Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
Zak Smith, 2004

From PYNCHON-L:

Page proof.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
397 Words
22 June 2004
Artforum International
16
ISSN: 1086-7058; Volume 42; Issue 10
English
(c) 2004 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.

To the Editor:

There's an error concerning my piece Pictures of What Happens on Each Page
of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow in David Joselit's review of the
Whitney Biennial, "Apocalypse Not" [May 2004]. Joselit writes: "Like its
literary model, Smith's work adopts an episodic structure through its
arrangement of 755 page-size drawings in a grid, but the connection to
Pynchon is largely metaphorical. While adopting different visual idioms
ranging from cartoons to modernist abstraction, Smith's subject is
apparently his own private milieu."

The connection to Pynchon's text is by no means "largely metaphorical"; it
is in fact meticulous, exact, and quite literal. As the title states, the
images correspond, in the order presented on the wall, to each page of the
novel--the first Viking edition, to be precise. (See, for instance, in the
detail reproduced in Artforum, the image in the bottom row, far right, which
corresponds to page 536: "He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors
spiking out from his head.") The images required hours of historical
research and are as true to the descriptions in the text as possible. If
there's a B-52 in the fiftieth drawing, it's because there's one on page 50.

While I can only guess what insights Mr. Joselit may have into my
(admittedly rather limited) "private milieu," I assume I will be believed
when I report that it is utterly devoid of V-2 rocket strikes, sentient
light-bulbs, and paranoid men in pig costumes. All of these do, however,
appear in Pynchon's book.

- --Zak Smith, New York

David Joselit responds:

I am sorry for any inaccuracy in my characterization of Zak Smith's work.
However, I remain convinced that the relation among his motifs, his formal
realization of them, and the profusion of pages that constitute the piece
place the viewer in doubt over how systematic the project is. It seems to me
that, like Gravity's Rainbow, this artwork is meant to embody a system in
the process of its own undoing. To my taste--and I'm afraid I can't cite any
higher power than taste--Smith's network of text/image somehow needed to
read more forcefully qua network in relation to its literary analogue.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

....more about Zak's art (which pynchonoid enjoyed tremendously at the Whitney in March): http://www.fredericksfreisergallery.com/artists/smith_04.htm

.... It's all so beautifully postmodern: all of the
Bushies' lies are true. Technically....

from: Fuzzing It Up by Ted Rall

From today's Financial Times:

....Of course, if Italian conspiracy theorists are to be believed, all talk of players, shapes and systems is academic, and the Scandinavians will strike a deal to play out the 2-2 draw that, thanks to Uefa's complicated and illogical rules (see panel), will see both through no matter what Italy do against Bulgaria - a suggestion dismissed as "ridiculous" by Olsen. Their fears probably say more about Italian football - which resembles sport as written by Thomas Pynchon, riddled by corruption and paranoia - than it does of the reality, but the instinctive defence that Danes and Swedes are bitter rivals doesn't wash....

....Like a modern-day Bayeux tapestry, Dominic McGill’s latest drawing, Project For a New American Century, is an epic graphite on paper panoramic loop that stretches 65 feet. Standing at almost 8 feet high, the drawing hangs suspended from the ceiling and fills the entire gallery space. Project for a New American Century takes its name from a Washington-based neo-conservative think-tank “The Project for the New American Century“. Drawn largely from historical quotes, political slogans , media buzzwords, and pop culture references; this endless timeline spans from Hiroshima through the Cold War to the present, ending and beginning in nuclear fire. The work functions as a hypertext of conspiracy, the sensational, the propagandist and the revolutionary....

Sounds pynchonoid to me. Click for more details of the show, June 29-August 6, in NYC.

....In the Christ Gibson finds the homoerotic ur-text behind the Nazi love of the beautiful blonde boy his taut body blossoming with his own blood at each bite of the whip....We are unable to understand contemporary history and the psychotic bases of American ideology because we have not yet learned how to read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I hope on another occasion to offer an extended discussion of all that this seminal work offers the student of ideology, the revolutionary nature of its insight into the capitalist mind and how it teaches us both to read and to practice the discipline of the image. For now I must condense that contribution into three concepts: (1) Pynchon reveals the constitutional stupidity of official rationality and its underlying madness; as in the fetishizing of any and all information (as if there was a precious secret that each inmate of Abu Ghraib could render up to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle et al). (2) The excessive actions that official rationality necessarily gives birth to are a result of the underlying paranoia and the desire for omnipotent control that results. (3) This disorder is fatally wedded to the effort to transform eros into thanatos so that there will finally only be one thing—the imposition of technoscientific rationality on the entire globe. Such is the categorical imperative of late capitalism in its Empire phase. Study of the image remains the way to combat it because the image reveals what it conceals. In doing so image addresses us at those psychological and emotional registers of our being that we are losing contact with more each day. They can be reawakened only by desperate measures....

