Hector & Reg / Frenesi & Maxine

[Fiona Shnapple]

I've not looked too much into adultery in Pynchon...so....but I'm more
interested in the waves feminism, capitalism, life, media, and  how
Pynchon's Mothers fair in these waves. Motherhood, of course, is a
topic that P critics have addressed in great depth, as it is a major
question and theme in all of his novels and works. I won't bother the
group with the works cited list, but Eddins, of course, and these two:

The Naming of Oedipa Maas, Emma V. Miller

"Take Me Anyplace You Want": Pynchon's Literary Career as a Maternal
Construct in "Vineland",  Terry Caesar

On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 7:13 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Frenesi---Free and Easy, remember?---is deeply implicated in VL's theme
> of the failure of 60s ideals......
>
> Maxine comes later. She is post-sixties. She might be where
> the second feminist wave left women......her fantasy life, sez BE
> is meager THEREFORE her sex life is (emotionally)....she may be called
> desperate??....
> You left your -Ex cause he fucked around.....yet, he's back?...
>
> There was a time, it is a major fictional theme,
>  that adultery ended things....for righteous reasons.
> Gone.
>
> In her personal life, fraud detection fails....
>
>
>
> From: Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 10:18 AM
>
> Subject: Re: Hector & Reg / Frenesi & Maxine
>
> 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
>
>
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