CoL49 ch5 / IA in gay bar / Zippo / The Stack

[Mark Kohut]

Also folks, let's try to see what is in front of our eyes and the humor.

To fail at suicide and not to keep trying and form a group is some kind of
joke. it is also some kind
of statement about that life force we spoke of. If death is our ultimate
entropy then this is beating
Maxwell's Demon....

On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 3:06 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?
>
> Maybe he had just concluded a session of sitting with a fellow IA member.
>
> After suggesting she write the founder:
> “Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who
> failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do
> they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling…
>
> He knows but he isn’t talking.
> What is love anyway (defining that’s beyond my remit, I think) & what do
> you do with your time when you’ve renounced it?
> Probably go looking for happiness, until somebody founds a
> happiness-seekers anonymous?
> Have a lot of hobbies?
>
>
> Noticed something I hadn’t before about the founder:
> “He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful
> Zippo, which had seen him through the Normany hedgerows, the Ardennes,
> Germany, and postwar America,”
>
> - so he was a WWII veteran
> - subject to the more real traumas that Oedipa had thoughtlessly,
> facetiously, wished on Wendell
>
> Curiously absent from the initial curriculum was basic or any other martial
> training:
>
> “Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed
> nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but
> sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and
> to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for
> specialized reasons he had to have explained to him….”
>
>
> Also had to look this up:
> “…he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The
> Stack into rush-hour traffic….”
>
> What is the Stack?
>
> The first 4-level expressway interchange - in Los Angeles - Google Maps
> said it’s permanently closed but I haven’t found any articles about its
> closing.
>
>
> https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/l-a-s-famous-four-level-freeway-interchange-the-stack-turns-58
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>