BE Ch 15 summary: Who knows?

[Allen Ruch]

Thank you for the summary, Joseph! 

I love this chapter—or at least the part where they take the boat out to the landfill. I've actually been there on a boat, and it was indeed creepy. There's this great moment in the chapter, laden with paranoia:

+ + + + + 

The industrial racket from back in the marshland behind the giant cliffs of ruin has grown continuous. Now and then workers, in long-standing Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming exchanges. "Strange shift to be working," it seems to Maxine. 

"Yeah. Nice overtime for somebody. Almost like they're up to something they don't want anybody to know about. [...] Either they're playing catch-up or they're getting it ready to open for dump business again."

A presidential visit? Somebody's making a movie? Who knows. 

+ + + + + + +

Well, not coincidentally, a lot of the wreckage from 911 was stored on Staten Island:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-cancer-rates-fresh-kills/

So this whole section feeds into the conspiracy/paranoia that *certain people* knew 911 was coming. And Maxine's "Who knows" re-appears later in Chapter 17, when she has a quasi-apocalyptic dream about wandering Manhattan:

"She smells smoke with a strong toxic element, plastic, drug-lab fixins, who knows?"

Well, every New Yorker present during 911 knows that smell. So this is the second time "who knows" is ironically inserted in the text as a reference to 911....

At this point in the text it seems increasingly obvious that Pynchon's fictional New York contains people who were aware 911 was coming... Not that the novel's implying it was an "inside job"—the constant Arabic angle precludes that to a certain extent—just that certain parties were either involved, or at least ready to profit, whether financially, politically, or both....

—Quail


On 1/20/22, 12:33 PM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Joseph Tracy" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

    After this I will post a schedule for coming weeks with all chapters available.

    BE Ch 15 summary

    Igor Dashkov shows up across from Maxine’s office in  Russian made stretch blacl LImo(a ZiL-41047,) with March K inside  and a bag of cash for Maxine as thanks for the Madoff tip. She is reluctant but takes it as retainer, hops in and sees March is counting her own cash for a delivery of  her ex’s bathtub speed to Daskov.   I G also loads her up with Russian Ice cream, …it’s real ice cream,” Igor explains. “Russian ice cream. Not this Euromarket food-police shit.”  
      March invites Maxine to go uptown to find her Ex, Sid, and pick up his delivery to Igor. 
    “Igor says you saved them a shitload of money.” 
    “You think that ‘them’ includes Igor himself?” 
    “He’d be too embarrassed to tell anybody. What was going on?” 
    “Some kind of pyramid racket.” 
    “Oh. Something a little different.”
     “You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—” 
    “No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”
    Enticed by merengue, Maxi agrees to go with March and they meet Sid at a dance club, Chuy’s Hideaway.
    Colorful neighborhood and March,  Maxi and Sid are dancing soon. Getting out  of Chuy’s late, they go to Sids’s 28 ft Art deco 1937 Gar Wood runabout at the Tubby Hook Marina. A DEA vessel shows up  and Sid powers down the right side of the channel past the Statue of Liberty “sliding into Constable Hook Reach and on down the Kill Van Kull. Passing Port Richmond,…” into a region of oil tankers and garbage dumps  ”Neglected little creeks, strangely luminous canyon walls of garbage, smells of methane, death and decay, chemicals unpronounceable as the names of God, the heaps of landfill bigger than Maxine imagines they’d be, reaching close to 200 feet overhead” finally to a landfill scheduled to be park called Island of Meadows. 

    Presently March and Sid are into one of those low-volume elliptical discussions parents have about their children, in this case Tallis mostly. Sid suggest he was friendly Geek at first but got rich and cut them ot of their lives, March says “The kid was bent from the jump, under obligation to forces which do not advertise publicly. What did they see in him? Easy. Stupidity. A stupidity of great promise.” 
    Somebody is woking late at the Island of Meadows making a fair amount of noise and 
     “Sid starts up the motor finally, heads back up Arthur Kill and into Newark Bay, at Kearny Point bears right into the forsaken and abused Passaic River. “Let you two off when I can, then I’m gonna return to my secret undisclosed base.” 
    After all night out, hair windblown, Maxi feels peculiarly free.
     Dropped at Nutley they take a bus and Maxine dozes dreaming of a desperate bus drive with Windust driving a bus full of Latinos away from an ominous volcano. Later,  at a latino breakfast place Maxine asks March about Guatemala in 82. March describes Rios Mont’s death squads, one death camp on Pacific, details that cause Maxine to lose her appetite.
     “Why do you ask?” 
    “Just wondering.” 
    “Yeah. When you’re ready, tell me. I’m really Dr. Ruth Westheimer, nothing shocks me.”









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