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

[Mark Kohut]

Benny in the city, with or without the Jets, yo-yoing, is
more of his lostness.....our lostness as America became cities

from a small town unity................



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, August 26, 2010 11:04:00 PM
Subject: Re: More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Where is Benny from then? having worked in 5 Towns, young, in construction,
> I thought he was clearly from ...the area anyway. NO?

If Benny were a 5-towns Jewish boy he'd have no business working on a
road crew. Young P's old man was an elected position in the town (this
gets kinda confusing since the 5-towns are not towns and neither is
Hempstead) of Hempstead. Glencove, where P attended HS, is not a small
town or what Laura described as a a small town. None of these towns
are, and none were, when P was a kid, small town america, as in Our
Town. The south shore of long island, whrere 5-yowns is and was when P
was at cornell and when Benny worked there, a strange place. Jewish,
for the most part, it pretended to an affluence and waspishness it
could never truly understand or be a part of. Pynchon seems to have
utter disdain foe the place and with good reason. Benny is a city kid.
That he would cross lives with Fina and Rachel is not a stretch. That
he would ev en give Owlglass a second look or run from Fina is absurd.


>
> No, I am not reading him as TRP (except as TRP read himself thematically, if 
he
> did,
> into Benny's hometown in V.). I am trying to read him within V.
>
> Point is still: small-townness where "everyone knows your name".....
>
> Which I would link if I were good enough with Jefferson's village center
> homestead,
>
> small farmers, communities of M & D's time    AND
> with the European village where Cyprian recovered in AtD.....................
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, August 26, 2010 5:23:56 PM
> Subject: Re: More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street
>
> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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