipa-centric reading. There’s certainly more to the book that that, but that’s the part I noticed
most this time around.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 8 09:20:53 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

I do not think that is the real realization she comes to....and I'll take Pynchon's words and vision on America
any day over and over over yours....

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 8 09:23:32 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

The novel is Oedipa-centric....She is the only main character....she experiences all the themes, all the vision,
all the mystery and THAT ENDING....

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Aug 9 07:17:22 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

On Thu, Aug 8, 2024 at 5:21 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I do not think that is the real realization she comes to....and I'll take Pynchon's words and vision on America any day over and over over yours....

Well, of course! Mine’s non-authoritative, and idiosyncratic. I’m not wedded to it myself.

There’s not a lot from the author about the book:

“The next story I wrote was “The Crying of Lot 49,” which was marketed as a “novel,” and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up till then.” (SL intro)

He doesn’t seem to give any pointers about what to look for.

IJS:
- She finds out more, bit by bit, about the stamps
- she often feels on the verge of a revelation
- She never actually has that realization - hence “asymptotic” as she keeps learning more
- She goes to the auction to find out more about the source of all those stamps.

But we already know: the author made them up.

That’s the truest revelation she could come to, & it would make it clear to her that she’s in a fiction.

That’s kind of a short circuit, breaking the 4th wall from the outside as a reader. One is always aware in the background that a story is a story. But if in the course of examining things in the story, its fictive nature comes
to the foreground, then you have the option to think about that.

Or not (-;

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Fri Aug 9 11:37:42 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

This line was about Tracy’s words on America.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Aug 11 02:21:04 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

Good reminder. It’s a little vague as a description of her state, but pretty clear as the author’s comment on not being pregnant.I had forgotten it by the time she made the appointment. It was my original thought that she not pregnant but reading the text Michael commented on made me wonder if that was sure.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 11 05:53:46 UTC 2024

CoL49 group reading - Oedipa’s errant impulses

Violent & unwise - Vis a vis Tremaine:

She left, wondering if she should’ve called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn’t she? You’re chicken, she told herself….

Whimsical - At the nice hotel hosting the deaf dancers:

A clerk popped up from behind the desk where he’d been sleeping and began making sign language at her. Oedipa considered giving him the finger to see what would happen.

Are these 2 points of self-censoring enough to define her as someone who won’t follow through on the next one?

Before the auction:

She was not sure what she’d do when the bidder revealed himself. She had only some vague idea about causing a scene violent enough to bring the cops into it and find out that way who the man really was.

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 11 06:14:40 UTC 2024

Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

Yes, thanks both - thanks Mark for remembering that quote which occurs a couple pages later

And thanks Joseph because I didn’t know it was a quote till I read your reply

Here’s the sentence:
“Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.”

So, is she pregnant?

Rather than veering off into “Rosemary’s Baby” territory (a book which didn’t come out till 1967) I’ll take that as a “no” and leave it there

 - except to note a slightly odd use of “your”
- (Tremaine’s use of “your niggers” pops up as a cognate but doesn’t seem very relevant)
- often in the book, the prose dips into the vernacular with a “your”: “…this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair…”

“There was your Mucho….”

“One of your endless repetitions.”

“[one of Mucho’s teen queens’] eyes ultimately, statistically would meet Mucho’s and respond, and the thing would develop then groovy as it could when you found you couldn’t get statutory rape really out of the back of your law-abiding head.”

“…the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound.”

“A few of your more affluent type members….”

“…fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding.”

(Et alia)

- a rendering of a parlance still in use and slightly comical (Cliff Clavin on “Cheers” would modify nouns with a “your” quite frequently, as did Schneider on “One Day at a Time”)

-  in order to sometimes personalize, and other times lighten the mood?

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sun Aug 11 11:57:36 UTC 2024

Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Good reminder. It’s a little vague as a description of her state, but pretty clear as the author’s comment on not being pregnant

Yeah, it is wilfully pregnant with possibilities of meaning.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Sun Aug 11 15:44:21 UTC 2024

COL 49 2024 group read MPIN-AT

Yes Mark, you, who claim to be so text oriented, need to pay attention to who is saying what. Still I like Michael’s answer of Pynchon’s own words as much as anything I might say. 

