CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Joseph Tracy]

> On May 2, 2024, at 11:53 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Extrapolating from footwear to narrative stances and attributing
> avuncularity to the author -
> 
> Treatment of the super-rich as a phenomenon and as people in CoL49 is
> evoked in a few of Oedipa’s memories of Pierce, and a lot of details of his
> footprint in the economic landscape of Southern California
> 
> There’s a way to see this treatment as a way of inveighing against the
> effects of extreme wealth (and possibly part of a tendency evinced in AtD’s
> Vibe family - certainly malefactors of great wealth - and also in Jess
> Traverse’s “monopolist” quote from Emerson in _Vineland_)
> 
> But it could also be a thought experiment - how does someone cope after
> rejecting the more unsavory aspects of capitalism embodied in Pierce, when
> the effects of it are all around her and he made provisions to keep her
> involved?
This strikes me as a rich and important question because it is so universal to the US and to any society benefitting from cruel or unsavory practices of acquisition. There is no doubt that most of us have some benefit from practices we oppose. How far can anyone distance themselves from that entanglement?  What does it do to conscience, to politics, to life pursuits, to our attitudes to those on the losing end of  power arrangements? I can see this question looming behind her Uncle Sam ‘hallucination’. What does she owe to his insistent desire?  For Oedipa, whose tendency with men is to put them first but only up to a point.

"Mucho Maas, home, bounded through the screen door. “Today was another defeat,” he began. “Let me tell you,” she also began. But let Mucho go first.”

 , well , for her who is as educated and intelligent as the men she meets, and as brave in danger, and is, in a secretive resistance to male presumptions,  deeply affected by  Remedios Varo and her vision of feminine power and creativity she finds herself in a direct confrontation with what  those male presumptions mean and how powerfully l embedded they are in her world.  This is clearly to my mind one of the most persistent questions and themes in COL49
. to 
> 
> There’s a modicum of tenderness to the portrait of Pierce that emerges -
> nowhere does Oedipa remember him being deliberately cruel*, just not
> connecting with her Rapunzel self-concept - and bringing them into jeopardy
> with the precarious bust of Jay Gould on a narrow shelf above their bed
> (which apparently she never felt empowered to move.)

I want to repeat 2 short stories taken from Howard Hughes life( Wikipedia, an imperfect source but usually gets the basics right and easy to use) to show both sides of this coin. In 1936 he was out drinking and dancing with one of his babes  and driving home on a foggy night when he hit and killed a man. The only witness at first said the car was going too fast and erratically and the man killed was in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Some journalists say Hughes bribed the witness, and that is why  he changed his testimony to fit Hughes version of the story and exonerated him, his partner for the evening also went with Hughes innocence. I think it  is not unfair to say he most likely  got away with negligent homicide and used his money to do so. 
  10 years later Hughes was testing an aircraft( XF-11)  and crashed through a technical failure, getting severe burns and bad injuries, broken ribs etc. He was pulled from the scene by William Durkin who he generously sent 200 $ a month from then on .
   The thing that is particularly troubling about the combination of humane and ruthless behavior with those who are very powerful is how easy it is to cover large scale savagery with presumptions of either good intentions, or decent behavior in other parts of life. Or to excuse it because it was widely endorsed by the society and leaders. Abu Graibh comes to mind as a case where the the cover up justice falls on the lowest ranking participants. Fallujah advanced the career of a General. No weapons of mass destruction ever appeared in Iraq. One could go on for along time this vein and with more egregious examples.  

South Africa tried to resolve this dilemma with a truth and reconciliation process. The central importance of this was to admit that the crimes of apartheid really were crimes and those who participated made immoral personal choices, while seeking to put the past behind and open the door for change. It was not so easy as it sounded and did not adequately address the inequalities that had resulted, but it seems like a noble and merciful attempt to change direction by acknowledging the implications of white supremacy and colonialism. 

Metzger mocks  Oedpa’s search for explanations and answers about some of Inverarity’s seemingly creepy activities: "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.”  In fact Oedipa’s primary motive seems more personal,  both about her responsibility in questions of PI’s estate, and trying to see who the hell this man she had cast as prince really is and why so many men want to exclude her from serious pursuits.

> The chance of mishap would be non-trivial in the event of an earthquake or
> strong tremor.
> 
> What a vivid way to dramatize the risks to Pierce and Oedipa of his
> admiration & emulation of the ethically challenged financier!
> 
> In fact - maybe that’s how Pierce died?**
> 
> * I think it would have almost certainly have been she who slammed the
> hotel room door - but his “Shadow” warning to Mucho doesn’t seem very
> friendly of a flex,
> does it?
> 
> ** I think of him as much older, but he could just as easily have been a
> Wunderkind, couldn’t he?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 1, 2024 at 2:11 PM O G <octogonalyoyo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Association is the way a higher order of consciousness can operate.  If
>> you see your uncle's favorite footwear, you can immediately see and know
>> everything about all your uncle's favorite footwear in all of his lives
>> forward and backward.  That is, the entity who plays your uncle, all its
>> other lives in which is obtained favorite footwear.  You would never have
>> to read about the footwear, or hear or learn about them.  They're all just
>> there, present, in a flash.
>> 
>> That's how it is possible.  So then you just assume the entity playing
>> Pynchon is bleeding through to a degree.
>> 
>> Yes I am being whimsical when I say forward and backward, as there isn't
>> any.
>> 
>> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l