COL49 Group Reading. Week Two. May 5 to May 12?

[Mark Kohut]

I cannot find the revised schedule but I believe we started last Sunday
and I chose Week Two which starts today.

Please look over and self-summarize. A summary is itself a Reading, imo,
and I prefer my own phenomenological reading. Some bits, some observations,
some varied possibilities and my choices among them often. Sometimes.

Also, I have a copy of the original hardcover, the pagination of which is
quite
different from later editions. Chapter 1 begins on page 9, for example.
Old-fashioned bookmaking where all the earlier pages are laid-out like
books used to be. One page a huge 49 After the earlier words of the title
on the opposite page saying BY THOMAS PYNCHON.   We know
from later books that Tom valued and took control of those elements. Did he
here?
( I say "Cork" Smith let him, yes)

So, my page 16---"it was Dr. Hilarious, her shrink or
psychotherapist".....a reminder that this use of 'shrink' is
the first found citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. [headshrinker
appears in either* The Wild Ones *or *Blackboard Jungle *
in the mid-fifties] Linguists tell us the use of words in speech can
precede the earliest print usages by many years, a decade or more
(and this varies as much as words, of course)

Can bring us back to the time of the story, esp when
we read on about 'die Brucke'.."the bridge inward". As this novella
and Oedipa have just emerged from the 50's, we can reflect that most
cultural historians, regular historians and most psychologists still
consider
the 50s a quite repressed decade. *Howl *did not Howl for no reason. Betty
Freidan's
*The Feminine Mystique, *a huge bestseller about repression was published
in 1963
with the interviews and writing starting in 1957. (she originally told her
publisher the
book might take a year to research and less to write)

Oedipa is trapped in that world but---how suburban repressed is she? Or is
that where her
quest begins?