Bad Sneakers & a Fina Salada

Robin Landseadel robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Tue Sep 7 12:27:51 CDT 2010


On Sep 7, 2010, at 10:02 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Face it, Chapter 6, Part 1 is not Pynchon's finest literary  
> achievement.  It's enough to make one long for The Whole Sick Crew.   
> Was watching West Side Story all that the fresh-out-of-the-frat  
> Young P had to do before attempting to "write" Puerto Ricans?  Sort  
> of a precursor to our trusty Wikipedia.  Agree, Robin, his attempt  
> is embarrassing.  But are VL's Hector, Vato and Blood, with all  
> their "ese"-spouting all that more accurate?

"Accurate" wasn't what reached for and realized. It was a "Chip &  
Dale" cartoon as interpreted by Cheech & Chong, and quite respectable  
in that regard.

I mean, it got me to laugh, and yeah, it really sounded like a Cheech  
& Chong routine.

> Two more things painfully stand out:
>
> "The minute her horny boys caught a glimpse of the wanton behind the  
> saint, the black lace slip below the surplice, Fina could find  
> herself on the receiving end of a gang bang, having in a way asked  
> for it."
>
> No comment.

Let's face it, Oed ain't eggsxckly a Feminist model herself, being  
altogether too willing to "let go, just feel it", but then again, this  
is supposed to be the early phase of the "Revolution in the Head."

	". . .Indeed, the American folk-protest movement had thrust plain
	speaking so obtrusively into the pop domain that every transient
	youth idol was then routinely interrogated concerning his or her
	‘message’ to humanity. If it has any message at all, that of I
	WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND is ‘Let go - feel how good it is’.
	This though (as conservative commentators knew very well)
	implied a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status
	quo. Harbouring no conscious subversive intent, The Beatles,
	with this potent record, perpetrated a culturally revolutionary
	act. As the decade wore on and they began to realise the
	position they were in, they began to do the same thing more 	
	deliberately. . ."

	“. . .The destabilising social and psychological evolution wit- 	
	nessed since the ‘60s stems chiefly from the success of affluen- 	ce  
and technology in realising the desires of ordinary people.
	The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in
	fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration with its roots
	in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation,
	they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either
	love-and-peace or a vague anarchistic European version of
	revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary right-wing pundits
	attack the ‘60s, they identify a momentous overall development
	but ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted
	against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a
	marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose
	alternatives to a waning civilization.

	Ironically, the harshest critics of the ‘60s are its most direct
	beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism.
	Their recent contribution to the accelerated social breakdown
	inaugurated around 1963—economic Darwinism wrapped in
	self-contradictory socio-cultural prejudices—hasn’t helped
	matters, yet even the New Right can’t be held responsible for
	the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the
	First World is currently sinking as if into a babbling, twinkling,
	micro electronically pulsing quicksand. In the Nineties, the
	fashion is to reprove others for our own faults; yet even if we
	take the blame for ignoring our limitations and eroding our own
	norms over the last thirty years, it is hard to imagine much, short
	of fascism or a Second Coming, that will put Humpty back
	together again. . ."

http://tinyurl.com/242kvxj

The author doesn't exactly let himself off the hook, while not really  
taking the fall either:

	It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many
	American males, even those of middle-aged appearance,
	wearing suits and holding down jobs, are in fact, incredible as it
	sounds, still small boys inside. Flange is this type of a character,
	although when I wrote this story I thought he was pretty cool. He
	wants children — why isn't made clear - but not at the price of
	developing any real life shared with an adult woman. His
	solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size and demeanor
	of a child. I can't remember for sure, but it looks like I wanted
	some ambiguity here about whether or not she was only a
	creature of his fantasies. It would be easy to say that Dennis's
	problem was my problem, and that I was putting it off on him.
	Whatever's fair — but the problem could have been more
	general. At that time I had no direct experience with either
	marriage or parenting, and maybe I was picking up on male
	attitudes that were then in the air — more documentably, inside
	the pages of men's magazines, Playboy in particular. I don't
	think this magazine was the projection, exclusively, of its
	publisher's private values: if American men had not widely
	shared such values, Playboy would have quickly failed and
	faded from the scene.
	SL intro

> Then there's this painful underage girl thing: 14-year-old Lucille,  
> 12-year-old Bianca.  I'm not saying Pynchon's a Polanski, but I  
> don't think his constant references to sexualized teens [the almost  
> sentimental portrait of the child-molester earlier in this book,  
> Zoyd fighting an attraction to his daughter as he watches her  
> sleeping, Merle encouraging Dally's teen sexual initiation] are  
> nothing more than a friendly nod towards his one-semester teacher  
> Nabokov. Write what you know?  Write what you feel?  I forgive  
> Pynchon, I forgive Woody Allen; I admire Polanski the artist, but I  
> loathe the man, and think he should be locked up.
>
> Laura

And things get so much better/worse in Gravity's Rainbow.

And then we get Prairie . . .


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