BEg2 chapter 10 G&D redux

[Michael Bailey]

Rich wrote:

what's that term, oh yeah, wittering. good description for such paragraphs



De gustibus…


Not a completely worthless paragraph?
Have I counter-data?
Perhaps - I did have some takeaways:

Mention of DVD as a kinda new thing (everyone I know was pretty excited for
awhile that year about making these) gives period flavor

Mention of the director, who’s a focal point and usually kind of an
interesting character …
Stonechat per Wikipedia -

The *European stonechat* (Saxicola rubicola) is a small passerine bird that
was formerly classed as a subspecies of the common stonechat. Long
considered a member of the thrush family, Turdidae, genetic evidence has
placed it and its relatives in the Old World flycatcher family,
Muscicapidae.

Which alludes to Passerine in CoL49, imho.



Lighting crew and cast difficulties - mentioned for flavor but all done
really quickly (a virtue if you aren’t wanting to linger in this passage
anyway)

The eccentric architect - resonance with Ghostbusters, feeds into
Kugelblitz building weirdness motif

The oddly facing seats - I leap (probably foolishly) into meta mode: the
play a metaphor for this book, which looks toward being a “well-made” plot*
 - the askew views from seats being the preconceptions readers bring - the
mad architect being Pynchon himself in his earlier books - Scott and
Nutella Vontz being the benevolent angels but Vontz means “bedbug” in
Yiddish … bedbugs famous for being crazy … consistent with Kugelblitz
vision and mission statement

Per reddit:

I suppose the surname is most famous for the *unusual*looking building
called the *Vontz* Center for *Molecular Studies* in Cincinatti. (Sic)




I was hoping to find something on the actual auditorium in Collegiate
School, where the author’s son attended, but nothing protruded invitingly
from the piles of online data, and they’ve moved premises in 2013, making
references to the old 78th Street Building (now condos)
 historical/archival & hence harder to find - so, absent some Adderall or
something, I’m not going to produce data on that. Probably not germane
anyway if I had to guess.



* the author of the French play La Tosca, source for Tosca, was
Victorien Sardou, “ best remembered today for his development, along
with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play.”

Reading up on that there are a lot of things that make me think BE -

The biggest one is (thanks, Wikipedia!)


   - scène a fairè (the "obligatory" scene) – a term invented by the
   19th-century critic Francisque Sarcey – a scene in which the outcome the
   audience expects and ardently desires comes to pass or is clearly signalled.


Like Maxine and Horst getting back together.

 If BE is a “well-made” novel, it’s a weird one.
However, that’s okay too:

“ The formula came into regular use in the early 19th century and shaped
the direction of drama over several decades, but its various elements
contained nothing unknown to previous generations of writers, and neither
its first proponent, Eugène Scribe, nor his successors applied it
unvaryingly.”






On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 1:32 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at
gmail.com <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>>
wrote:

>* “Saturday night at Kugelblitz, despite the lighting crew getting stoned and
*>* confusing or forgetting cues and the kids playing Sky and Sarah, who have
*>* been going steady in real life, breaking up loudly and publicly at the
*>* dress rehearsal, Guys and Dolls is a roaring success, which will look even
*>* better on the DVD Mr. Stonechat, the director, is shooting of it, given the
*>* many sight-line issues at the Scott and Nutella Vontz Auditorium, whose
*>* architect owing to some sort of mental condition kept changing his mind
*>* about such nuances of design as getting rows of seats to actually face the
*>* stage and so forth.”
*>