BEg2 story thoughts, ‘cause …

[Michael Bailey]

Because I’m feeling like not being super focused -

BE - New York, I like to compare & contrast with V.

In V., you could be a young roisterer & live in NYC in any number of cheap
digs, not that they were great but they were there. A reality reflected in
much fiction & many lives, artsy kids would move there and find a garret or
something.

In BE that’s less and less an option. Now you have to play the market like
Horst or have a career like Maxine, (and she still has to “rely on the
kindness of stranglers”)  even a garret is way expensive. On the plus side
it’s a bit cleaner & safer.

My big glow of “oh I’m so perceptive” was in comparing the pear tree
metaphor in V. with the actual pear trees in BE, a shift in perspective
from the young P. thinking in terms of um, Toynbee or something, &
“decky-dance,”

To, like, the mature P. with a darn good career under his belt despite the
decline of the West & thinking in less desperate terms while still
realizing the dire straits are quite real & sharing some of his good
fortune by various usable descriptions of actual good and bad scenes.
Usable in terms of enjoyment, but also in terms of text that a person can
use to organize, reify, critique & expand his or her own experience. There
may be a way thru the maze, or
something, one thinks, after such a read.

All good novels do this, to some extent. (And they have to do a lot of
other stuff, sure) But I find Pynchon’s work to contain a high ratio of
usefulness for our place & time & tendrils of usefulness for my own outlook
qua me.


But, also - not just V.’s pear trees do we see a morph of - how about that
flaming tongue in the Jacobean play in CoL49, compared with the simmering
tongue cooking in the Tarnow apartment, its aroma pervading and imbuing
like all get-out -

Such a figuration, the unholy Pentecost of the young writer’s furious
communication, words phrases and thoughts around violence and madness, held
aloft afire with enthusiasm - like GR - a potent (and again with the)
societal critique…

Whereas with BE the maturity, the new takes on familiar tropes, not denying
the horrors in our world or stinting in deploring them, but also having
found more areas of relishment, at least a few cozy corners, and sharing
them. The slow-cooking, family dinner tongue.