<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span>love the other meaning of "legend'...the noticing of rising intonation w Maxine re March.....</span></div><div><span></span> </div><div><span>and Yes, most.....No one is innocent....</span></div><div><span></span> </div><div><span>That unfolds in almost endlessly discussable ways....</span></div><div><span></span> </div><div><span>In one of the good Oxford U books I wrote about t'thoter day, on Comedy, the writer gives us a good quote </span></div><div><span>from the narrator of Gentleman Prefer Blondes to a guy and shows how hard it is to tell who is being treated comically,</span></div><div><span>leaving us basically with Both/And.....like P and here.......</span></div><div class="yahoo_quoted" style="display: block;"> <br> <br> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue,
Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> On , Mark Kohut <markekohut@yahoo.com> wrote:<br> </font> </div> <div class="y_msg_container"><div id="yiv2674935794"><div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><span>Great post and first thoughts best thoughts (I hope) as Zen Master Suzuki is always saying. The real estate development as loss theme that is in Inherent Vice is accepted as Total Loss Farm (an allusion and so to speak) </span></div><div><span>in Manhattan. We might remember that in the trailer Not-Pynchon chose to allude to what Robert Moses did to </span></div><div><span>ethnic
neighborhoods in New York City. And, a book many a reading upper West Sider refers to--I know one UWS friend who gave it away--and another thing Pynchon gets right. </span></div><div><span></span> </div><div><span>Yes, finely noticed and associated, I say to your question about March's face as described. And, I think from the phrase</span></div><div><span>Old Lefty, the Fabian
bit bucket and March one thing P is "saying', 'showing' ,using is the notion that NYC in BE</span></div><div><span>has no genuine ''Left' tradition left. ....Further, that the kids see her as "crazy'--meaning their innocent acceptance of the world as it is sees her as 'weird'?? --and she is also referred to with "mad dog' ---a term we remember was applied to that 'radical' Bertrand Russell in Against the Day---I would argue that Old March was valuable in P's categorization but....now? </span></div><div><span></span> </div><div><span></span> </div><div><span></span> </div><div class="yiv2674935794yqt9510256006" id="yiv2674935794yqt93194"><div class="yiv2674935794yahoo_quoted" style="display: block;"> <br clear="none"> <br clear="none"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida
Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> On Saturday, October
26, 2013 10:38 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis@verizon.net> wrote:<br clear="none"> </font> </div> <div class="yiv2674935794y_msg_container"><div id="yiv2674935794"><style>#yiv2674935794 #yiv2674935794 --
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#yiv2674935794 </style><div><div class="yiv2674935794WordSection1"><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">“March and Maxine go back to the co-opping frenzy of ten or fifteen years ago,†i.e. 1985-1990, but that recognition is briefly delayed. We first hear of March (via Otis & Ziggy’s report) as a “really crazy lady,†an alumna guest speaker at a Kugelblitz school assembly with “something she wanted to say but not in front of a kid audience.†See Michael Chabon’s NYRB review, </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/thomas-pynchon-crying-september-11/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/thomas-pynchon-crying-september-11/</a>,</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">for thoughts on innocence, parents and the
stories they tell or don’t
tell children. Is this perception of something left unsaid a plausible one for Otis or Ziggy? (We don’t know which one is speaking.) And with 11 September still months away, what might be the “something else†beyond “oil business†that links the Bush family with Saudi Arabian terrorists? Some industrious graduate student should tally all the Pynchon characters who are flagged at their first appearance with indicators of concealment, hidden agendas, something they can’t say, etc.: it’s a signature trope. </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">In Maxine’s memory (54) of red-haired March in her red snood at the tenants’ protest, what makes March’s face “silvery at the edges, like some antique photograph� Is that a visual correlate of “old lefty?†Think also about Merle’s photography, the alchemy of silver, and the bright backlit rim of things seen
against the day.</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">Some context for the co-opping frenzy: Real estate and its financing are a large part of any city’s economy, and have long been a larger fraction of New York City’s than most. Long ago, Wharton and James inspired me to read about the Gilded Age and the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_McAllister#.22The_Four_Hundred.22" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Four Hundred</a>†families at the top of NY society then. I was struck by how many of the fortunes were tied to savvy investment in local land. We associate the Vanderbilts, Astors et al with shipping, railroads, and beaver pelts, but few of their investments matched the long-term ROI of parcels of farmland in the path of the city’s expansion. Because the value of land and buildings is so closely tied to public infrastructure and investment in streets and utilities,
bridges,
subways, etc. (and to zoning and building codes since they came into play), the real estate industry is intertwined with the city’s politics from deep underground to the top of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_tower" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Freedom Tower</a>. (Again, true of any city, but the stakes are higher where the dollars-per-square-foot are higher.)</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">I’m not knowledgeable about the changes in the industry and tax codes in the 1980s that made it especially profitable then to convert rental apartment buildings to co-ops or condominiums. I heard about those skirmishes at length from friends, my former neighbors on the Upper West Side. But by then I was engaged with the changes that had already swept loft neighborhoods in SoHo and Chelsea, and were beginning in my part of the Brooklyn waterfront. By the 2000s,
former
