BEER Group Read. Bruce Winterslow and Vyrva McElmo

[Fiona Shnapple]

Sesame Street is so like your generation.

Pynchon is up to his old double stuff here. So, you must know who
Destiny Hope Cyrus is by now. She's in the news here everyday. She
goes by Miley and she makes Lolita look like she needs a good spanking
in a dirty motel room. Well, who is she?

Seen Big Fish? This is an important thread in this Bleeding Edge
because the old man, that's Pynchon, a kind of Wicks, tells tall tales
to entertain the kids. BTW, if you've not read Rushdie's books for
kids you should. They too are about the dying story, the death of the
tale, of the story teller, and of the culture and environment, of
course. This fucking old men with young kids. Better than these
fucking old men with young hot bitches. No, not HH, Roth, Maequesz....

Here's a good one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories

In any event at Madison Square, back to Big Fish and what's here
name/face. See that's the prob, she goes by Destiny in the credits,
her given name, but she is so Miley in Big Fish. She plays Ruthie:

Ruthie is a childhood friend of the main character Edward Bloom in his
hometown of Ashton. She appears only briefly in a scene where Ed and
his friends visit a local swamp witch.

The film credits her by her real name, Destiny Hope Cyrus, and she
uses her real accent. Other actors, especially Scottish Ewan McGregor
and English Alison Lohman, struggled to get the Alabama sound the
movie called for.

That ear thing again.

Anywho, Miley gets a big break, she gets to play, Miley, not that
Miley, not herself exactly, but Miley Ray Stewart, born on November
23, 1992 (age 13-18) a fictional character from the Disney series
Hannah Montana, portrayed by Miley Cyrus. A farm girl from Tennessee
who moved to Malibu, California to live her dream, Miley has a secret
identity, Hannah Montana, who helps Miley accomplish being a
sensational pop star while still having a normal life, although
sometimes she wishes she could be one alter ego all the time.

Did you get all that? So as he has done since GR, P is using the old
double, triple take, double take fake.

And, without a spoiler...we can say that this ain't your generation's
novel, son. Like Praire is the quest character in VL, a novel with
strong feminist feel to it, the girl who sees the trees, weeeeee,
trees.

BYW, all this aside, notice how P nails the UWS even as he cartoons
and double stuffs the characters. Pomona transplant, Stanford start
up. I know these people, they lived on the uws then, some still do.




On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 8:20 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Niiiice. I would never have guessed on a surface reading that McElmo
> referred to anything other than Sesame Street. And Heikki, you just
> banged that out into several more dimensions.
>
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 11:16 PM, Heikki Raudaskoski
> <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>>
>> "Virva" is a Finnish female first name. The name comes from "virvatuli",
>> "will o' the wisp". And, as Vyrva's last name may refer to St. Elmo's
>> fire, and Kugelblitz is introduced on the previous page...
>>
>> On Mon, 14 Oct 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>>> Bruce Slow as Winter? and Vyrva, physically slow, 'a West Coast' thing, "not
>>> nearly time-obsessed enough".
>>
>>> Then Pynchon jumps back in time---the looseness, the looseness; "he can do it anytime"-- to "before [Maxine and Vyrva] got to know each other"
>>> when Maxine saw her as a California type who must surely drink herbal tea.
>>>
>>> Mediated seeing. Seeing in stereotypes. Even our 'fraud detective' of some supposed acuity.
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l