CoL49 (5) Round The Bend

[Ian Livingston]

"The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of
man."  Patti Smith

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> I've got three more posts [still percolating in my noggin] then will pass
> the Olympian's torch to Natalia/Dave Monday and wander off into the
> wilderness. Thanks for all your feedback, alternate views and general
> avoidance of fire-fights
>
> I came in thinking mostly about the magical subtexts in CoL49 and left
> seeing much more of the novella's quotidian placement in the context of
> Southern & Bay Area California of the mid-sixties. Once again, a quote from
> "Journey Into the Mind of Watts":
>
>        While the white culture is concerned with various forms of
>        systematized folly--the economy of the area in fact depending
>        on it--the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities
>        like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites
>        have mostly chosen--and can afford--to ignore. The two cultures
>        do not understand each other, though white values are
>        displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens, and
>        though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to
>        miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must
>        drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to
>        very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a
>        change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a
>        look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But
>        Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles
>        further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.
>
> While all those allusions to Revelation & Pentecost & various & sundry
> Heresies still float over and through the story, this time around I was
> struck by "The Two Americas" theme that runs through "The Crying of Lot 49":
>
>        If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any
>        other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might
>        have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any
>        of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred
>        alienations, if only she'd looked. She stopped a minute between
>        the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming
>        conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on knowing
>        as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks
>        ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened,
>        authenticated the great night around her. If only she'd looked.
>        She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the money'd
>        run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm flatnesses
>        where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes.
>
>        Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero;
>        were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's
>        disinheritance? Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the
>        Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day
>        might have. What was left to inherit?
>        PC 148/149
>
> To suggest the  inheritance is Waste itself seems much too obvious—so
> obvious that it must be the point. When Oedipa became aware of that "Other
> America", late one night in San Francisco, she became a witness to the waste
> generated by Inverarity's estate. Oftimes it appeared as human waste,
> poignantly so with the old sailor and his letter to his ex, dropped off by
> Oedipa into a W.A.S.T.E. receptacle.
>
>
>
>