Sarkozy and Me

[mikebailey]

I suppose it might look that way to her, but we know that Lyle Bland financed
P's education...and I doubt that his father was a surveyor/town planner
just as a hobby...

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Otto wrote:

> Sarkozy and Me
> By Mary Grabar
> white people do. Pynchon sums up his poetic reverie with, "As this
> summer warms them up, last August's riot is being remembered less as
> chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a
> coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the
> action, a scattering of The Man's power, either with real incidents or
> false alarms."

I wonder how much hanging around in Watts Pynchon did...
I don't usually pine for much openness on his part - just
like watching "The Making of..." movies doesn't usually attract me...
but wouldn't it be nice if he hauled off, like he sometimes does,
and responds in print...
"I visited (or, lived in) Watts that summer, somebody really did say there
was a balletic quality...the Civil Rights Act was new and my criticisms
were well-informed for the time"...or something...

I imagine Buffy up in her mod Manhattan penthouse
> saying to Chad, "Darling, you must read this! Maybe we can get our
> chauffeur to drive us through Watts for a performance."

would that be a totally bad thing?  They might drop some coin...
no worse than eco-tourism in Brazil?

> Pynchon is like the 25-year-old graduate student caught up in Marxist
> theory while living off the largesse of his parents, whom he
> indirectly indicts through his razing of all remnants of Western
> civilization. I remember such a fellow MFA student expounding on
> Marxism and writing a Whitman-esque ode to herself about shaking the
> hand of a homeless man and giving him a few dollars.
> (...)

ok, how about some other comparisons: Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers" comes to mind, which didn't see print till 1970 - and although
"JMW" doesn't evoke with the particularity that Wolfe did, it does have
some Pynchon touches.  Mentioning the Watts Towers and linking that image
with the objet trouve art fair at the end of the article ties the piece
together, and suggests a concern with the way the human mind shapes
experience artistically (like the drummer in Vineland, taking life's
hard knocks and molding a rhythm one can groove to)
Also, the piece may be informed by Michael Harrington's _Poverty in
America_ - he digs into possible reasons why the "Great Society's"
outreach doesn't completely connect with the need in Watts...

Further sources for the thinking behind JWM - Autobiography of Malcolm
X (we are pretty sure he read that); "Manchild in the Promised Land"
was good too; "Black Like Me" - liberalism made some non-black people
do stirring things back then, and, you know, not all of
them were in vain...

ah well; no such thing as bad publicity.
Reading the article prompted me to reread "JMW" again...

and got to admit, very little in his further works following
on or adding to the insights: the blacks in Vineland are, um
(though 'tis my fave book), not the most sympathetically portrayed;
the treatment of race in GR is appropriate for the nature of
the main character and the narrative, and the meditations of
Enzian; perhaps the Secret Integration holds the key to some sort
of resolution that he reached, to stop preaching on that topic?