Not Jimi's cross town traffic kazoo but a west side story

[michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com]

Coolio and as always, thanks for the references and the redirect...I'm not quite abashed enough not to object slightly that I'm being misharacterized if described as suggesting young P as a partisan of the hipster morality: au contraire, I'd say he's interested enough to describe scenes but golly, there are deep moral (and aesthetic)reservations that frame every instance of libertinism in the tale; these are certainly not accidental or incidental;  the insights that precipitate out, the terms that remain after cancelling like terms, may seem provisional, tentative and offhand - keep cool, but care, type of thing - but unlike Queen Jane's advisers, they don't seem to be pushing in the direction of any more drastic conclusions than seeing things as they are, which is one of the great things about these stories...wrt to the nose job in particular, I'm pretty sure that a writer with P's skills, if he wanted to go all polemic, he could have us up in arms: this is a rape, despite the mitigating factors, which though charmingly described, never completely undermine the knowledge that this is not something you'd want to happen to your sister...although she might enjoy the song...anyway, my pov is  we will learn he got into the profession because of love, he's got enough joie de vivre to send her on her way with a song, but we will never find even a flicker of approval in the story for the rape if we read honestly and attentively, smooth her hair with automatic hand though she may
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-----Original Message-----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Sender: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:08:47 
To: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Not Jimi's cross town traffic kazoo but a west side story

The notion that young P is some kinda hipper than Farina playboy of
the Eastern Village promoting swinging happenings and women's sexu and
liberation here in V. is a kinda intersting feminist lecturing  I
suspect that P isn't quite there yet. Even Oedipa, a conservative gal
who gets out on the road and discovers the lust of younger men is not
quite there yet. And, when P does finally get there (VL), if in fact
he ever does (I say he doesn't) all that feminist stuff from the
educated pussy is not as amusing (and it is in the amusement tt we
find the ethos) to our heroine (that is Prairie not Zoyd) as those who
would save her from THEIR visions and re-visions with their visions
and re-visions (or what they once had a Ginsbergian vision of or was
it something on the Tube or the bad aci?) of her time and place of
birth    The chapter, as Mark noted, doesn't quite fit in. But P slams
it in there and finishes it off by naling on the iceing with a silly
song. The focus on the luddite issues that inform the love and death
theme is all wine and candy, but we shouldn't miss the Forest Gumpings
of her-story for the trees that Prairie is so amazed by (no, it is not
the LSD the idiots put in her baby ba ba). So, Shakespeare. Yeah,
another high school biggy (did I mention the influence of Our Town?)
is what we need to read here. And, Henry Adams but I kn ow we're all
sick and tired of Henry and the young man he adores, Clarence King.
R&J has been required reading for high school and young college kids
in literature or English programs for about 75 years. I wonder why. I
really do, when  Midsummer, the companion play, and certainly a better
play for young people who are crazy with harmones and gender and sex
and well, sex, but R&J, well it has been re-made several million times
to address the specific crosstown traffic of the young and beautiful
not to mention the damned (gotta get that Fitzgerald in there because
his influence on early P is as important as the spy novels and boy
adventure books). One such, of course, is West Side Story.  The nose
job chapter, like the previous chapter, starts with a modern
transportation system and she is traveling across the town (P looked
into a bit of Germantown history), but the point is that she might be,
if she were not so afraid of faceless Puerto Rican rock slinging and
humping in the dark ubnder the bridge in central park (the paranoia
even to gunshots is her's), she might find a young amigo, even an
Angel. But, we are sick. yes, the tube, the film, the stage, the text
...run that in reverse.

note Jimi layed down some of that pipe with a kazoo

 West Side Story (1961) is an energetic, widely-acclaimed,
melodramatic musical - a modern-day, loose re-telling of Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet tragedy of feuding families, although the setting is
the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s with conflict
between rival street gangs rather than families. West Side Story is
still one of the best film adaptations of a musical ever created, and
the finest musical film of the 60s. It arrived at a time when the
silver screen was realizing tremendous competition from TV and other
genres of cinematic entertainment.