BEg2 chapter 12 digging in again

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Jan 7 07:26:09 UTC 2022


Joseph Tracy wrote:

Going uptown, Maxine gets a weird slow ride with an anti-semitic
cabbie who may be about to lose his license, she doesn’t like park
ave.


https://youtu.be/GcCNcgoyG_0
Off topic perhaps…


Park Avenue:

“Built originally as a kind of genteel lid to cover up the train
tracks running into Grand Central, what should it be, the
Champs-Élysées”

There’s a fascinating Wikipedia article on Park Avenue, and one on the
Champs-Élysées.

Maxine isn’t impressed!


“In broad daylight, however, at an average speed of one block per
hour, jammed with loud and toxic-smelling traffic, all in advanced
states of disrepair, whose drivers suffer (or enjoy) a hostility level
comparable to that of Maxine’s driver here—not to mention police
barricades, Form Single Lane signs, jackhammer crews, backhoes and
front-end loaders, cement mixers, asphalt spreaders, and battered dump
trucks unmarked by any contractor’s name let alone phone number—it
becomes an occasion for spiritual exercise, though maybe more of the
Eastern type than anything connected with this radio station, now
blasting some kind of Christian hip-hop.”

Cash for clunkers - years in the future from 2001 - did noticeably
remove a lot of jalopies from circulation.

Not an unusually long sentence for Pynchon, but partakes of that listy
sense for which Slothrop’s desk gave many of us a taste.

Drivers suffer “or enjoy” their hostility level.

Tom Wolfe talked about New York traffic in some essay or other, how
every little micro aggression inflicted by one’s fellow commuters
caused a little more adrenal hypertrophy, or something like that but
more polished. And how the drivers came to expect and enjoy it.

The commute becomes an extension of her Zen sitting, but with the
cabdriver’s “evangelical” hostility the looming presence her sitting
is set against, instead of Horst.

This resonates nicely with an earlier reference to the single-person
submarine she erects around herself when looking at real estate
threatened by the same type of demolition and construction happening
around the cab.

“Dump trucks unmarked by contractor name or telephone number” is a
little unsettling - it’s as if Chicago School propaganda of
privatization had pushed away the idea of the city owning and
maintaining the streets with city vehicles and valued public servants
enjoying benefits and held to accountability in the name of a
commonality of interest, in favor of a low-bid scramble.


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