V-2nd - Chapter 8 - Rachel: tight

[Mark Kohut]

yeah, yeah AND

Benny's 'automatic' erection is linked to that clockwork universe, that
phrase of the way of the world from Descartes: 'the simple clockwork of itself", 
like 
a yo-yo, inanimate................

Pretty interesting to me in at least two ways. 1) Slothrop's conceptually 
upcoming erections,
overturning this clockwork cause-and-effect, yes? and
2) linking such 'lust' with the inanimate...............

One might think TRP is kinda indicating human sex is not--should not be---just 
lust? 



----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, September 30, 2010 10:03:59 PM
Subject: V-2nd - Chapter 8 - Rachel: tight

The receptionist, a slim girl who seemed to be all tight - tight
underwear, stockings, ligaments, tendons, mouth, a true windup woman -
moved precisely among the desks, depositing applications like an
automatic card-dealing machine.


Okay, I'm trying to visualize here.  I think I've succumbed, in the
past, to unwarranted multiplication of entities.  Is the receptionist
Rachel?  Apparently yes, yet she's also an interviewer.

Like Benny, I'm perhaps blinded by my lust.  Oboy, oboy, good stuff.
Hope she picks me, I hope the machine I immediately think of her as
(first, "windup woman" and then "an automatic card-dealing machine")
operates in such a fashion as to select me...

is it like this to be on the female side of intersex relations?  I
mean, there's all this work stuff, and you've got to be polite, stifle
the hardon (the imperative, oboy, really only thing worth working
for!), fit into all these inanimate connections like a machine part,
conceive of ladies in machinic terms to understand what's going to
happen next when the really thing you want to do is this other
upwelling...
One wonders....inquiring minds want to know!

of course, if there is a way to connect that love and desire via
inanimate objects, it wouldn't be a problem...????


anyway, I just wanted to note, that the tightness idea is furthur-ed
on the next page, as in:
"Already they were in bed; he could see nothing but a new extemporized
daydream in which no other face but this sad one with its brimming
slash-slash of eyes tightened slowly..."
...the antecedent of "tightened" is "face", right?

and the tightness, which besides being antithetical to Benny's
egregious slackness, also reifies or ramifies into machine-likeness,
or at least segues into it, and (by virtue of being a schlemihl) this
is detumescifying

which of course is a dysfunction, by Reichian sex-economic standards:
tightness implies sexual tension, which ought to invite bio-something
streaming and sexual release!!

Rachel: tight!


-- 
- Obama’s actions in office seem to indicate that he actually believed
his own bullshit.
(from Norman Spinrad's blog http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/)