"He had believed too much in the lot"

I've been backspacing away fluffy opening remarks continuously for the last 10-12 minutes now, so I guess I'll just jump right into The Crying of Lot 49 and get the big moment out of the way without too much performance.

Technically, this is a rereading of Lot 49; but by chapter 2, I was well aware how unprepared I was to read something like this back in high school, how little I remembered of what seems overt and fundamental this time. Back then, having read virtually nothing outside of various conservative curricula, finally striking out on my own, I found the book grand and sinister, meanly subversive anid often frightening. I'm not sure I allowed myself to laugh. I'm still reluctant to call anything by Old Tom -- which is what I've been calling Pynchon recently, an unexpected but I think fertile association of the author with Tolkien's Tom Bombadil -- "light-hearted." But his tongue is pressed pretty firmly against his cheek throughout this one, and my involuntary snickering is practically perpetual.

It's weird to begin this course with a book that seems like a sort of interim piece in the context of the man's oeuvre: it's like, sandwiched between two sprawling European epics, Lot 49 -- this distinctly American, very contemporary (being set in the era of its publication) short novel -- pokes up for a moment or two. Sort of like America is where Pynchon can stop and catch his breath (his spiraling, Technicolor breath that tastes a bit like pot, of course). Which is distressing.

So to climb out of that confusion, I took your post about "crying" as a way of grounding my reading. But the word in any form, I'm 99% sure, does not occur in Chapter 1. What I did notice is that, in a related...thing, the word "lot" actually has an interesting function. It is used with regard to Mucho Maas's time as a used car salesman. Mucho, the "hyperaware" oversensitive husband of Oedipa attaches too much to his used car lot, seeing it as a place where poor hopeless people come with their poor hopeless cars to trade them in for poor hopeless replacements, only caring that these "new" used cars were not their own -- essentially trading "lots" with someone else. Mucho acts as a minister to this trading of lots, burdening himself with unbounded pity, and I guess can almost be seen, in his unfiltered receipt of sadness/pain, as preempting the "crying" that pops up throughout Oedipa's subsequent adventure.

Having read for today through page 80 or so, I've got a bunch more notes I want to get to, but being pressed a bit for time, I think I'll just make a second meaty post tomorrow or Sunday to get it out of the way before Tuesday's final thoughts.

And they're off!

Matt