CoL49 group reading ch4: the quotable Fallopian

[Joseph Tracy]

> Such dismissiveness!

Brilliant insight and perfect neutral word.

The dismissiveness is a theme. In the most general terms it is kind of  power struggle mindset, a way of dismissing any claims on attention from non-orthodox points of view. It is culturally easy at this time to be dismissive toward women, but Fallopian and Metzger also use it against each other, PI used it against the anarchist Jesus Arabal in Mazatlan and showed little respect for Oedipa. Mucho’s boss directs it to Mucho and Mucho carries it home looking for support and missing Oed’s need for support. Later the founder of the group to break love-addiction dismisses an entire form of relationship based on his own bad experience. Angelo dismisses anything or human in the way of his consuming  ambition  and  even when his schemes are unraveling  and his power is clearly about to end he doubles down on violence Mussolini style until he is hanging from a meat hook.  Those who have given up on power games,  have a strong dose of compassion, like MR Thoth or Mucho  or who are secure in their world like Cohen show more respect and attentiveness to Oedipa. There is clearly in my mind a part of her that is divided between attraction toward the compassionate and dismissal of them for lacking the male power drive, between attraction to the power players and the realization that they are prone to disrespect her and others to the point of abusiveness. 

These mental habits have deep roots and latch on to larger social forces,  habits of interpreting history that justify disrespectful and insulting  behavior. They mask shallow desires, violence  and self interest with grand narratives. Koteks doodles and dreams of being an inventor but has no ongoing work, Nefastis “invention” shallowly  literalizes of Maxwell’s demon that dismisses the mental labor(labor he and Koteks want to be paid for) as not valid work.  Oed immediately sees through Nefastis’s' idea with basic practical science.  Metzger claims the status and “realism” of war vet because he played that role as an actor. But his concern for vets ends with bones in the lake bought by his client.  He aligns against any labor demands as being  Marxist despite a long US history of struggle for collective bargaining rights  and a large body of law  established in a legal system  which pays him well. Fallopian  not very secretly  aligns himself with the confederacy and its pre-industrial slave and land ownership based utopia. Undecided between war with Russia and war with other un-american Americans, his  ambition is to use racially toned middle class resentment to carve out his own John Birch style organization. He dismisses the criticism from other right -leaning persons as akin to biblical literalism. 

Some dismissals have the implication of violence, like Driblette, and violence lurks throughout the kingdom of Inverarity, (or is it now the kingdom of the butcher, lawyer, actor, or  is it now her kingdom, our kingdom?) : the monetized bones of  GIs,  Bloody Chicklitz and the MIC contracts,  Mafia and Mafia lawyers, Thoth and the night-riding ‘Indians’, Guns and Swastikas made by hired ‘niggers’, Hilarius going crazy, revealing his Nazi past  and shooting out the window, the  de-humanizing  implications of mass produced printed circuits as a model of the future.,  the man Oed meets in a SF gay bar who later when she calls, desperate to find if he was hired and by who tells her it is “too late for me”, Driblette drowned in his grey Genarro suit  in her once comforting and eternal Pacific. 


> On Jun 18, 2024, at 2:56 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> “I’ve had hints,” he told her, “sure. I wrote to Sacramento about that
> historical marker, and they’ve been kicking it around their bureaucratic
> morass for months. Someday they’ll come back with a source book for me to
> read.
> 
> “It will say, ‘Old-timers remember the yarn about,’ whatever happened.
> Old-timers. Real good documentation, this Californiana crap. Odds are the
> author will be dead. There’s no way to trace it, unless you want to follow
> up an accidental correlation, like you got from the old man.” “You think
> it’s really a correlation?” She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long
> white hair, over a century long. Two very old men. All these fatigued brain
> cells between herself and the truth. “Marauders, nameless, faceless,
> dressed in black. Probably hired by the Federal government. Those
> suppressions were brutal.” “Couldn’t it have been a rival carrier?”
> Fallopian shrugged. Oedipa showed him the WASTE symbol, and he shrugged
> again.
> 
> “It was in the ladies’ room, right here in The Scope, Mike.” “Women,” he
> only said. “Who can tell what goes on with them?”
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l