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

[Mark Kohut]

re: humor....Nazis aren't funny so Pynchon laughs at them in a pointed way;
adultery is not funny either
yet...we have it; suicide isn't funny yet....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODV6mxVVRZk

PS: when you put the words 'suicide is painless' into the YouTube search
engine....you get a Crisis hotline first!

On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 7:44 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>