BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!
Robin Landseadel
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Wed Oct 16 09:41:33 CDT 2013
"Saved" [HA!] from having to even think of Dizzy's Scam [one of those
"Cat's Breath" Koans, I suppose] Maxi is relieved to see Reg, who
looks "hammered" and if anybody would notice that sort of thing, it
would be Maxi.
So, beneath the surface of Glib, "Pynchon-Lite" BE is a thickening web
of cross references to previous Pynchonian Propositions, like—"You
become what you watch on TV." A lawyer Obsessed with Perry Mason, a
Radical Film-maker who learned perhaps a bit too much from TV. But in
this case, perhaps the most successful of these portraits of
televisual crossdressing, we are not quite sure of chicken or egg—did
Larry David observe Reg? Is the "Trailer" for BE Reg's work? Did Reg
get the idea from watching Seinfeld?
Reg might have thought of himself as a "Radical Documentarian", but
now that the work is flowing in, he ain't so radical no more. Now,
having taken on a sinister looking project, he's scared, goes to Maxi.
The dialog —when I say how there are signs of Larry David's presence
in BE, here it is:
"Looks like I'm catching you at a busy time"
"Seasonal, Passover, Easter week, NCAA playoffs,, St. Patrick's on a
Saturday, da yoozh, not a problem, Reg—so what have we got here, a
matrimonial?"
It doesn't have to be Elaine precisely, but we can hear the speech
rhythms we heard on TV here, the compression of dialog to adapt to the
increasing percentage of ads to program, particularly notable in the
Law 'n' Order juggernaut.
"Though she feels like she's in a play, she is anyway . . ."
On Oct 16, 2013, at 6:22 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Yeah, so we get from P what a non-group-reader has cited as an
> homage, a borrowing,
> an allusion to a famous Seinfeld show. One he thought better than
> this book, this take, I guess.
>
> As Reg's film-stealing videos get acclaimed by the Acdademy, we get
> another savaging of
> Candlebow U. For Pynchon just about all academics, in their
> professional guise, are candlebrow idiots,no?
>
> What else here? Another punch at stupid supposed avant-garde art,
> post--modernist 'works of art'?; a jab at 'documentary', that is,
> "social realism" "art" that is nothing, in these
> times, but reproductions of older works? Back in the Day there was
> lots of critical discussion about how
> the art of these times could not be great if it was simply in the
> mode of traditional realism, traditional forms, etc.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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