SLPAD - 95 - "Low-Lands" - 8

[rich]

I won't claim literature is dead, but it sure seems to take alot more time
to find new work I really like. I was just thinking the other day to try to
name 5 current writers (not including Pynchon, DeLillo, etc.) I look
forward to seeing new work. I can't.

rich

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 1:23 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> (Re: New World Writing -  "& so forth" doesn't mean trailing off in a long
> tail, either: Algren, Margaret Mead f'r Pete's sake, Ionesco, Gide,
> Ellison, Donald Barthelme, Wendell Berry, Dylan Thomas - it's almost as
> exciting as looking at the authors in old issues of, in a different genre,
> Ramparts Magazine eg.
>
> (Mea culpa - there's lots of great writers now & I can hardly name any.
> Just read a Hernan Diaz book, _In the Distance_ though - beautiful,
> depressing in a bearable way, because thought-provoking  - hypothetical
> movie pitch: "ya know Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_? It was ever thus, even
> if you were a big Swede." Probably will follow up with reading his new one,
> _Trust_. Also kind of stoked about Zadie Smith's new one.)
>
>
>
>
> The Flange abode perched on a cliff overlooking the Sound. It had been
> built vaguely to resemble an English cottage back in the ’20’s by an
> Episcopal minister who ran bootleg stuff in from Canada on the side. It
> seemed everyone living on the north shore of Long Island at the time was
> engaged in some kind of smuggling, because there are all kinds of little
> spits and bays, necks and inlets which the Feds still have no idea exist.
> The minister must have taken a romantic attitude toward the whole business:
> the house rose in a big mossy tumulus out of the earth, its color that of
> one of the shaggier prehistoric beasts. Inside were priest-holes and
> concealed passageways and oddly angled rooms; and in the cellar, leading
> from the rumpus room, innumerable tunnels, which writhed away radically
> like the tentacles of a spastic octopus into dead ends, storm drains,
> abandoned sewers and occasionally a secret wine cellar.
>
>
> What does this say about Flange?
> I don't see him as an inheritor of wealth, but he had to have had some
> familial help - maybe he is an inheritor after all: he put in his time in
> the Navy and segued (afaict from the text) right into bringing Cindy to
> this house which, I mean yes there were some great deals in those days, but
> on savings from Navy wages? & I don't imagine him as a fixer-upper person.
>
> Maybe he finished law school & went into the Navy as a (communications)
> officer, coming out into a prearranged job?
>
> Anyway, not to overwork Bartleby (he would prefer not to comply anyway) but
> I'm convinced Flange is an attorney, and has become  disgusted with what
> he's been doing in that capacity to the extent that he's developed a
> malaise so familiar to readers of all the excellent tales & explications in
> New World Writing et al  that the only text required to summon a full
> picture of the loathsomeness of his work is what he tells somebody's
> secretary at Wasp and Winsome: "Flange. No."
>
> Though, at some point, he did put in the immense work of passing the bar
> etc and made enough sense in interactions with less-disaffected attorneys,
> clients, and superiors to sojourn at Wasp and Winsome for seven years,
> reaping rewards commensurate with that position. So on the one hand, I
> respect his intellect for success on those terms *and* his discernment in
> rejection of a career many times depicted convincingly as soul-destroying.
> But on the other hand, what he's going to do instead, even in its inception
> in the rumpus room, is quite unattractive IMHO. At least at first blush.
>
> But that's getting ahead of the wave, as it were.
>
> This house description is a generous, if not downright lavish, detailed
> description, foreshadowing Slothrop's desk, or the desk at the beginning of
> M&D.
>
> And we'd best unpack it a little.
>
> But right now, all I can think about is what it says about Flange: if he's
> not a one-percenter, he's got to have something going for him, whether it
> be familial largesse (though we get nothing about his roots) or amazing
> competence at the practice of some very lucrative and miserable branch of
> law, or oh! maybe it's Cindy's family money (nothing in the text to suggest
> that, tho': he supposedly "dragged" Cindy from her mother's flat in Jackson
> Heights, which is nice but not posh, right? Or maybe her mother's divorced
> from a posh father who dotes on Cindy manifesting in a house as a wedding
> gift?) - whichever way he got there, Dennis Flange is perched on a catbird
> seat, we already see enough to surmise he will be letting things slide - is
> this to be a cautionary tale or something else?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>