From a thoughtful essay by Walter A. Davis: The Bite of the Whip: Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib

I've been reading, and enjoying, Jan Swafford's biography, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, about another Yankee genius who managed to break out of his milieu's cultural expectations box. "Creative artists were something that, for the most part, old-fashioned Connecticut Yankees notably were not," Swafford writes. "Practical musicians they were....The rare composers of concert music, however, had to justify their profession to dubious countrymen....Connecticut men of letters were less likely to write imaginative fiction than to be teachers, such as Yale's Timothy Dwight, or nuts-and-bolts scholars like Noah Webster, the dictionary man....Born both a Yankee and an artist, Charles Ives was predestined to a divided nature." Pynchon's not from Connecticut of course, but he shares Ives' Congregationalist roots, and as I've been reading this biography I've wondered if Pynchon might also have had to overcome a similar cultural predisposition against art for art's sake. Another similarity between the two artists: Ives mixed popular American and high European culture elements to create a native American music, just as Pynchon combines pop and high culture elements in his work.

Why am I not surprised that the Line, in all its destructive Vistoid glory, turns out to be where VP Cheney hunkers down since 9/11 in his "undisclosed location" pulling the Bush puppet strings and pushing the US into a racist, imperialist War That Never Ends? Sez New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani:

...Mr. Bamford unearths ... the identity of one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney after 9/11 (Site R, a secret military command post on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border)...

Jeffrey Eugenides and Jim Lewis discuss literary modernism in The Father of Modernism. Lewis mentions Pynchon in the lead article of the exchange:

"...what did I actually learn—from Barthelme or Pynchon, or for that matter Beckett or Raymond Queneau, or for that matter Joyce or André Breton? That writing has infinite possibilities, yes; but not all of them are equally worth exercising."

The Babies of Wackiness guide to Vineland can be downloaded as a .pdf, Otto said in a PYNCHON-L post today.

Jack Parsons & The Curious Origins of the American Space Program by The Magician surfaced on PYNCHON-L, with an intriguing table of contents:

Part 1: Hermes, the Ontological Detective
Part 2: The Suicide Club Gives Birth to Both the U.S. and Chinese Missile Programs
Part 3: The Slaves Shall Serve
Part 4: Abreaction Therapy
Part 5: Rocking to Amargi
Part 6: Exodus
Part 7: Sex and the Single Succubis
Part 8: Conservation of Momentum
Part 9: Paradise Lost
Part 10: The Cult of Intelligence
Part 11: The Book of the Antichrist
Part 12: Stairway from Heaven
Part 13: Sacred Tunnels
Part 14: The Tyranny of the Black Brotherhood
Part 15: Mute Testimony
Part 16: My Name is Zak
Part 17: Stab Your Demoniac Smile to My Brain!
Part 18: Bloody Dichondra
Part 19: Axe Me No Questions
Part 20: Manuscript Found in an Urn
Part 21: Leaving Mecca
Part 22: The Square Root of Minus One

Road to Surfdom juxtaposes statements made by President Bush on the 2003 U.N. Day in Support of Victims of Torture, with the August 2002 Justice Department memo prepared for White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales. Read it, then Pynchon's Intro to 1984.

2004 was the year They put the cocaine back in the cola .

"1904 was .... the year the American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic and death-oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WWII" (Gravity's Rainbow p. 452)

Thanks to Pentagon "black bag" funding, the Total Information Awareness Program continues its Big Brother snooping: "When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at the Bank of America branch, a record of that deposit showed up immediately in the computer databanks in the office across the street, just as financial, travel and other personal transactions of virtually every American do millions of time every minute," reports Capitol Hill Blue. Pynchon saw it coming, of course:

"The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what? [...] The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking."
--Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone Junction

Fictional Minds by Alan Palmer "suggests that readers understand novels primarily by following the functioning of the minds of characters in the novel storyworlds," according to the publisher, University of Nebraska Press. The book "analyzes constructions of characters’ minds in the fictional texts of a wide range of authors, from Aphra Behn and Henry Fielding to Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Pynchon" using " 'real-mind' disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science."

I'm back, still convinced it's Pynchon's world, we just live in it.

"Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you figure it out."
--Vineland

From the preface of a recent book, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina:

"This book [...] explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies. This strategy was originally developed in the late 1940s to contain communist China; it has since been used to secure control over foreign petroleum resources. The result has been a staggering increase in the global drug traffic and the mafias assorted with it, a problem that will worsen until there is a change in policy.

[...] Today drug networks are important factors in the politics of every continent. The United States returns repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies (or what I call drug proxies) with which it has a penchant to become involved. Surprisingly, this is true even in Colombia, where we are nominally fighting a war on drugs; yet the chief drug-trafficking faction, the paramilitaries, are allies of our allies, the Colombian army. Worse, they are the descendants of yet another clever CIA notion -- to train terrorists to fight the left -- which has once again come back to haunt us.

[...] These problems facing America are by no means entirely of its own making. But one recurring cause, commonly recognized, is U.S. dependence on foreign oil and its need to control international oil markets. Past U.S. support for drug proxies is another more covert and less recognized contributing factor, one that must be acknowledged if the root causes for these crises are to be addressed.

Conversely, the great resistance that still exists to acknowledging past U.S. involvement in and responsibility for covert intrigues contributes to our present inability to bring true peace and security to the rest of the world. The agencies responsible for past errors are too concerned to preserve not only their reputations but their alliances and, above all, the corrupt social systems in which such alliances have thrived. Consequently an international drug traffic, which the United States helped enlarge, continues to thrive.

