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

[alice wellintown]

Somehow, consumerism is too early for California. WG is right to get it in NYC.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Edward A Moore <edmoorester at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>