V2nd - Chapter 8 - idiosyncratic rendering of Benny as WA

[Michael Bailey]

It's true: I've been skipping around, lapsing into meta musings,
displaying nostalgia for the smokes of yesteryear.

But today I rededicate myself to sequential close reading of Chapter 8.
a-and constantly solicit feedback too, like a good host!

p 240 - "I feel like a gigolo."
Okay, the urge to change Benny just a bit, give him red hair, black
"contraceptive" eyeglasses, make him trim and nervous...he's coming
out with Woody Allen lines all the time!  Schtick!

It's crucial to my analysis that practically everybody in Pynchon
books is viewed with some affection!  Otherwise, for Pynchon to
appropriate the yiddishe self-deprecating humor tradition in order to
portray someone we are supposed to hate would be as bad as Mafia's
fiction...wouldn't it?

side bet:

Those of us who've read Mortality and Mercy in Vienna:
the mixture of "mensch and Machiavel" explicit in that story,
is it relevant to Pynchon's choice to make BP Jewish-Italian?








-- 
- "After all, Salaam and Shalom are only slight different spellings of
 a word that means the same thing in Arabic and Hebrew.
Which translated into English means peace be upon you." - Norman Spinrad