COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Did Pynchon use  Zapf fonts?  The books I have don’t have font notes , but ATD certainly looks like Patatino.

> On Jun 4, 2024, at 7:52 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the summary!
> 
> Some not completely unrelated thoughts:
> 
> 
> Zapf’s Used Books - Hermann Zapf was the designer of the Dingbat font, but
> also a bunch of other stuff, including the Palatino font and automated
> justification.
> 
> Also a calligrapher, in 1960 he did the Preamble to the United Nations
> Charter in 4 languages for the Morgan Museum.
> 
> https://www.themorgan.org/literary-historical/116614
> 
> 
> He also was a consultant for Hallmark Cards in the 1960s and ‘70s,
> developing a style manual for their lettering artists.
> 
> 
> 
> —- regarding the anthology Driblette can’t lend her because somebody took
> it -


> 
> “There was another copy there. Zapf might still have it. Can you find the
> place?” Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went. “Are you
> putting me on?”
> 
> — does she say, “Are you putting me on?” in response to “can you find the
> place?”
> (Like, of course I can find the place?)
> 
> - but that seems too mundane to follow a feeling of something dancing in
> her viscera.
> 
> — so do all the other proximate possible meanings I can think of:
> 
> a) she’s incredulous that he loaned out his copy to party unknown & didn’t
> get it back?
> 
> b) you’re putting me on - his name is Zapf?
> 
> c) it’s just a throwaway remark to a showering man?
> 
> d) an example of the “bad ear” Pynchon deprecated in the _Slow Learner_
> intro?
> 
> - slowly it dawns on me that the dancing in her viscera is connected to the
> dance mentioned earlier in that bit about the languid, sinister blooming of
> The Tristero:
> “something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late”
> Which she has.
> 
> Maybe the reason Driblette can’t just ask one of the cast for the book back
> is because whoever he gave the book to is, like, a Man in Black.
> 
> Maybe they’ve put the frighteners on him and took his original copy,
> although that would seem an ineffective way of impeding him.
> 
> He seems loath to reveal anything about other interested parties - and
> imputes an unlikely “scholarly dispute” to explain her and their interest.
 That’s the kind of explanation that makes sense to me.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 4:35 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
>> What happens after the play, as CHAPTER  3 draws to a close, marks  a
>> break between Metzger and Oedipa, and raises questions about Driblette’s
>> nervous evasiveness, and  his passionate portrayal of the play as merely
>> entertainment.
>> 
>> HERE IS A not very condensed SUMMARY  with comments
>> 
>> OM wants to go backstage with Metzger to question the director Randolph
>> Driblette who also played Gennaro.
>> 
>> “Oh, about the bones.” He had a brooding look.
>> Oedipa said, “I don’t know. It just has me uneasy. The two things, so
>> close.”
>> 
>> It now becomes obvious that Metz’s urgent desire to leave is more than
>> distaste for the play, In recent events Oedipa has found out that Pierce
>> Inveraritiy’s holdings are quite vast and that there is very dark aspect to
>> some of his business affairs including the purchase of human bones of
>> american GIs from  an ex fascist mafioso,  aerospace weapons investments,
>> and the ability to run freeways through cemetaries.   The author has
>> foreshadowed the way these shadows will come from Trystero and now in the
>> play the Trystero  has begun to be named and identified in the center of a
>> bloody power struggle. Metz himself may be the legal side of settling the
>> estate but he is also an actor  who has already deceived Oedipa and must
>> understand her “easy”ness may be in doubt. He turns to acting the macho
>> lawyer scolding a ridiculous softheaded witness.
>> 
>> “Fine,” Metzger said, “and what next, picket the V.A.? March on
>> Washington? God protect me,” he addressed the ceiling of the little
>> theater, causing a few heads among those leaving to swivel, “from these
>> lib, overeducated broads with the soft heads and bleeding hearts. I am 35
>> years old, and I should know better.
>> ” “Metzger,” Oedipa whispered, embarrassed, “I’m a Young Republican.”
>> “Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old
>> enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand
>> Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people
>> today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this
>> one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise
>> ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her
>> first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our
>> boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”
>> 
>> This is obviously more about fears in Metzger’s mind about where her
>> questions might lead than the wildly overgeneralized  tough guy put down of
>> her as an idealistic youthful female, which then  leads up to his dubious
>> legal and moral argument over her required loyalty to what is quite likely
>> a criminally acquired estate.
>> 
>> “It isn’t that,” she protested. “I don’t care what Beaconsfield uses in
>> its filter. I don’t care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don’t
>> want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pietà, or
>> cancer . . .” She looked around for words, feeling helpless. “What then?”
>> Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. “What?” “I don’t know,”
>> she said, a little desperate. “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.”
>> “Against whom?” inquired Metzger, putting on shades.
>> “I want to see if there’s a connection. I’m curious.”
>> “Yes, you’re curious,” Metzger said. “I’ll wait in the car, OK?”
>> 
>> In this exchange I am seeing the oft-noted pattern in Pynchon’s characters
>> of the divided loyalties of a woman attracted in 2 directions- both toward
>> the authority figure of the state (or estate), and toward truth that might
>> question and undermine such loyalty( Frenesi, Shasta Fey, Katje, Maxine
>> Tarnow). Her curiosity has been met with  insults. Her request for support
>> can only be understood by Metzger as being “against” someone.  As we have
>> seen earlier, the instincts of this lawyer are to close his eyes to the
>> truth if he thinks it will serve even a potential client.
>> 
>> OM makes a beautifully written entry backstage to where Driblette stands
>> .”She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded
>> by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying
>> intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she
>> didn’t.” He discourages her from asking about the play elaborating an
>> argument that it is a cheap horror flick with no meaning, but also, later,
>> that the words are not the important part but the life-giving vision of the
>> director. She asks about a copy of the text.
>> “Why,” Driblette said at last, “is everybody so interested in texts?”
>> “Who else?” Too quickly. Maybe he had only been talking in general.
>> Driblette’s head wagged back and forth. “Don’t drag me into your scholarly
>> disputes,” adding “whoever you all are,”
>> She asks about the chill silence in the 4th act and finds they weren’t in
>> the original nor were the 3 assassins seen.
>> He goes on, under the assumption she is a scholar , saying you guys are
>> like puritans about the Bible, hung up with words  and perhaps goes  a bit
>> too far in dismissing the importance of words. His arguments much better
>> crafted than Metzger describing himself as the projector in the planetarium
>> procecting a world.
>> He tells her “ you could could fall in love, talk to my shrink….
>> “Driblette?” Oedipa called, after awhile. His face appeared briefly. “We
>> could do that.”
>> He wasn’t smiling. His eyes waited, at the centers of their webs.
>> “I’ll call,” said Oedipa. She left, and was all the way outside before
>> thinking, I went in there to ask about bones and instead we talked about
>> the Trystero thing. She stood in a nearly deserted parking lot, watching
>> the headlights of Metzger’s car come at her, and wondered how accidental it
>> had been. Metzger had been listening to the car radio. She got in and rode
>> with him for two miles before realizing that the whimsies of nighttime
>> reception were bringing them KCUF down from Kinneret, and that the disk
>> jockey talking was her husband, Mucho.
>> 
>> 
>> Open to questions, theories,
>> ? “like a lab maze for studying intelligence in tears” ?
>> 
>> ? we could do that?
>> 
>> Insolid verity and pierced parity…. About the best I can do JT
>> --
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>> 
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