BE toilet tropes and slippery slopes

[David Morris]

There’s a special toilet in ATD, but It’s more a moving target, more like a
mythical contour, than an actual toilet:

At the end of the episodes of the Chicago Exposition, when Lew Basnight is
about to head West, the general tone of the book gets pretty dark as the
airship passes above the great cattle killing-floors where “an instructive
hour of throat-slashing” is presented to a school-outing tour as it follows
the stock  “from their somber arrival in rail cars, into the smells of shit
and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and  dead,” with the
kiddies ending up in a jolly and macabre souvenir-shop.  And in the airship
someone quips, “That’s about it.  The frontier ends and the disconnect
begins.”

But this observation then brings to mind a remembered time of not long
before where “there was still a frontier, you always knew where it was and
how to get there, and it wasn’t always between natives and strangers or
Anglos and Mexicans or calvary and Indians. But you could feel it,
unmistakably, like a divide, where you knew you could stand and piss would
flow two ways at once.”

DM

On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 4:22 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Also a connection with toilets and drug use - In BE coke and then Avi with
> computer duster in toilet,  Coy Harlingen In IV   (IV in this case intra
> venous), prolly more    Then there is famous harmonica retrieval plunge of
> Slothrop. I guess a lame joke would be that with Pynchon as with so many of
> his readers, toilets are a place where shit happens. A trbute to Duchamp?
>
> > On Dec 16, 2021, at 4:07 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> > And (I suppose "mild spoiler?") in Chapter 28 of "Bleeding Edge" Pynchon
> gives us a tour-de-force of toilets, ending with a surreal sequence in a
> massive disco toilet. —Quail
> >
> > In BE Maxine finds Felix Boingo’s name on Toilet wall in Montreal which
> leads her to the sought after Vip E.
> >
> > Pg 146 while tailing Tallis Maxine sees her looking through  a window
> into a  toilet showroom jst before being picked up by guy exiting
> Darklinear solutions
> > Lester Traipse has argument with Ice heavy over web code in men’s toilet
> > March’s ex,  Sid used to work as studio 54 toilet attendant
> > etc etc  etc 43 appearances of the word toilet
> > Apparently there is a film called Movie 43 which came out the same year
> as BE so no likely connection to Pynchonian toilet gematria
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> > Sam Harpoon
> > @SamHarpoon
> > <https://twitter.com/SamHarpoon>
> > ·
> > 5h
> > <https://twitter.com/SamHarpoon/status/1471211232984121346>
> > Why would anyone want to see a modern movie that “takes place” in the
> 1970s when there are plenty of movies from that actual era they can see
> instead? It’s absurd that a “re-creation” gets a major release while there
> are still prints of my “Plotz!” which were never projected. SH.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>