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

[Michael Bailey]

You said before - but I didn’t catch it (-;

Thanks!

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 5:01 AM J K Van Nort <jkvannort at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Interesting enough, Hap Harrigan was a character in a movie named “The Hot
> Heiress”, and the actor who played that role, Ben Lyon, who became a movie
> executive and discovered, drum roll please…
>
>
> Norma Jean Dougherty otherwise known as Marilyn Monroe. We know who she
> had an affair and sang Happy Birthday to.
>
>
> A “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” moment. Still I don’t think that was
> accidental or a typo.
>
>
> In solidarity,
>
> James
>
>
>
> Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
> <https://mail.onelink.me/107872968?pid=nativeplacement&c=Global_Acquisition_YMktg_315_Internal_EmailSignature&af_sub1=Acquisition&af_sub2=Global_YMktg&af_sub3=&af_sub4=100000604&af_sub5=EmailSignature__Static_>
>
> On Thursday, June 13, 2024, 03:13, Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>