My thoughts on your idea that you own the true and final inside track on the writing of Thomas Pynchon are simple. If it were true you would be able to demonstrate serious insights in more than 2 or 3 sentence posts. You would possibly be published in large body of Pynchon criticism and would occasionally come up with at least an essay on this list.. You have done nothing of the kind and live in a state of delusion aligned on a dying list-serve with an angry idiot who can’t spell. You are ultimately afraid to think for yourself and put those ideas in a coherent form which stands on its own. As a result you are deeply stuck in your absurd authority posturing and unable to engage respectfully with others. 

I am not alone in disgust at the way you and Morris presume to be the arbiters of what can be said about Pynchon or world events.. Several others have left and been in contact with me to say they avoid the list because of you 2.  That is your great contribution to this project. I have had enough the 2 of you with your pettiness and harassment. I will probably post some final thoughts on COL49 and will not return though I will miss the thoughts of Michael Bailey and James very much, just as I miss others who have left.  I hope you can find a more peaceable and friendly way of talking about the arts. Maybe you should try actually creating something. It ain’t as easy as it looks.

Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Tue Aug 13 01:52:16 UTC 2024

Summary of thoughts on COL 49 for group read 2024 part 1)

There are aspects of the different summaries posted so far about  The Crying of Lot 49 that appeal to me  and hold insight, But overall I find them incomplete and not easily reconciled to the scope of key events of the novel .

Where I agree: 
1) I agree with Michael Bailey that COL 49 has to be seen as a self aware post modern novel and that the main character becomes increasingly conscious that she is manipulated by men and specifically by the deceased Pierce Inverarity but  ultimately by the author Thomas Pynchon who defines her and her quest. This contributes to the feminist tone of the novel significantly because the author takes a shared responsibility and is not merely posing as someone who opposes male privilege. However this also poses other questions about constructing fictional characters and worlds and those are still to be considered. After all, no character can awake from their fictional reality,  precisely because they are fictional, but real humans can escape cultural or personal fictions and that, being the point of the structure, asks the reader what is the reality of the fictions of concern in this novel?  
2) The novel is a feminist critique of various forms of machismo, particularly the dualism embraced by militarism and robber baron capitalism where enemies become convenient tools for accumulating wealth. One is also forced in this approach to consider the human flaws and cultural conditioning of the feminine heroine which may be somewhat limited by Pynchon’s own identity.  The particular structures of American and California  patriarchy are also under the microscope in the novel and need to be considered, as part of a feminist consideration of the novel. 
  3) It is about the search for what is real, and the concomitant quest to expose and abandon lies and self-deception. This is a pretty general theme of writing and a pretty generalized approach to this novel.  If there is an important revelation about reality in the novel, what is it? To describe that reality and forces that obscure that reality  becomes the task of a meaningful review of the novel. 

For the preceding and following key reasons  I propose a more multivalent intentionality to the novel.
All of the approaches above fail to address  these 3 elements : 
the larger  and more specific cultural and historic context of the novel, 
the murder mystery that is quite central to the novel, 
the imaginary war over control over the postal system ( which I contend is an obvious  stand-in for all communication media)  is a power struggle which stretches through the history of all media. 

 These 3 elements combine and overlap to shape the core antagonist to Oedipa Maas and her quest.  A full sense of the novel seems to me to require a reckoning with the role of these elements. They comprise the prison tower which Oedipa and many others wish to escape from.

Attempted brief summary:

 Along with the feminist values and confrontations , I see the novel as addressing the post-traumatic mental state of America  after the JFK assassination, and more specifically the mental state of the westernmost coast which is in significant ways defining the national future. The story takes place in the 49er state where military contracts, aerospace, real estate, binary codes , and printed circuits are the new gold rush. The form of the novel is roughly a kind of post-modern allegory  or Greek drama replete with  a rock band called the Paranoids as the chorus , where Oedipa Maas represents a dissatisfied questioner of her role as a California housewife who is named executor of the estate of a prince of capitalism named Pierce Inverarity. He is  involved in, or has  at least been documenting,  an ancient power struggle over control of the postal system; this power struggle documented in his stamp collection slowly becomes evident to Oedipa as a defining and ongoing  core struggle of the actual world with its political and cultural landscape..  In a central ‘coincidence’  the postal questions along with questions about  bones from a WW2 massacre which were  sold to Inverarity by the Mafia, questions which are amplified and focused  by the Greek chorus of the Paranoids,  cumulatively lead her to attend a play about the murder of a duke and his rightful heir by a neighboring duke who uses the mysterious assassins of the secretive competing postal service called the Tristero (or Trystero) for that killing.  

