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

[alice wellintown]

Not buying your fusing of VL and V., but some sorta radical chic
critique by an avante garde young P is in play here, but this is not a
cheap shot at Rand; A shot at the decky dance of Rand and her
Shrugging Fountainheads and all those teens and college brats lugging
around those anti-feminst, he-man individualst reactionary reactions
to not exactly what Orwell had in mind when he wrote 1984. There is
something about this Mafia and her Husband, and Rand & Co. that is
quite clever. Subtle variation on the theme young P is developing
here. I'd say, the sexist reading or the cheapshot reading or both are
missing the point. Try the race card.

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 1:44 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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,
>