Horst-Maxine-Windust

[alice malice]

Horst is not into the political intrigue, the game that Max plays; he
wouldn't sit there talking to Marge about how the Plutocrats are setting
the races and neighbors against one another, how Gentrification is a Robert
Moses master plan, recite from the Guardian, but he knows a lot, and he's
not dumb. Though Max complains that he's a Lug, an American from the
Heartland who has roots in Europe that give him his Hollywood good looks
etc, he's now q


On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 9:47 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think this argument is based on a false dichotomy which Pynchon
> deliberately constructs, in this case based on tropes from the
> romantic genre and especially from TV/Hollywood romantic comedy.
>
> Horst vs Windust gives rise to the convention of the Wrong Partner, in
> which a dialectic of partner preference is used to play out a
> conversation between desirable but apparently exclusive character
> traits (or even larger traits of a society itself). So you have the
> companionate marriage versus the passionate but untenable affair, or
> the boring but reliable wrong partner versus the exciting and chaotic,
> or the monied versus the earthy, or the hard worker versus the
> gadabout. Pynchon knows that this convention is deeply, deeply
> entrenched in our romantic narratives and that we will pit Horst
> against Windust. He makes them both attractive depending upon your own
> angle of incidence. And equally unattractive by other routes.
>
> To ask whether we're supposed to sympathise with/forgive/forbid either
> of these guys is to take an oddly naive realist perspective on the
> writer we're all pretty well-versed in doing anything but, which is
> again why I find this book so fascinating. By engaging with modes that
> aren't so self-consciously, erm, self-conscious, he has us quite
> forgetting ourselves.
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 1:05 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Ok, go for it. A passage, a page. Anything at all, from the book.
> >
> >
> > On Sunday, February 23, 2014, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'll leave what Horst 'should' do to you and stick with what he does,
> >> in the book, which is not much. He's loathsome.
> >>
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
> >> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >> Sent: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 7:28 pm
> >> Subject: Re: Horst-Maxine-Windust
> >>
> >>
> >> Who ain't to blame? Right? We all just a bunch of dollar diggers
> >> dumping all our shit on the rest of the world.  Horst should quit his
> >> job, repent, go live in a monastery or a commune. But that ain't in the
> >> book.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:05 PM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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?
>
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