$300-$400-per-month rental lofts like mine would become million-dollar (and up) condos. I was familiar with loft landlords’ “encouragement†of turnover a la Kriechman. I organized tenants’ demonstrations like this one. I tracked and attempted to influence the community-board, city, and state policy decisions (more of them in back rooms than in public forums) that permitted/drove the changes.</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">Note that March explicitly links the displacement of relatively well-to-do and empowered Upper West Side tenants here to earlier events less than a mile to the south: the demolition thirty years earlier (V days) of a poorer Puerto Rican neighborhood to make way for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Center" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Lincoln Center</a>. Note also that no one is entirely innocent: Maxine’s opera-loving parents Elaine and Ernie
have “no love
for Lincoln Center, but you can’t keep ‘em away from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_opera" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Met</a>.“</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">From here on throughout the book, no reference to matters of NYC real estate -- from dot-com offices in the Flatiron district to the “Newspaper of Record†(NY Times) celebrating every form of “urban renewal†-- is casual. We are never far from demolition slower than that of 11 September, and construction more concrete than virtual cities in video games. We’re learning the rules (overt, implicit, and deeply secret) of the emerging cyber-real-estate industry: its land rush, infrastructure, zoning, and so on. I sure hope someone’s keeping records, don’t you?</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">Note also how quickly the
connections accumulate:
the “really crazy lady†</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoListParagraph"><span>(1)<span> </span></span>attended and speaks at the school Maxine’s kids attend</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoListParagraph"><span>(2)<span> </span></span>is Gabriel Ice’s mother-in-law</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoListParagraph"><span>(3)<span> </span></span>is an acquaintance from the real-estate skirmishes of the late 1980s</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoListParagraph"><span>(4)<span> </span></span>has been a UWS neighbor (unknown to
Maxine) all along</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoListParagraph"><span>(5)<span> </span></span>knows Maxine’s parents from protests against Reagan’s games in Central America, linked via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Iran-Contra</a> to a Middle Eastern country run by fundamentalists and sponsors of terrorism, with whom we would no more cut deals than with, say, Saudi Arabia. </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">No wonder Maxine makes a note “to see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is up to these days.†In terms of the stricter conventions of detective fiction, this is seriously bogus, like those phone calls to the squadroom in Law and Order that always supply the next piece of the puzzle just in time. But as I
wrote offlist to one of you recently: â€In fifty years of Pynchonian quests, investigations, and balloon chases, I can’t think of one that isn’t minutely supervised by those tall cloud angels at the horizon, who toss in ‘clues’ the way we feed goldfish...â€<span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"></span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">A few notes to supplement the <span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"><a href="http://bleedingedge.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6#Page_53" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Pynchon wiki</a> fo</span>r these pages:<span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"></span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal">53: “The hashslingrz legend continues, here.†“Legend†is an interesting choice, more loaded in several directions than, say, “Hmm,
another
hashslingrz connection, here.†One that occurs to me is the use of “legend†in John Le Carre to mean “cover story/identity†– often a spy’s faked background complete with documentation. Possibly a hint that this is not just potential business fraud, but a matter of concern to larger powers and dominions?</div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">54: “Gestapo techniques†– along with the p. 56 invocation of “fascists†and “When I hear the word culture… I release the safety on my Browning!†[not Goering, sorry, March] a reminder that the UWS was home to many European emigres from the 1930s. That’s floating in the subtext (and some Columbia U. - Central Park locations) of the movie Marathon Man, with its revenant Nazi.</span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span
style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">54: “the union’s giant <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_rat" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">inflatable rat</a>†– if Wikipedia’s <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-history-of-scabby-the-rat" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">link</a> is correct and the rat was first used in Chicago in 1990, this may be a slight anachronism. As a loyal New Yorker, however, I’d welcome any evidence that this is just another desperate bid for status from the ever-jealous Second City. </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">55: “since the late fifties when the Puerto Rican gangs were terrorizing the Anglos in the neighborhood†-- e.g. <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Agron" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">Salvador Agron</a>, inspiration for Paul Simon’s “The Capeman†– although that fatal, West-Side-Storyish gang rumble was in Hell’s Kitchen, one neighborhood south from the UWS. My family moved from a Boston suburb to Manhattan in the summer of 1960, when gangs – and several public-school scandals – were much in the news. That, along with more income at new jobs for both parents, may have helped persuade them to send their sons to prep-school Collegiate (pp. 95, 130, 149) rather than a public school -- which had not been a family trajectory before that. No one is entirely innocent.</span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">57: “’I do remember,’ Maxine tells the boys now, ‘March was always
sort of…
political?’†– Is that a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" shape="rect">high rising terminal</a> intonation? Given all she’s recalled of March in the few seconds since p. 53,iIt’s not the first time, and won’t be the last, that Maxine is less forthcoming than her sons’ knowingness might seem to invite. </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Again, like Chabon sez:</span> innocence, parents and the stories they tell or don’t tell children<span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">. </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div class="yiv2674935794MsoNormal"> </div></div></div></div><br clear="none"><br clear="none"></div> </div> </div> </div></div>
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