Chap 4 YoYodyne, factory of war

[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> p. 82 "It was some such feeling" [to at least project an arrow on the dome] that ...got her to a Yoyodyne stockholders' meeting.
>

where they sing songs - we all know IBM had just such a songbook for
their execs, right?

but anyway...
okay, it keeps comin' up, that "project a world" thingie.

 I tend to read for the sex'n'drugs, and music - rock-n-roll but also
other stuff like Bartok - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF0PxroEcZw
(Robin probably could say which versions are best)..., and I'm always
looking out for a good yarn...snappy locutions, jokes...and (possibly
pathologically) minute analysis of verbiage and punctuation, the more
to relish said snappy locutions, jokes, and twists of plot...

...not so much themes...(my shortcoming, I confess rather than boast)

but isn't "project a world" another version of the tapestry-in-tower
realization?
The differences betwixt the 2 are worthy of a good-old compare-and-contrast

a) the tower's a daylit scene with no clear end to the making, the
planetarium dark and enclosed with at least the implication of an
Outside World

b) there's an audience for the planetarium show (as Paul pointed out)
within the context of the conceit, whereas the audience for the Varo
painting is in a different level of simulacrum than the painting
itself

c) neither one is really that daunting, I mean honestly - or am I just
that superficial, more turned on by the idea of Metzger and Oedipa
doing it (and - "her climax, and Metzger's, when it came" - apparently
coming together: when "it" meaning the orgasm, came -- not, when
"they" separately came - it, one shared orgasm, was simultaneous with
the blown fuse, which is cool to contemplate), or more interested in
visualizing a Stoned Soul Picnic...
that I don't initially get why Oedipa would be moved to tears by the
Varo painting or Driblette would elaborate just as much on the
dissolution of the planetarium show by his demise as on the
possibilities of the performance.  Maybe for me this reading will help
develop a feel for their sadness.  Death and adult fiction are linked
in the Preface to Slow Learner, of course...

d) but if there is meant to be a linkage between the two concepts,
could there also be a progression intended?  Of the two, the
planetarium show seems more benign - if she adopts that as an image of
what she's doing, doesn't that give her a degree or two more freedom?

e) could there be an intended parallel between the 2 deaths, Pierce's
and Driblette's, both dying for lack of [her] love, or at least, dying
lacking love?

> Old men's hands on her thighs. Men who might have been twins---like Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome? Their hands roaming dream landscapes?? Dream landscapes usually positive places in TRP's world...What men want? Old men too old for Oedipa's fertility?
> Is Oedipa a female version of the Fisher King? Or, as Robin and others say, a Mary symbol? If she becomes pregnant, the land is
> now OK?
>

That's cool about the Romulus and Remus reference!  and likewise the
Fisher King, a redoing of that myth from the distaff pov mutatis
mutandis

-- later in the book, isn't there something about her going to a
gynecologist?  "they had no test for what she is pregnant with"

> "Quonset building, gunboats, invasion, platoon-sized groups (next page)" ....workers like a military action.
>

if she is going on a quest, from a home ("safe as houses") to a motel
to a play, being stripped of layers of clothing (and, by implication,
other types of insulation) to come closer to the world, there probably
would be a place en route where she'd encounter the
military-industrial complex...

the hands falling on her lap are also akin to the "manuus mortis" (?)
dead hand of militaristic tradition?

a-and what she runs into there is that she meets Stanley Koteks, who
in that hive of collectivism is basically lamenting his loss of
individuality...



-- 
"...songs by the Paranoids, and juicing and feeding pieces of eggplant
sandwich to a flock of ...seagulls...and hearing the plot of *The
Courier's Tragedy*...related near to unintelligible by eight memories
unlooping progressively into regions as strange to map as their rising
coils and clouds of pot smoke." - typical day on the Pynchon Liste