SLPAD - 93 - Low-Lands - 6

[rich]

I'm having trouble finding anything redeemable in Low-lands, though there's
some overlap with stuff that was cut from V. which I find intriguing

rich

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:41 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> “You keep that weird crew down in the rumpus
> room,” she would yell, brandishing a cocktail shaker. "You are a damned
> ASPCA, is what you are. I doubt if even they would take some of the animals
> you bring home.” What Flange should have answered but didn’t was something
> like, “Rocco Squarcione is not an animal, he is a garbage man with a
> fondness, among other things, for Vivaldi.”
>                It was Vivaldi they were listening to now, Sixth Concerto
> for Violin, sub-titled Il Piacere, while Cindy stomped around upstairs.
> Flange got the impression she was throwing things. He wondered every once
> in a while what life would be like without a second story and how it was
> people managed to get along in ranch-style or split-level houses without
> running amok once a year or so.
>
>
>
> Il Piacere is a fairly well-known piece, at least I recognized it. It runs
> about 9 minutes, so they may have run through a lot of repertoire before
> getting to this piece.
>
> 8 hours of drinking wine and listening to music, wow, he must be pretty
> sick of his job if this is his preference. (A little bit of Bartleby the
> scrivener preferring not, although Flange may possess slightly more
> volition...and at least he has a drinking companion - a little bit of
> peripheral Huck and Jim)
>
> And it seems reasonable to impute an inebriated "yeah, that's what I
> should've said," state of mind - so that this is still Flange speaking, not
> the omniscient narrator chiming in with an unimpressive normative
> rejoinder. (That entity, I choose to believe, has a clearer vision, a
> higher purpose, and manifests through choice of details & vocabulary rather
> than intervening directly.)
>
> Suburban misery chronicles were familiar territory - John Cheever? - so
> could Pynchon be upping the ante by making Flange a wealthy denizen of a
> beyond-prosperous exurbia, and exaggerating the marital disharmony?
>
> Gratuitous author-state-of-mind speculation: at time of writing, his
> description of a 7 year  marriage gone stale could not reflect personal
> experience but rather observation - of people in his circle of family and
> friends, also stories of Cheever, maybe John Updike, and other media such
> as "The Seven Year Itch" (1955)
>
>
>
> Then this:
>
> He wondered every once in a while what life would be like without a second
> story and how it was people managed to get along in ranch-style or
> split-level houses without running amok once a year or so.
>
>
> Meanwhile, Cindy is in fact running amok upstairs, which he's able to
> ignore because of the spatial separation provided by both his stereo system
> and the generous dimensions of their house.
>
> Again a glimpse into the mind of Flange as the thought of living with less
> of wealth's cushioning  briefly enters his mind, but only as something
> other people experience.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>