This week in pointless trivia.

[John Bailey]

Yes to this. I don't think Pynchon has ever, ever posited sex as some
sort of free-love antidote to Power and Control and Death-Systems.
He's not that kind of 60s/70s writer. I think about Bakhtin's
carnivalesque in this regard - what seems to be a moment of liberation
from social structures is really a release valve built into those
structures themselves, not threatening to them, and in fact
reinforcing the 'normal' state from which the zaniness appears to
depart. I doubt Pynchon wants to do that.

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l