Hector & Reg / Frenesi & Maxine

[Fiona Shnapple]

Yeah, that Hector is wired up. He's boiling over with his movie money
making madness, a detox patient on the run, at times he's a cartoon
cop bouncing off the walls and ceiling then racing through the painted
landscape.  Reg is not. P shifts the Brady Bunch obsession over to the
guru and give Reg a project in the works. But the key to the parallel
is in the waves of media technic and how the women are seduced by the
wave. Not creepy at all. Smart P.

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Fiona Shnapple
<fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Self-reliant, sort of, and while she may seem more stable, and more
> realistic, next to Frenesi and her context or the wild decades Frenesi
> experiences, Maxine is a postmodern poster child, a fucking mess, a
> tangled and crimped circuit board unplugged and disconnected from
> nature and life.
>
>  For starters, she is very insecure. And, forget about looking for
> love in all the wrong places, she's looking for Maxine in all the
> wrong faces and pages.
>
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>  Important Parallels play out , but have different origins and take different directions.
>>
>> Frenesi/Maxine. Lefty humanist parents , yes ; seduced by fascists, yes.  Certainly these are a reinforcing of some interesting notions on left /right divisions that 5 or 6 Pynchon women have followed. To be honest it feels creepy at this point..
>>  If you look closer after that there are powerful differences . Frenesi is more intense, more idealistic, and her swings more profound. Her seduction doesn't just lead to a new life and relationship, but  into a life-long betrayal of friends, parents,  her child and husband .    Maxine loves her parents  and having discovered something about  a "good marriage" has her doubts but still fiercely loves her sons and still has a huge soft spot for Horst. .  She is more stable and realistic and self reliant and is seduced by the male intensity and danger of  Windust, but she is nowhere near ideologically seduced by fascism just as she gently rejects Maxine's  take as going too far with not enough proof. She even  finds the human side of Windust.    Of course one could argue about  what her embrace of self-defence and its association with Israel  does mean, but it doesn't feel ideological in an extreme sense.  Charmed by snakes with oil?   Or just likes sex and to be desired. As far as snake -oil,   she seems to be pretty discriminating about the evidence that comes her way and what it might mean.  Also she is not guessing as much as Oedipa but knows what she is about with the tools of fraud investition.. Her only real reasons for this quest are adventure and the moral/social  dimensions  of a case involving lots of loot, the future of  the medium of modern communication and powerful players .
>>
>> Reg seems real different from Hector.  Reg is laid back and rides his luck.   Hector is anything but laid back and straight from the loony bin.  Reg moves on when the danger is high and warns Maxine.  Hector is permanently lost in TV land. But there are many parallels too and they are either intentional variations on a theme or stock characters in TP land.
>>
>> I'm not sure but it's hard to stop thinking about this dude's books.
>>
>> On Nov 27, 2013, at 6:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>>
>>> So there's all this chat about how BE is on the wavelength of CL, but
>>> we are also reminded of VL. In VL, one of the plots has Hector  out to
>>> make a film about Frenesi. She, of course, is not even around, so his
>>> mad quest, that has him grabbing her kid and playing good cop bad cop
>>> with her X, is mostly Tube-mania. But here, Reg, a film-man not unlike
>>> Hector in many respects, has Maxine in on his project. She vulnerable
>>> and so easily charmed by snakes with oil.
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l