Horst-Maxine-Windust

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Horst is no more guilty than Windust. They both share in the blame for 
11 Sept.


-----Original Message-----
From: alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 5:24 pm
Subject: Re: Horst-Maxine-Windust



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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