CoL49 group reading ch 5 - depressing / babushka?

[Michael Bailey]

It gets pretty depressing.

I’m interested in relating to the (simulacrum of a) lived experience of the
characters, Oedipa in particular.

We’ve all had days like that…


Here’s something I was puzzled by:
“…she pattered down the steps into the street, flung a babushka over her
license plate and screeched away down Telegraph.”

This is right after old Nefastis tries to get her to have sex with him.

But why does she put a babushka over the license plate? Just planning to
drive dangerously? Confident she can elude pursuit?


Anyway, whatever bubble or tower she’s been in, she’s essentially now
facing the world without her customary filters and there’s a lot of
experiences that she’s now filing under the rubric of “Tristero”

As the narrator says, “…there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so
to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later
was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been
enough. Or too much.”


Some kind of unsatisfying metanoia has enveloped her and she walks and
rides around the Bay Area for 24 hours, apparently able to elicit
confidences from strangers, whether they be children, alcoholics, the
suicidal lovelorn, or “Negroes”, without breaking her stride.

Dickens used to take long, long walks & isn’t there some lore pertaining to
the same tendencies in “OBA” (who was the p-lister of old who coined that
abbreviation for “our beloved author”? Robin Landseadel?) - although, was
that the disavowed Japanese Playboy interview?

Anyway, the unheralded but ever-present denizens of San Francisco and their
experience of the city open up to her in her state of mind, which is
destined to be temporary but (italicized)
“She was meant to remember.”

The state of mind is unsustainable; if and when she later remembers, it
won’t be with any Proustian longing to recapture it. But that may be
because it’s firmly lodging itself, unforgettable.

It may be that, as suggested in the _Slow Learner_ intro, one “mature
fictional” theme here is she’s coming to terms with death? Pierce’s, and
death in general as a relief from, a hypothetical final point in the
trajectories of, all these unsatisfying lives?



“In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in
the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose
melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican
girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s
motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns
and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.”

It’s one of the more pleasing images from the chapter.


I wonder, is it a faint echo of Kerouac’s Mexican girl?
Mike Heron wrote a song about her and the _On the Road_ passage:
https://youtu.be/VGYZW32mxUY?si=n3ohnzpcWbv1AS8c