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

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Up front, Wendell Maas comes across as a smug, traditional little patriarch.  Oedipa's had a pretty major bit of news, but it's lost in the shuffle of Wendell coming home and griping over his prosaic day over a cocktail.  Oedipa, the good little housewife, lets him go first.

But Wendell is "Mucho" Maas.  His intense sensitivity to the horrors of the used car business makes him seem like a precursor to Pirate Prentice in GR.  He's virtually clairvoyant as he "reads" a beat-up old trade-in.  He certainly feels others' pain (though not Oedipa's).  Oedipa, in turn, leaves him for an indeterminate amount of time without much fanfare.  His hipper job at the radio station seems to have rendered him more dull than when he was a used car salesman.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: May 4, 2009 10:42 AM
>To: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: CoL49 (1) Too Much Kirsch in the Fondue page one-ish
>
>
>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
>
>
>
>      
>