Fwd: BEg2 ch30 aftermath p3

[Mark Kohut]

If others are unaware, the West Side Highway was the road on which almost
all the debris and destroyed buildings were driven north. I was staying on
lower Christopher Street very near the West Side Highway and it was
constant. That HIghway goes all the way up and would have been able to be
heard and seen by Thomas and Melanie in their apartment in the 70s' and
maybe he knows from experience missing the "ambient racket".

Then that was done as TRP has indicated. Meanwhile down Broadway, goes the
stuff to help. And as Michael compresses it, it seems like a
military logistics event, which it was.

'Boilerplate' seems a neutral yet surprising word (to me).

Best riff on why Robert Moses turns over which I never have gotten---and
shows the essentially comic meaning of all this, comic in the literary
sense as MIchael half-alludes. Comedy means the players live.

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 1:19 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Paragraph 3:
> “For a couple of days, the West Side Highway falls silent. People between
> Riverside and West End miss the ambient racket and don’t get to sleep so
> easily. On Broadway meanwhile it’s different. Flatbeds carrying hydraulic
> cranes and track loaders and other heavy equipment go thundering downtown
> in convoys day and night. Fighter planes roar overhead, helicopters hang
> battering the air for hours close above the rooftops, sirens are constant
> 24/7. Every firehouse in the city lost somebody on 11 September, and every
> day people in the neighborhoods leave flowers and home-cooked meals out in
> front of each one. Corporate ex-tenants of the Trade Center hold elaborate
> memorial services for those who didn’t make it out in time, featuring
> bagpipers and Marine honor guards. Child choirs from churches and schools
> around town are booked weeks in advance for solemn performances at “Ground
> Zero,” with “America the Beautiful” and “Amazing Grace” being musical
> boilerplate at these events. The atrocity site, which one would have
> expected to become sacred or at least inspire a little respect, swiftly
> becomes occasion instead for open-ended sagas of wheeling and dealing,
> bickering and badmouthing over its future as real estate, all dutifully
> celebrated as “news” in the Newspaper of Record. Some notice a strange
> underground rumbling from the direction of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx,
> which is eventually identified as Robert Moses spinning in his grave.”
>
>
> Hops around, doesn’t it?
> Effect of the 24 hour news cycle. Language is mostly respectful; glancingly
> perfunctory only once: “boilerplate.” Grappling for a thoughtful stance as
> in “tragedy for those who feel, comedy for those who think” ?
>
> There’s what looks to me like a “one, two” pattern to the sentences.
>
> West Side Highway quiet / hard to sleep
>
> Broadway different / ground traffic / air traffic and noise filling the air
> (technically a “one, two, three”)
>
> Firehouse deaths / neighborhood outpourings of sympathy  ( 1 & 2 in the
> same sentence)
>
> Corporate memorial services / child choirs extremely busy singing patriotic
> songs
>
> And finally,
>
> Machinations of real estate greed over the newly vacant site, bickering
> (with another deprecating reference to the uncritical stance of the
> “Newspaper of Record”) / Robert Moses spinning in his grave
>
> (He’s probably not outraged at any of the proposed uses, but at the lack of
> central planning & the undecorousness of it all?)
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>