BEg2 chapter 17 Impressionistic summary

[Joseph Tracy]

As to ancient war-machine nightmares, Montauk  is associated with a story  of time travel of a military vessel. That concept of weaponized time features prominently in Against the Day: the quaternion weapon that backfires on the assasin Woevre, the time machine that gives the chums a glimpse far into a dark future,  Candlebrow. Windust is a kind of living time machine still carrying all the paranoia of banana republicanism. Regardless of imaginary or real time machinery, Pynchon probes at who has what technology and what tech is secret and supervised by the war machine? After all,  weapons are all designed to shorten someone’s time. The questions raised in the book are not trivial.  I remember the way the media minimized our use of depleted uranium and the fact that exposure to the radioactive material released from theses rounds sickened many soldiers, often attacking their reproductive organs, and also caused many birth defects among Iraqis.  Salvation according to the PNAC.
   Anyway moving back to the book, I see Heidi rather differently. She seems obsessed with sex and trivia and it's hard to see how anything she says is helpful to Maxine, who is looking at what really seems like a criminal conspiracy shared by Arabs, Muslim bankers, a high tech security firm connected to Promis, and intelligence or military or both. Twhat Maxine nows already would put anyone into a state, but it seems to be pointing Maxine, toward finding how much evidence there is and acting on it, though how she will respond is yet to be known. She is dealing with the most grown-up stuff that anyone could face and she is keeping her cool  apart from the air Jordans don’t fail me now scene. 


   
   
> On Feb 5, 2022, at 11:09 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> . 
> Maxine’s extra diligence takes her beyond her remit.
> 
> We see her emotionally moved to tears by a country song, particularly the
> pedal steel, but also the lyrics about a woman who loves a faithless man.
> 
> “No man is a hero to his valet,” or to his contractors. Especially when
> they don’t get paid. All of these pickup driving gun toting hard workers
> perforce have access to the private spaces of every mogul.
The line “No man is a hero to his valet .”struck me as rather profound as I read it,  even more so when combined wth the thoughts on the rich and their servants/contractors etc.. Where is that line from; is it in this chapter? I want to know who I’m quoting. 
> 
> Pirates used to bury a lot of their crew along with their treasure and
> Ice’s ilk suffer from the same impulse, of which their contractors are not
> unaware.
> 
> Ice’s house - the connection between the spiderweb of techno-wealth and the
> latest instantiation of an ancient war machine nightmare runs from Ice’s
> wine cellar.
> 
> Maxine’s dream:
> Not-quite-Manhattan where if you go far enough out any Avenue it begins
> mingling with suburbs
> - seems to me like the trip to the Hamptons
> 
> Shopping mall theme of battle aftermath
> - this reflects both Ziggy and Fiona’s play in the toy mall, and the actual
> state of affairs in the world after 100+ years of war. She “understand[s]
> it’s been deliberately designed” to look that way, carrying forward GR
> themes about the market forces in which war takes place. Presumably the
> Elect sipping fancy drinks are all the happier about their status amid the
> ruins.
> 
> “She’s supposed to be meeting Heidi there” as more of the oblivious
> consumers, but the scene changes and she’s confronted with the smell of
> burning from the scene of Epperdew’s venery.
> - this might be positioning Heidi as her link to normality, and revealing
> the impact of her day’s work, more impactful than even the many familiar
> fraud cases she already has seen.
> 
> No neighbors concerned, no sirens - strong noir implications: where are the
> authorities when you need them?
> 
> Lester Traipse imperiled - as in waking life
> 
> “ She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something,
> but can’t see what…”
> - a deeper implication of noir themes: her defrocked status means she has
> less recourse to a book to go by, fewer reliable forces of order to
> escalate to; as Sam Spade, Doc Sportello, and Philip Marlowe did, she will
> have to rely on her wits and personal code of honor to achieve even an
> ambiguous victory.
> 
> Heidi, with her good appetite, nudges Maxine back towards critical thinking
> rather than regale her with more disturbing tangents - sometimes she is the
> saner one of the two.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l