COL 49 CH5 notes

[Mark Kohut]

Vatican porn is the worst porn....I've read....

On Fri, Jun 28, 2024 at 12:37 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Notes from the first part of Chapter 5 with other ruminations on novel as
> a whole
>
> In the 1st line of ch 5,
> who is saying what her next move “should have been”,  and why,  and how
> can she or the narrator know this and from what place in time? Again we
> have an indication that the entire novel  is a reflective review of either
> OM or the narrator or both . It’s almost all past tense and we have this
> and other insights or value judgements which come as truth statements
> without clarity of where they came from.
>
> Do we eventually find out ”where Richard Wharfinger had got his
> information about Trystero.” ( We have to wait for her time with  Bortz to
> answer that)  Why is the tristero reference only to be found in a  secret
> Vatican porn text of Wharfinger’s play and is there some indication of how
> it came to Driblette. Is that why he is dead? Also one wonders how the
> vatican version could have been much  more pornographic ? The play seems as
> pornographic as the director and society would tolerate.   “  Incest is a
> favorite theme of pornography. It is not elaborated in the Driblette play ,
> but  is prominent enough in the play to make one wonder if P probing at
> something about the political incest that would have been necessary to
> organize the murder of Kennedy .
> She does find out how the inventor Nefastis picked up his mail, or at
> least that Nefastis is on the Waste mail route even though she at this time
> had only the potsmaster letter to indicate that such a mail system might
> still be active. The false stamps and postmark seem different from the
> WASTE mail which does not mention such details.
>
> Adjective
> nefāstus (feminine nefāsta, neuter nefāstum); first/second-declension
> adjective
>         1       (of a day) on which judgment could not be pronounced or
> assemblies of the people be held
>         2       (figuratively) contrary to the sacred rites or to
> religion; irreligious, impious; wicked, profane, abandoned; unlucky,
> inauspicious; hurtful quotations
>
> Why/How is the beach she where she dreams of making love with Mucho not
> part of any California she knew?  There is every kind of beach imaginable
> along the long coast of California, and Carmel has the softest , whitest
> sand i’ve ever known.
>
> tristero - latinate  ero as spanish suffix = holder of, manager of  ,
> yielder of , which leads to begetter of sorrow, or  begetter of secret
> meetings/joinings
> tryst-ing president has tryst with death, becomes sadness of nation and
> turning point of coup against the people.
> tryst-eros
>
> Black clad= black operative Mafia or CIA
>
>
>
> Is Maxwell’s Demon in fact  Clerk Maxwell’s  joke science to suggest our
> dependence on a divine creative life force ?
>
> False promises based on false premises. OM has moved through a series of
> relationships based on an internal myth of  princely rescue, and an
> external sense that her entrapment is large, malign and impersonal. She
> bares her soul in peeled back layers, but is still not free, not the naked
> Venus risen from Pacific foam into a joyous new world unable to constrain
> her. The layers are reviewed in semi- allegorical characters as she follows
> that life principle of curiosity like Alice in Wonderland.  ( to be
> continued)
>
>  Every plot, every character, every allegorical claim of princely promise
> and manly assertiveness that  she puts on, she seems destined to shed
> starting with P.Inverarity representing the Gouldian American dream of
> material acquisition and conquest at any cost, but he is so confused and
> un-appealing in his multiple personality masks it is like making love with
> someone who isn’t  real. She leaves
>
> Her failing connection to Mucho Maas is more ambiguous, both contributing
> to the lack of genuine attention to building an authentic relationship.
> The isolation involves  personal choices as well as social pressures.
>
> Next the peeling back is ritualized and involves the magic potions of
> liquor, fame, war heroics, and law- law both incarnate in Metz and broken
> in adultery , she wins the bet but has not bargained for any prize,  she
> weeps , perhaps at how easy she has been or perhaps that she is naked but
> still not free. Metzger+Butcher Butchers separate the meat from the bones.
>
> The paranoids become a muse-like chorus observing her affair ,
> serenading,  direct her attention to the odd similarity between the
> Couriers Revenge and the story of bones bought from fascist mobsters. They
