Crying of Lot 49 recalls Gaddis on consumerism and "stuff"

[Edward A Moore]

Crying of Lot 49 recalls Gaddis on consumerism and "stuff"

This reminds me of the "individualistic" neck tie mentioned in the quote.

“Yet at least he had believed in the cars.

Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in,

Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most
godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of
their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so
naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame
cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off
enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smell
hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three
generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust

— and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual
residue of these lives,

and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused
(when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to
be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost:

clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink
flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs,
help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old
underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping
your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might
pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated
uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash,
condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes

— it made him sick to look, but he had to look.”

ed