CoL49 group reading ch 3 Re: Hap Harrigan & Metzger’s diatribe

[Michael Bailey]

So it was “Hop” not “Hap” - minor proofreading error, or intentional
evidence of Metzger’s ballistic state: “he’s even mangling his words”?



Metzger: “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.”

Mansplaining, textbook.

He imputes all this from Oedipa’s wish to talk to Driblette.

Admittedly, he’s been sensitized by DiPresso’s threat of a lawsuit. But
what a jerk!

She wasn’t joining in that action or any other, & even if she were, he’d
still be getting paid.

She’s interested in the play.
This is completely outside the scope of his objections, and presumably of
his mental process as well.

He’s ridiculing her youth- but much older than she can he be?

The text says, “Some twenty-odd years ago, Metzger had been one of those
child movie stars” - between 1934 & 1944 - if he was 6 in 1940, then he
himself would be barely 30 in 1964.

(the Greek fisherman in “Cashiered” bears a lot of similarities to Zorba
(1964) but that’s clearly not a timeline determinant)

- there was a thread on this list many years ago in which someone mentioned
in a discussion of CoL49 that there were at that time such phenomena as
liberal Republicans. Oedipa, like Hillary Rodham, identified as a “Young
Republican.”

https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/september-2019/when-hillary-clinton-was-a-teenage-republican/

“[Hillary] was … spirited in her support of Republican presidential hopeful
Barry Goldwater in high school, parading through the halls in a “Goldwater
Girl” sash”

There’s no mention at all of the other political party in CoL49, is there?

It’s tempting to speculate about Pynchon grappling with a Republican family
heritage, set against the panoply of loons exemplified by Goldwater -
although Goldwater himself was far from the looniest - and how the conflict
between Pierce’s Fangoso Lagoon vision of society and the “lived reality”
of a lot of other people who by default and probably even by design were
excluded or “disinherited” from it could’ve led to a re-examination of
values that may have been as confusing to him as it was to Oedipa -

But even if that’s true, it’s intermingled with layer upon layer of other
interesting stuff anyway, stuff that’s more explicitly mentioned in the
text.

But on the same tangent, just poking around, this article
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/how-the-morning-news-helped-dallas-become-the-city-of-hate-6430851

Was pretty interesting - new to me:

Dealer Plaza is named after the George Dealey, founder of the Dallas News.
The park, with a 12 foot statue of George Dealey, was a Works Progress
Administration project.

Dealey’s son, Ted, had been an anti-KKK crusader in the 1920s, and a
supporter of the New Deal, but by 1963, he famously ran a hostile ad in the
Dallas News on November 22. The paper, like its publisher, had taken a
far-right turn - the article details an earlier incident when Ted Dealey as
a guest at a White House luncheon for publishers launched an intemperate
diatribe.


Anyway, guys like that, displaying unremitting hostility, unsmiling rich
dudes - nowadays the well-known face of Republicanism - Metzger & Dealey
the larva and pupa, Trump, Abbott, etc the imago…

Crises of conscience among the more intelligent and less bellicose people
under the canopy of the Republican tent…

My mom among them, it was clear in the 1970s the whole party was
unreasonable & she switched.

My dad stayed a moderate Republican till he got dementia (correlation is
not causation, though) but my uncle who was even farther right in the ‘60s
(had a bomb shelter & worked for Dow Chemical) was disgusted by Bush 43.






On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 11:39 AM J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

> Strangely enough, while the cartoon series was Hop Harrigan, a movie The
> Hot Heiress with a character named Hap Harrigan exists.
> In a six degrees of Kevin Bacon-like moment, the actor who played Hap was
> Ben Lyon, who discovered Marilyn Monroe. A-and we all know with whom she
> had an affair and sang Happy Birthday!
>
>
>
> Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone


> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>