> seem to bring out a feistiness in her that shows up in her questioning of
> Metzger , just as the play they recommend brings out his inner control
> freak and determination not to look where she is looking. We know the
> Metzger relationship won’t last and another separation is coming.
>
>  Another layer gets peeled away by the play in an encounter with an artful
> projection whose more than entertaining power cannot be negated by
> Driblette’s arguments agains the importance of text. She needs to know some
> things, sees something he is anxious to negate.
>
> For my thinking the only satisfying explanation to the mystery in the play
> that draws her like a moth to the flame is that it conjures the recent
> un-named murder of the President. She lives in the real world of her time,
> the growth of the MIC, she  passes through real student groups in Berkeley
> in 1965,  she once revered  James Forrestal, John Foster Dulles, Senator
> Joe McCarthy and clearly would have been affected by and wondered about the
> horrifying assassination in Dallas, site of one of Fallopian’s PPS mail
> systems. Nixon goes unmentioned but makes a major connection to Southern
> California and the characters in 49. ( 49ers)
>
> The recall of the Ike-era figures in Chapter 5 seems another shedding: she
> asks where were ”those dear daft numina who’d mothered over Oedipa’s so
> temperate youth? In another world. Along another pattern of track, another
> string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who’d
> thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the
> skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under
> aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again.”  It was Kennedy, youthful
> artists, a more open media  but Kennedy as much as anything  who swept the
> McCarthy out of favor, Kennedy, now “ dead, impossible to find ever again”.
>
> Fallopian is another driven, success oriented male working in the MIC that
> Ike warned about. He wants to hook into the right wing sentiments which are
> an inherent part of militarism and his green-light-catching eyes point, as
> does his Peter Pinguid society to a jealousy of those who have succeeded in
> this goal, like his prime competitor, founder of the Birchers, candy
> magnate Robert Welch. Fallopian’s ideas and his hero, PP, are laughable but
> his confidence invites her to stay in touch and  later to …confide. He
> encourages her most paranoid interpretation of her experiences and sends
> her to buy guns from a man who sells Nazi armbands..  Again she cannot wear
> what he offers and she remains in limbo, evidence of the findings of her
> quest about to be sold off.
>
> Hilarius is another layer of the culture of the time, in this case with a
> hidden ‘face’ . Freudian psychiatry was a new secular religion among the
> middle and upper classes with a promise of liberation from past traumas,
> from false social constraints, bad relationships, and anything blocking
> personal ‘fulfillment’.  It was also of high interest to those wanting to
> go further with Edward Bernays’s work in mass psychology to shape desired
> social attitudes, and had entered very dark terrain in the mind-control
> work of Sydney Gottlieb and MK Ultra.  Pynchon has been interpreted as a
> Freudian  but in Hilarius  he is pointing toward the potentials for abuse
> reminiscent of similar themes in GR.  Oddly Bernays went( much earlier) to
> the same high school and college as Pynchon. When OM seeks his help sorting
> out real from unreal, the old nazi has gone batshit crazy and she gets him
> into the hands of the police. One more layer discarded.
>
>
> There are characters who don’t seem to so easily fit this pattern,
> particularly Mr Thoth, Genghis Cohen, Mucho Maas, Driblette the artist, the
> alcoholic sailor seeking forgiveness,   and Emory Bortz.  They are all
> non-aggressive, though affected by varying degrees of fear. Bortz is the
> least fearful,  perhaps because his focus is on the history of
> disagreements and power struggles with all its juicy stories safely behind.
> He has an interesting cult of student followers which echoes the 60’s
> academic re-consideration of historic forces like patriarchy, racism,
> revolutions  and empire building ( Kirpatrick Sale, a friend of TP, is an
> example of that trend and is slyly mentioned in Bortz’s notes found in the
> copy bought in Berkeley).
>
>
>
> FSM= Free Speech Movement- 1964-65 Berkeley
> YAF= Young Americans for Freedom- Conservative group founded 1960
> VDC= Vietnam Day Committee Formed Berkeley 1965
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> --
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>