Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[jochen stremmel]

Another passage about girls by a great American author comes to my mind:

Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced
persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet
settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men
drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled
labor there is a competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets.
They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for
themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and
stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly
sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy
life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with
them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into
the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after
every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men,
and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream.
They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere,
group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits,
charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner,
washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home
projector, and the eternal whimsical romance -- with crinkly smiles
and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and
unskilled into a technician's world, and in a few years they learn
that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and
precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These
are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the
dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can't
have any. And the schools were we teach them non-survival are
gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine,
unless they contract something incurable.

2012/9/16 Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>:

>
>
> finally, next, the girls who, i can't help but notice, are seen as
> yearning individuals
> great emphasis is placed on their yearning
> - (probably because seen through merle's own yearning eyes)
>
> ---