<div>Yeah, it seems that the missing piece, at least the search for it, and the laughter and the tears that are part of the search or quest, are truly sacred. </div>
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<div> She does laugh. Doesn't she? While droll and wry, and because the author has elected to use her narrative for most of the book, her sense of humor is very close to the implied author's and, though his humor has been much ridiculed recently in reviews, the author's humor, especially when he combines bafoonery with grave themes (basic comic relief), crude, vulgar, and off-color humor, his silly songs and such, with desriptions of historical evil and shades of conspiracy is essential to his method, to, to use an old formalistic idea, his selection of genre. </div>
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<div>Searching for a missing piece is one thing, finding it and making a frictionless roll through life quite another. </div>
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<div>from a review of Shell Siverstein's famous children's book </div>
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<p>This very simple story deals with the concept of true happiness, fulfillment, non-monogamy and love. As Anne Roiphie explained in <i>The New York Times</i> Book Review: <i>"This fable can also be interpreted to mean that no one should try to find all the answers, no one should hope to fill all the holes in themselves, achieve total transcendental harmony or psychic order because a person without a search, loose ends, internal conflicts and external goals becomes too smooth to enjoy or know what's going on. Too much satisfaction blocks exchange with the outside."</i></p>
<div>Yes, exchange with the outside is there in Entropy. Opedipa is the missing piece and quester in the excluded middle polis. So rich and poor NYC. </div>
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<div><br>Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and<br>too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,<br>two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the<br>audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that<br>
obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and<br>outside, the wild and civilization. What <b><b>Oedipus</b></b> lacks (and<br>Thebes as well) is some <b>middle</b> term, an Aristotelian Polis<br>that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us<br>
whole in a community constituted by diversity.” 287<br>So says, J. Peter Euben in The Road Home: Pynchon’s The<br>Crying of Lot 49, the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy<br>of Political Theory. [1990]<br><br>“If there is any hope in the novel, it rests with Oedipa.<br>
She is the only one who does not give up the quest…she is<br>the <b>middle</b> term….” 302<br><br>Is Oedipa the <b>middle</b> term, an Aristotelian polis?<br><br>‘tis better to be lord of men than of WASTE: since neither<br>
walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void and no men<br>dwell with thee therein.” Priest of Zeus to <b><b>Oedipus</b></b><br><br><br>Greek Drama, Pynchon knows, has its roots in cult and in drama, gief and laughter are seperated, so comedy and tragedy. The comic mingling was part of the felmale cult. In BE, as in AGTD, P explores these themes of sex, gender, cult and the sacred. Horst meets Maxine in a bar, the Ceres in Chicago. Sure, he trades grains, the bar is actually there, but what has happened to the cult of Ceres? </div>
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<p>O'Higgins locates the source of this tradition in women's cultic obscenity, <i>aischrologia</i>. The first chapter reviews the evidence for women exchanging lewd jests and ritual insults in the context of the festivals of Demeter, especially in Attica. The literary evidence for this is late, most notably the scholiasts of Lucian and Athenaeus, but O'Higgins makes good use of material evidence to bolster her case. She argues that the Thesmophoria provided a forum where women could exchange information, via cultic mockery and sexual jesting, about using certain plants and herbs to control their fertility. Thus women's speech is not simply a reaction to a male hegemony but the product of a subculture which assisted women in gaining control of their own bodies. </p>
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<div><a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004-12-22.html">http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004-12-22.html</a></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 11:17 PM, David Payne <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dpayne1912@hotmail.com" target="_blank">dpayne1912@hotmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT:#ccc 1px solid;MARGIN:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;PADDING-LEFT:1ex" class="gmail_quote">Because he's a missing piece of Maxine who doesn't laugh?<br><br>On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 09:12:36 -0500, <a href="mailto:martharoostersingh@gmail.com">martharoostersingh@gmail.com</a> wrote:<br>
<br>Why does P give this profopund insight to Horst?<br><br> <br>If BE is what has been called a satire, not in the mode of GR (GR may be considered, and has been by several critcs, and with success, a Menippean Satire, an Anatomy, a Encyclopedic Narrative, Postmodern non-corrective Satire), but what is called "light-hearted satire", we should do well to give our attention to Horst's claim that laughter is sacred. Laughter, of course, is not essenatial to satire, and, is not its goal. In fact, as Horst explains, so much that is called humor is a sacralization of the profane consumer laugh track or the mere use of satirical tools of irony, parody, and the like.<br>
<br>BE is not meant to be a funny book. I may make us laugh, or smile, but rarely LOL, because it is light-hearted satire that seeks to humor us out of our collective paranoia and call attention to what we have made sacred----9-11, that Survivor Tree, the Flag, the Wars. </blockquote>
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