Indoors, the evening gets you’d say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it’s anybody’s business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter’s clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. “Yes!” Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. “And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic!
Thomas PynchonThe row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute.
Thomas PynchonUma geração atrás, o número cada vez menor de nascimentos de crianças vivas entre os herero era um assunto de grande interesse para os médicos de toda a África meridional. Os brancos preocupavam-se, de tal modo como se o gado estivesse atacado de peste bovina. Uma coisa desagradável, ver a população subjugada diminuindo daquele jeito anos após ano. O que é uma colônia sem seus nativos de pele escura? Que graça tem, se todos eles vão morrer? Apenas uma ampla extensão de deserto, sem criadas, sem trabalhadores rurais, sem operários para a construção civil e as minas - peraí, um minuto, é ele sim, Karl Marx, aquele velho racista manhoso, escapulindo de fininho, com os dentes trincados, sobrancelhas arqueadas, tentando fazer de conta que é só uma questão de Mão-de-Obra Barata e Mercados Internacionais... Ah, não. Uma colônia é muito mais que isso. A colônia é a latrina da alma européia, onde o sujeito pode baixar as calças e relaxar, gozando o cheiro de sua própria merda. Onde ele pode agarrar sua presa esguia rugindo com todas as forças sempre que lhe der na veneta, e beber-lhe o sangue com prazer incontido. Não é? Onde ele pode chafurdar, em pleno cio, e entregar-se a uma maciez, uma escuridão receptiva de braços e pernas, cabelos tão encarapinhados quanto os pêlos de sua própria genitália proibida. Onde a papoula, o cânhamo e a coca crescem luxuriantes, verdejantes, e não com a cores e o estilo da morte, como a cravagem e o agárico, as pragas e os fungos nativos da Europa. A Europa cristã sempre foi morte, Karl, morte e repressão. Lá fora, nas colônias, pode-se viver a vida, dedicar-se à vida e à sensualidade em todas as suas formas, sem prejudicar em nada a Metrópole, nada que suje aquelas catedrais, estátuas de mármore branco, pensamentos nobres... As notícias nunca chegam lá. Os silêncios aqui são tão amplos que absorvem todos os comportamentos, por mais sujos e animalescos que sejam...
Thomas PynchonTags: colonialism-karl-marx
You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?"
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what."
"The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market."
"A religious beef, you're saying?"
"It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations--more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.
They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes--family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore. . .the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who've kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready.
Thomas PynchonDo you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window. . .that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is. . .?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs. . .planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead.
Sometimes he'll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody's laughing at something and he isn't, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. "For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.
Thomas PynchonAfter the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them.
Thomas Pynchon[...] times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.
Thomas PynchonReclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . .
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