I shall argue in this book that covert operations, when they generate or reinforce autonomous political power, almost always outlast the specific purpose for which they were designed. Instead they enlarge and become part of the hostile forces the United States has to contend with. To put it in terms I find more precise, parapolitics, the exercise of power by covert means, tends to metastasize into deep politics, an interplay of unacknowledged forces over which the original parapolitical agent no longer has control. This is the heart of the analysis.

[...] In short the etiology or origin of global terrorism is rooted partly in the historical context of previous U.S. policy decisions with respect to both drugs and oil. I say this not to cast blame but to suggest the proper direction to search for solutions. Decision makers of a half century ago cannot be faulted for lacking the foreknowledge that comes more easily in retrospect. It is, however, not too late to address the legacy they have left us -- a suspect affluence grounded in part on the impoverishment of the rest of the world. As long as that legacy is not corrected, we can be sure that the problem of terrorism will remain with us. [...] "

Ted Rall's comic today, Gitmo House, puts a black comedy spin on the US treatment of teenaged detainees who have been abused at Guantanamo Bay.

"It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return
to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an
unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the
day, is good, and that human decency, like parental
love, can always be taken for granted--a faith so
honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and
perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing
to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being
betrayed."
--Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to 1984, pp. xxv-xxvi. (The Guardian has published an edited version online).

Happy birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

"Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr was born to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennett Pynchon on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York."
--The Straight Dope

Jim Knipfel has reviewed Pynchon's foreword to 1984. Here are some excerpts:

[...] Another way to catch people’s attention, the editors figured, is to commission a new foreword by someone who might have some special, unique insight into what Orwell envisioned. For the centennial edition of Animal Farm, for instance (which received a similar repackaging), they hired Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and The Magician’s Assistant. But who would be right for 1984?

Someone, maybe, who might feel a special bond with Winston Smith. Or O’Brien or Goldstein or Big Brother himself. Even Tillotson (you never hear enough about him). If it turns out to be an author who writes like no one ever has before—or ever will—then you’ve got a double bonus. People will pick up the dusty old novel not for the dusty old novel, but for the secret prize hidden inside, like the toy balloon gondolas and plastic cavemen that used to lie buried at the bottom of boxes of Fruity Pebbles. I never liked Fruity Pebbles much, but those gondolas were the best.

Plume couldn’t have done better than to snag Thomas Pynchon. While we all, in some way, have a stake in the implications of Orwell’s novel, I have to believe that Mr. Pynchon’s stake is a bit bigger.

Much as Orwell "foresaw" a world of electronic surveillance, falsified history and sham wars, Pynchon’s own writings (intentionally or not) have had a prescient quality of their own, envisioning everything from the internet to the convergence of computer technology, artificial intelligence and genetic research, which he presaged in his 1984 essay, "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?". Pynchon is also, it goes without saying, well-versed in the mechanics of paranoia and conspiracy.

Here, in his first extended bit of published writing since his introduction to Jim Dodge’s 1997 novel Stone Junction (an essay which also had quite a bit to say on matters Orwellian), Pynchon employs a language that’s simple and straightforward, yet plays with ideas that are (unsurprisingly) subtle. In the end, he’s produced the most insightful—and playful—analysis of the novel I’ve ever read. Pynchon weaves elements of Orwell’s biography together with various political and historical events of his day (and our own) to explain not only what’s going on in 1984, but why, and where it came from.

At the same time, he deals with the above-mentioned "snitch" controversy (without saying as much), dismisses other controversies (like recent claims that Orwell was an anti-Semite) and demolishes several overly simplistic readings of the novel.

[...] He does pause briefly at a couple of points to draw parallels between 1984 and 2003—the use of doublethink by modern-day politicians and media outlets, for instance. He even brings up parallels which aren’t usually brought up: the similarity between Oceania’s Ministries and our own Department of Defense (which wages war) and Department of Justice (which regularly stomps on human and constitutional rights). Early in the essay, he even hints (again without saying as much) at the events of September 2001 and the effect such events usually have on the political outlook of a nation. An attack on one’s own homeland can suddenly transform peace activists into dangerous subversives in the minds of most citizens. It was something Orwell witnessed during the Blitz, and something we’ve witnessed over the past year and a half.

As with most everything he writes, Mr. Pynchon’s essay flows easily through a remarkable range of topics—technology, historical precedent, Orwell’s situation and our own, the cuts the Book of the Month Club wanted to make before releasing the novel, various characters and the roles they play—and how fictional characters can develop the nasty habit of doing things the novelist himself never expected. He even hints in the closing paragraphs that 1984 ends on a note perhaps a bit brighter than most of us realize.

As always, it’s a delightful little ride and, all told, it’s less an introduction to the novel than it is a commentary written for readers already well familiar with it. [...] "


I like Knipfel's take on the foreword. Unlike a couple of trolls on PYNCHON-L, he seems to recognize that Pynchon's assignment wasn't to write a textbook or monograph about Orwell, and that Pynchon takes the opportunity to provide tantalizing glimpses into his own writing. Dave Monroe is right to say -- in his recent comments on PYNCHON-L -- that the foreword is at least as much about Pynchon and his writing as it is about 1984.

