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

[Mark Kohut]

Great post and first thoughts best thoughts (I hope) as Zen Master Suzuki is always saying. The real estate development as loss theme that is in Inherent Vice is accepted as Total Loss Farm (an allusion and so to speak) 
in Manhattan. We might remember that in the trailer Not-Pynchon chose to allude to what Robert Moses did to 
ethnic neighborhoods in New York City. And, a book many a reading upper West Sider refers to--I know one UWS friend who gave it away--and another thing Pynchon gets right. 
 
Yes, finely noticed and associated, I say to your question about March's face as described. And, I think from the phrase
Old Lefty, the Fabian bit bucket and March one thing P is "saying', 'showing' ,using is the notion that NYC in BE
has no genuine ''Left' tradition left. ....Further, that the kids see her as "crazy'--meaning their innocent acceptance of the world as it is sees her as 'weird'?? --and she is also referred to with "mad dog' ---a term we remember was applied to that 'radical' Bertrand Russell in Against the Day---I would argue that Old March was valuable in P's categorization but....now? 
 
 
 



On Saturday, October 26, 2013 10:38 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
  
“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-september-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” 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. (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. 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.“
 
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 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 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” – if Wikipedia’s link 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, 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 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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