BEg2 chapter 3 - farewell chapter 3 / Maxine & Deseret

[Michael Bailey]

We were never that concerned with Chapter 3 qua Chapter 3 (-;

The last bit is intensely foreshadowy-

“I heard it’s run by the mob.”
“Which mob exactly, Heidi? And what difference does it make?”
 Plenty, as it would turn out.

And yet, I don’t remember why. Good thing we are having this reread!

Farewell, chapter 3. Happy trails, Till we meet again.

———-

Heidi isn’t nearly as fascinated by the Dakota. Watching it seems to have
been Maxine’s initiative, as an example of her taking the lead for once.

It’s “twelve stories and a full square block of sinister clutter—helical
fire escapes at each corner, turrets, balconies, gargoyles, scaled and
serpentine and fanged creatures in cast iron over the entrances and coiled
around the windows. In the central courtyard stands an elaborate fountain,
surrounded by a circular driveway big enough to allow a couple of stretch
limos to sit there and idle, with room left over for a Rolls-Royce or two.
Film crews come here to shoot features, commercials, series, blasting huge
volumes of light into the unappeasable maw of the entranceway, keeping
everybody for blocks around up all night. Though Ziggy claims to have a
classmate who lives there it’s far from Maxine’s social circle, key money
even for a studio in The Deseret said to run $300,000 and up.”


Big money in those days.
Natural to think of the Dakota - name similarities in that, notionally,
“Dakota” takes in more than one state, as does “Deseret.” (Thanks, Neal!)


“blasting huge volumes of light into the unappeasable maw of the
entranceway”

Appease - pacify or placate….relieve or satisfy
(Oxford languages)

Maw - “jaws or throat of a voracious animal”





“At first Maxine found it romantic, all the mutually disconnected lives
going on in parallel—later she came to take more of a what you’d call
gothic approach.”

This seems to hold a literary reference to Romanticism and the Gothic
Movement.

Wikipedia - Romanticism was characterized by its *emphasis on emotion and
individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature*,
preferring the medieval rather than the classical. ... It also promoted the
individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from
classical notions of form in art.

Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a
genre of literature and film that covers horror
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Horror_fiction>,
death and at times romance
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Romance_(love)>. It
is said to derive from the English author Horace Walpole
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Horace_Walpole>'s
1764 novel The Castle of Otranto
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/The_Castle_of_Otranto>,
later subtitled "A Gothic Story". Early contributors included Clara Reeve
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Clara_Reeve>, Ann
Radcliffe
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Ann_Radcliffe>, William
Thomas Beckford
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/William_Thomas_Beckford>
 and Matthew Lewis
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Matthew_Lewis_(writer)>.
It tends to stress emotion and a pleasurable terror that expands the
Romantic literature of the time. The common "pleasures" were the sublime
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Sublime_(literary)>,
which indescribably "takes us beyond ourselves."