Bianca

[Anville Azote]

On 11/9/06, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that you're taking one part of the elephant for the whole.
> What is pervasive in Pynchon, and *meant* to provoke the unease you're
> feeling, is the insistence that the erotic and sexual moments  -- the
> moments when you would be most unguarded, most yourself, most open to
> another, most free of "public" social roles and expectations -- are
> precisely the moments when Powers you'd rather not think about -- within and
> without -- may be most busily at work. (cf. Plato, Choderlos de Laclos,
> Freud, Plath, Norman O. Brown, Foucault, Sappho, Mailer, any random
> bodice-ripper or Mike Hammer novel, _passim_).
>

While we're at it, why not raise the point of mechanophilia,
"auto"-erotica in the truest sense of the Word, from the GI boys
singing about 1001 ways to make love to the A4, to the delectable feel
of Imipolex G, and then on to Rachel Owlglass and her MG reincarnated
as a male counterculture figure in Vineland. . . .

"We report two cases in which men used the hydraulic shovels on
tractors to suspend themselves for masochistic sexual stimulation. One
man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a
name and writing poetry in its honor. He died accidentally while
intentionally asphyxiating himself through suspension by the neck,
leaving clues that he enjoyed perceptual distortions during
asphyxiation. The other man engaged in sexual bondage and transvestic
fetishism, but did not purposely asphyxiate himself. He died when
accidentally pinned to the ground under a shovel after intentionally
suspending himself by the ankles. We compare these cases with other
autoerotic fatalities involving perceptual distortion, cross-dressing,
machinery, and postural asphyxiation by chest compression."

Abstract of "Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics", Journal of
Forensic Science, 1993, Vol 38, Issue 2, p359-64.  Via the Mind Hacks
blog:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/11/is_that_a_hydraulic_.html

>
> I don't believe there's a Pynchon reader alive -- certainly not this one --
> who'd give a 100% honest answer to: "List the passages in Pynchon that give
> you a hardon / get you wet." I'm down with the most candid discussions of
> orifices, flushes, fluiids, and spasms -- buit *please* don't ask about the
> kinky stuff that goes on between me and little black marks on a white page.
>

I wouldn't be surprised to see a few comments along these lines
(though not fully honest ones, natch') in the Amazon.com reader
reviews.  Or in Wikipedia vandalism.

-A. A.