Hector & Reg / Frenesi & Maxine

Fiona Shnapple fionashnapple at gmail.com
Fri Nov 29 20:53:36 CST 2013


Like Maxine, Frenesi has two children. Both of Maxine's children are boys,
however, and this, and the context, changes everything.  Maxine has a
sister, a sisterhood too, and there is Fiona, a girl she looks after often,
but no daughter. And, like Larry, Maxine is law enforcement, a detective, a
cop...whatever. She doesn't need Brock, she has her own gun.

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> yes, Frenesi was deeply implicated in the failure of the 60s to change...
>
> Maxine comes after. yes, disconnected...all she has of nature is that 30
> second
> staring at the pear tree.....
>
> Her fantasy life is meager as a lobotomized soul---sez so on the page
> ....her sex life is THEREFORE also disconnected (In the way yashmeen is
NOT;
> in the way Oedipa
> learns some imaginative [real fantasy] connections....one might even say
> desperate.......
>
> it is, in general, some new kind of woman--perhaps some failed feminist
(he
> says controversially)
>  who fucks her ex-- back after he fucked a younger chick and M. left him
for
> it.............(no open marriage
> here; no acceptance and keeping up appearances......)
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 9:58 AM
> Subject: Re: Hector & Reg / Frenesi & Maxine
>
> 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
>
>
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