It’s crucial to consider the temporal  context of the novel which is taking place  3 years after the JFK murder, and  also the references to that event  in the novel itself. These include the following:   the start of the student anti- Vietnam war protests, the CIA, Dallas,  one of the Dulles brothers, the growth of the extreme California right, Dr Hilarius is a character  representing  both the importation of Nazis into the CIA and the COINTELPRO CIA research into LSD , Yoyodyne defines the growth of power and influence from the MIC which Ike warned about  , and the similarity of the name of the evil duke in the play, Duke Angelo, to the operational leader of the CIA JJ Angleton. There is also  in the novel the mysterious deaths of those who know something about the fictional Tristero which has a parallel in the deaths of witnesses and investigators into the JFK murder.  Oedipa’s skeptical attention is first  drawn to contemporaneous oligarch/mafia criminality and then to a Jacobite  murder story of rival dukes and then to the postal war which groomed the murderers in the play. This serves as a way for Pynchon to avoid direct political attention, while following a path very similar to that of Dorothy Kilgallen and other JFK researchers.  Several of these  were first involved in Mafia investigations then the JFK  murder but ultimately it became obvious to many that the connection to Cuba and the mafia was also a connection the the CIA, their agent/patsy , and a deep murderous  power struggle over who would shape American foreign policy. 

The search for the fictional tristero and their chief rival  the historical Thurn and Taxis postal service becomes an historical search reaching back to Diocletian ,The Nicene Council,  Augustine and on through wars of the Holy Roman Empire and the nationalist and reformation wars between Catholics and Protestants. The Tristero then moves  to America as it began to nationalize the postal service. The Tristero is pure fiction but the war is real. It is the war over who will  control letters,  words,  language and ideas  and it sweeps through human history with all its bloodshed and comedy, pathos, kindness and tragedy. This history Pynchon affirms is ongoing and informs our time and place, our own tragedies, lies and truth-tellers.  There are also lots of good jokes , psychedelic visions and weird stories to relieve the density of information packed tightly into this brief book.
******************

Most of the characters strike me as very allegorical and fill out the landscape of California in 1966 with particular attention to political, pharmaceutical  and technological dreams.

to be continued… maybe

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Aug 13 17:25:10 UTC 2024

a little pynchon and entropy joke.

<https://x.com/NautilusMag>
Nautilus Magazine
·
Jan 30, 2019 <https://x.com/NautilusMag/status/1090625687826956288> "If black holes truly had no entropy, then any time an object fell into a black hole, its entropy would effectively be deleted, reducing the entropy of the universe and violating the second law of thermodynamics." http://bit.ly/ruin-time <https://t.co/Z36lqUPihC>

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Aug 17 11:41:27 UTC 2024

just a little 'excluded middle' joke; a little Crying of Lot 49 glossing?

Have we reduced all the complexity of the world merely to a series of false binaries? Answer Yes or No.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Aug 17 12:19:45 UTC 2024

The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

Ok, we all know of the card Teacher Baxter Hathaway sent to creative writing student Thomas Pynchon when he was very late to turning in any writing per the class assignments:

"Shit or Get Off" or suchlike of a man straining on the toilet....

So, this longer threatened piece of mine on the end of Crying of Lot 49, riffing/"analysing", will be broken into shorter turds.....

Here are some words on, contra Mr Van Nort, the sublime beauty, cohesive thematic widening embracive meaning of the ending of Lot 49. IMO

First here is James Wood on the ending of Richard Linklater's* Before Sunset:* What most interested me, however, was that it was a film improved by a beautiful ending, so that as soon as it was over it began to seem a better film than it had seemed while it was running. (And this wasn't just because it was over...) Jesse has agreed to go to Celine's apartment. She puts on a particularly lovely Nina Simone song, "Just in Time", and dances along to it. Suddenly she turns to Jesse and says, "Baby, you're going to miss that plane." Jesse shrugs, says: "I know," and then gives a foolish smile....

Chekhov-like, Wood avers....MK: all open endedness able to expand into so many possibilities that all the real and not-so in Lot 49, i.e. all those dropped religious allusions along with the full gamut of mysteries re the Trystero and all the words on America means......

Pychon has ended this novel about America in the mid-sixties capturing --with such compact writing density (as Joseph implied)--the incredible possibilities America was in 1966.....

This is what Oedipa is pregnant with.

This is why the Trystero is both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary; violent and a force for communicative peace in history. That is, that history is not ruled by the 'logic' of the excluded middle; that so much anarchic reality is beyond the binary; beyond all the known either-or rules....

That history lets in what is not determined, unknown as we await the crying.