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

[Mark Kohut]

We are coming up on a sex fetish involving Maxine any chapter now....

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 5:55 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>