BE redirect

[rich]

u could be right about Rosemary's Baby being some great feminist horror. my
money is on Carnival of Souls.

u know Im reading V again and it's amazing to me he was in his youngish 20s
when he wrote it, with such world-weariness; like I felt about BE, a man in
his late 70s to write with such vigor (though I have alot of issues with
the book)

Pynchon's villains in the later books are front and center--no
sugar-coating romance of Blicero with the Scarsdale V, Mr Ice types.  he
lays it out

so why convolute things.

modern finance is mostly alchemy now. I doubt 90% of those on the street
making millions could explain exactly what they do. alot people hate
capitalism and rightly so in many instances but it's gonna be hard to kill

that;s the thing. the system is like that feeling one had under
psychedelics that everything was this massive beautiful thing that even
evil and other shit would be absorbed by the sheer size and weight of it (I
know this sounds trite) with no fuss or muss (though I did see rumsfeld
emerge out the side of W's head once like some horror from Carpenter's The
Thing but that's another story). that's modern capitalism, it just absorbs
everything but it's not a beautiful thing. it's an efficient thing. and woe
to us all

finally, that is what Pynchon does, the good old misdirect personified.
good way not to be played out or irrelevant soon after not that he probably
cares about that all that much

rich

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 4:09 AM Cometman via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
wrote:

> Thanks, rich, for the kind words. I did suspect the doctor, but it’s nice
> to know. The whole story of Rosemary’s Baby has probably been analyzed in
> feminist terms as the patriarchy presiding over the ceding of autonomy in
> child rearing, hasn’t it?
> My analysis of the choice of villain in BE needs a little work.
> We know what we know (although there is more info than my buffers can
> store - I guess that is why tv news repeats a manageable number of facts
> over and over, that and supporting a narrative, of course) but we don’t
> know the full extent of what we don’t know.
>
> But I do know that Horst’s unoccupied office was not part of
> Cantor-Fitzgerald, so the direction of attention would be towards the
> relatively humble sphere of commodity trading rather than municipal bonds.
> And the notion that he’s able to continue his trading in the Midwest, and
> even make a vacation of it for himself and their sons, suggests a focus on
> the ways life goes on after a cataclysmic event.
> The rise of gaming and its implications as a method towards social control
> (at one point the kids play a game where they shoot people for having bad
> manners, and at another point they inform an adult that, sorry, kids don’t
> read anymore) and away from it (DeepArcher); the financial implications of
> big computing taking its place among multinational movers and shakers in
> the person of Gabriel Ice; the personification of the executive arm of
> neoliberalism in Windust, his undoing, and his human side; the rise of
> Russian influence in the US - all of these and more seem to be larger
> themes in BE than the events of late Fructidor 2001.
> Did the Internet (and by extension, the plot of BE, a-and human progress
> itself) interpret them as damage and route around them?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>