Beer: All In The Family

[Markekohut]

I think this a wonderful essay, or mini-essay. Thanks and so long for now. 

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 22, 2013, at 8:34 AM, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> Looks like others will be doing all the heavy lifting on this overview of our mascot's latest. This group read is a bit sudden, though the players invested in this discussion are clearly up to the task. As of now I'm investing my time and energies to a set of paintings of Hindu Yantras for a show in early December. I am finding the opening up, the revealing of layers in this exegesis of Bleeding Edge worth the tagging along. I'll drop in with comments from time to time, but understand, my heart belongs to Laxshmi.
> 
> There's a way Pynchon's collected works are considered one big message in code, seeing as code is central to his work. But beyond the Genius/Idiot Savant of Punnery, creator of indigestible foodstuffs and naughty Rocket Limericks, there is a person, that guy of no particular outstanding visible appearance, throwing those switches and levers. There is the narratorial voice, never once relinquished up to the First Person of Chandler's tarnished Knight, but stuck like glue by the Lord Overlunch of these stories, semi-omniscient and more observant than most. And that person, that voice, is growing up in public, first rejecting family, or at least acting as if "Family" was some sort of poison in his first three books. Family becomes more far more poignant and central in the tale of Vineland, hopeful too, as is the introduction to Slow Learner. Family and Family ties are wonderfully interwoven into the Glorious Fugue that is Mason & Dixon. Family is absolutely central to The Traversi vs. Vibes central plots that animate Against the Day.
> 
> I would go further, and have gone further, noting how the Family History of the Pynchons, going back to William, founder of Springfield the first, [Jedidiah be damned] is such a big part of all of the author's writings. The Vibes of AtD are a mirror reflection of the Pynchons of Yacht racing and the New York Stock Exchange, America's Nobility until undercut by a manipulation of Pynchon & Co. stock, something to do with the propaganda potential of sound on film and big players squeezing out the mavericks. Those funny stamps in CoL49? Tax Stamps? {Lord Overlunch almighty, do we need tax stamps for stock transfers these days or what?}. The History of the Great, Heretical Pynchons is worthy of a Pynchon-sized tome, all by its lonesome. A very high percentage of outliers to be found there in Tom's ancestors..
> 
> Could we say that on some level, our beloved author has been coasting on the last two? It certainly feels that way. But I think the biggest shift, crossing over the two most recent books in a way not really witnessed in the previous books, is a real sense of comfort and stability in the family. Of course, we have all noted how Pynchon clearly has been influenced by Ross Macdonald. The Lew Archer series of novels place internal family conflict at the center of his crime novels, something I would say that Pynchon has picked up and ran with in the last two books, but notable from the opening Blue Jays through the closing Blue Jay feathers of Vineland as well.
> 
> If you've read this far, note that I'm going to get very spoilerish here, so if that sort of thing bothers you, avert your eyes.
> 
> We get a sense that things between Doc and his parents are semi-copacetic, the sense that "family", as screwed up as they are, are pretty much alright in Inherent Vice. In Bleeding Edge, domesticity, in the context of the Upper West Side, 2001, is at the center of the story. I don't know if one would consider Doc Sportello 'privileged'—I'd consider myself lucky to be living in those times at/near Manhattan Beach, I could easily picture a more boring existence. But it's credible to say that Doc is on the preterite side of the fence. Maxi, like Oed, is not. And, while Oedipa leaves us with the perhaps the most self-consciously cliff-hanging ending in fiction, Bleeding Edge ends, domesticity wise, with a happy ending.
> 
> If there is a Great curve here, it's not towards greater and more paranoid levels of complication, which are inevitable anyway, Moore's Law never sleeps and neither do NSA's servers. That's where "They" are headed, though Maxi is on some level, part of they, just like the rest of us whether we know it or not. But, past that, there's the karmic responsibility of raising your young. Somewhere along the line, if one is to grow up, one realizes that one is not immortal but that one leaves one's karma behind in the form of family and the responsibilities and rewards that family incurs. I would say that Pynchon as a young man was the sort of person that Pynchon, the now rather old man, would have problems hanging out with. In fact, the author said as much in the introduction to Slow Learner. Mind you, what I am writing is in reference to that simulacra of this person, the writings of this author and what the voice of this author is telling us. But it's not as if his books are entirely in code or that the codes used are all that hard to decipher. Looks like he uses Google, just like the rest of us mere mortals, has a thing for the Brady Bunch too, or so I  have heard.
> 
> One of the things that Bleeding Edge tells us is that Horst is not so bad after all, even if it means that the Jewish Mother marries into the Elect power structure that brought on the Holocaust. It's a living, like Daffy Duck will tell you, this is the sort of dealing with the devil we all deal in. Oedipa was shocked—shocked to see all the preterite suffering that was previously buried to her, as she quested for her novel's McGuffin. Maxi was, is and shall evermore be the knowing one—been there, done that, lost the tee-shirt, always sufficiently self-aware to know when she's going in too deep, always drawing on her various "Spidy Senses" to cover her ass. So, for once, we have a "winner" in the center of the novel, a chosen one, though what really makes Maxi a "winner" is all stuff that the author witnessed watching his son grow up in the Upper West Side, with a Professional, High-Ticket, knows her stuff inside and out Mother for a wife. I would say that a lot of the 'family' element popping out in Bleeding Edge is autobiographically based, much as the lurid scene of Doc Sportello has all sorts of signposts to times and places within the author's personal experience.
> 
> We have traversed from the Human Yo-Yo of Benny Profane, like a cur without a home, lost on the subway, to semi-cozy domestic scene on the Upper West Side, from feeling orphaned, to living in the neighborhood with the [Jeepers!] Tree of Life visible on the morning walk to school, all lit up like Stonehenge rotated specially for the morning of the Spring Equinox.
> 
> If everything connects, it connects the deepest in family.
> 
> Meanwhile, here's the announcement for my upcoming show.
> 
> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=629225230463071&set=a.262126650506266.79156.100001267982193&type=1&theater-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l