Section the Third, pg.17-19 spies and girls

[ish mailian]

All those girls.

They are women in an efficient bureaucracy who when the  typewriters
are idle feed the birds. The males are diligently plotting death,
though only some of them know it while others don't. How convenient is
that? Do they hear the birds? The song?

In the building not in any guidebook, a map, of girls that may not be
real, suggests the real omission of the women in the counter
bureaucracy and the New Left.


from The Grand Coolie Damn by Marge Piercy (1969)





On one Movement staff where I worked, there was one macher; a couple
of other males who did not challenge his hegemony, plus a two thirds
majority of women. Whenever we threatened to form an alliance on
anything that mattered, the macher would begin jiggling the sexual
balance of the group, pursuing publicly one of the staff or another
until he had succeeded in creating a harem atmosphere in which all
attention once again centered on him. He would use his confidant
relationship to the staff members to persuade each to talk about the
others, comments he would remember and reveal as if reluctantly at the
proper moment. Even the fact that he was sexually involved with only
one of the staff could be turned to moral advantage, for he would keep
her in her place (on his right hand, just under the thumb) by
constantly pointing out that he could in fact be involved with the
others, by ignoring her in the office, and flirting and teasing, and
creating a constant subsurface tizzy centering on his person. None of
this, of course, was ever openly discussed. The superficial reality
was business as usual, bureaucratic efficiency and personal relations
kept out of the office. The effect was to make his position
impregnable and enable him to dismiss whomever he chose.

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Was just reading some missed posts about the scene reconstuction of London at the time. Good to get Monte’s feedback from his Father who was there. This chapter has that quality of realism sandwiched into the stranger stuff. Girls first appear here, women really, but they are called girls because that is how the men are seeing them. Later we meet women like Jessica and Katje etc.
>
> …you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the feeders the girls have put up.
>
> “Girl at the main desk, gumpopping, good-natured bespectacled ATS, waves him on upstairs”
>
> “The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled “Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and up to Hampstead Heath—in every direction goes this glossy, multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Carolines, Marias, ”
>
> “He moves back down the beaverboard maze, in the weak yellow light, against a tide of incoming girls in galoshes, aloof Bloat unsmiling, no time for slap-and-tickle here you see, he still has his day’s delivery to make. . . .”
>
> Bloat speculates that the girls may be imagined and that has been batted around, but it seems that from what we gather in the text it is Bloat, Prentice, and Feel  who may be the ones sadly disconnected from real sexual and personal relationships as the last line in this chapter and many other lines in the novel indicate.
>
> Life and youth are all around along with the fear and duties of war to which these felows have attached themselves.  But there are no James Bonds or even Tyrone Slothrops in this crowd.
>
>
>
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