BEER -- chapters 10 and 23 (possible spoilers) -- PROMIS 1.5

[Joseph Tracy]

I don't have the book with. Is my memory wrong that Reg gave the video copy to Max or did it come with no explanation from the bike messenger. Was it never connected to Reg?  I need to get a copy since I am now following this discussion despite by avowed disengagement.
On Dec 14, 2013, at 8:28 AM, David Morris wrote:

> Windust's fucking Max isn't his downfall, it's the video delivered by the magic courier.  If she'd never met him, her giving that video to March would still have been his demise.  The real questions are who took the video, and who gave Max a copy of it.
> 
> On Friday, December 13, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> 
> On Dec 13, 2013, at 4:19 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> > I clearly don't have a solid sense of where my thoughts on all this will end up but your ideas and questions pushed me into some interesting musings, at least for me
> > On Dec 13, 2013, at 1:28 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
> >
> >> Windust is like a golem, animated by a little scroll with something on it in the nature of "free markets" or "austerity"...maybe American exceptionalism or triumphalism or maybe just a serviceable villain...
> > Good analogy. I tend to agree with all those images to a degree, but he too is secretly a person of divided loyalties. P insists on several humanizing stories. 1) The woman in Guatemala   2) Promis sounds pretty nasty no matter who benefits, we don't know if Windust knows about American use of Promis or is just tracking Israeli use as a loyal agent. This blurring of lines and alliances may seem like betrayal to a true blue nationalist or may simply be a function of how his paranoid worldview leads to a hall of mirrors. 3) Who kills Windust? Could he represent the Able Danger component of the  9-11 backstory.  Is Windust looking a little too hard to find the real threat, and closing in on the Pogo revelation: "We have met the enemy ...
> >
> > I feel this is not Vond,  aspiring control freak, divided-and-conquer manager of future detention camps, and I am your father Darth Vader,   but a DoubleV, a double agent of deeply if privately divided loyalties, a secret heretic, a conspiracy theorist with a hard outer shell, and all the credentials of a patriot, playing his part  but internally  dissatisfied with the payoff and looking for a home for his lost soul.
> >
> > Would this idea have precedents? Who leaks to Seymour Hersch? Who is the deep throat of the Nixon whitehouse or  of 9-11? Or is that just more crazy paranoia and all those torture victims got what was coming to them or they are just the sad victims of power games, another proof of human brutality that serves the duel purpose of proving that this is our own true nature, that we are at best all sinners saved by the almighty red white and blue hand that blessed us to be the chosen nation ?
> >
> >>
> >> You ask a different question than the one I was wondering about: why is Maxine attracted to Windust...which see Brock Bond and Deuce...
> >>
> >> But why is he attracted to her?  I think it's fair to say he's pretty important in the book...is it like some fatal attraction?  As a nonobservant Jew, although she's actually a fairly observant human being, is their intercourse, verbal and otherwise, some way she has of deactivating him?
> > Does she see herself in Windust, the chosen inheritor of  divine rule though ethnic and ideological cleansing?  Does she have a secret  feminine saviour complex, is she too atracted to being a secret agent of compassion and truth as he may have done in Guatemala, risking everything in an underground war?  We see something like that inclination in her relationship to Reg and Eric.  But then she is attracted to Mafia types, independent building  contractors, the whole gamut of America, and that is the only way I can make sense of her.
> >
> > She is the all purpose sexy american soul and that is why Windust wants her, because he has lost his like Dust in the Wind scattered by the chariots of the empire.
> >>
> >> I don't mean in some kind of Magical-Hebrew way necessarily, as that idea is offensive even to me though I'm not real sensitive, but just some parts of the Jewish tradition or way of life, stuff like jubilees and not muzzling the ox that treadeth the corn, and the traditions of argumentation, scholarship, sort of antidote the kind of dogmatic fanatical tendencies that he embodies - or can do so, I'm thinking of this Jewish kid in our grade school, Bruce Hoffman, who got different holidays and stuff and didn't seem quite so in awe of the same authorities I was...
> > I think this is the real promise of America. Miscegenation. Losing purity for reality.  This crossing of boundaries , this dna transfer, this doing and undoing of families is what Pynchon returns to as the fertile ground of change and the constantly fading and reappearing glimmer of hope.
> > Vond Dies in the land of ghosts, but Frenesi lives on, reconnects to the real, her roots.
> >
> > Pynchon asks us to identify with the two-timer, the heretic, the fraud investigator, but also the mother, Diana launching her arrows, the deep and ever fertile underground where all seeds must root to live.
> >>
> >> Like Windust's attitude on movies during the Cold War and how she meets it with an equally confident Logos, she's like, "Let's see what you've got, big boy!"  Or even, "you are so Wrong!" She's more than a match for his mojo...
> > yes
> >>
> >> So why does he pursue her?  He should be aware that she's dangerous, but he may be ignoring that danger while relishing the danger he poses to her.
> >>
> >> I'm attracted to, but feel I must resist completely giving in to, the idea of Maxine deactivating the golem of Friedmanite praxis, embodied in Windust from 9/11/73 to 9/11/01...with her magical Jewish intercourse...no, NO!...
> >>
> >> Much truer to say that fraud investigation, here embodied in Maxine, eventually catches up with the lies behind forcible privatization, disempowering its dogsbodies like Brock Vond or Windust!
> > Yes enough with these  claims of Purity  lets look at the numbers. Lets get real about what is going on.
> > But then what?
> >>
> >
> 
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