V2nd - Chapter 8 - triptych plus one / coonskin cap / Paola / Outlandish Records catalog

[Mark Kohut]

I vote for this q/ob of yours, Mike
 Benny's disbelief in stuff is of
the type that interferes with doing stuff? 





----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 11:18:58 AM
Subject: V2nd - Chapter 8 - triptych plus one / coonskin cap / Paola / 
Outlandish Records catalog

a)  The 4 sections of Chapter 8 develop Benny, Roony, Benny, Stencil

Since in Section 3, McClintic Sphere and his band play a tune called
"Fugue Your Buddy",
-- a fugue often has 3 parts: theme, development, recapitulation, but
there are triple fugues and even quadruple fugues

section 1 (Benny deciding to look for work) would contain the theme
section 2 (Roony rampant) - Roony is sort of what Benny could develop
into, by continuing along the trajectory or promising start of going
to work?
section 3 (Benny settling into the routine of Roony's world, or his
place in King Roony's court)
section 4 (Stencil - gosh, one of the best Stencil bits coming up)
does he represent the something else that will eventually unseat
Profane from his trajectory - Roony doesn't believe in any of the
stuff he's doing, but he is able to do it and enjoy it anyway -
perhaps like his childhood racism, he accepts it as the way the world
is (as a scammable place) -- whereas Benny's disbelief in stuff is of
the type that interferes with doing stuff?  And although he doesn't
believe in Stencil's rigmarole either, it's so obviously imaginary
that perhaps he finds it more attractive (the way Doc, in IV, decides
to trust the bad guys?) (But all that's yet to come, right now I'm
just suggesting that the juxtaposition of Stencil next to what could
be an account of BP falling into Roony's orbit and becoming a
fully-fledged WSC'er, is a strange attractor that bids fair to turn
the story in a different direction)

----------------
coonskin cap as hermaphrodite symbol:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol  for me, the salient
feature of a coonskin cap (other than the offensive racist
connotation, or is that just me flashing back to one of the uglier
terms I encountered in childhood?) is that it's a round thing with a
straight hangy-down thing.
Of the symbols on the Gender symbol list at the wiki page linked
above, the one that's a circle with a straight line is the "neuter"
symbol (unicode U+26B2)

however, I guess if you consider the cap portion as a receptive shape,
and the tail as a projective shape...

---------------------------

Paola - I guess, in addition to getting revved up by thinking of his
song, Roony also gets hot thinking of Paola.
The description of her as having "the passive look of an object of
sadism, something to be attired in various inanimate costumes and
fetishes, tortured, subjected to the weird indignities of Pig's
catalogue, have her smooth and of course virginal-looking limbs
twisted into attitudes to inflame a decadent taste..." -- segues into
the description of Mafia on the next page: "One hand at her crotch,
one twisted in her hair, he lifted her like the victim she wasn't,
half-carried, half-tossed her to the bed where she lay in a sprawl of
white skin, black pubic hair and socks, all confused."

One thinks of Greta Erdmann and a whole bunch of kids conceived by
guys who'd just seen her at the movies...
now RW is getting turned on by what he imagines to be the perverted
fantasies of Pig regarding Paola.

Should we think about the "king of the subway" earlier in the chapter,
and wonder if Roony, as "king of the decky-dance" isn't riding some
kind of powered vehicle equally obliviously ?

-------------------------

Outlandish Records:
Volkswagens in Hi-Fi
The Leavenworth Glee Club Sings Old Favorites
tape recorder disguised as a Kotex dispenser in the ladies' room at Penn Station
Microphone in hand, lurking in false beard and Levi's in the
Washington Square Fountain
whorehouse on 125th Street (crossing those tracks again)
the bullpen at Yankee Stadium on opening day
the version to end all versions of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture
The Street Fight in Amsterdam Street
2 McClintic Sphere records

--- Benny comes so close to becoming a clerk at Outlandish, too!
Winsome surely would've hired him.

Before McClintic Sphere, the closest thing to a normal record is the
Leavenworth Glee Club

Seems like there's some kind of moral in "Outlandish Records" finally
seeking out an art form born in the USA...