This week in pointless trivia.

[Robin Landseadel]

My TV consumption was such that I gleefully watched Friends, Seinfeld,  
& Sex and the City. My memories of Manhattan proper are all during the  
Dot-Com Boom, or at least the Clinton Economic Expansion. Prior to my  
second marriage, Shira had me along for work/family visits in NYC, mid- 
ninties. We spent a lot of time with her Aunt who lived in the Upper  
West Side. I love Zabar's, the subways, the general tummel, the old,  
soulful buildings, the new soulless ones. I've heard Shira's left- 
leaning Jewish family hash over stuff hashed over in BE,  
stereotypically or not. And let it noted by one and all that Shira  
does a killer job at vocally impersonating Ethel Merman, full volume.  
This all conflates in my mind while reading Bleeding Edge.

My experience with Pynchon's portrayals of sex is that they all rather  
repulsive on multiple levels. I point to page 666 of Against the Day  
as an exemplar. I mean—were you turned on by the hairspray and the  
strip Boticelli and Oedipa giving up her all to "Metzger"/Butcher?  
Didn't think so. I rather doubt the author gets turned on by these  
scenes, I always assume that they, like his puns, usually are pointing  
to some other elephant in the room. My sense with Maxine is that she  
has more or less the same sense of morality around sex as Elaine from  
Seinfeld. Much as another P-Lister sees the Young Teri Garr as Oedipa  
Maas, I see Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Maxine Turnow.

On Oct 8, 2013, at 4:28 PM, John Bailey wrote:

> I'm going to lower to tone of conversation somewhat by pointing out
> that one of Windust's most obvious referents is the male love object
> in Sex and the City, Mr Big. Not a fan of the show but of the episodes
> I ended up watching over the years, what struck me is how alien its
> central relationship seemed to me - a woman holding a torch for this
> ultra-powerful patriarch whose appeal seemed to be in his emotional
> unavailability. I've known many women who see this dysfunctional
> dynamic (in the show) as perfectly normal.
>
> I'm certainly not going to advocate watching the show in order to
> engage with BE more closely (god knows I'm not going to) but I have
> zero doubt that it is a significant intertext in this novel about
> women in New York at the turn of the century. Maxi's conversations
> with her female pals and her relationship with Windust are in part
> Pynchon's rejoinder to this ridiculously popular portrait of his town,
> and Windust is just an exaggeration of the plutocratic male ideal it
> presents.

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l