Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[rich]

not to shit on anyone's porridge but isn't this the kinda sentimental stuff
we all got all too quickly buried in after 9/11

a church near home. jesus and the twin towers, anyone?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gkjarvis/285835579/

rich



On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> I did not know about the Survivor Tree. Highly relevant indeed for a
> reading of BE based on Northrop Frye's notions of spring, comedy and "Life
> Returning" -- which I hope to hear more about.
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> Am 21.12.2013 14:53, schrieb Fiona Shnapple:
>
>> The Life Force is not quite exhausted or extinguished. Maxine has only
>> sons, but the Pear Tree, it's magical magnetic force holds the boys
>> and Maxine if only for a brief moment as the novel begins, its blossom
>> petals strewn in the gutter, waste, at the end of the novel, is still
>> a source of Life Returning, a confirmation of the Body and the here
>> and now, a force against linear conspiracy that seeks to connect the
>> dots and discover the causes, and the tree, a made literary and
>> mythical symbol. is also  as an allusion to the September 11 callery
>> pear tree that came to be known as the Survivor Tree after sustaining
>> but living through the September 11, 2001, terror attacks at the World
>> Trade Center.
>>
>> In any event, in the meeting in the restaurant P wants to get The Book
>> of Leviticus in. It seems an awkward blurting on Maxine's part, she
>> seems ignorant of the text, though she has been slipping in and out of
>> a defensive posture, having something to do with her Jewish roots,
>> though she has not real conscious understanding of them, they return
>> here with her dietary habit of avoiding pork, though none is offered.
>> She says, "don't ask", though it's obvious enough she's never asked,
>> or understood the book. But P must get it in with Sappho here.
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 8:09 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> " the return of the repressed" observation and " the "its politics is on
>>> its sleeve" line are so fine....
>>> One might argue, given some textual clues----I especially like how
>>> Maxine, unlike her activist parents, can't like opera----the form of
>>> outsize emotions dramatized and she, who has an impoverished fantasy
>>> life.....typifies NYC's final killing of the repressed ( in her generation)
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> On Dec 21, 2013, at 7:53 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>  One could argue that Pynchon is trying to expiate our if not his own
>>>> sins, Sloth primarily, as described in his essay on that Deadly Sin,
>>>> and to offer, if not a cure, at least a treatment for addiction to
>>>> Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms, Law & Order, Friends, Seinfeld, cartoons,
>>>> jingles.... and so on, but, despite the fact that we have yet another
>>>> character addicted to the Brady Bunch (Hector in VL, Shawn in BE),
>>>> this kind of argument doesn't make much sense. There must be another
>>>> reason why P continues to "make it literary" even as he floods the
>>>> narrative with pop references.   The making it literary, with
>>>> allusions and references can't be helped. Neither can pop punctuation
>>>> that flood the narrative, the dialogue, the thoughts and feelings of
>>>> characters, especially Maxine because, as protagonist, she at the
>>>> center of most of the free indirect narration, and because of where
>>>> and when she was born and how she was raised.  As McHale explains in
>>>> his essay, "Zapping, the art of switching channels: on Vineland",
>>>> Pynchon is still working with Brown and plumbing his favorite topic,
>>>> the Big D. Mediated Lives and Mediated Deaths are the effects, the
>>>> return of the repressed.
>>>>
>>>> To return to the meeting of Maxine and Windust, where I contend the
>>>> talk of PROMIS and the like is beside the point, mere conspiracy talk
>>>> that will drive the quest, the detective genre into dead end, and is
>>>> satirized at every turn, and only distracts us from the mythological
>>>> and psychological themes. The mixing of Sappho and the Strangers in
>>>> the Night (the film it was first produced for), the umbrellas
>>>> touching, Heidi's comments, the madness of Maxine, of all of the
>>>> characters as they are viewed by the other characters, these are the
>>>> making it literary things we need to pay attention to and not the
>>>> conspiracy about September 11. The politics of the novel is on its
>>>> sleeve. Pynchon doesn't bury his anger or condemnation of the
>>>> politics, the media, the sad and disgusting behavior of the people
>>>> after their initial acts of magnanimity, philanthropy and brotherhood.
>>>> He names Madoff. He names the Mayor. The President. he exposes the
>>>> Neo-Liberal, Friedman economics of greed etc. There is no smoking gun
>>>> to be found in this work of fiction. Simply isn't there. Hell, Wired
>>>> Magazine, or better The Guardian that March reads will ask and answer
>>>> more questions than P poses.
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> 'Making it literary' seems almost effortless here in his free & easy
>>>>> pop
>>>>> culture style....
>>>>> He is playing/using his lit notions almost as if quoting himself...at
>>>>> times.....
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Friday, December 20, 2013 8:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple
>>>>> <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> In his SL Intro P critiques his "first publish story",  "Small Rain",
>>>>> noting that he tied to use an ear he had yet to develop, he took his
>>>>> own bad advice and tried to make the story literary by loading it up
>>>>> with allusions to Hemingway and Eliot, and, that after decades of
>>>>> maturity, in retrospect the story contains, a powerful, though at the
>>>>> time latent, political or class theme that P would focus on through
>>>>> the rest of his career: how the preterit, the working class embody, in
>>>>> their work, the moral, and even the intellectual virtues that the
>>>>> educated class, the managerial class, the elect have claimed as their
>>>>> capital.
>>>>>
>>>>> Reading BE one may be put off by the language and the pop references,
>>>>> but the ear is quite impressive. The ear, the languages that P has
>>>>> mastered here would draw the praise of Mark Twain, who had quite an
>>>>> ear, and who famously criticized Cooper for not having one.
>>>>>
>>>>> In any event, the ear is now amazing.
>>>>>
>>>>> But he continues to make it literary. The technique that Wolfley
>>>>> describes in his essay on P and the influence of Brown, later analyzed
>>>>> in depth by critics like McHale, the technique he developed in GR,
>>>>> reversing cause and effect, to mirror the complexity of contemporary
>>>>> existence, the transition from Adams and Entropy (V.)  to Adams and
>>>>> Gravity (GR), continues in BE.
>>>>>
>>>>> So, the meeting between Windust and Maxine here, while dropping some
>>>>> bread crumbs for the conspiracy theorists, Promis and so forth, is,
>>>>> underneath, about Maxine & Sapho.  Of course, Eliot's use of the poem
>>>>> in the Wasteland, doesn't make Maxine the Hyacinth Girl, but P makes
>>>>> it literary, as usual, and to be distracted by the grand political
>>>>> chess match, at the expense of the ordinary working men and women, out
>>>>> in the evening, after work, in the rain, in a cafe for a talk, that
>>>>> seems so broken by power, so useless, such a waste....but there is, in
>>>>> the material forces, most of them on Maxine's side of the table, a
>>>>> dialogue of self and soul worth spilling into the basin. But it works
>>>>> on the "made literary" level; the political power game is a clogged
>>>>> toilet.
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>
>>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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