BE: Maxine's misunderstood high school boys and the girls who compete to...them

[Fiona Shnapple]

Midway through BE, as the angles add up to Nothing, Death even, the
curves of dimensions multiply, and Maxine's algebraic geometry gives
way to the lessons she leearned in her theater arts classes;  she uses
her pole riding skills, her gummy shoes and even her naked feet to
chase down the dark nonlinear geometics of Laplaces her Difference
Equation can at least feel, if not readi, but this is Regression,
Linear Regression, and high school, where and when, for we must have
an X and a Y,   the messages from Maxine's Vertex, or Vortex, of
Femininity pile up unanswered (255).

Did Windust take out Lester?

Some misunderstood teenagers? (246)

Didn't Talking Barbie, for a while before the feminists attacked the
CEO,a female CEO, at Mattel,  say, "Math is tough" or some such?

So Shawn's analysis, that this is High School again, the girls
competing to marry the boys with big IP, while secretly yearning to
fuck the bad-asses, is not quite as sadistic as...well....yeah, it's
high school in America, so sadistic it is.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult
company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and
priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was
among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The
Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has
within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which
focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from
adult responsibilities.” Yes, his words were prudish, but many parents
have had some version of these misgivings ever since, especially those
who’ve consciously opted not to send their kids into the Roman
amphi­theater. (From the website of the National Home Education
Network: “Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to
educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization!
Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely
resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”)

In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such
peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have
little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box
without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says
Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time
studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection
between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward
aggression. Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart
from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an
upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines
those hierarchies is often the crudest common-­denominator
stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—­rather than the
subtleties of personality. “Remember,” says Crosnoe, who spent a year
doing research in a 2,200-student high school in Austin, “high schools
are big. There has to be some way of sorting people socially. It’d be
nice if kids could be captured by all their characteristics. But
that’s not realistic.”


http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/index2.html
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l