Horst-Maxine-Windust

[alice malice]

If anyone in this novel resembles Vibe, it is Ice, not Horst. Horst cheats
on his wife. Infidelity is not a crime in NYC. She's no Mother Maxina. The
family is, fairly typical of the UWS,  it functions in a dysfunctional
world. That Horst, according to Maxine, once put his hands around her
throat and choked her, and that he still loses it over trivial shit like
the missing Chunky Monkey ice cream, is all I can find in the novel to make
him less than Pynchon's most sympathetic characters. Dixon, for example, is
far from perfect. His abuse of the females is not excused by his whipping
of the slave driver. Slothrop's, Zoyd, the list goes on. Horst is a good
father, a decent guy. And, again, his skill, luck, independence, and great
fortune, are matched against he neo liberals, neo techs, the brave new
world that has taken his trade, his job. So, again, he is more like the
author than Max, who is, subjected to the harshest satire. She bends and
takes Windust through her torn hoes. Like Frenesi on her knees. Horst is on
a different vibe.
On Sunday, February 23, 2014, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Alice, with all due respect,  I can withdraw my two lines supposedly
> summing up my view of Wall Street and the argument ( within the fiction)
> still stands.....my 'associative', descriptive leap " to the 1%"---simple
> fact re Horst; drop the Occupy resonances if you want, ....and the niceness
> of Wall Streeters is just a tail. " Niceness was to pickup on Morris's
> good-heartedness and simply to
> Say many of the very rich can be very " nice"....
>
> I brought out some textual NotNicenesses earlier.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Feb 23, 2014, at 2:25 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mark,
> With all due respect,your view of "wall street" is superficial and
> distorted and so the conclusions you draw are ridiculous.
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, Horst makes money.....a 'wonderful' quality in all of TRP's
> fiction....one of his deep authorial thematic identifications. THIS IS
> SARCASM.
>
> Rich Horst cheated on Maxine. Rich Horst seems to have left Maxine with
> little (but the 'house") as they say.
>
> Horst can seem to sense where the money will be....like Jay Gould? Or a
> Vibe?
>
> Watching bad TV is TRP's way of saying he is his culture, mindless, with
> an "inhuman"---[in the sense his skill
> happens without much interaction with human beings...he doesn't make
> anything, create anything--even a 'team"]
> skill for getting rich. He is the 1%, with an overt "niceness"---why
> shouldn't he be? He is Wall Street.
>
>
>   On Sunday, February 23, 2014 12:44 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>  He is a very sympathetic character in BE.  He seems almost pure hearted.
>  He watches bad TV, but makes tons of dough. What reader wouldn't want to
> be in his shoes? Would that we could be so lucky.
>
> On Saturday, February 22, 2014, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> What? Don't like Horst? Why? He has money? He trades commodities? Nothing
> wrong with his job, right? He's an independent craftsman.  He's good. Real
> good. Nothing wrong with that. What? He seems like a good guy. There is
> that temper. That's not good. He gets violent with Maxine. But other than
> that, the novel pits him against the computer and the new kids on the
> block, and he gains our approval. Right.
>
> On Saturday, February 22, 2014, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Wrong.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Feb 22, 2014, at 9:53 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Horst does not adopt the new technologies that have all but
> buggy-whipped the traders in Chicago and in NYC by the time he moves to
> NYC.  He takes a sublet in the tower not because he has finally given in to
> computer trading but because he wants to keep at his old craft trade as
> long as possible. He is, as he says, a dinosaur. As he says, the computer
> trading has taken over and he can do his job anywhere now, but he wants to
> trade the old way. Though the trading pits in the building of Lower
> Manhattan are on the lover floors, Horst takes a sublet at the top. These
> floors have been relegated to the old world traders, guys and gals who
> trade bonds and act as dealers for UST Securities, so Cantor Fitzgerald the
> Firm hardest hit on September the 11th. The novel clearly sides with Horst
> and his craft. His magic, his luck and fortune, not unlike the author's
> own, is set against, not entangled in the computer traded world that allies
> itself with the neo-liberalism of Windust.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
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