BEER Chapter 9, 90, 91 The Wrong Door

[John Bailey]

There's a clear theme across Pynchon's entire body of work that
connects toilets, television, electricity, railroads, the postal
system, film distribution, meat markets, slave networks, and now the
internet. These aren't morally equivalent but structurally there's
something going on there that keeps popping up in his novels and I
don't know 'bout you but it strikes some chord with me that keeps me
coming back.

If P is a systems novelist, as some have argued, then the toilet is
one of the integral systems BE is analysing. There's a pun in there,
of course.

I still maintain that the loo focus is also a deeper meditation on the
internet itself.

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> Speaking of making Tapes like the old man does, Space Ghost...or
> sitting the kids down to watch a Marx Brothers Opera, I gave my son a
> copy of The Things They Carried. He never read it. Likes books about
> as much as Maxine likes Opera. But over in the War the soldiers can
> watch stuff on the Net, my boy plays video games too, and we talked
> recently about Restrepo, which is pretty much his world, now that he's
> gonna be a civilian again, I'm gonna get him to watch Deer Hunter with
> me and The Motorcycle Diaries.  Beautiful films. I doubt I can get him
> to identify with young Che, though he'll probably get the Zen and the
> Art of Motorcycle Madness I'm pushing up the dusty roads of Peru like
> Camus' Sysiphus.
>
> My boy signed up to come home on a ship, with equipment, but he didn't
> get the call, so into one of those military transports, but this gave
> me hope. the sense of adventure is not far from our capacity to
> wonder.
>
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:59 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe this is too obvious, but the dotcom dough, and thus the Alley
>> and the Street, the City, is in the shitter, ironically, it's that
>> shitload of money that bubbled up from the toilet economy (not quite
>> what Neo-Liberalism or Milton Friedman, or even those Yups with the
>> Adam Smith Tie Pins had in mind) an amount, as Vyrva says, "above a
>> critical amount, it's all bad" (38) that has everybody in the toilet,
>> looking for a way out of it. When the shit hits the fan, and is turned
>> to dust, it's a chance to clean up, like I seen birds do sometimes,
>> but most folk just can't take the ashes to ashes and count their
>> blessings, they got to get into the shit and make sense of it somehow.
>> That's what the Tubes for, and yup, that's what the Deep Archer is
>> opened sourced to by Ice & Co. It's a Brave New World, we just get to
>> be the thought police in it.
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 9:08 PM, Robin Landseadel
>> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> Toilets again. What is it with these toilet? I mean, NYC in the toilet, that
>>> I get mebee and then there's all them albino Alligators—and while we're at
>>> it, why not more on the fore and aft of out notable scribe's corpus as of
>>> now, bookended in NYC? Why not a few more extensions on that instead of
>>> getting all obsessive compulsive over Hanna what's-her name and some Kraut?
>>>
>>> But and in any case. That compacted, quippy quick comeback sound of dialog
>>> throughout the book. it makes me think of other verbally quick on their feet
>>> shows of the nineties and early oughts—there was a brief flash of "Mad About
>>> You" flashing by my eyeballs, noticed that Hellen Hunt would make for a fine
>>> Maxine. But and in any case, as the number of commercials increased during
>>> the turn of the mellenia, computer programs designed to foreshorten dialog
>>> without altering pitch began to appear, enabling many episodes of Law and
>>> Order to be viewed with somewhat pixilated banter. The writing helped, of
>>> course.
>>>
>>> And in any case, we begin quite televisually with "Tonight's descent into
>>> sleep is helical and slow." Prime Pynchon and Maxine's dreams of a somewhat
>>> less tarnished Reg Despard are abruptly cut by Reg's phone call* It ain't a
>>> movie anymore, Maxi." I guess it's a wipe and a little finger-popped bass
>>> figure to an all-night Ukranian joint in the East Village. Dialog in TV
>>> mode, circa 2001:
>>>
>>> "You look like shit, Reg, What happened?"
>>> "Technically," moving his hands away from the keyboard, "I'm supposed to
>>> have free run of hashslingrz, right? except I always knew I didn't. And,
>>> well, yesterday, finally, I walked through the wrong door."
>>> "You're sure you didn't find it locked and jimmy it?"
>>> "Well, it shouldn't have been locked, sign on the door said 'Toilet.' "
>>> "So you entered illegally . . ."
>>> "Whatever. . ."
>>>
>>> Whatever indeed, as another potential bit of "Truther" material slips in
>>> with the insinuation of collusion between NSA and their associates and some
>>> so far un-named Arab concern, aforementioned Arabs behind said locked door
>>> marked 'Toilet,' make of that what you will. What is it about Maxi and
>>> toilets anyway?-
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l