BE Ch 15

[Mark Kohut]

"everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be
itself".....from that early story, we get more "waste disposal" here and
everywhere......

Yet, in this chapter we get "100 acres of untouched marshland" on p 166 and
..."sanctuary" in Deep Archer with Web Crawlers itching to index and
corrupt"...for "far-from-selfless ends"....

I would see a Pynchon associational linking right here in this
chapter....purity laid to waste wherever ......




On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 3:18 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I keep thinking about the bold flight and escape to the mountains of trash
> where Sid takes March and Maxine after a night of dancing.
>
>  It’s a kind of Pynchonian  apocalyptic vision, fleeing the lair of the
> beast in high spirits only to find oneself surrounded by all the detritus
> of the life you and everyone you know lives. We want there to be an away, a
> place to dump the old while we bring in the new, a place to get away to
> when the noise gets too loud, the stupidity piled in layers everywhere you
> turn, the lying ads too invasive. So much of Pynchon’s fiction is about
> that elusive escape route. But on a round planet contained in it’s own
> atmosphere, it’s own field of gravity, its ever growing supplies of human
> waste there is no ‘away'.  What goes around, comes around, not so shiny as
> it was on the shelf.
>    There is no away so we make our way back to whatever we have for home
> with our bags of cash, past the dark dreams, the troubling queston marks,
> away from that part of our own geography we wish were not home but know is
> piling up around us as real as walls, trash cans, toilets.
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>