I suspect that the foreword points to Pynchon's current novel-in-progress, the way his 1993 essay Nearer My Couch to Thee provided a glimpse at what was to come in Mason & Dixon, published in 1997, with its talk of Franklin, time, dreams, and the fading of "the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end."

A Pynchon scholar friend suggests that the appearance of this Foreword may also be read as an alert that a new Pynchon novel could be on its way, the author doing what he can to raise his profile a bit -- without plunging into the celebrity author circuit -- in order to help with the marketing of his book. I hope he's right.

Pynchon has written a foreword to a new edition of Orwell's 1984. Some reviewers have praised it highly (just about the only place it's being trashed -- by a couple of the usual suspects -- is PYNCHON-L). The Guardian has published a slightly shortened version, but it's worth buying the book to read the Foreword in full.

Pynchon has strong words for post-9/11 U.S. Here's a sampling:

"[...] Now, those of fascistic disposition - or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong - will immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one's homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument - let alone a prophecy - in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet had behaved on occasion no differently from a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity. [...]"

"[...] Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named "the department of defence," any more than we have saying "department of justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever. [...] "

"[...] Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?" "Orwellian, dude!"

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party - like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about. [...] "

" [...] The interests of the regime in Oceania lie in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire, and language as a vehicle of thought. Memory is relatively easy to deal with, from the totalitarian point of view. There is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has become a commonplace, circa 2003, for government employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialise truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don't learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes - or best of all that it doesn't matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour's entertainment. [...]"

"[...] There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger - his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith "believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 . . ." Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984 , was imagining a future for his son's generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed. [...]"

Pynchon presents a nuanced argument, however, which is worth reading in the context of the entire Foreword. It also provides some tantalizing glimpses into Pynchon's writing practice, and sheds light on the novels, stories, and essays where Pynchon shares and responds to some of Orwell's concerns. So, buy the book and read Pynchon's Foreword, then go ahead and read 1984 again, too.

"There were men called 'army chaplains.' They preached inside some of these buildings. There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened. Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and some died before they got back inside a garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened. It was quite common."
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 693

Speaking of God, preparing for war
JUAN O. TAMAYO
Knight Ridder

CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait - On the brink of war, chaplain Doug Dowling is thinking about the sermon he will deliver today to American leathernecks in his sandbagged chapel a few miles from the Iraqi border.

He will urge the Marines to treat enemy bodies with respect, to look away from the grotesque mutilations of war. He will tell them the war is not about getting even for 9/11. And he will tell them that amid the horror of war they may find the beauty of valor and comradeship and, perhaps, the presence of God.

A stocky Navy lieutenant with a blond mustache and bare-walls haircut, the 42-year-old Milwaukee native looks like a Marine in his digital desert camouflage uniform, floppy "boony" hat and military web gear.

But he wears a tiny black metal cross on his shirt and speaks with the fervor of a former Navy warplane navigator who was stationed in Kuwait during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War and then became a pastor for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"There is a God who is a warrior, but God is the same always," Dowling said. "The God you believe in as you may go to war is that same God you believed in yesterday and the day before, so nothing changes for me on this day."

Dowling has baptized 32 people here, including a Navy officer he met briefly in a military base parking lot and christened with water from a plastic bottle.

He will hold one more service today in his tiny chapel with a cross on top, really a bunker dug halfway into the desert sand and then sandbagged for protection.

"I will pray for our men and for theirs, too," he said. "And I will pray especially for peace."

"In Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 69 the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics and its dismal decree that all information inevitably crumbles away is made vivid by a woman named Oedipa, who wonders how many men have slept on a sailor's burning mattress, how many lives lost forever," writes Alan Lightman in the New York Times.

And, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, 'Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look that way--but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . . "
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 521


"The networks don’t like to talk about how much they actually spend, but one veteran of the media scene here estimated the cost for a major TV network at about $100,000 a month. Others say that is a low estimate. Almost all of this cash (except a few “tips” here and there) goes directly to the Iraqi government. Once you add up the bill for the TV networks alone, we’re talking perhaps millions of dollars in revenue a month for the government.

There is a joke here that the major media outlets are now competing with oil smuggling as the number one money-maker for the Iraqi government. It is particularly ironic that while Rupert Murdoch’s 'troops' from FOX News Network rally for the war, dismissing antiwar activists as dupes of the Iraqi regime, the “network America trusts” is paying 'Saddam' (as they refer to Iraq) hand over fist tens of thousands of dollars every month. But stroll down the halls of the press center and you’ll see that Rupert’s troops have multiple battalions. He also owns Sky News (the British version of FOX), as well as the Times of London. A bit of research would probably find that Murdoch owns other publications operating here as well.

FOX News reporters (and others as well) like to say 'for the benefit of the viewers' that their broadcasts are being monitored by the Iraqi government. Fair enough. But perhaps the Murdoch Empire should begin each of its reports or dispatches from Baghdad by disclosing how much money they paid “Saddam” today. "

-Jeremy Scahill, reporting from Iraq
IraqJournal.org, 1 February 2003


....as multinational corporations prepare to rebuild -- reaping fabulous profits in the process -- what the US prepares to destroy....

