No subject

[Mark Kohut]

Thanks, Michael, a good part. Perhaps this is a distinction that doesn't
really exist--you can all vote--
but this below seems different to me than the Long Island riff except for,
yes, the last sentence which
does move beyond particular observations into an associative metaphor that
I see as the author making not, never,
fraud detector Maxine...

If I'm right about the "tell' in the Long Island riff, then yes
"converged" signals it here, yay Mike, because everything before
this could be seen and known by New Yorker Maxine, not quite the case about
Long Island maybe?

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 3:33 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> “Notice that it begins with Maxine
> "feeling' the narrowing then we get the narrowing.
> Is there ANYWHERE else in this novel Maxine waxes like that?”
>
>
> I think so:
>
> Yes, a longer passage, more diffuse, with more detail on how things
> used to be, but it even has a “converge” - page 63, end of Chapter 5 -
>
> “…Times Square, which for a few years now she has made a conscious
> effort not to go near if she can help it. The sleazy old Deuce she
> remembers from
> her less responsible youth is so no more, Giuliani and his developer
> friends and the forces of suburban righteousness have swept the place
> Disneyfied and sterile—the melancholy
>  bars, the cholesterol and fat dispensaries and porno theaters have
> been torn down or renovated, the unkempt and unhoused and unspoken-for
> have been pushed out, no more dope dealers, no more pimps or
> three-card monte artists, not even kids playing hooky at the old
> pinball arcades—all gone. Maxine can’t avoid feeling nauseous at the
> possibility of some stupefied consensus about what life is to be,
> taking over this whole city
>  without mercy, a tightening Noose of Horror, multiplexes and malls
> and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car
> and a driveway and a garage next  to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh!
> They have landed, they are among us, and it helps them no end that the
> mayor, with roots in the outer boroughs
>             and beyond, is one of them.
>
>                                 And here they all are tonight, *converged*
> [my stars] into
> this born-again imitation of their own
>       American heartland, here in the bad Big Apple”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>