Lot 49 Ch 3 Random Notes & Shit

[Michael Bailey]

> "Things then...turning curious"--rather standard detective novel boilerplate?

or Alice in Wonderland?


> "revelations in progress around her"--could be but could also be
> Oedipa's plunge into solipsism or Pierce's clever sickness
>

could also be Biblical reference, horsemen and vials and so forth...


>
> Mike Fallopian--for a book so hung up on revelation and otherworldly
> spirits, there are lots of references to the earthly--female anatomy
> reproduction doesn't get any more earthly.
>

Gabriele Fallopio was born in Modena and died in Padua.
His scientific, stuidous life was an interesting counterpoint to the
[murdering bastards] feuding nobility celebrated in The Courier's
Tragedy.
And yet he spent a lot of it cutting up people just like they did -
though his dissectees were already dead...


> 51
>
> excluded middle--the creeping horror of both marxism and capitalism
>

making the connection between surplus value (Marxist, right?) and a
professional wanting patent credits is obtuse at first glance, but run
that the other way (workers should have a right to the fruits of their
work just as inventors should to theirs*) and you find that Metzger is
deriding simple justice and defending vicious custom...
an oppressor playing the part of a lawyer...

<rant> --- people talk about how managers and professionals and
creative people work so hard and therefore deserve high wages - yet
aren't their educations heavily subsidized?  Isn't going to school
almost always more fun than working? Isn't professional work generally
a lot more fun than labor?  so why is it people blindly accept that
they should be paid more than a laborer? They have worked in concert,
unionized if you will, to claim they are worthy of respect and
propagandized till people believed it</rant>

Metzger's reactionary stance here prefigures his taking himself off
the case later...and his refusal to listen to Oedipa's reasoning,
instead pigeonholing her as a "libber", is offensive.

> Peter Pinguid is also a speculator in real estate like Pierce; Oedipa
> giggles at the connection; she won't be later as the connections start
> piling up
>

like the Traverse family, some of whose attitudes were shaped by being
born on the rebel side, the sons of the Confederacy dispersed but
certainly didn't disappear


> in the ladies latrine (i don't equate latrine w/ a woman's
> bathroom--pynchon plays around with gender roles throughout the book)
>

I get military connotations from "latrine" - Oedipa's trip becomes
more of a forced march, and - like Frenesi - she starts "soldiering"?



> 56
>
> Lake Inverarity--a place of real Bad Shit--no trees, earth-moving machines
>
the place also resonates with where the bones were found
- still it doesn't stop O from loving the center island

> Oedipa calls Di Pressi a selfish schmuck--if anyone is selfish its her
> companion Metzger who sits on the booze so the Paranoids wont get to
> it--she does have her blind spots


yeah, she's taking up for the Mafia guy - people go all apeshit
sentimental over them for some odd reason, The Godfather, The Sopranos
- I could never understand it


>
> 79
>
> Driblette gives the spirit flesh by his art but by drowning himself
> later he returns to that spirit by sacrificing his flesh--is oblivion,
> madness, the only alternative to the flesh, the only way to some sort
> of redemption, to be subsumed into some general truth? is that in
> Oedipa's future
>

he's taking a shower and talking about offing himself.  (after the
play) -- does he think this is a turn-on for Oedipa?
Are all the guys who are interested in her doomed (like O'Connell in
Northern Exposure?)
What's his motivation?  I end up preferring the more paranoid notion
that the Trystero got him.


> ‘wharfingers’: impoverished, diseased sailors who had been left behind
> when their vessels departed to prevent shipboard epidemics.
>

I was way too lazy to look that up.  Thanks!

> is pynchon the diseased sailor spinning
> the ball here
> and we're driblette--
> making that wharfinger's yarn real?

that's a nice image, goes back to the old story of the caveman
unskilled at the hunt painting the cave walls, artist as outcast?

>
> or is pynchon simply driblette
>
> making real what those beautiful,
> diseased drunken sailors
> sweated, humped and cried
> all those years in innumerable bars, beds
> and snow drop prisons across the globe?
>

I think he must've gotten a lot out of his tour of duty in the Navy.
went in a prospective Mike Fallopian,
came out a troubadour...



-- 
"For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as.
For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are." - GR, p
136