"There's something still on, don't call it a 'war' if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate's gone down a point or two [...] but Their enterprise goes on"
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 628

The death rate's ready to climb again, dramatically, and opportunity abounds:

Job Description

United States Navy

MORTICIAN-$6,000 Sign-On Bonus
Location: New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Chicago, IL;
Houston, TX; Philadelphia, PA; San Diego, CA
Position Type: Employee
Position Duration: Full-Time
Date Posted: 01/31/2003

We are looking for candidates Nationwide!!!!

Worldwide. Position will require relocating.

The Navy Mortuary Affairs Program is responsible for the recovery, preparation and final disposition of Navy and Marine Corps deceased personnel and their eligible beneficiaries. Even during peacetime, we are funeral service professionals caring for our brothers and sisters-in-arms throughout the world during a most difficult time, providing aid to their families with Honor and Dignity. You would serve as a uniformed member of the United States Navy Hospital Corps, a group deeply ingrained with traditions of Honor and Commitment not unlike the devotion of those who choose the funeral industry as their career.

Requirements are a graduate of accredited Mortuary school and licensed Funeral Directors/Embalmers willing to serve where needed in locations such as Italy, Spain, Guam and the United States. Experience in all facets of the funeral industry is a plus with emphasis placed on technical ability. An enlistment award of $6000 is available as well as advanced rate upon completion of training. Applicant must be a U.S. Citizen , less than 35 years of age, and in good health.

Worldwide. Position will require relocating

For more information, contact a Career Development
Specialist at hj@cnrc.navy.mil (email), or
888-633-9674 (toll free).



Pentagon stocks up on body bags

Nearly 10,000 bags were ordered, but officials say they have not been shipped to the Persian Gulf.

By Sydney P. Freedberg
St. Petersburg Times, published January 31, 2003

In the last six months, the Pentagon has ordered 9,640 body bags, but they are not immediately headed for the
Persian Gulf.

'Right now, we're just replenishing supplies' in military warehouses, said Frank Johnson, a spokesman for the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia. 'It's not necessarily an indication of things to come.'

But two military suppliers said it is logical to assume that the government is anticipating battlefield casualties.

'The fact is, they are preparing for casualties,' said Gerald Kramer, president of Extra Packaging Corp., a Boca Raton-based supplier of body bags. 'This is a buildup of bags for a war that may occur.' [...] "


The Daily Howler, 3 February 2003:

"[...] In an editorial, the Washington Post describes another paradox about the reaction to Columbia. Last Friday, four U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, victims of a Blackhawk crash. But their deaths have been completely ignored, even as the Columbia seven are discussed wall-to-wall, and even as we stage worthless discussions about whether the space program will continue. (Hint: It will.) '[A]s we read the biographies of these brave seven,' the Post says, 'replay their buoyant interviews of recent days and come to know the grief-stricken but proud surviving spouses and parents, we might spare a moment also for the four who died near Bagram, and the others most of us will never hear about.'

Those others 'we will never hear about' include the coming dead in Iraq. It has been remarkable to compare the mourning for the Columbia seven to the all-encompassing lack of interest in the deaths which will soon occur in Iraq. Is war on Iraq a good idea? On that, we don’t express a view. But it has become rather clear that these upcoming deaths play no role in our current calculus. In the press, we have seen almost no attempt to estimate or discuss the impending loss of life. Recent reports about 'Shock and Awe' or possible use of American nukes have produced almost no discussion. Do Americans care about Iraqi deaths? There is almost no sign that we do.

Inevitably, others will notice. In this morning’s Times, for example, Neil MacFarquhar reports reaction in the Middle East to the Columbia disaster. He quotes a Jordanian columnist who 'said he hoped the disaster would push Americans to reflect about what they are doing in the Middle East every day, about the destruction and death visited by American-made munition.' There is, of course, no chance that any such reaction will occur. Around the world, people will notice this lack of concern about deaths which lie outside our family. [...] "

" [...] MotherJones.com: What do you make of the Total Information Awareness project?

John Perry Barlow: I was just writing a spam to my friends last night about its 'all seeing eye' logo [The logo has since been changed - Ed.]. Looking at that logo, you've got to wonder if they aren't just engaged in some massive prank on us. It's hilarious -- straight out of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Can you beat it? It's fortunate that this is so stupefyingly funny. [...] "

" [...] If things turn more bleak for McCaw, Ellison or Bertarelli, they can always look to the story of the Wall Street tycoon George Mallory Pynchon for inspiration. A few years after a failed effort aboard his yacht Defiance in 1914, Pynchon's brokerage house went bust and he was barred from the stock exchange. But Pynchon landed on his feet. He was soon hired by a rival broker — as a messenger. [...] "

from:
Pursuit of the America's Cup Can Be Fulfilling, and a Curse
By Warren St. John
New York Times, February 2, 2003

....thinking of the many Pynchon characters who fail to get the message....

