Bleeding Edge: Ducks on Stamps

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Pynchon writes about stamps also in other books like /The Crying of Lot 
49/. Communicative representations of order, --- a profane kinda Tarot ...

"Tracking from one group of attendees to another, locating presently a 
normal-enough looking citizen with an interest in migratory-bird hunting 
and conservation stamps, known to collectors as duck stamps, and his 
perhaps-less-involved wife, Gladys---
  ' ... and my dream is to become the Bill Gross of duck stamps.' Not 
only federal duck stamps, mind you, but every state issue as 
well---having wandered with the years into the seductive wetlands of 
philatelic zealotry, this by-now-shameless completist must have them 
all, hunters' and collectors' versions, artist-signed, remarques, 
varieties, freaks and errors, governors' editions ... 'New Mexico! New 
Mexico issued duck stamps only from 1991 through 1994, ending with the 
crown jewel of all duck stamps, Robert Steiner's supernaturally 
beautiful Green-Winged Teals in Flight, of which I happen to own a plate 
block ...'
  'Which someday,' Gladys announces chirpily, 'I am going to take out of 
its archival plastic, compromise the gum on the back with my slobbering 
tongue, and use to send in the gas bill.'
  'Not valid for postage, honeybunch.'"  (Bleeding Edge, pp. 13-14)

This is an article on Robert Steiner which contains examples of his work:
http://www.steinerprints.com/master_of_duck_stamps.pdf

So here we have a man avoiding relationship with his wife by developing 
a mania for collecting duck stamps. Collecting mania (dt. "Sammelwut") 
is a well known phenomenon, but what about the ducks? Is there an 
Arcanum of US history which involves ducks? Or does, perhaps, the word 
"duck," like "beaver," carry in American English a sexual connotation? 
And if so, which? There is a very famous movie where ducks on stamps do 
appear, and this movie is "Fargo" by the Coen Brothers from 1996. You 
remember Marge's husband Norm? He's painting ducks, and in the end of 
the movie one of his motives makes it on a small fee stamp. Pynchon most 
certainly knows the movie, but on first look it's hard to see any 
connection between these two artistic representations of ducks on 
stamps. Isn't Pynchon's character a caricature while the Coen Brothers' 
one is a likable human being supporting the movie's heroine? Yes and no. 
Norm is likable but also, as all the good people in "Fargo" are, a 
little simple minded and naive; his art is decorative and thus largely 
irrelevant:

 > He is a folk artist, and from the brief glimpses, both visual and 
spoken, his thing seems to be ducks. Given the profusion of tacky 
statuettes in the movie, this raises a red flag: his creations are part 
of that dreary cultural landscape I described earlier, a landscape 
decorated with kitschy, unimaginative art. The selection of his mallard 
painting for a postage stamp seems at first like an affirmation of his 
artistic ability, but in fact, it is yet another exercise in 
misdirection. What it signifies in context is the larger society’s 
embrace of the bland, repetitive and predictable. <

https://thisruthlessworld.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/what-does-this-movie-mean-the-coen-brothers-fargo-1996/

"Bland, repetitive and predictable" is also the behavior of the 
borderliners on the cruise ship. While I personally like the works of 
Robert Steiner as far as I know them, it wouldn't be completely unfair 
to call them "kitschy, unimaginative art." And since the borderliners' 
cruise ship journey does stand in a certain sense for Western culture in 
general, Pynchon seems to be saying that we're left with either Reg's 
digital tape-it-all-positivism or with the questionable achievements of 
handmade paintings of idealized nature. This does not meet the 
complexity of things. Is Pynchon here also self-referential?

Und jetzt schafft 'was, ihr Nullen!

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