Welcome Joe

[Henry Musikar]

I think that this is my favorite first posting since I joined the 
list (DCNY not withstanding). wRite on, Joe!

On 25 Sep 96 at 13:40, Joel Dinerstein wrote:

> Date:          Wed, 25 Sep 1996 13:40:29 -0600
> To:            pynchon-l at waste.org
> From:          jdinerstein at mail.utexas.edu (Joel Dinerstein)
> Subject:       GR's Moby-Dicks

> This is my first post to the list -- I just joined for the group
> read -- so I'm sorry it's a bit on the lengthy side.  But jeez, it's
> nice to be goin' through GR with a motley crew.  So, then...
> 
> 
> In response to the coupla queries on the relationship of Moby Dick
> to GR....
> 
> In my last read of GR, I realized Moby Dick is in the very
> foundation of GR, from chasing down "whiteness" (pick up your free
> melanin test kit at the door) to looking for some sort of new
> American malehood on the (watery) road -- 'cause ain't nothin' worth
> doin' around the ol' Puritan home.
> 
> To wit:   GR's whole opening scene of males waking up and stroking
> each others bananas for breakfast reproduces Moby Dick's utopian
> male democracy scene on the Pequod when the men are all a-wash in
> sperm oil.  The Pequodniks are so delirious with happiness as they
> collect the sperm oil from the whale, and rub it on themselves and
> each others, they almost hallucinate with joyous homoeroticism.  In
> GR, Pynchon grounds this male bonding in war, I suspect because war
> is the ancient social basis for all-male bonding (that hunter vs.
> gatherer thing).  Maybe that's a bit much (it even sounds too PC to
> me), but still the novel clearly starts in He-Land with Pynchon
> joyfully narrating the womanless college-dorm-ish paradise of guys
> farting, belching, snarfing, joking, cigarettes and coffee on
> everyone's breath, etc.
> 
> Obviously, Pynchon's dishing up the phallacy fast and hard and
> tongue in cheek here (and soft and mushy for breakfast).... phallics
> phalling from the sky and come a-croppin' on the roof and protruding
> from pajamas, bananas bringing the boys together like the hooked
> ring of Josephine Baker's skirt.  The bananas chain the boys
> together (all chemistry puns intentional) like some sort of dying
> Iron Age bond; just as the symbolic post-war "bond" will be the
> corporate taffy that opens up the Counterforce section.  I think not
> just *the*"Iron Age" is imploding here, but lots of iron "ages" --
> the Ages of Conquest, Exploration, Colonialims, etc. -- each of
> which is tied up in certain dying visions of Euro-American manhood
> (Rational Man, White Man, Self-Controlled Man, etc.).
> 
> Pynchon's a late-breaking Beat writer, after all, and his generation
> of postwar "cool" rebels were out looking for a new version of
> manhood far from The [Vietnam] War's or The Firm's.  They would find
> much that was cool  -- language, music, body movement, philosophy
> and bogosity -- in non-white ethnic male cultural styles (esp.
> African-American and Native American).  So, like the original
> Ishmael -- that Biblical exile whose father banished him from home
> -- Slothrop, the Beats and their hippie heirs hit the road looking
> for a new way to be far away from their long-forgotten father.  As
> for Melville's Ishmael, his frank admiration of the non-white "main
> men" of Pequod's harpoon squad made a seminal contribution to the
> confused American amalgam of primitivism and acculturation that
> Pynchon harpooned for his own uses.
> 
> Which is to say....
> 
> In-coming *male*, indeed.
> 
> But I do go on.  Sorry about blathering on so.  Lookin' forward to
> your comments.
> 
> 
> Joel Dinerstein
> jdinerstein at mail.utexas.edu
> 
> 
> 
> 

Keep Cool, but care. -- TRP
http://www.nicom.com/~gravity/mypage.htm