" [...] in the world of people who obsess over abandoned subway stations, the fierce debate over whether 76th Street exists has transformed it into transit Atlantis. For decades, the station has been rumored to sit just to the east of the Euclid Avenue station, part of a grand, never-realized plan to continue the A line out to 229th Street in Cambria Heights, where the subway is now only a distant rumor. The station cannot be found on any map, however, nor can it be reached by any train. On the street where it is supposed to be, along Pitkin Avenue, just over the Brooklyn border into Queens, there are no traces of evidence, like subway grates, that anything lies below. Some swear they have been inside the station — or, more accurately, they swear they have talked to others who swear they have been inside it. But apparently these explorers have never returned with pictures. And so that leaves true believers, chief among them a retired transit worker and police officer from Queens named Steve Krokowski, in a decidedly lonely minority. So lonely, in fact, that during a recent exchange on a Web site for subway buffs — www.nycsubway.org — many doubted the existence of not only the subway station but also of Mr. Krokowski himself. Perhaps, they suggested, his whole account of the station's existence was part of an elaborate ruse, worthy of Thomas Pynchon or Chuck Barris. Perhaps even the name itself was a subtle hint: Krokowski . . . crock? [...] "

Next Stop, 'Twilight Zone' (a k a 76th St. Station)
New York Times, January 21, 2003 

"[...] Quoting the New Testament, Mr Bennett argues that Jesus anointed his disciples with the oil and encouraged them to do the same with other followers. This could have been responsible for healing eye and skin diseases referred to in the Gospels. "If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil... and receiving this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ," Mr Bennett concludes. [...] "

from:
Jesus "healed using cannabis"
by Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian
Monday January 6, 2003


"...but Peter was only bringing hops in to the cooling-pit, the most ordinary of tasks,-- slipped in the dust, fell in the Pit, with the dried hops nearly twenty feet deep, hot from the Kiln [...] Certain herbal essences in massive influxion, as I feel it my duty to assure her, have long been known and commented upon, as occasions of God-revealing. She nods emphatically.-- As weeks passed, she tells us, Peter Redzinger's account chang'd, from a simple tale of witness, to one of rapture by beings from somewhere else, 'long, long from Pennsylvania,' as he expressed it,-- and always at the center of the Relation, unwise to approach, an unbearable Luminosity."
Mason & Dixon, pp.357-358

"The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark. Hunchbacks, lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of all descriptions have come popping out of their secret spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against the rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole common sky in a tessellation of primary colors. They occupy the chambers and bins and pockets of administrative emptiness left after the Revolution, when the emissaries from Dutch Shell were asked to leave, and the English and Swedish engineers all went home. It is a period now in Baku of lull, of retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these fields by the Nobels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New wells are going down elsewhere, between the Volga and the Urals. Time for retrospection here, for refinin the recent history that's being pumped up fetid nad black from other strata of Earth's mind. . . . "
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 354

...found while looking for something else (after talking yesterday with a friend who spent time with Cliburn and his formidable mother, Rildia Bee, in the 70s, after recently meeting a Julliard classmate of Cliburn's):

" [...] In the United States, this period followed the McCarthy Senate Hearings where anybody with the slightest, or even imagined, affiliation with communism was branded as subversive. To complicate matters, a few months prior to the Competition, on October 10, 1957, the Soviets had shocked the world by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite ever to orbit the earth. Americans had been beaten in the race to space. It was a devastating psychological blow. Sputnik symbolized the technological superiority of a totalitarian government. Even more frightening was the possibility that such rockets could carry atomic bombs. Americans feared communism would soon take over the world.

Enter 23-year-old Van Cliburn, child prodigy pianist from Kilgore, Texas. [...]

Cliburn had the chance to perform in Baku only once. It was his first trip back to the Soviet Union after the Competition. Actually, he had expected the entire concert to be canceled because of the U-2 Affair that had occurred in early May when the Soviets shot down the U.S. reconnaissance plane and captured pilot, Gary Powers, whom they imprisoned as a spy.

Relations between the two countries broke off. An Official State Visit by Eisenhower was canceled. Since Van's trip had been organized by the U.S. State Department as part of a cultural exchange, he expected the same until a special directive from Khruschev told him to proceed with the concert tour as originally planned.

He toured various cities in the Soviet Union on that trip including Moscow, Riga, Minsk, Kiev, Sochi, Leningrad, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. He managed to squeeze in two days in Baku where he gave a single concert-June 28, 1960. [...]

One of the most vivid memories was the ride into the city from the airport-passing miles and miles of oil derricks. "The Azerbaijanis asked me whether I had ever seen anything like this before? I told them my father was an oil executive with Magnolia Petroleum (which later became known as Mobil Oil Company) and besides, I had grown up in Kilgore in East Texas which, in 1930, had had the largest oil boom up to that time in the history of the U.S. The oil wells in Kilgore are packed together so closely; it's amazing! They found it hard to believe that I was so familiar with similar fields like their own. Small world, isn't it?"

"By the way," Cliburn added at the conclusion of our interview. "Are those wonderful old oil derricks still standing in Baku? And are they still stretching far out into the Caspian Sea?" [...] "

from:
The Era of Van Cliburn Musical Phenomenon in the Midst of Cold War
by Betty Blair
Azerbaijan International (3.3) Autumn 1995.


