CoL49 (1) Too Much Kirsch in the Fondue page one-ish

[Mark Kohut]

Well, not quite Edie Sedgewick, I'd say, but the point is taken. [Velvet Underground aside, Edie Sedgewick was found by Andy Warhol when he, thru Paul Morrisey, were "managing" the Velevet Underground] 

Oedipa is the kind of woman---maybe?---Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) was written about? "deckful of days which seemed more or less identical"...those repressed 50s hanging on until..............
 
In Spring 1963, a poll of graduating college students had results little changed from the 50s.
The large majority of women wanted early marriage, picket fences, early perfect families, for example.
 
By Fall 1963, new college students, class of 1966, had inverted their values, esp. had the women. The free speech movement had started on college campuses, pot smoking was a spreading wanted thing; women wanted adventure before they settled down......and more.
 
Source for polls: Wm Manchester's "Glory and the Dream".
 
MLKjr's I Have a Dream Speech within the March on Washington is August 1963. 
 
James Meredith graduates from U of Miss, 1963. summer.
 
Art Roberts, music director of WLS, placed "Please Please Me" into radio rotation in late February 1963. Beatles are hot in Europe--Beatlemania---but not until early 1964 in America.......good story on how it would have been late 1963 but for JFKs assassination. 
 
And, not least for social insight and for some sense of the future,  The Feminine Mystique, published 19 February 1963 is .............a huge bestseller. 
 
  Annus Mirabilis
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
                 --Philip Larkin
 
 
 Do we agree that Crying of Lot 49 is set in 1964, right after all of the above? Or slightly later? Or, pubbed in 1966 was it to be read as
a novel about NOW then? (or sorta both?)
 
 




----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2009 2:07:21 PM
Subject: CoL49 (1) Too Much Kirsch in the Fondue page one-ish

    One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a
    Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much
    kirsch in the fondue. . .

We start in a suburban world, stable to the point of of stasis, a throwback to the fantasies of the fifties. Oedipa Maas is a Young Republican living in "Kinneret-Among-The-Pines," possibly an analogue for Carmel by the Sea, possibly a stand-in for Cambria in the Pines—two towns filled with good conservative values and high-ticket nick-knacks.:

    . . . her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-
    Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came
    through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort
    Wayne Settecento Ensemble's variorum recording of the Vivaldi
    Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist) . . .

Oedipa Mass---possibly the most empathetic of all of Pynchon's Characters---starts off as one of the most conservative of all of Pynchon's characters. We start with a young woman facing right and by the end of the novel she has been firmly been directed west. By the end of the novel she might as well be Edie Sedgwick:

http://www.jiscilla.com/photoblog/images/EdieSedgwick.jpg