Cof L49

[David Payne]

lotsa of Alice in Wonderland connections made in this group reading:
 
* Curiouser & Curiouser
* Driblette's head / Cheshire Cat
* Satirical poems & songs (see Laura, below)
* Down the rabbit hole / out of the tower (see Bailey, below)
 
I was also reminded of AiW by Dr. H's pill offerings.
 
Others?
 
 
 
On Sat, 6 Jun 2009 01:00:06 -0400, michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com wrote:

> Laura wrote:
>>> The satirical poems and songs that crop up in Alice In Wonderland seem like an inspiration.
> and I replied:
>>
>> Pynchon, though, often aims for lyricism rather than satire, in the
>> songs and I think it's also fruitful to place that production value
>> higher on an imputed scale of values in his prose than many people
>> seem to do.
>>
> which sounds ever so slightly rude, though the sentiment is quite innocent.
>
> Alice's adventures are analogous to Oedipa's in several ways.
> First, Alice's trip down the rabbit hole interrupts a sweet summer
> afternoon, and young Alice is obviously well-born, young and healthy.
> Although Oedipa's angst is inarguably real, the circumstances of her
> life are what many people would call idyllic. We know from _Vineland_
> that the divorce she's heading toward is going to be "unusually
> amiable"; she's not lacking for material well-being, she's the good
> fortune to be attractive and orgasmic. A-and although she correctly
> senses conspiracy (or at least, something piscine), she herself is not
> directly threatened.
>
> Like Alice (who faces the various bogies of Wonderland with direct
> questions, applies her own standards of behavior to them, and finally
> puts them in their place definitively) Oedipa has a brave heart: not
> quailing before the hazards in any environment (instanced by her
> willingness to pinch a boat with the Paranoids, have sex with a
> stranger, introduce herself to various and sundry, walk the streets of
> San Francisco without either Michael Douglas or Karl Malden), and
> daring - in the current chapter - to detach herself from a guided tour
> in a defense facility, an environment many of us might find daunting,
> and strike up a conversation with Koteks.
>
> Delving a little deeper, the situations and characters Alice meets are
> distortions of recognizable types in Victorian England, which in many
> cases are still recognizable today. In some avuncular way, Carroll
> may have been preparing the young dear with his tale for experiences
> she could expect in her future. Unwind a little bit of the kinky age
> difference and CofL49 might be a sort of Baedeker OBA compiled for
> young female Republicans.
>
> Specifically, as the Mad Hatter referred to mercury-poisoned
> craftsmen, the Red Queen to power-mad aristocrats, "nothing drier than
> a caucus race" to the predictability of politics, etc etc etc, a young
> lady worth her salt in California would probably encounter the land
> speculators, the disgruntled techies, the New Agers (what is the
> Nefastis Machine but an attempt to graft psychism with an overcoat of
> Science?), the wingnuts, and - if she actually looks - the
> disenfranchised.
>
> I think Carroll's songs are tighter, in general, and more loony...
> (We went to see the Dali museum in St Petersburg yesterday, and in the
> context of those works a little light went on in my mind and tonight
> I'm thinking of Lewis Carroll as maybe the first surrealist.)
> if he were in charge of the songs in CofL49, Baby Igor's song would be
> 3 or 4 stanzas. The Serenade would not change much, it reminds me in
> some ways of the Mock Turtle's Song. Serge's song is the least
> Carrollian and reminds me that Pynchon's purposes are not the same as
> Carroll's.
> But after all this Wonderland aspect is but one of the many layers,
> only a fraction of the surplus value.
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