CoL49 Emotionality

Sun Feb 7 17:46:37 CST 2016

It wouldn't surprise me if that passage or others about Hawaii (which
figures several times in both the Didion collections) had been filed away,
but Vineland pp 56-57 doesn't strike me as an allusion we're "meant to
get." Despite her writings about LA, I don't feel a lot of overlap as  a
*place* between her California (Sacramento family that had reached Oregon
before 1850) and its relation to Hawaii (the old pink Royal Hawaiian filled
by Matson liner with 'people like us') and Pynchon's.

As a state of mind, OTOH... I hear lots of Oedipa, a shared "things are not
making the sense they should, and I'm worried about the new sense they may
be about to make," in Didion's reportage, and occasionally in her fiction.

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 5:52 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is the Honolulu sequence early in Vineland - in which Frenesi and Zoyd
> are in Hawaii in lieu of a divorce, also - an allusion to that Didion
> piece?
>
> Also of note: just reread it and it refers nostalgically to Gordita
> Beach, the fictional setting of Inherent Vice. The Californian novels
> really do all occupy the same universe.
>
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 3:13 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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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