This week in pointless trivia.

[Rich Clavey]

As long as it relates to Kubrick's version rather than King's.
 


________________________________
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> 
Cc: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>; Pynchon List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, October 8, 2013 7:08 PM
Subject: Re: This week in pointless trivia.



can we discuss room 237 instead? 




On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:09 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

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/?listpynchon-l
>
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