V-2 - Chapter 9 - "Everything Smelled Like Hairspray."

[Michael Bailey]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Robin Landseadel
>
> The following passage, read in light of "Teflon in Depth," is linked to both
> GR and Boeing/Rocketdyne. Note the alternation between the bombardment* at
> Gallipoli and the attack of the hairspray can, how the net effect of seeing
> the words on the page is so close to intercutting in films. It was a rather
> avante-garde trope back in 1966 to intercut between two otherwise unrelated
> scenes in a film:
>
>        She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length
>        mirror, saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she
>        fell over, taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can
>        hit the floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of
>        pressure the stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can
>        swiftly about the bathroom. Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa
>        rolling around, trying to get back on her feet, amid a great sticky
>        miasma of fragrant lacquer. "Oh, for Pete's sake," he said in his
>        Baby Igor voice. The can, hissing malignantly, bounced off the
>        toilet and whizzed by Metzger's right ear, missing by maybe a
>        quarter of an inch. Metzger hit the deck and cowered with
>        Oedipa as the can continued its high-speed caroming; from the
>        other room came a slow, deep crescendo of naval
>        bombardment, machine-gun, howitzer and small-arms fire,
>        screams and chopped-off prayers of dying infantry. She looked
>        up past his eyelids, into the staring ceiling light, her field of
>        vision cut across by wild, flashing overflights of the can, whose
>        pressure seemed inexhaustible. She was scared but nowhere
>        near sober. The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or
>        something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have
>        computed in advance the complex web of its travel; but she
>        wasn't fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any
>        moment, at whatever clip it was doing, a hundred miles an hour.
>        "Metzger," she moaned, and sank her teeth into his upper arm,
>        through the sharkskin. Everything smelled like hair spray. The
>        can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery,
>        reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell
>        jingling into the sink; zoomed over to the enclosed shower,
>        where it crashed into and totally destroyed a panel of frosted
>        glass; thence around the three tile walls, up to the ceiling, past
>        the light, over the two prostrate bodies, amid its own whoosh
>        and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the TV set. She could
>        imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give up in mid-
>        flight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa's nose. She
>        lay watching it. CoL49, 24/25
>

Gallipoli: here I come, Constantinople...


>
> The intrusion of the bullets from the Turks to the characters that earlier
> provided "My Daddy, My Doggie & Me" is another world's intrusion into what
> first appeared to be the safe formula of a 1930's musical. The destruction
> of bathroom by hairspray can is yet another world's intrusion into the
> [usually] safe environs of a Motel. Think as well of the bombardment of
> gamma rays into SHROUD.

so if Wikipedia has not deceived me, Gallipoli was a rude shock to the
notion that the Allied powers could quickly overrun the Ottoman
Empire, an intrusion of another world into the ambitions of the West?
And Profane's witnessing of SHROUD's treatment, treatment obviously to
be added into the repertoire of things that can be done to humans, an
intrusion of the military-industrial complex's plans into his rather
simple scheme to pad through life with minimal involvement?





-- 
- But you can wade in the water
and never get wet
if you keep on doin' that rag (Grateful Dead, "Doin' That Rag")