Zoyd's Pedolections

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 3:13 AM
Subject: re: Zoyd's Pedolections


> Otto
>
> >Is it really a predilection for schoolgirls *or* isn't it something
different?
>
> It's something different, Zoyd likes jail bait.
>
> "Lots of them I see in school everyday."
>

Again I disagree to the way you paraphrase it:

> Vile minded Zoyd, when he's not trying to pick up the wife of one his
> soon to be business partner,

He's just got caught by the look at sweet Moonpie. When he talks to her he
doesn't even know that she's got a partner until RC returns from the loo.
The text gives a plausible explanation by referring to "Zoyd's crippled
receptors" (36).

> jerking off and stalking Frenesi on the
> edge of Paradise,

Following Frenesi and trying to talk to her surely hasn't been the best
idea, but I don't think that Pynchon had had that "stalking" in mind when he
wrote the scene. Try to imagine his situation, a cop, in Marxist terms the
"class-enemy" of the hippies, has taken his wife. But stalking requires
repetition, it's not a single attempt to talk to your ex, and we're not told
that he did try it again.

> he's banging Prairie's classmates.

Girls like Prairie sees at school, that's not her classmates. She says that
all he dates are women that won't fit in, and as I've said I agree to
Prairie that Zoyd wants to remain free in case Frenesi would return to him
one day. At the openeing of the novel Zoyd is solo, no word of an actual
partner.

> It bothers her,
> too. When Chè and Prairie slip into the lingerie they lift on their
> shopping spree Prairie can't help but think of Zoyd, her dad, and how
> much he would enjoy seeing the display.
>
> I think the SL Into, provides the answer to Dave Monroe's question about
> the significance of Zoyd's pedolection. I don't happen to agree with P.
> He says that American men are really boys.

I wouldn't limit this to America.

> He also says the Movements
> put too much emphasis on youth, especially eternal youth.
> Hector and Zoyd debate this topic at the bowling alley.

Right, but isn't it true? What about 'trust nobody above thirty'? I've read
Farina's novel only once but isn't that Gnossos kind of convinced that he
cannot die?

> Hector takes Pynchon's
> rather conservative position: grow up, you are going to die someday.

But that's a rather secular, 20th-century re-statement of the Roman "carpe
diem tempus fugit" that says that there is no eternity and just one life.

> LSD
> is a drug that the men use to turn back the clock, become babies in the
> candy houses of their own solipsistic minds, enjoy  mindless pleasures
> (Mucho) and escape death (the X ray vision), responsibility.

It's been some decades ago but that hasn't been my impression.

> While they
> blame all their problems on  their parents (in Zoyd's case, the
> government), they stay in the nest forever, cause they need Big Nurse.
>

Where does Zoyd blame his "problems" on the government? His problems we get
to know are caused by the government respectively its agents. Did he place
that monolith into his house? You say he's a dealer but I still miss the
textual evidence for this.

Otto