COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

[Mark Kohut]

I am I think In agreement with the first para from Tracy's post. Peirce
could not, when one gets granular with the details,
have set everything up.....Just look at page 65 when she got up early to go
to a Yoyodyne stockholders' meeting.....
And s what happens was unset -up...

Misc. on page 65, you will notice the word Negroes.....which will fade from
American books starting sweepingly in 1968.
Replaced by African-American and then Black overwhelmingly....remember
Black Power, etc?

On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 1:37 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I guess I just don’t see how anyone could predict or stay ahead of her
> enough to know what bus she would take or where she would sit on the bus.
> Her pattern of movement was crazily erratic or arbitrary. Also what would
> be PI’s motive in all this? I see this whole line of thought as the kind of
> paranoia that is desperate and illogical and ascribes an impossible level
> of power and manipulative skill to the presumed controller of events. Once
> a person sees any such deception in a powerful person or organization it is
> hard not to wonder how much of that is directed at you.  It seems rather to
> me that Pynchon is carefully presenting a story where the protagonist is
> stirred to investigate something that looks highly unlikely but is found to
> be so real and troubling that she can barely cope, and looks for any
> possible explanation.
>
> Also if we assume that PI did set all this up and also made sure that the
> evidence of this large secret network  would be made to disappear early in
> the disposition of the will, I would argue that this leads to something
> very much resembling the course of events following the Kennedy killing and
> the scope of the efforts to prevent contrary evidence and testimony to the
> magic bullet riddled narrative of the Warren commission, including the high
> likelihood the Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered and her files stole. Maybe a
> plausible for-instance  type explanation of what PI could have been up to
> and why he would have set up this elaborate and expensive illusion, would
> give more credibility to this idea.  I honestly can’t think of how that
> would work to explain the events of the story. P does not have human
> villains without human motives. Is it really a parable where PI is the
> Devil( Ala the world the flesh and the devil)? What is his goal as a devil?
> I’m really trying to think this through with everything on the table so
> far.
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 15, 2024, at 1:03 AM, Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yeah, it’s weird.
> >
> > IMHO, none of those things are impossible for old Pierce, given enough
> > money, an undying passion, & an imaginative trusted factotum willing to
> > farm out tasks.
> > Especially with the partial disclaimer that maybe she didn’t see as many
> > post horns as she thought.
> >
> > The man in black, for instance, might not have been Johnny Cash, but
> could
> > easily have radioed ahead to a crew who would then follow her - and by
> > covert suggestion, not a hard task given her state of mind, lead her onto
> > specific buses etc.
> >
> > And so on & so forth.
> >
> > There’s a certain amount of willful & wistful romanticism required to
> > prosecute this viewpoint, and I don’t think that’s my main angle anyway.
> > But ijs…
> >
> > What stood out recently for me is the action spreading over time with
> > references to a panoply of plotting and evildoing - and a great many
> > references to WWII, from the bones, to IA founder’s time in service, to
> > Oedipa’s lightly almost wishing wartime military on Wendell as an
> > alternative, more serious trauma than the used car lot, to Metzger’s
> > contemptuous imagining of Oedipa’s war, to Hilarius’s role in the most
> > horrific scenes thereof.
> >
> > It’s a glimpse of a mindset that I’ve read about, people whose viewpoints
> > and planning were molded in wartime, shaping all their future actions,
> > making it easier than it ought to be for them to perpetuate offensive
> acts
> > in the name of defense and security.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 6:34 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> >> She seems to b moving around SF a lot, first by beach then in Fillmore
> >> black neighborhood and sees posthorn scratched in back of a bus seat(
> >> impossible for PI to have set up) with DEATH as  acronym DON’T EVER
> >> ANTAGONIZE THE HORN. That message  returns to  what I am seeing as the
> back
> >> and forth between a sinister and Dangerous Trystero and the less scary
> idea
> >> of un-monitored communication at the grass roots (WASTE). The airport is
> >> even further away. ACDC with posthorn claims to be death cult. Basically
> >> one seriously weird person after another.  "She busrode and walked on
> into
> >> the lightening morning, giving herself up to a fatalism rare for her.
> Where
> >> was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That
> >> optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago
> radio
> >> drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption
> from
> >> hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery. But the private eye
> >> sooner or later has to get beat up on. This night’s profusion of post
> >> horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating
> up.
> >> They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one
> by
> >> one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.”
> >>
> >> She pondered this  refusal of the government postal service.
> >>
> >> "It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it
> was a
> >> calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
> machinery.
> >> Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the
> power
> >> of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their
> own,
> >> unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum
> >> (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected
> world."
> >>
> >> But something changes in her through her encounter with the alcoholic
> >> sailor where she acts directly to comfort and help him send a letter to
> a
> >> long separate wife.  Not the only time Pynchon has observed  that there
> is
> >> something about the courage to act from compassion, no matter how
> seemingly
> >> trivial that often marks a change and frequently leads to larger
> actions,
> >> deeper courage. She uses her letter delivery to follow the WASTE  mail
> >> carrier back to Nefastis’s  Ap. ???That is weird to me and I would be
> very
> >> curious if anyone sees a particular meaning there? ??
> >>
> >> She moves through serious doubts about her sanity as she returns home(
> to
> >> Galilee in the Pines; with the name Kinnaret taking on intensity  as
> though
> >> an ancient question of truth and faith were at play) with the hope that
> >> Hilarius will be able to resolve the question of her sanity.  This is a
> >> reflection and question and self doubt that is both normal and healthy
> and
> >> also holds the potential for a dark turn toward authority as the voice
> of
> >> truth. How much should a sane person who is confronted with evidence of
> >> something that does not fit her picture of the world relinquish the
> direct
> >> evidence of an honest inquiry to a psychological or politically
> comforting
> >> explanation.?
> >>
> >> More later, which I know D Morris will be looking forward to anxiously
> or
> >> amusedly or some somethingly.  I aim going out to play music and dance.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>