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[John Bailey]

Yaaaay, finally someone is recognising my Kugelblitz thesis. Although
this is the point in the novel that is paranoid, not Maxine. And I
can't find any evidence that she's middle-aged - has anyone worked out
her own timeline? I recall a conversation with her parents that
suggests her age by inference...

Most of the males Maxine works with are at "entry level adulthood" -
wonderful phrase. Absolutely essential to my reading of the novel, at
least.

And FS, this post has made me wonder something for the first time,
which might be obvious to everyone else:

Why does everyone read the outlandish coincidences in this novel as
just more Pynchon carry-on? Reg is commissioned to make a doco on a
company that clearly has secrets, and just happens on the roomful of
EMP-building Arabs? Isn't it more likely that he's been duped into
thinking he's found a scenario that's entirely set up? If so, by whom,
etc etc.

A truly paranoid reading of this novel I would like to see - one which
approaches it with 100% suspicion. But that's not how detectives work,
as we know. The detective is made by the case.

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:17 PM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> Who would take a shot at her? Again, page and passage is helpful. Why
> would anyone take a shot at Maxine? Something she said? Did? Or did
> she walk on to a Law & Order set? Maybe she's just paranoid. Maybe
> she's part of some grand delusional conspiracy of her own middle aged
> paranoia and creeping boys of entry level adulthood she works with.
> She is, after all, in that middle age stage that Otto Kugelblitz calls
> the paranoid stage. And Reg and Eric are not quite grown ups.  Way
> back in Ch 2 when we meet Reg Despard, the movie pirate, who tells us
> he has a boy genius in IT working on the case, we discover that the
> entire paranoid investigation springs from a film that Reg is
> shooting, a documentary about a computer-security firm downtown called
> hashslinggrz. Work is work. Right? Maybe not. So Reg just wants to
> know who he's working for. Outfield and Despard creep Ice & Co.
> through the system, but get locked out of the private vaults where,
> well, the company, a security firm after all, locks up its private
> doings. Though Maxine says she would prefer to kick back like Angela
> Lansbury (Jessica Fletcher, Murder, She Wrote, English teacher,
> Novelist, amateur investigator who one-ups the professionals), she
> packs a gun, and Reg, well, he got the academic's attention with his
> neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis, is not gonna settle for the
> promotional documentary he's been hired to produce, he feels like Erin
> Brockovitch.
>
> Maybe these guys are looking for more violent scripts? Maybe it's a
> pyramid scheme. Like, is Maxine working for reg now?
>
> Maxine does still have that concealed-carry permit.
>
> Kick back like Angela? Right.
>
> Clearly, ''Murder, She Wrote'' does not dabble in MTV flashiness or
> special effects. The basic form of the show predates broadcasting. The
> standard ''mystery'' of literature and early films became a staple of
> radio in 1930 with the introduction of a series featuring the exploits
> of - who else? - Sherlock Holmes. The heyday of radio in the 30's,
> 40's and early 50's was crammed with mystery formats, from Nero Wolfe,
> Sam Spade and Bulldog Drummond to ''Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost
> Persons,'' ''The Shadow'' and ''Casey, Crime Photographer.'' And
> television, of course, has been awash in mystery/suspense shows. In
> the earlier years, there were ''Martin Kane, Private Eye,'' ''Alfred
> Hitchcock Presents'' and such offbeat efforts as Blake Edwards's
> ''Peter Gunn,'' in which Craig Stevens hung out at an eccentric jazz
> club named Mother's, and ''Richard Diamond, Private Eye,'' featuring
> David Janssen with a mostly unseen secretary named Sam, whose legs
> belonged to Mary Tyler Moore.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/16/arts/tv-view-it-s-fun-and-it-s-not-violent.html
>
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 2:22 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>> Er, for one, Maxine is being shot at?
>>
>> Am 25.11.2013 22:06, schrieb Fiona Shnapple:
>>
>>> And there safety is threatened by? Page and passage, please.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l