CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

Wed Jul 3 15:00:55 UTC 2024

In my experience in the 60s chick was something men called women when the women weren’t there and not very commonly. Otherwise everyone had names, particularly in a small group . Not saying that these young men are anti—woman, but their language easily fits with the women as status symbols, acquisitions and Pynchon is not unconscious of the implications of this language and how it reinforces a not -so -subtle status distinction and objectification, or how easily habits pass from one generation to the next. Culture is powerful and often caters to biological realities. My main point is more about the culturally shaped self centeredness  that appeals to and profits from everything  but real mutual shared relations, real connections to the land that sustains us, to the memory of  and respect ( or intelligent disrespect) for those who shaped our world( the cemeteries, and GI bones), and how the disappointment of personal fulfillment within that materialist culture translates into a violent loveless ideology of power.

False consciousness  is not a term I use or am familiar with as integral to Marxism, not being drawn to marxism or  isms of any stripe. Some of Marx’s ideas about how exploitation works are persuasive and logically elaborated, but are not, in my view, peculiar to capitalism, which like marxism, seems as a whole, more like a religion than a sound economic or social understanding. I just read in Wikipedia that upward mobility is a named component of "false consciousness" that prevents effective resistance to exploitive practices. The real question is not the reality of upward mobility , but its  cost, and the methods used to achieve it regardless of  espoused goals. Mussolini started as a leftist but was essentially a ruthless narcissist. The modern religion of upward mobility gets linguistically pretty weird. Obama talked about how everyone wants to “get ahead”. Linguistically this is like saying the King had 3 daughters and each grew to be more beautiful than either sister. Therecan be no more without less,;no ahead without behind, no upward without downward. The mythologies of love promoted by commercial culture are advertising functioning as well payed  reinforcement  for a cultural religion. This re-examination of sacred myths  is what Oed M. was referring to in her thoughts comparing student activism in third world countries to what she saw at Berkeley.

I like the Arrabal information for the artist. Interesting that the surrealists were a group that Remedios Varro was part of, but turned away from because of sexism. The tower she paints is as strong a vision of the exploitation  of the creative power of the feminine as anything  I can think of. The Spanish  translation seems about the same as my loose use, which is only the way an English speaker might hear the word,  something P has been known to do but not at all an attempt at the definitive.  Oddly , or not, all definitions and the artist work similarly to support the themes of the novel. Arrabal, Spanish with Arabic roots,  can also mean slums, poor neighborhood. 

> On Jul 2, 2024, at 5:53 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> All too much for me to 'swallow"....to me, much of this is like the "false consciousness" that Marxism named....
> but in reverse....
> I see TRP simply accurately saying how many young men of the time, any time, thought of their female get-it-on-with friends..
> as "chicks"...the word is of the time.....read a history or memoir of the time, see how most of the women were treated....read 
> memoirs even of Leftists ....women, esp and how they were seen and treated by these men/boys for good societal change...
> anti-capitalist, anti-war and, unfortunately---hardly aware enough of women to be anti-women....Metzger's crude sex wants 
> are as bad as he musicians.....and with one leaving for Metzger TRP shows the equivalence....TRP working this awareness into this novella which attitude--a little of--he apologized for in Slow Learner, from his early stories and V...
> 
> I see TRP taking this issue as seriously as all the others....He satirizes and makes us laugh as seriously as he explores, plays with. inserts 
> the "numinous' into his fictions...
> 
> Arrabal (arable) doesn't work for me...Spanish/English non-association for one reason.....but look up the meaning of Arrabal and
> it means an area outside of a city, an area around a city......fits very nicely into TRP's vision of anarchism I suggest......just the occasional 
> area in our world......
> 
> And then THIS association: ...coupled with JESUS, jesus!....a glimpse from another world, right? 
> In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Movement> with Alejandro Jodorowsky <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky> and Roland Topor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Topor>, inspired by the god Pan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(mythology)>. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics#The_Coll%C3%A8ge_de_'Pataphysique> in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp>, Eugène Ionesco <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ionesco>, Man Ray <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray>, Boris Vian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian>, Dario Fo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo>, Umberto Eco <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco>, and Jean Baudrillard <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard>. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Breton>'s surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol> and Tristan Tzara <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Tzara>.
> 
> Writer and critic Javier Villan <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Vill%C3%A1n> wrote of Arrabal:
> 
> Arrabal's theatre is a wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative world. It is a dramatic carnival in which the carcass of our 'advanced' civilizations is barbecued over the spits of a permanent revolution <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution>. He is the artistic heir of Kafka <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka>'s lucidity and Jarry <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry>'s humor; in his violence, Arrabal is related to Sade <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade> and Artaud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artaud>. Yet he is doubtless the only writer to have pushed derision as far as he did. Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve.[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Arrabal#cite_note-1>
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2024 at 3:46 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
>> In a materialist, competitive society there is a fair amount of confusion between love and capital assets . Miles, Dean Leonard and Serge have names but their companions are “their chicks”. The confusion is a marketing bonanza for capitalism. .  But the net effect on marriage  is that a better position is offered and the acquired partnership fails while the abandoned partner may have seen love and meaning and a human sanctuary where there was really  only a contingency. This is echoed with the drummer when his girlfriend still called only "Serge’s chick" leaves him for Metzger. The reaction of the jilted  can be cynicism about love or a search for the real thing in self and relations. Of course there are many versions of what is real, and it is hard to see Pynchon taking this topic over seriously apart from OM’s intense pursuit of what is real in both love and capitalism, good faith and foul play, law and truth, the lives of the powerful and the powerless. 
>> 
>> What I mean is it is hard to take seriously the problems of either the paranoids shallow youth culture and art; or the problems of weapons and aerospace  executives, who don’t know what they are signing, getting replaced by a computer; or lawyer/actors  like Metzger  going for easier prey.  What I take more seriously  is the IA, the rejection of love  that grows out of  and is really essential to Yoyodyne policies and is a powerful force in the dark satiric vision of America Pynchon is elaborating. Money from violence or deception is real and highly desired, and human commitment and shared values are slogans for productivity and sales tools.  That this IA  organization is followed in O. M.’s next personal encounter by the CIA seems no accident to me. Claims of clandestine intelligence  instead of love, secret power vs local post colonial collective decision making, coercion versus anarchism, Angelo/Angleton versus Niccolo/Kennedy. Cities designed like printed circuits with fake lagoons vs (Arrabal arable) land from Mazatlan still connected to its own history, where the CIA is not shaped by fascists but anarchist collectives as they resist becoming another plaything of rich gringos..
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>> > On Jul 2, 2024, at 6:37 AM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org <mailto:pynchon-l at waste.org>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Questions:Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?
>> 
>> --
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