....and on that serendipity tip, just for fun:

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) has been observed again over Baku this week.
UFO was flying, different colors lights were brightening around it.
05/01/2003 14:04
Baku Today

According to the information given to "olaylar" news agency by expert in UFO Fuad Gasimov, chairman of Cosmic Seismological Department of Azerbaijan National Aero cosmic Agency, appearance of UFOs in the sky is symbolic and it is an alarm signal.

"Something must happen," he said. “If we analyze the processes going on in the world, we would observe that probability of war becomes high in Iraq.”

F.Gasimov stated that the appearance of UFOs is reason for probability of outbreak of Iraq war. “They try to prevent the war,” expert said.

The appearance of UFOs in Azerbaijan sky may be estimated as a warning against the republic too expert in UFO says. In case war outbreaks the objects are against of use of the Azerbaijani airport.

Some scientists claim that UFOs were also observed before and warned about natural disaster. Mr.Gasimov stated that UFOs hinder the prediction of earthquakes and researches carried out in this field.

"They don't want mankind reveal their secret. But there are some facts stating that UFOs keep in touch with the scientists. Though most approach this unserious, objects keep in touch with selected persons by the means of Morse alphabet or telepathy signals and transmit information related to the future".

According to Mr.Gasimov, Einshteyn dreamed about the idea on A-bomb. Besides it, German scientist who invented bomb wrote in his memories that he invented it in his dream. "All this ground that these claims are true,” expert insists.

information provided by Olaylar.

Sometimes, Pynchon's so-called "reclusive" qualities (a descriptor he described, in a phone interview with CNN in '97, as a sort of code-word used to describe somebody who doesn't want to talk to journalists) seem quite refreshing in contrast to other writers. And I'm not sure what Gabaldon gains by launching what Pynchon called, in Mason & Dixon, an "inexpensive salvo" -- despite her huge audience and financial success, might she be just a tad concerned about herself as a mass media creation?

Writer's a 'born storyteller' - and multitasker
byy Richard Nilsen
The Arizona Republic
January 3, 2003

Diana Gabaldon is a fire hose.

Whether she is talking to a visitor or writing novels in half-million-word chunks, words pour out in a torrent from this tiny woman.

You struggle to keep up.

"Well, most novelists are exhibitionists by nature," she says. "And when you find one who isn't, like Salinger or Pynchon, you kind of wonder what they're hiding - in poor Tom Pynchon's case, this is all too evident, if you've ever seen the sole known picture of him.

"I love talking about books - any books, but in particular my own - and if that can be done with somebody who actually likes books in general and understands what writing is . . . well . . . .

"So far, I think, I've seen four or five hundred published articles, interviews, et cetera, concerning myself. They're invariably entertaining, I'll say that much. Der Stern - German equivalent of Newsweek - just sent me one they did, with the headline, ' "I like men," says the bestselling American author Diana Gabaldon . . . and she is an expert!' "

The Valley resident and author is more than a bestseller. Her Outlander series of novels has some 12 million copies, translated into 16 languages - including a new deal to sell them in China.

The five books in the series, averaging 700 to 1,000 pages, tell the story of an English nurse in 1945 who accidentally touches a magic rock in Scotland and is transported to 1745, where she finds war and rebellion and a handsome man. [...]"

"James Wood, the very smart and very grouchy literary critic for The New Republic, has become increasingly exasperated with those enormous, encyclopedic novels like The Corrections that contemporary writers keep churning out. These show-offy books -- all longer than Ulysses and teeming with zany-yet-brilliant characters whose improbably interlocked stories are punctuated by smarty-pants digressions on arcane topics like earthquake detection, Quebecois exceptionalism and the semiotics of hot-dog stands -- are, Wood says, 'perpetual motion machines' that are 'ashamed of silence' and pursue 'vitality at all costs.' He has even coined a damning phrase for the genre: 'hysterical realism.' In hyperdrive novels like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Wood complains, 'the conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted and overworked.' In other words, today's novelists suffer from the literary equivalent of attention-deficit disorder, and it's way past time for the Ritalin. "

from:
Hysterical Realism
by Daniel Zalewski
New York Times, 15 December 2002

[...] Marshall Mathers raps and sings some songs as
himself: For example, "I'm Sorry Momma." In such
songs, he never uses the "n word." He does use bad
language to describe his family, such as the terms
"faggot father" and "bitch." But is this really any
worse than, say, the hundreds of pages dedicated to
excrement in Thomas Pynchon's much-ballyhooed work of
"literature" "Gravity's Rainbow?" [...]

from:

Is Eminem really any worse than Mark Twain?
by Geoffrey Christopher Rapp
FindLaw Columnist
published at CNN.com, Friday, November 29, 2002

Hundreds of pages?

Tattoos for the rebellious pig, Pynchon's "one pig that wouldn't die", perhaps...

"A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals. ... Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham."
An Animal's Place
New York Times Magazine, 10 November 2002

"[William Slothrop] and his son John got a pig operation going--used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn't really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road [...] --and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day--pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must've been like for William. [...] William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying...possessed by innocence they couldn't lose...by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life...."
(Gravity's Rainbow, p. 555)

"The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States. [...] it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant. [...] Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States. Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers. [...] "This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."
New York Times
9 November 2002

"The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature?"
Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone Junction
Thomas Pynchon, 1997

Todorov re Pynchon:

'GOP' supporters actually Greens

[by] Kerana M. Todorov

A recent mailer sent to voters by a group of "local Republican" supporters of Supervisor Elizabeth Martin included a list of people who supposedly belong to the Grand Old Party. But at least three of the 74 names listed in support of the District 4 candidate are registered Green Party members, the Nevada County Elections Office's electronic database shows, and at least one is nonpartisan.

