BE Ch 9 summary - Chunky Monkey

[David Morris]

Other reasons Pynchon might like to include bananas in his novels:

1.  They look sorta like penises, especially when they’re in your pocket,
or when eaten in a suggestive manner.

2.  Monkeys eat them in comical fashion.

3.  People have been known to slip and fall (comically) on their peels.

4.  When made into a cream pie, they are funny when smooshed into someone’s
face.

David Morris

On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 12:36 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it is also more than that he likes them, which he probably does.
> Almost everyone does, right?
> Some speculative glossing: ...Very nutritious.
> "The scientific name for banana is Musa, from the Musaceae family of
> flowering tropical plants, which distinctively showcases the banana fruit
> clustered at the top of the plant. The mild-tasting and disease-resistant
> Cavendish type is the main variety sold in the U.S. and Europe. Despite
> some negative attention, bananas are nutritious and may even carry the
> title of the first “superfood
> <https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/superfoods/>,” endorsed by
> the American Medical Association in the early 20th century as a health food
> for children and a treatment for celiac disease."
>
> Cold countries are not the best places to live in Pynchon's world, and as
> with Ice even as a name, Pynchon gives cold and North the old
> symbolic meanings
> in so much literature since before Shakespeare....
> Warm countries are the better countries, friendly, habitable, etc.
> And bananas unite us to our animal cousins.
>
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 11:07 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> > Like bananas myself, even organic bananas are way cheap and good in
> > smoothies especially with homegrown peaches from the freezer. Maybe the
> > whole Pynchon connection is less cerebral than I think; perhaps a deeper
> > level  is more operative.
> >
> > > On Dec 16, 2021, at 10:53 AM, David Elliott via Pynchon-l <
> > pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Another banana reference. We have them in
> > GR and IV. Isn’t there a banana reference in M&D? It might be an
> ingredient
> > in a food Mason and/or Dixon eats but not explicitly mentioned? I don’t
> > remember. Any other banana references in the other novels?Anyway, Thomas
> > Pynchon must like bananas. That’s my deep contribution to the read. Just
> > wanted to take it to another level.
> > >
> > >
> > > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > >
> > > --
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> >
> >
> >
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> >
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