V-2nd - Chapter 10: FLIP FLOP

[Michael Bailey]

Dog Days: also, a literal dog appears, and vomits -- we are spared him
proverbially returning to it...

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> in this FLIP FLOP section, binariness is, not surprisingly, alluded to. Grows in
> prominence to Vineland (and beyond, I guess).
>

isn't somebody mentioned as having rung some kind of change on the cycle
(can't find it atm)

> Does not seem to have the same resonances yet here in V.--or does it?
>

Have you ever had people demand a yes or no answer?  It tends to drive
me slightly nuts...not sure if Pynchon ever gets that way, but he's
meditated on it for sure, in GR Roger Mexico has for his territory all
the little spaces between 1 and 0, in Vineland the binaries line up to
No for Frenesi trying to cash her check...

>In Vineland, the binaries
> Rereading yet again, I am struck by the bleakness of the NY of 1956 here. Yes,
> vertical death like horizontal stacks of bodies. All dead.
>

Eliot influence?  "I did not know death had undone so many"

> And that long passage Laura quoted about all kinds of deaths in the dog days."in
> a congruent world that did not care"---very echoing of
> existentialism (as a philosophy) phrases...
>
> Bleaker than Bleak House. What a wasteland.
>
>

although for $300 back then you could get a trip to Cuba...
and there was this nice little park behind the library, and the
proprietors of several eating and drinking establishments were very
kind to young couples...
and somewhere in the city, a man's wife and son went to the country to
escape the heat, and left him alone to deal with his upstairs
neighbor, who happened to be Marilyn Monroe...
(7 Year Itch - 1955)


-- 
"Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a
violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural
liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the
whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all
governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical." -
Adam Smith