BEER Ch. 6, 53-57: knotting into March Kelleher

Sat Oct 26 09:37:49 CDT 2013

"March and Maxine go back to the co-opping frenzy of ten or fifteen years
ago," i.e. 1985-1990, but that recognition is briefly delayed. We first hear
of March  (via Otis & Ziggy's report) as a "really crazy lady," an alumna
guest speaker at a Kugelblitz school assembly with "something she wanted to
say but not in front of a kid audience." See Michael Chabon's NYRB review, 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/thomas-pynchon-crying-s
eptember-11/,

for thoughts on innocence, parents and the stories they tell or don't tell
children. Is this perception of something left unsaid  a plausible one for
Otis or Ziggy?  (We don't know which one is speaking.) And with 11 September
still months away, what might be the "something else" beyond "oil business"
that links the Bush family with Saudi Arabian terrorists? Some industrious
graduate student should tally all the Pynchon characters who are flagged at
their first appearance with indicators of concealment, hidden agendas,
something they can't say, etc.: it's a signature trope. 

In Maxine's memory (54) of red-haired March in her red snood at the tenants'
protest, what makes March's  face "silvery at the edges, like some antique
photograph"?  Is that a visual correlate of "old lefty?" Think also about
Merle's photography, the alchemy of silver, and the bright backlit rim of
things seen against the day.

Some context for the co-opping frenzy: Real estate and its financing are a
large part of any city's economy, and have long been a larger fraction of
New York City's than most. Long ago, Wharton and James inspired me to read
about the Gilded Age and the "Four Hundred
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_McAllister#.22The_Four_Hundred.22> "
families at the top of NY society then. I was struck by how many of the
fortunes were tied to savvy investment in local land. We associate the
Vanderbilts, Astors et al with shipping, railroads, and beaver pelts, but
few of their investments matched the long-term ROI of parcels of farmland in
the path of the city's expansion. Because the value of land and buildings is
so closely tied to public infrastructure and investment in streets and
utilities,  bridges, subways, etc. (and to zoning and building codes since
they came into play), the real estate industry  is intertwined with the
city's politics from deep underground to the top of the Freedom Tower
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_tower> . (Again, true of any city, but
the stakes are higher where the dollars-per-square-foot are higher.)

I'm not knowledgeable about the changes in the industry and tax codes in the
1980s that made it especially profitable then to convert rental apartment
buildings to co-ops or condominiums. I heard about those skirmishes  at
length from friends, my former neighbors on the Upper West Side. But by then
I was engaged with the changes that had already swept loft neighborhoods in
SoHo and Chelsea, and were beginning in my part of the Brooklyn waterfront.
By the 2000s, former $300-$400-per-month rental lofts like mine would become
million-dollar (and up) condos. I was familiar with loft landlords'
"encouragement" of turnover a la Kriechman. I organized tenants'
demonstrations like this one. I tracked and attempted to influence the
community-board, city, and state policy decisions (more of them in back
rooms than in public forums) that permitted/drove the changes.

Note that March explicitly links the displacement of relatively well-to-do
and empowered Upper West Side tenants here to earlier events less than a
mile to the south: the demolition thirty years earlier (V days) of a poorer
Puerto Rican neighborhood to make way for Lincoln Center
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Center> . Note also that no one is
entirely innocent: Maxine's opera-loving parents Elaine and Ernie have "no
love for Lincoln Center, but you can't keep 'em away from the Met
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_opera> ."

>From here on throughout the book, no reference to matters of NYC real estate
-- from dot-com offices in the Flatiron district to the "Newspaper of
Record" (NY Times) celebrating every form of "urban renewal" -- is casual.
We are never far from demolition slower than that of 11 September, and
construction more concrete than virtual cities in video games. We're
learning the rules (overt, implicit, and deeply secret) of the emerging
cyber-real-estate industry: its land rush, infrastructure, zoning, and so
on. I sure hope someone's keeping records, don't you?

Note also how quickly the connections accumulate: the "really crazy lady" 

(1)    attended and speaks at the school Maxine's kids attend

(2)    is Gabriel Ice's mother-in-law

(3)    is an acquaintance from the real-estate skirmishes of the late 1980s

(4)    has been a UWS neighbor (unknown to Maxine) all along

(5)    knows Maxine's parents from protests against Reagan's games in
Central America, linked via Iran-Contra
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair>  to a Middle
Eastern country run by fundamentalists and sponsors of terrorism, with whom
we would no more cut deals than with, say, Saudi Arabia.  

No wonder Maxine makes a note "to see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is
up to these days." In terms of the stricter conventions of detective
fiction, this is seriously bogus, like those phone calls to the squadroom in
Law and Order that always supply the next piece of the puzzle just in time.
But as I wrote offlist to one of you recently: "In fifty years of Pynchonian
quests, investigations, and balloon chases, I can't think of one that isn't
minutely supervised by those tall cloud angels at the horizon, who toss in
'clues' the way we feed goldfish..."

A few notes to supplement the Pynchon wiki
<http://bleedingedge.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6#Page_53>
for these pages:

53: "The hashslingrz legend continues, here." "Legend" is an interesting
choice, more loaded in several directions than, say, "Hmm, another
hashslingrz connection, here." One that occurs to me is the use of "legend"
in John Le Carre to mean "cover story/identity" - often a spy's faked
background complete with documentation. Possibly a hint that this is not
just potential business fraud, but a matter of concern to larger powers and
dominions?

54: "Gestapo techniques" - along with the p. 56 invocation of "fascists" and
"When I hear the word culture. I release the safety on my Browning!" [not
Goering, sorry, March] a reminder that the UWS was home to many European
emigres from the 1930s. That's floating in the subtext (and some Columbia U.
-  Central  Park locations) of the movie  Marathon Man, with its revenant
Nazi.

54: "the union's giant inflatable rat
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_rat> " - if Wikipedia's link
<http://www.vice.com/read/the-history-of-scabby-the-rat>  is correct and the
rat was first used in Chicago in 1990, this may be a slight anachronism. As
a loyal New Yorker, however, I'd welcome any evidence that this is just
another desperate bid for status from the ever-jealous Second City. 

55: "since the late fifties when the Puerto Rican gangs were terrorizing the
Anglos in the neighborhood" -- e.g. Salvador Agron
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Agron> , inspiration for Paul Simon's
"The Capeman" - although that fatal, West-Side-Storyish gang rumble was in
Hell's Kitchen, one neighborhood south from the UWS. My family moved from a
Boston suburb to Manhattan in the summer of 1960, when gangs - and several
public-school scandals - were much in the news. That, along with more income
at new jobs for both parents,  may have helped persuade them to send their
sons  to prep-school Collegiate (pp. 95, 130, 149) rather than a public
school -- which had not been a family trajectory before that. No one is
entirely innocent.

57: "'I do remember,' Maxine tells the boys now, 'March was always sort of.
political?'" - Is that a high rising terminal
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal>  intonation? Given all
she's recalled of March in the few seconds since p. 53,iIt's not the first
time, and won't be the last, that Maxine is less forthcoming than her sons'
knowingness might seem to invite. 

Again, like Chabon sez: innocence, parents and the stories they tell or
don't tell children.   

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