IVing IV, a touching touch

[Mark Kohut]

Alice sez:
the Feminist
battle against phallic hegemony is also a raging.

I think I agree, but the battle was being won by all the women in Inherent Vice, yes, including walk on the wild flatlands Penny, but it is, at this point being lost. Shasta gave up 'free' love; Penny now too. 

--- On Wed, 12/2/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVing IV, a touching touch
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 6:21 AM
> > much as I agree on some of this
> stuff, feminism-wise, I don't agree that
> > there is anything "up there in the [male chauvinist]
> treehouse" worth
> > of a woman aspiring to or
> > emulating or being pissed to be left out of...
> 
> Just 25-30% $  is all; not to mention, as I noted, the
> petty
> perquisites and envy of those a rung below on the corporate
> ladder.
> Consider Bigfoot's envy or the keeping up with the yacht
> club Jones
> that the text keeps foregrounding.  Penny is a member
> of that singular
> set of women who have managed to penetrate the first layer
> of
> patriarch but have bumped their heads on the glass ceiling.
> Men ain't
> exactly her friends, but she needs to use their power (a
> private Dick
> might work) to penetrate their world.
> 
> >
> > that's not acceptance of the status quo, just flat
> disbelief in the importance
> > or goodness, even for insiders, of lopsided (poorly
> engineered.
> > dysfunctional) power structures...
> > an attitude which I think Pynchon
> encourages...frickin' pyramid
> > schemes every one 'a' them, if ya think about it...
> 
> Yeah, of course, daisy chains, screwing the screwed, petty
> perks and
> the like, but that reasoning, sound as it may be, is often
> cold
> comfort and less spending money to a female earning 75% of
> what a male
> earns to do the same job. And, I'm guessing she doesn't get
> invited to
> boys night out when all the dealings go down. When Larry
> enters
> Penny's work place he gets a small idea what it is like for
> Penny;
> he's in a world where women have power and their use of it
> or abuse of
> it may come down to sex or gender. Penny uses this Dic, and
> his Dick,
> even sells it or trades it to other men. Not something
> Larry can get
> over. He's not a surfing saint. But it's not a matter of
> revenge.
> There is more than one war going on. Of course the big war,
> the
> theatre war of buying and selling, has the same impact it
> does in
> Beaver and Jessica and so on in GR, but Vietnam and the
> Feminist
> battle against phallic hegemony is also a raging. Penny may
> not have
> all the rockets and helicopters, but she knows how to win a
> battle or
> two.
> 
> >
> > 's also why I go along with millions - and see signs
> that Pynchon does
> > too - that
> > supporting an organized state where the formerly
> oppressed will take
> > the positions of
> > oppressor is really not worth the struggle...
> >
> > I think that is what the Events of 1968 were about -
> disdaining
> > that form of revolution where you think you will stop
> when your group
> > is on top...
> > but things just keep turning, Trotsky mows down the
> anarchists at Kronstad,
> > America land of the free has the fugitive slave act,
> Mao tse Tung gave
> > thousands of women
> > venereal disease, Napoleon follows the French
> Revolution by making
> > himself emperor
> >
> > is like one of those mini-golf holes where you try to
> hit the ball
> > into a recessed area
> > atop a knoll, but the momentum always carries it up
> and over, back
> > down again...Idiot's Delight
> > they called it...
> >
> >
> > --
> > - "The doctor said give him jug band music; it seems
> to make him feel
> > just fine!"
> >
>