The How old was Bianca, Lolita thread

[ish mailian]

Commercial mass culture, of consumption, of the production and consumption
of "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", images and sounds, and in
Slothrop's world, cinema, German to American, from Fritz Lang's M (1931),
for example, to Temple's Baby Take a Bow (1934), the child is vulnerable to
the criminal mind (Beckert) , a victim of the Depression that desperately
needs to be kept amused by a child.

It is there in V., the possible influence of Nabokov but more likely a mass
cultural analysis,  and in the Slow Learners. The sick crew in "The Secret
Integration", Operation Spartacus (1960),  with Kim Dufay, "a slender,
exotic-looking sixth-grader with a blond pigtail that hung to her waist"
and her boyfriend, "Gaylord, an infatuated sophomore shot-putter who just
liked them young" (150-151).

The seductive subversive expression that, from Freud to Marcuse, as Hite
explains in her analysis, and as others, notably Freer, Thomas Pynchon and
the Counter Culture, suggests that play and work are not so distinct
(Dewey), but that mass culture and new "Ways of Seeing" (1972) have
repressed both, the mechanical bride and the mad men.


https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/seductive_subversion/

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 6:17 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Monte wrote: "to suggest that Bianca, Slothrop, and "the penis he
> thought was his own" have been programmed for this by commercial mass
> culture as much as by pornography."
>
> Cf. Metzger's movie in Chap two of The Crying of Lot 49: " A small
> crowd was seeing it [the little submarine] off, among them the old
> fisherman, and his daughter, a leggy, ringleted nymphet who, should
> there be a happy ending, would end up with Metzger."
>
> There it is early.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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