This week in pointless trivia.

[rich]

but is Kubrick's version really Kubrick's version?



On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Rich Clavey <antizoyd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> >
> > -
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> -
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>
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