BEg2 chapter 12 investigative spadework

[Mark Kohut]

"Change your hair; change your life."---Solange from *Inherent Vice.*
The East Side is the rich(er) side of Upper NYC. The society side. The
women do their hair--more.
The West side, the more liberal side, has women who let their hair down, in
more ways than one.

Leading me to some wonderful Google Boooks discoveries: this, an
introduction to some ancient Greek poems:
"Respectable ladies, the kind who wear hairbands and ankle-length skirts,
arehereby warned off"

Hairbands and hair scrunchies are used to wrap around a ponytail or bun for
an instant, glamorous look.

Hairbands are for the women who do more sport--manual.

On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 4:32 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
> “She meets Tallis in  upper east side in enormous house after passing
> through boring rooms with expensive but uniterestingly collected art.
> Tallis says Gabe has weird demands, and they got to know each other at
> Carnegie Mellon when he was using her room’s computer as refuge from
> bagpiper, but they get along. Tallis says she and her mother hate each
> other, and she hated fighting between her parents. She tells how March
> is accusing Gabriel Ice of financial misbehavior larger than Iran
> Contra. Tallis  either is or is playing the ditz and doesn’t really
> want to know if finances at hashslingerz are clean Gabe Ice is evasive
> about it.”
>
>
> He probably graduated to using her room’s computer, but he was at first
> using ones in the common rooms of various dorms.
>
> “the sound was enough to drive Gabe out to the computer cluster, which
> still wasn’t far enough. Soon he was out gazing at student-lounge
> television screens or using the facilities at other dorms, including
> Tallis’s….”
>
> Also, I don’t think he was just studying comp sci,
>
> “…he quickly slipped into a tubelit clustergeek existence, often unsure if
> he was awake or dreaming in REM, which might have accounted for his early
> conversations with Tallis, which she remembers nowadays as “unusual.” She
> was his dream girl, literally. Her image became conflated with those of
> Heather Locklear, Linda Evans, and Morgan Fairchild, among others.”
>
> Which squares with libido expectations for a future mogul?
>
>
>
> CMU bagpipes major:
>
> https://www.cmu.edu/cfa/music/news/2009/carnegie-mellon-is-home-to-nations-only-graduating-bagpipe-major.html
>
> “The tradition of bagpipes at Carnegie Mellon dates to founder Andrew
> Carnegie, who employed his own personal piper, said Alasdair Gillies,
> director of Carnegie Mellon’s piping program and a world-renowned bagpiper
> himself.
>
> Mr. Carnegie’s Scottish roots are apparent throughout Carnegie Mellon, from
> the school’s mascot, the Scottish terrier, to the student newspaper, The
> Tartan, to the traditional Scottish dress worn by members of the school’s
> “Kiltie” marching band. In 1990, the school instituted the world’s first
> bagpipe degree, a major — complete with a designated need-based scholarship
> — focusing on both studio performance and the history and culture behind
> bagpiping. Mr. Hudson is just the third bagpipe major to graduate from
> Carnegie Mellon since the establishment of the program, though there are
> two other majors now enrolled behind him.”
>
>
> https://www.alexcooper.com/blog/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-cy-twombly
> Hey, he was named after Cy Young!
>
>
> “There is a Bösendorfer Imperial in the corner, at which generations of
> hired piano players have provided hours of Kander & Ebb, Rodgers &
> Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber medleys while Gabe and Tallis and assorted
> henchfolks work the room, gently thinning the checkbooks of East Side
> aristos on behalf of various causes, many of them trivial by West Side
> standards.”
>
> Kander & Ebb? Who they?
>
> https://www.theatretrip.com/musicals-by-kander-and-ebb/
> Cabaret was by them!
>
> Generations of hired piano players? Seems like either hyperbole - or, the
> piano predates the Ices with the connotation that prior to them it was
> providing background music for some other 1% couples shaking down the
> aristos for charity. For whom “Ice” would be an ok metonymy, denoting their
> diamonds and the probable temperatures of their hearts…
>
> Or maybe just the varying ages of the pianists for the different
> engagements. They came from different generations but played the same
> piano?
>
> Also - “gently thinning the checkbooks of East Side aristos on behalf of
> various causes, many of them trivial by West Side standards.”
>
> So at least for Maxine, there’s a palpable difference between Upper East
> and Upper West? Earlier in the chapter we get,
>
>  “ Maxine is no stranger to the Upper East Side, though it still makes her
> uncomfortable.As a kid she went to Julia Richman High—
>
> well, she could’ve been on the natch once or twice—“
>
> [ where else would you get this joke, with this verbiage, “the natch,”
> reminiscent of the rebooted Mucho Maas in _Vineland_?]
>
> “…over on East 67th, rode crosstown buses five days a week, never got used
> to it. Deep hairband country. Visiting over here is always like stepping
> into a planned midgets’ community, everything scaled down, blocks shorter,
> avenues less time to walk across, you expect any minute to be approached by
> a tiny official greeter going, “As mayor of the Munch-kin City . . .”
>
> Hairband country?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>