BEg2 Lester Traipse (Dr Wu) more Traipse / Epperdew & vanilla fantasies

[Mark Kohut]

MB: "And then there’s this little gem embedded in Maxine’s viewing fare, of
the
young women with enchantingly spelled names like Typhphani talking about
their exceedingly vanilla love fantasies -

- which, to be honest, sound pretty nice to me.
But Maxine, veteran of the sexual revolution that she is, is shocked!
shocked! at the tameness."

against those vanilla fantasies...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/books/review/anonymous-sex-book.html?smid=url-share

Here's the interpretive question, one of them: Given the skewed
psychological reality of Maxine and these New Yorkers---
is that a fair phrase?---are the lack of "imaginative' fantasies a sign of
innocence, naturalness in relation to romantic relationships
Or ....something else?.....the imaginative fantasies are akin to the sex
fetishes in GR, so to allude lightly...?

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 2:09 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Lester Traipse!
>
> - he is the corpus delicti so he must be important
>
> He very quickly advances from a sidekick of Felix to somebody whose death
> Maxine feels deeply
>
> The name Lester -
> https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=lester
> English: habitational name from Leicester, named in Old English from the
> tribal name Ligore (itself adapted from a British river name) + Old English
> ceaster ‘Roman fort or walled city’ (Latin castra ‘legionary camp’).
> English (of Norman origin): habitational name from Lestre in Normandy.
> English and Scottish: variant of Lister.
>
>
> British tribal river name + Latin “castra”
> Is it reading too much in to say it reflects the development of the
> Internet from a freely flowing river to a walled encampment? Probably.
>
> Then the surname Traipse
> https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/traipse
>
> to go on foot
> also  : to walk or travel about without apparent plan but with or without a
> purpose
>
> Does he traipse?
>
> Characteristics
>
> Scrooge McDuck necktie
>
> Talks like Kermit the Frog (maybe this is what endears him to her
> initially?)
>
> Square-rimmed (glasses presumably)
>
> Maxine takes to him, although - unlike the way she took to Felix in Canada
> - not as a short term love interest
>
> Into tables as a Web design tool - argues violently against CSS with
> goonish looking fellow in men’s lav (Maxine crosses gender barrier to
> retrieve him)
>
> Former hwgaahwgh employee, had tete-a-tete with Gabriel Ice that still
> gives him nightmares
>
> Scared to tell Maxine the whole story
>
> ——- Dr Wu is a song within a song!
>
> Maxine chooses to sing Dr Wu —- in all the lyric descriptions online that
> I’ve seen, nobody ever comes out and says (maybe because it’s too obvious,
> but I just want to point it out anyway): “Dr Wu” is the name or at least
> the subject of the stupid song the people are singing - “all night long we
> would sing that stupid song” (and it went like this: are you with me, Dr
> Wu, etc)
> / I tend to agree with whoever laid into Steely Dan’s oeuvre, at least in
> terms of occasional annoying lyrics -
>
> But anyway Maxine choosing this song is almost a gaffe like choosing “Ship
> of Fools” on a cruise ship, or “Play Us a Song Mr Piano Man” in a piano
> bar.
>
> I mean, all night long, they - right there in the Lucky 18! - are singing
> songs of less than stellar import, less than crystalline thinking, more
> than homeopathically inane.
> ———
>
>
> More Traipse
> - teamed up with Felix, but Felix seems to be functioning as somewhat of a
> minder, intruding on Maxine’s nascent tell-me-all mind meld before she can
> wring the facts out of Traipse
>
> Maxine finds a big stream of money diverting to a Traipse account from the
> Hashslingrz-hwgaahwgh fundage (itself puzzling) - obvious embezzlement!
>
> So - and I didn’t really catch the import before - Maxine volunteered to go
> talk to Traipse on Lester’s behalf, using her Israeli brother-in-law’s
> employment at Hashslingrz as an in.
>
> Why do that since she’s talked to Ice on her own before? And why does she
> think he’ll listen anyway - they aren’t on good terms at all!
>
> But before we get any action on Lester Traipse there’s the tape from Marvin
> and she starts worrying about VIP Epperdew instead, herself traipsing out
> to Montauk!
>
> I get why some people get impatient with the intertwining plots…I mean, she
> calls up Felix Boingeaux to ask him about Epperdew, but doesn’t talk to him
> about how she thinks he might be the one who sent her the videotape!
> Which is logical because he’s a known whistleblower!
>
> “Flustrating”
>
> And then there’s this little gem embedded in Maxine’s viewing fare, of the
> young women with enchantingly spelled names like Typhphani talking about
> their exceedingly vanilla love fantasies -
>
> - which, to be honest, sound pretty nice to me.
> But Maxine, veteran of the sexual revolution that she is, is shocked!
> shocked! at the tameness.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>