BE -- "death wish for the planet"
ish mailian
ishmailian at gmail.com
Sun Feb 28 10:56:04 CST 2016
Does Ernie's belief that television cop shows steered his daughters to the
careers and mates they chose hold water? Or was it his anti-capitalist,
anti-Zionist, anti- neoliberal, anti-neocon stories that drove these
decisions? Maxine wonders. Maybe her mother, who so adored Windust for his
shoes and style, though Maxine didn't take him down in the dirty carpet
like a dog because she shared her mother's fashion lusts, had more to do
with her attraction to Horst, her career in fraud? Maybe she it's
Maybellian? Maybe, as Gaga sez, she was born with it. This guy is something
of an expert in media or cultural history. He sure does bring his job home.
Pushes his attitudes on his family hard. Seems his politics dominate his
private life, like what opera to see, what tv to let the kids watch, but it
seems to have backfired or, at least, to have failed. Does the novel
think it foolish to involve one's kids in Marches?
That TSI essay I cited recently makes a strong argument against King and
using children to make the equality case.
On Sunday, February 28, 2016, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't mean fool in the Shakespearean, as in Lear's Fool, sense at all.
> Pynchon's narrators in GR are Shakespearean Fools in that the songs, the
> twists and turns of language, the puns, the playful and risky addresses to
> the audience/reader, the court, the Greek Chorus kind of function the Fool
> has been said to resemble...as Ahab's Fool, one Pip, the Black minstrel
> does, no Ernie is a nice old guy, smart and insightful enough, not a wit,
> not a tragic or ironic voice, not a mouthpiece of Pynchon, but of, in the
> Mennipean tradition, an attitude, one that he carries into his private
> life, sort of a twist on the way, though without the moat and sharp
> division, John Wemmick works in Dickens's GE. Wemmick works for Vibe, or
> as he is named by Dickens, Jaggers.
>
> Anyone with Google can trace a brief history of the internet. It's not
> 1970 so Pynchon doesn't impress us with his research, as he once
> did, neither does Ernie. Though Ernie tries, Pynchon knows better.
>
> On Sunday, February 28, 2016, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','jstremmel at gmail.com');>> wrote:
>
>> If Ernie is a fool then in a Shakespearean sense, somebody who has savvy
>> and freedom to speak the truth like in that paragraph about the genesis of
>> the Internet Thomas quoted from.
>>
>> 2016-02-28 13:46 GMT+01:00 ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> It's difficult to make strong arguments about the characters in these
>>> satires, but I'm confident in my reading ....sorry not going to defend
>>> it right now.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 2:56 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
>>> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>> > To me this suggests that your argument that P depicts Ernie as a fool
>>> is
>>> > rather weak.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Am 27.02.2016 um 18:43 schrieb ish mailian:
>>> >>
>>> >> Of course, P hedges his satire of Ernie in several ways, not the least
>>> >> of which is that the text also suggests that his daughters are
>>> >> attracted to fascists and pigs not because of anything on the Tube or
>>> >> in Film or mass produced culture (the Tube) but because of something
>>> >> in them, something in females, just because they are female, or, to
>>> >> complicate matters, because of some variation on the Electra Complex
>>> >> ...etc.
>>> >>
>>> >> Hedging is not quite what he does, it's that ironies, like Jewish
>>> >> Lefty raised Girl falls for German Commodities trader with fascist
>>> >> face of Hunky Nazi Hollywood Star than gets fucked in the ass by a
>>> >> Neo-Con and ends up with his Wife talking US South American
>>> >> politics.....and on and on turning the old daisy chain of screws so
>>> >> that we get hysterically inflated to the bursting point of a million
>>> >> laughs on every absurdity turned inside out and backward.
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
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