More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street

[alice wellintown]

But Benny is not from 5-towns. He worked there once, road
construction. Benny can't buy a begal and lox in a good greek diner in
5-towns. And, if you are reading Benny as Pynchon, Pynchon is not from
5-Towns. 5-Towns is south shore boarder of Town of Hempstead Jewish.
Pynchon's world, just across the Island to the North, where my husband
grew up, ios Gatsby Land.

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nah, I'm sticking to my last.....in V. the Street is what the Tower is in Lot
> 49, analogously...
> it is everywhere and Benny is a nowhere man on them...............
>
> There is an undertow of innocent wholeness in that Five Towns world where Benny
> came from
> and that attached him to Rachel...
>
> Psychic wholeness despite whatever. I do not think The Secret Integration is
> much relevant to
> V. (even if your fine high evaluation of it is right)..............
>
>  in
> The Secret Integration resist racism, from their parents, their
> schools, the community organizations, the religious institutions, the
> books they read, the monuments and statues and museums and
> architecure...and their resistance is Romantic, they use their wits,
> their imaginations, to construct an integrated society, they construct
> Carl from their encounter with the real Carl, and from the waste, what
> the modern consumer cult tosses away, refuses to integrate, much as
> the artists young P so admires, both the romantic and gothic ones he
> describes in his luddite essay and the ones he admires out in Watts,
> who, through imagination and some "primitive and natural" magic (these
> are two essential elements of romantic art) create something sublime.
> So, the Unity (Adams's 11th-14th century cult of the Virgin force
> Unity, and the whitebread homogenious suburban Levit Long Island unity
> turned suburban sprawl is not favored over the multiplicity of the
> City Street.  Young P hasn't quite worked this out in V., but in CL49,
> he begins to work this out. By GR, he finds his place. Rilke, not
> Adams, provides the solution. Now, when I say Rilke, just like when I
> say Adams, I am using shorthand...and yes it is reductionist, but if
> I'm to say anthing with coherency in this rediculous forum, I need all
> manner of short hands.  The Secret Integration is set in the Military
> Industrial Complex. If you look everything up, Mr. Reed, all the
> propper names, Mr. Hollinder, you will discover that The secret
> Integration has a subtext or under the tapestry or what Moore (in his
> full length study of GR) calls, the multiple parody of allusiveness or
> something like that..that points to the bomb and the forces that built
> the cold war kartels. But, anyway, young P is caught, early on,
> between Ben Franklin, who leaves Boston and goes to the CITY of
> brotherly love, to find himself, his fortune, and to get up early and
> do all the things on his schedule or list and Charles Brockden Brown's
> romantic heros who leave the country and come to the CITY to find
> corruption, filth, crime, quaker city sin. Of course, P knows his
> Gatsby; all of the characters in Gatby are WESTERNETRS wgo come east
> to NYC. The narrator, Nick, comes from a family of HARDwear sellers.
> Not SOFTwear or anything else abstract or intangible, but he goes into
> the BOND business. Bonds are wall street calculations, complex
> formulas, intangibles. So, a tool maker man from the west (Fitzgerald
> read Adams and Adams has a profound influence on GG) goes East to sell
> wall street abstrations. The dream gets wrapped around the City, where
> Jay Gatz, a list maker and schedule man, has the second great FALL of
> One Dimentional Man (Marcuse). But what of the Trees? Prairie? The
> Woods, dear Henry (not Adams, the Walden Guy)? The Sea, Herman? Malta?
> The Rock and Soul? Is the land, America, that great green breast in
> dutch sailor's eyes that was stripped to make room for gatsby's house,
> haunted? The house of the seven gables? Read The Devil and Tom Walker,
> and AGTD, if you dare.
>
>
>
>