CoL49 (5) Inamorati Anonymous

[Page]

>From Robin:

"From this day I swear I will stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or 
cat, car, every kind there is." (About Inamorati Anonymous, not Robin.)

Is there not a double sense of loving cars? One can love cars, as I did when 
a foolish youth; but one can also love cars as Rachael did. Or a 
combination: fucking a carberator on your Porsche.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 4:31 AM
Subject: CoL49 (5) Inamorati Anonymous


> We start The Crying of Lot 49 in the center:
>
> He had believed too much in the lot, he believed not at all in the
> station. Yet to look at him now, in the twilit living room, gliding
> like a large bird in an updraft toward the sweating shakerful of
> booze, smiling out of his fat vortex ring's centre, you'd think all
> was flat calm, gold, serene.
> PC 6
>
> As the book progresses, we move towards the margins. The book starts
> with Oedipa coming out of a relationship to big-time plutocrat Pierce
> Inverarity, having moved into the waiting arms of used-car salesman
> Mucho Maas. By the time we are settled into the novel's "present",
> Mucho [now a DJ at a top 40 radio station] is showing an unfortunate
> taste for jail bait. It is safe to say that Mrs. Maas is in an
> unstable marriage. As collateral damage in executing Inverarity's
> will, Oedipa slips and falls into a relationship with the oily lawyer
> Metzger. The next time we see Oedipa in a compromising position, John
> Nefastis [the ne plus ultra of the creepy nerd] offers to do it to the
> evening news:
>
> "It's OK," he said. "Please don't cry. Come on in on the couch.
> The news will be on any minute. We can do it there."
>
> "It?" said Oedipa. "Do it? What?"
>
> "Have sexual intercourse," replied Nefastis. "Maybe there'll be
> something about China tonight. I like to do it while they talk
> about Viet Nam, but China is best of all. You think about all
> those Chinese. Teeming. That profusion of life. It makes it
> sexier, right?"
> PC 86
>
> Note that Pynchon applied for [and was refused] a position at U.C.
> Berkeley in the math department in 1964. This note is illuminating in
> several ways:
>
> "One letter from Mexico in 1964 details the profound effects of
> the Kennedy assassination on Pynchon’s mental state. A
> negative review of V. and his self-professed inability to plot
> have him questioning his worth as a writer, but rejection from
> Cal-Berkeley’s math department tips the balance back in favor
> of writing.
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_news.html
>
> By the time we reach "The Greek Way", Oedipa has lost her "sexual
> relevance." She is drawn by her urge to uncover the mystery of
> Trystero to "a fag Joint", wandering onto a stop for a tourist tour
> through San Francisco: "If you're well behaved we'll hit Finoccio's
> next."
>
> Oedipa is at her crossroads here, in the moment before she drifts into
> "The Greek Way":
>
> Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being
> presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and
> interpenetrated with the dead man's estate. Here in San
> Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there
> might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away
> and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random,
> and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely
> nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix.
> PC 88
>
> It only takes  her an hour of drifting into the evening's first crowds
> before Oedipa runs into a muted posthorn:
>
> When things had calmed she was near the door with an
> unidentifiable drink in her fist, jammed against somebody tall in
> a suede sport coat. In the lapel of which she spied, wrought
> exquisitely in some pale, glimmering alloy, not another cerise
> badge, but a pin in the shape of the Trystero post horn. Mute
> and everything.
> PC 89
>
> It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get
> peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in
> among the words.
> PC 55
>
> It is about this point in the story where Oedipa seriously questions
> her own sanity:
>
> "Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going
> out of my head."
>
> "You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman."
>
> "I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,"
> she pleaded. "But I'm not your enemy. I don't want to be."
>
> "What about my friend?" He came spinning around on the stool
> to face her again. "You want to be that, Arnold?"
>
> "I don't know," she thought she'd better say.
>
> He looked at her, blank. "What do you know?"
> PC 90
>
> And, by this point, what has she projected, imagined, concocted on her
> own?
>
> The anonymous gent with the posthorn pin happens to be part of
> Inamorati Anonymous, an organization of isolates who protect each
> other from the perils of falling in love. This is a nested story, the
> gent with the pin explains the presence of the muted posthorn in a
> story that points back to Yoyo/Rocketdyne. A computer [IBM 7094] takes
> over an executive's job in a company that makes ICBMs for doomsday
> devices. The former executive places an ad in the LA Times, asking if
> anyone could come up with a good reason not to commit suicide. The
> letters he receives that argue in favor of suicide happen to have
> muted posthorns on their envelopes:
>
> The stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned
> almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved
> the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly
> the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing
> clearly through the watermark. "A sign," he whispered, "is what
> it is." If he'd been a religious man he would have fallen to his
> knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: "My big
> mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love:
> hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found
> a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign,
> revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will
> be its emblem." And he did.
> PC 93/94
>
> On a certain level, flows and tracks of entropy are the signs [or the
> residue of the signs—the spoor] leading towards the Trystero.
> Accepting lovelessness as inevitable is entropic in its own special
> way. The trajectory of Oedipa's search for love [in all the wrong
> places] ends with her losing everyone she cares for.
>


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