CoL49 Emotionality

[Steven Koteff]

Well JD is a classic Sensitive. The disillusion, the migraines...

Have you read much of her more recent stuff, Monte? In the wake of tragedy (the death of her husband and daughter) her attention turns ever more refinedly inward in her later stuff. Magical Thinking, Blue Nights.



> On Feb 7, 2016, at 9:53 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> With all due respect (i.e. the very highest) to James' mistrust of "mere immersion in one's own states,"I commend to your attention the Joan Didion of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968) and 'The White Album' (1979). She turned that immersion outward (neat trick), fusing emotionality into observation, and came as close to Oedipa as non-fiction can come. 
> 
> "1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together... We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce. 
> 
> I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.
> 
> You will perceive that such a view of the world presents difficulties."
> 
>> On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 5:51 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One must do everything to invent, to force open, that door of exit from mere immersion in one's own states.—Henry James, letter.
>> 
>> What do we think was 'the look on her face"? I have always thought it was a kind of start; a registering of awareness that 
>> this thing, this whatever she's been searching for, this Tristero is real, not just an elaborate prank, game or projection.
>>  Most of the reported stuff is ambiguous re that; this if true is not, is historically real yet ...is still like a taunt! A massive historical plot.  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 11:28 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Here's Genghis Cohen, showing Oedipa the counterfeit stamps in PI's collection: "'Why put in a deliberate mistake?' he asked, ignoring--if he saw it--the look on her face. 'I've come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt.'"
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Feb 6, 2016, at 5:36 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Steve points to: 
>>>> "She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive." 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> yes, markedly..sensitive? (Remember Oedipa thought she might be a 'sensitive' as P adds his resonances.) Pynchon's feminism,
>>>> perhaps, as we talked of before on this List? One might write an essay on the old-fashioned 19th century-like, shortened-Jamesian. psychological movements of Oedipa's mind, right?, hidden amidst her overt quest. We get this after she has been self-unwrapped with Metzger---too obviously a hidebound California Young Repub woman now loosening up? She cries after Metzger says, that  Pierce said "She wouldn't be easy?" Why did she cry? 
>>>> This is adultery she commits, against the man she is going to think about very soon in the way we see below ---has it happened before? but not like this time? 
>>>> Adultery was--is--usually a central act with the most far-reaching consequences, esp for women maybe, especially then and times before then---and esp in fiction!  
>>>> Brian Moore's fine The Doctor's Wife of the 70s or so was, as Anthony Burgess said,  a quietly revolutionary novel since it showed full bourgeois Anna Karenina-like real love adultery leading to a new self, a completely new emotional life and HAPPINESS beyond the wife's imagining. Madame Bovary, she dead. Perhaps as emotionally liberating in its fictional way as Fear of Flying was sexually liberating for many woman, all the good girls, on the page but in the life beyond that page too. 
>>>> 
>>>> Discuss and connect. 
>>>> Second post to come. 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> In advance of the BtZ read, I am just starting a slow and hopefully deep, experiential reread of this book. Haven't read it in several years.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The book is so much more emotionally complicated, and smart than I ever realized. I think as a reader accustomed to normaler fiction you have a hard time A) getting the emotion behind the uniqueness and occasional density of the prose, and B) processing a book that just doesn't spend its time working in scene/plot in conventional ways or at a conventional pace. Maybe you could call this a shortcoming of the book--GR and M&D, in my opinion, operate with much more immersive scenery.
>>>>> 
>>>>> But still, this book is just really smart about human pain and loneliness. This is something TRP does not get enough credit for from non-Pynchontoligists.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Here's Oedipa, contemplating sympathy for Mucho and his difficulty overcoming the fear of statutory rape prosecution with regards to his attraction to high schoolers (this is pp 32-3 of the HPMC paperback):
>>>>> 
>>>>> "She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."
>>>>> 
>>>>> I mean I know he gets certain elements of relationship dynamics, especially sexual power maybe, very right. And that's on display here. But the other insights and complexities are not necessarily ones I was expecting. -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>> 
>> 
> 
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