Benny's job

[Dave Monroe]

... yeah, I know you're kidding, Terrance (though would the Bay of Pigs
somehow be being evoked here as well?), but I have addressed that little
problem of chronology before, that "Operation Igloo White" as more the
culmination of the type of elaborate military/intelligence (oxymoronic
or no) operation Pynchon parodies in Operation Alligator Patrol.  Again,
see ...

Edwards, Paul N.  The Closed World: Computers and the Politics
    of Discourse in Cold War America.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

... excerpted for your conenience at ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=227&sort=date

... and anytime any of these fine scholarly presses for whom I so
tirelessly shill want to float a few complimentary volumes my way, or,
for that matter, make a generous donation to waste.org for the
advertising space, well, by all means ...

But a few other things of interest from J. Kerry Grant's Companion to V.
(Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000).  There apparently was, indeed, a "Great
Sewer Scandal of 1955" (PC115/PF113/B101):

"5 in Queens Guilty in Sewer Scandal" was the headline of the lead story
in the New York Times for June 10, 1955.  A contractor and his son were
convicted along with three borough employess after a two-mile section of
brand new sewer in Laurelton, Queens, had to be replaced.  The trial
lasted almot fourteen months and was then the longest criminal trial in
the nation's history. (Grant 67)

... hence why "the deparment had developed a passion for honesty."
Apparently it indeed does pay to look everything up ...

Should have noticed, Frank Herbert fan that I am, that Benny = bene
("well-intentioned," according to Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the
Novels of Thomas Pynchon, see Grant, p. 3), but was particularly
interested to find that that song "learned from a para on French
leave"--"French leave"?--"from the fighting in Algeria" Paola teaches
the Whole Sick Crew (V., PC11/PF18/B10) was written by Boris Vian ("Le
deserteur," 1955).

Not only did I recently, finally read Vian's I Spit on Your Graves (no
relation to the castration-anxiety-inducing exploitation film, but it's
still pretty brutal, disturbing), but it brings in that Algeria element,
which not only hints as well at Vietnam (and both American and French
involvement there), and postcolonialism in general, but also gives
particular motivation for Pynchon's echoing of Frantz Fanon's Black
Skin, White Masks at the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow.  As Pynchon
perhaps evokes modernity by evoking Baudeliare at the outset of V., he
invokes postcolonialism, postmodernity by echoing Fanon at the outset of
GR.  Or so runs my working hypothesis ...

Anyway, on Boris Vian, see Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular
Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley: U of California P,
2000).  Vian was an interesting figure all around.  Asked to find and
translate American pulp novels for a French publisher after WWII, he
apparently decided it would be esaier to write his own.  Presented
ISOYG, however, as his own trans. of the work of an African-American
writer.  Only came out that Vian had written it himself some time later,
after he'd translated the book into an English "original."  Was later
made into a film.  At Vian's private screening, he allegedly exclaimed,
"Those are supposed to be Americans?  My ass!" and died.  You can see
the appeal ...


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20010117/d2b9c285/attachment.html>