BEg2 chapter 8: Child of countless trees/child of boundless seas

Tue Dec 14 18:12:52 UTC 2021

What you suggest is how I’ve read it before, but Maxine saying she’s 12 stuck out more. Maxine has kids close to this age and  walks them to school and sees kids across the spectrum . I teach( glass arts and other art) young students in the summer and a weekly  evening glass class for freshman-senior. If I said someone was 12 , the oldest they would be is 14. Also he is lying about his name. It all just struck me as more creepy. If I found out an adult was having sex with one of my students it wouldn’t be funny. The fact that Maxine mostly wants Lucas to pay her for an important contribution does indicate she may be exaggerating on her age estimate and just being emphatic that this isn’t cool. But I thought I ‘d throw out this darker thought and see if any more evidence turns up. There is also something about L being drawn to the abyss that I wonder about. Later we find out Vyrva is sleeping with Ice and that is why she is away so much. Also Maxine has a suspicion Vyrva is sleeping with Luke. How much is hidden under outward show? Is Pynchon reversing some of the predator prey roles. Slaggiatt, IgorDashkov and Misha and Grisha seem at first glance suspicious, but their actual doings are far less predatory than Ice or whoever in the CIA had Windust hunted down. 
  I think your view has strong arguments and is just intuitively more likely. But I wanted to get this darker reaction in the record and in my own radar  and see if anything else like that shows up. 

> On Dec 14, 2021, at 8:26 AM, Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com> wrote:
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> I take this to be exaggeration, not some illegal/Epstein situation. I know that Maxine characterizes Cassidy's age as "south of anything legal" and says, "She's twelve," but I think that's typical Maxine exaggeration, like the "hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome," etc. 
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> In 2001, the age of consent in New York was 17. Here's the evidence that makes me believe Cassidy is actually in her early 20s. Cassidy has multiple tattoos, which you can only legally get at the age of 18. She mentions that she goes to frequent clubs, which means she'd have to have identification showing she's 21. And she also has/had a job at a graphic design company, which implies she's out of, or at least on the late stages of, college. (But certainly out of high school.) So I'd say she's in her early 20s. And having known people in their thirties who have dated people in their early twenties, a common joke/criticism is, "What, she's/he's like <insert wildly inappropriate age>?" So I certainly don’t take Maxine literally here. 
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> Now, yes I know: you can find tattoo artists who will overlook the age restriction, you can get a fake ID, and you can get a job while still in high school, even at a professional design company if you have the right connections. But all of those together? Seems unlikely for me. Also, if this really were a Lolita situation, I really don't think Momma Maxine would be so casual about it! Maxine may not have the best moral compass, but that's hard to overlook. Nor would Lucas have been so eager to send Maxine into the bathroom to meet Cassidy. If he were sleeping with a sixteen-year old (or younger) girl, I would suspect he'd try to hide that awful shit, rather than bring her to a diner to break up with her and then ask an adult woman with one foot in law-enforcement to check up on her. 
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> This does not absolve Lucas from his cad-like behavior of giving a false name, etc. But I don't think he's some Judge Roy Moore-like monster. 
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> I hadn't thought of possession to explain Cassidy's "forces." Interesting....I need to look deeper ono Pixie Colman... I don't think she claimed any esoteric inspiration for her work on the Tarot deck, but she was a member of the Golden Dawn...
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> —Quail
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> PS: One of my favorite Dead songs
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> https://www.dead.net/song/cassidy
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> On 12/14/21, 4:50 AM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Joseph Tracy" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
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>> On Dec 13, 2021, at 4:56 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wroteLucas & Cassidy - “better start paying her royalties” see this is Maxine
>> flexing. She has some clout.
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>    I have been wondering about this whole scene  in a rather different way because it implies that Lucas may be a very shady character. He is, legally speaking, raping ( statutory is bull) an underage girl from whom he got a key component of his part of Deep Archer.  He is lying to her about his name. Also why was Lucas at hwgaahwgh ? I thought he was the graphics dude getting generous help from the world of hackers and gamers and open source. No earlier mention of him having this connection.Is Maxine going to follow up on this?  Also it gets creepy in another way “Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”
>      "“No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with,…” She says if she came to it now she would like to apply javascript public void close which I need help to understand, but sound like some knd of impairment.Basically it sounds like black magic or posession. She is being used and perhaps by more than Lucas. 
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>    Frankly this sounds like 2 aspects of Jeffrey Epstein. The connection to rape of underage girls and his connection to Promis, Robert Maxwell, and that whole rabbit hole.  Anyway to me Lucas looks way more fishy this time around. 
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>    With Inslaw out of the way, Brian sold the software all over the world. Eitan later recruited Robert Maxwell to become another Promis salesman, which he did remarkably well, even succeeding in selling the software to Soviet intelligence and conspiring with <https://www.wrmea.org/003-september/book-review-robert-maxwell-israel-s-superspy.html> Republican Texas Senator John Tower to have the software adopted by the U.S. government laboratory at Los Alamos. Dozens of countries used the software on their most carefully guarded computer systems, unaware that Mossad now had access to everything Promis touched…..a few years after Epstein’s release from prison following his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, Barak formed a company with Epstein with the chief purpose of investing in an Israeli start-up then known as Reporty. That company, now called Carbyne, sells its signature software to 911 call centers and emergency service
>    Israeli media reported that Epstein and Barak were among the company’s largest investors. Barak poured millions into the company and it was recently revealed <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-july-11-2019/> by Haaretz that a significant amount of Barak’s total investments in Carbyne was funded by Epstein, making him a “de facto partner” in the company. Barak is now Carbyne’s chairman <https://carbyne911.com/team/>.   written by Whitney Webb
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