V-2: Re: BDSL, 1- Genetic Therapy for Inherent Vice

[Michael Bailey]

I sort of like the Whole Sick Crew scenes...
even though they are all pretty minor characters.

The cheap shots at Mafia aren't the most palatable part of the book,
but considering them as a part of a larger whole
(you don't have to buy this - although I'm reasonably sincere about
it) in which significant progress was made toward undermining
militarism and authoritarianism by associating them with private
perversion, hungupness, uptightness...

so like, you had "girls say yes to boys who say no"

but you also had missiles as phallic projections, the "violence as
repressed homosexuality" stuff (good examples in Vineland),
(also, did you ever read the Harold Hedd comix?  There is a great bit
in, I think the book is "Anus-clenching adventures with Harold
Hedd"...
or maybe "Harold Hedd and Hitler's Cocaine..." where he gets out of a
fight by offering to have sex with the guy)
an assumption that the sex lives of the power elite were screwed up,
an assumption that those who sold their souls for money and
power were forced to utilize prostitutes because they were incapable of love,
an assumption that making love was different from having sex, and that
there was an ease of affection between people
of a pacific and kindly nature which would never be known by
"Greedheads" -- this was a term that people spoke aloud and with
disdain!  (and rightly so, i continue to believe: "quite right,
slick!" (-Donovan))

(ok so this was all a couple years later than V.'s action, but P was
in the avant garde)

anyway, a policy among the left, the young, the hip, the beautiful,
that the official faces which in Vineland were revealed by the 24fps
cameras to bespeak the impoverished and twisted personalities
(...souls...) behind them, were animated in that wicked fashion
by the conservative, moneygrubbing, Social Darwinist warmongering that
they espoused...

...that ugly philosophy makes people ugly...that imperialism in the
polis is reflected by unsavory praxis in the boudoir...

and since, as Ishmael Reed wrote, "writin' is fightin'" (which as a
pacifist I must disavow to an extent, whilst admitting a certain
attractive resonance to the notion, and a preference for that form of
fighting over, like, hmmmm, ALL others...if one must contend...),
the proliferation of violent and greedy philosophies needed (and still
needs) to be met in the field of, um, battle...(right?)

anyway, although it may have been a somewhat ad hominem way to
proceed, it was effective, demonstrably true in many cases
(witness any number of sex scandals, and that's just the ones we know
about, among those foax)
(the knuckledragging slavery-justifying warmongering conservative
ranks don't have a monopoly on sex scandals,
but that's the beauty part, not only do we strike a blow against
political enemies when we accuse
them of unsavory practices, but, we also weigh in against unsavory
practices (which may come back to haunt us, but that is actually
a feature, not a bug...)) and it sticks in yer mind...

 so the satirist instead of arguing against the *philosophy* of the
Roman matron who said "come back with your shield or on it",
lampoons her looks, private life, and so forth

and I'd put the Mafia material in that general category

it may be just a little more vehement than the criticism of our hero
Benny, a little more focused than the implied critique of Stencil
as completely heartless (tin man)...but it's quickly over, and it's
not like he gives her a nasty disease or makes her suffer (unless you
think of Objectivism as a nasty disease, which I tend to...)

looking for that cure that bandwraith mentioned


and but then so also therefore, if we stipulate a political spin, and
that it's not supposed to be nice, then we can look at
the nosejob and the seduction of Esther as analogous to the rape in
BDSL although I'm just not familiar
enough, all I remember is ol' Gnossos, didn't he give her a codeine
suppository or something, and didn't she
have knee sox?

so, remembering only those details, I'd say I'm not quite ready to
compare/contrast yet,