CoL49 Group Reading - misc notes

[Michael Bailey]

https://youtu.be/TdgFpn5_P9M?si=hR6t37YINEhorLhL

Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, mvt 4




Revelations


“Hey,” said Oedipa, “can’t I get somebody to do it for me?” “Me,” said
Roseman, “some of it, sure. But aren’t you even interested?” “In what?” “In
what you might find out.” As things developed, she was to have all manner
of revelations.



Then a couple pages later - there’s the first one already, although she
doesn’t apprehend it - but it’s early days

“…so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just
past the threshold of her understanding.”






Long sentence dep’t: word count 264

Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in,
Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most
godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their
families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for
anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty
underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the
value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children,
supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers,
or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the
actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things
had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear
most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps
tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢,
trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts,
tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book,
rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for
wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull
you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a
salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body
wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look.

This, and the lies & chicanery I guess is what gave him the willies so bad?



“By the time he married her he’d already been two years at the station,
KCUF, and the lot on the pallid, roaring arterial was far behind him, like
the Second World or Korean Wars were for older husbands. Maybe, God help
her, he should have been in a war, Japs in trees, Krauts in Tiger tanks,
gooks with trumpets in the night he might have forgotten sooner than
whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly with him for
going on five years.”

(“whatever it was about the lot” - she doesn’t know, does she? A-and all
the 264 words paint a picture, but it’s not that terrible, a different sort
of person might even enjoy the different carscapes - not begrudging himself
a pleasure in the commerce, doing his best to give an honest deal - it
wasn’t he who put sawdust in the transmissions or honey in the cylinders,
or called clunkers creampuffs.

(Was it that he couldn’t bear being “one of those guys” and despite his
best efforts with hair and wardrobe he couldn’t both keep his job and also
give these people a good deal on those crap cars so he felt himself sliding
into that category anyway?)




Temporally speculating - so he did that for two years -

2 years at the hellish used car lot, then 2 years more (at KCUF) before
Oedipa & he got married.

Now she’s talking about 5 years - so, like, they are now married for 3
years & he’s been working at KCUF for 5. Maybe even an anniversary lunch, a
certain feeling of residency making him feel empowered enough for a little
pushback in Funch’s direction, but no real clout in setting his own
parameters.

Too early, 3 years, for a marital seven year itch, but certainly long past
the honeymoon.

- they’ve been married 5 years
- Pierce had been speculating for 10 years

- Pierce and Oedipa were over a year before she married Maas - so their
breakup would’ve been 6 years back - if it went on from college the whole
time quite a lengthy item (4 years if he went right from college into
speculation)

- so maybe she went back home after graduation and he pursued her to
Kinneret-in-the-Pines, where she

“…had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a
pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of
Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it
turned out to be Pierce she’d happily pulled out the pins and curlers and
down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had
got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister
sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass.”

Something happened that embarrassed Pierce and her both, when he was
“halfway up” her tresses.

The prudish answer:
Premarital sex & the Pill taking her off a pedestal, removing the
likelihood of making babies, and muting the imperative of marriage, so
Pierce is “getting the milk for free” and not wanting to “buy the cow”
(what an unflattering formulation!)????

No textual evidence for that.

What the text says is “her lovely hair turned, through some sinister
sorcery, into a great uncharted wig”

Some sinister sorcery -
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
(Clarke)

If it’s not the Pill, it’s radio like those circuit boards she doesn’t
understand, the advanced legalese cementing Pierce’s effects, the sad
technology of Mucho’s cars, the flying aerosol can, the bone filters, the
neon Echo, the (tame) Impala she drives.


The controversial statement:

“Maybe, God help her, he should have been in a war, Japs in trees, Krauts
in Tiger tanks, gooks with trumpets in the night he might have forgotten
sooner than whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly
with him for going on five years.”

Basically she’s tired of his bellyaching and starting to get pissed.

Same genre as parental “I’ll give you something to cry about” or “think of
the starving children in China, how would you like to eat leaves?”

but internalized - not yet ready to voice the complaint to him - And maybe
she never will.

The “God help her” is her feeling a little guilty right while she thinks
about it -

And then there’s this bit:

“You comfort them when they wake pouring sweat or crying out in the
language of bad dreams, yes, you hold them, they calm down, one day they
lose it: she knew that.”

This is folk wisdom

“Lose it” here I think isn’t in the colloquial sense of “going postal” or
something -
CoL49 might predate that usage?

She means lose the memory.

But what this illuminates is that in her comforting of Maas, she’s drawing
upon the folk-wisdom of comforting a returned soldier.

Which both Oedipa & I feel is disproportionate - & I think that’s what’s
meant by the passage.

not that combat veterans “should” get over their trauma more quickly, but
that the hypothetical veterans she imagines, who faced hugely more daunting
memories than Maas, hypothetically got over *their* distress more rapidly
than the comparatively neurasthenic car-lot veteran who’s still carrying
his.