Sure is daffy about those automobiles

[John Carvill]

Foax

This is a re-post, but I think it's worth repeating because (a) it's a
nice piece of writing, and (b) there are so many cars in IV. If
Pynchon wouldn't enjoy this article, I'll eat my hat.

Can ye also notch up yet another Pynchon ambivalence? IV displays a
love of cars, but also a concern with what all that oil is doing to
the environment. A dichotomy, no? Ok, here goes the re-run...

Just found this article (because it was in a Sunday Supplmeent that'd
got wedged down between a chest of drawers and a table, and my son
just shook it loose in the course of one of his regular rampages.....)
on cars, modernism, design, and sexuality, by Spephen Bayley.
Certainly seemed to trigger, for me, V., GR, & Against the Day
resonances.

Main article, on the cars, is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/28/motoring.cars1

Most Pynchonian bit is this though:


The sexual allure of cars
Stephen Bayley The Observer, Sunday 28 September 2008

A car is the most symbolically rich thing we ever buy. No other
artefact requires such investment of energy, money and passion to
manufacture. No other artefact sucks such cupidity and yearning from
its consumers. Cars are overwhelmingly potent, and there are
reasonable and rational forces trying to curtail our use of them, but
once - as Henry Ford realised long ago - you've let the genie of
consumer freedom out of the box, there's no putting it back.

And as John Steinbeck noted, the popularity of the Model T means 'two
generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the
clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system'.
Earlier artists also caught the erotic sense of speed machines. At the
beginning of the 20th century, futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
said: 'I became inflamed with the fever and desire of the steely
breaths from your full nostrils! I finally unleash your metallic
bride...' Was he addressing his car or his mistress? Or both? It is a
positional dilemma still known today. But the great age of car design
could not outlive the destructive success of the machine which, as if
a classical myth, has systematically destroyed its own support system.
Between the Forties and Seventies, cars of astonishing commercial
beauty were manufactured.

The relationship between cars and sex is deep. Like all matters of
aesthetics, the answer to the question 'What makes a car sexy?' has
direct and associational aspects. A car's shape has a direct effect on
us: sensuous surfaces, voluptuous radii, masculine girth and
aggressive projections all have an erotic character. The associations
are more subtle, but perhaps more significant. Words readily
associated with cars - speed, performance, pleasure, danger - are an
occult vocabulary of sex. Factor in notions of comfort, security and
texture, and you have the pre-eminent mechanical aphrodisiac.But with
the first oil shock of 1973, a book ever so quietly closed. Ever
since, cars with a sexual character have been pornographic rather than
erotic: parodic and preposterous, not essential and sublime. A moment
has passed with a whiff of leather and hot oil.



The 10 sexiest cars ever

1949 Porche 356

1961 Jaguar E Type

1951 Lancia Aurelia H20 GT

1948 Jaguar XK120

1968 Ferrari Daytona

1952 Bentley R Type

1953 AC Ace

1953 Chevrolet Corvette

1955 Citreon DS

1955 Mga


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/28/motoring.cars


Cheers
JC