GRGR 31 Shit'n'Shinola (is Re: Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Terrance wrote:

> 
>    ... Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of.
> Shit is the
>    presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with
> a scythe but
>    the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's
> warm and
>    private own *asshole*, which is getting pretty intimate.
> That's what that
>    white toilet's for. You see many brown toilets? Nope,
> toilet's the color
>    of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that
> white porcelain's
>    the very emblem of Odorless and Official Daeth. Shinola
> shoeshine polish
>    happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's
> in the toilet
>    slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance
> on his sin of
>    being born the color of Shit'n'Shinola. ... (688)
> 
> Red Malcolm (a parody of Malcolm X, when he had a  "slave"
> shining shoes at the Roseland State Ballroom) tries to
> sodomize Slothrop (GR.64). Sodomy is an important theme and
> metaphor in GR. Whappo is sodimized by  Crutchfield and of
> course the screaming when Blicero sodomizes Gottfried in
> order to break out and leave the cycle of infection and
> death is an orgasmic screaming that opens and closes the
> novel-the sado-masochistic coming together in death. The
> victim and the oppressor define each other, the guilt and
> innocence of both is debunked by Pynchon and the behavior,
> "the long daisy chain of victims and victimizers" or the
> unity of "destroyer and destroyed" (V.) is founded on  the
> fundamentally antagonistic aspects of the human psyche. So
> the black/white binaries are not only useless in life, they
> are useless when reading GR.  In my opinion, Jody's  reading
> is confirmed by the novel.


I don't know shit from shinola about who now stands for what in this
discussion but the obvious problem with P's new interpretation of shit 'n'
shinola is not especially that it is a complete antithesis of the
traditional meaning of the phrase "shit FROM shinola" as just correctly
defined by Seaman Bodine and which Malcolm would have known well and
applied frequently to his Harvard student customers, but that no self
respecting shoe shine boy would have allowed a product an execrable as
Shinola into his shoeshine box. Shinola in case anyone has forgotten was a
paint/dye like substance that was dabbed onto to a really scuffed up and
for all intents and purposes warn out pair of  shoes or boots as a final
last attempt at saving them from the rubbish heap. Shinola would be
guaranteed to ruin a GOOD pair of shoes. But that being said
it's a fine satire on theorizing about Whites views of Blackness.

			P.