BE Converging

[Allen Ruch]

Agreed, a good part, Michael! It also reminds me of this wonderful sequence from "Against the Day":

“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunchgrass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.”

On 2/10/22, 5:21 AM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Mark Kohut" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

    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
    >
    --
    Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l