BEg2 ch 39 - brief summary

[rich]

Windust is damaged early on by outside forces and his end is pretty much
foretold. But there's something tragic about him that I think doesn't match
with some of Pynchon's earlier villains, who are comprised of evil doers of
one stripe or another. Maybe, Pokler would be a closer approximation?

rich

On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 2:23 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>
>
> Tarot as though a message is being assembled from modern characters, The
> scholar, houseless, haunted woman...
> in the pedestrian corridor to the Port of Authority ads for movies,
> albums, yup toys,fashon… she thinks hell were a bus station in NY this is
> what All Hope Abandon would look like( sounds more a P thought than a
> Maxine reference.) My earlier (ch 38 thoughts) Dante reference was
> intuitive, not recalling this passage. This refer ence to hell is more than
> a little strange from a woman whose best friend is obsessed with the
> cultural ephemera being advertised. Still, death has a way of putting
> things in the starkest perspective and Windusts death was as starkly grim a
> memory and a regret as any that occupy Maxine.  I really don’t know how to
> take this vision of hell aspect of Bleeding Edge. Is it about the way we,
> or they, have structured the world from our own, or their own, darkest
> fears and most lascivious dreams of winners and losers in deadly games with
> the fierce gods of our moment in time? Is it the real structure of the
> world or just a case of following priests, salesmen and politicians in
> their unnecessary derangement? The reason the image of the bus station ads
> as the entry to hell makes sense to me is that it is entertainment and
> distraction which pulls us away from the prophetic warnings about where we
> are headed. There is less and less common ground in our stories. There is
> only win or lose in the ampitheatre of an ever shortening public span of
> attention where
> we are cheering spectators until the moment when our head is needed for a
> ball. I cannot go along with the idea that BE is Pynchon Lite.
>
>  Random thought: The one thing that Pynchon fails to take seriously in BE
> is the mythic power of the Islamic terrorist übermensch . He appears only
> as a halloween mask of Misha/Grisha, as a hundred arabs working on
> computers in a secret room at hashslingerz. What kind of a 9-11 story is
> this fer christsakes?
>
>    Xiomara. Such a beautiful name. If you have never heard the cuban
> american singer Xiomara Laugart she is soulful and subtle  and worth a
> listen; ocean breezes flow through her.
>
> Xiomara's story with Windust is telling. He 'saves' her from his own
> deadly mission.  American CIA heroes are always saving the benighted, those
> beguiled by anti-market forces and those  who think they should decide for
> themselves what they want . Windust is the one who needed saving, but his
> lostness went back far and deep and he was so lost that he had no idea how
> much he needed something  real. We have met him before in the works of
> Pynchon, picking off Hereros in the distance, experimenting on children,
> doing those things that “somebody has to do”, according to some very
> important somebodies. He was loved by 3 women we knw of  but it barely got
> past his cock, never came near who ever he was before he was recruited into
> the great game.
>
> Well ok we’ve all known a few Windusts, and we all are dealing with the
> effects of their version of realism.
>
>
>
> > On Dec 13, 2022, at 2:19 AM, Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> > .
> > Corrigendum from Chapter 38: Uncle Dizzy, who proffers a ring of
> > invisibility. When she gives it back to him, he puts it in, *and
> > disappears!*
> >
> >
> >
> > Maxine riding the subway seeing faces in windows of trains on parallel
> > tracks, as if they are Tarot cards.
> > Those whose eyes meet hers she figures are portentous. Eventually she
> > wonders if she’s performing the same function for some of them.
> >
> >
> > One of these people makes contact with her. It’s Windust’s Guatemalan
> > honey! She’s got an envelope, redolent of 9:30 Cologne, with the money
> > Windust borrowed from her at their last meeting, and some “vig.”
> >
> > After apologizing that it’s not the earrings she’d requested, Xiomara
> > suggests they walk over the Brooklyn Bridge together. Maxine agrees,
> > stipulating to a meal thereafter.
> >
> > Xiomara’s apparently in academia now, and is repaying Maxine as a favor
> to
> > Windust’s 2nd wife, now widow, Dotty (and also perhaps in aid of
> learning &
> > relaying news to interested Beltway parties on the likelihood of Maxine
> > making waves vis a vis Windust’s quietus.)
> >
> > At lunch, they converse.
> >
> > Xiomara has been on friendly terms with Dotty since the Clinton years.
> > She’s got some words on ultra-violent ancient Mayan ballgames & hellish
> > underground playing fields, & how they’d captured Windust’s imagination,
> > for Maxine to add to her collection of horror stories, intermingled
> > meaningfully with Rios Montt horrors & Windust’s role in those, before he
> > smuggled her out of that danger zone.
> >
> > He gave Xiomara a much-belated (like, way, way, way belated! He was
> already
> > married to Dottie, Maxine surmises) huge diamond engagement ring,
> >
> > “When you get to D.F.*, I want
> >            you to sell it,” and it wasn’t till then, that “you” instead
> of
> > “we,” that she understood
> >            he was leaving”
> >
> > * Mexico City
> >
> >
> > They walk to Fulton Landing where they can look across the river at
> “Ground
> > Zero.” Xiomara initiates another walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge.
> >
> > From an observation platform they look at the site.
> >
> > Maxine thinks, but doesn’t speak, of DeepArcher, where in a virtual way
> the
> > undestroyed site still “exists.”
> >
> > Xiomara says Windust had come there often in his last days, thinking he
> had
> > unfinished business. She thinks, though, that his soul is in Xibalba now.
> > The Mayan hell.
> >
> >
> > Later at home, Maxine sniffs the last of the 9:30 Cologne on the envelope
> > and money,
> > “ trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless
> >            and inaccountable as his spirit . . .”
> >
> >
> >
> > (With a similar longing to that that she’d felt for the untrammeled WTC
> at
> > the observation deck?)
> >
> >
> > “ And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light
> > diffusing through
> >            the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good
> night.
> > Good night, Nick.”
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>