CoL49 Emotionality

[Monte Davis]

I think I've read everything she's published. In the mid-1960s, I certainly
identified myself as NOT a Saturday Evening Post reader (I mean, Norman
Rockwell, come on!). I was quite cocksurely blind to what Clay Blair and
Bill Emerson were doing with it (including P's "The Secret Integration"
until after Col49 had come out) -- but I made damn sure to get every issue
with a Didion piece,

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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