The names were included at the end of a mailer titled "Local Republicans trust Supervisor Elizabeth 'Izzy' Martin." It is a "partial list," stated the mailer paid for by the Izzy Martin for Supervisor Committee. "That piece was written by Republicans who are working hard on my campaign," Martin said Friday. The group started working on that mailer two months ago, using a database provided by the Elections Office, she said. They all showed the names as Republicans, she said. "I can't really tell you anything more."

One of the registered Green Party members listed in the mailer is William C. Pynchon. Pynchon, a self-described Martin fan, said he does not mind being listed on her mailer. "I'll (lend) may name for anything backing Izzy Martin," said Pynchon, who hasn't seen the mailer. Nonetheless, he questions why party affiliations are mentioned in county supervisor elections. This doesn't make sense to a lot of people, he said. "It's a nonpartisan election."

Pynchon said he switched parties from Republican to Green last fall because he was unimpressed with the Republican or the Democratic presidential candidates. "Just don't tell my dad."


The Union, 2 November 2002

The email discussion group, Pynchon-L, today began a group reading and discussion of Slow Learner plus the story that Pynchon excluded from that collection, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna."

You can subscribe to Pynchon-L and follow the reading, along with the rest of the always-interesting posts to this high-traffic, high-attitude email list. Or, follow along with a slight time delay in the list archives. Posts marked SLSL ("Slowly Learning Slow Learner", the title conceived by Dave Monroe, who's hosting the first session, focusing on the book's Introduction, through November 25, when discussion of "The Small Rain" begins), beginning November 1, have a high probability of relating to this discussion, although those ornery P-listers may not always mark their Slow Learner-related posts with SLSL.

Quote of the day:

"With the obvious reference to Goethe's 'Lehrjahre' and 'Wanderjahre' of Wilhelm Meister, 'years of learning' and 'years of journeying', I wonder if Pynchon here points to Goethe as a model novelist. I have not been reading Goethe for many years now, but I recall thinking of his narrative style as a true choral one. In other words: a style that allows every voice and every character to speak of its own, giving out as much truth about (human) nature as it has to share. Just a thought."

The discussion has begun on an elevated plane, and most of the participants hope to keep it there. But, tender-hearted souls may wish to carry a fire extinguisher and appropriate protective gear into a discussion arena that, in the past at least, has been the site of many a flame war.

Pudding, in the sixth chamber, then with "Domina Nocturna":

"Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don't want them, or when we are suffocating. [...] His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning." (GR, 232, 233)

Poor sheep, that's us, all of us, including the unfortunate victims of the Moscow theater tragedy (expecting the usual soporific, they get the real thing), as Bush pushes ahead itching to unleash more of his so-called "anti-terrorism" strategies and tactics that have already proven to entail massive civilian deaths in their wake, as Putin ramps up his war against terrorism everywhere (can we assume that he's not really serious about pursuing all terrorists "everywhere"? going after terrorists the US is said to harbor could lead to some nasty business here in our own backyard) with the certainty that even more innocents will suffer in the process ...

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

...watching the screen, waiting for that missile to
drop...

Libertarian mag compares Beltway sniper to Pynchon

"My own baseless theory is that the murders were committed by a mad postmodernist. The sniper certainly seems more self-aware than earlier serial killers, and it has been widely suggested that he or she delights in undermining the police theory of the moment with each new target. If you want to foster suspicion of master narratives, you could do no better job than the killer has; he seems eager to do to criminologists what Burroughs and Pynchon did to literary critics. The Saturday slaying fits this there-is-no-pattern pattern, coming after much speculation that the perp avoids crime on weekends. Yet the drive to find patterns persists."

Reason Online, re the Beltway sniper hunt.

"OK, here's our impression of the Monday Morning
Quarterback watching a baseball playoff game: 'and the
count is 2-2 on Shindeldecker. Quasimoto at first,
score tied, top of the fifth. Brunhilde walks off the
mound ...'

Close-up of coach spitting.

Close-up of player spitting.

Close-up of two players spitting sunflower seeds.

Batter steps out of the box, looks to third-base coach
for the sign.

Batter steps back in.

Pitcher looks in for the sign. Shakes it off. Shakes
it off again.

Batter steps out of box, looks at third-base coach.

Close-up of ralley monkeys (towels, bras, T-shirts,
whatever).

Close-up of coach scratching his crotch.

Close-up of player scratching his crotch.

Pitcher throws to first. Runner is back in time.

Pitcher throws to first again. Runner is back again.

Close-up of manager pulling his ear.

Close-up of old couple in the stands.

Close-up of hitter adjusting his batting gloves.

Hitter steps out of the box.

Pitcher steps off the mound.

Pitcher back on the mound.

Hitter back in the box.

Throw to first. Runner is back in time.

Close-up of three players spitting sunflower seeds.

Ralley monkey falls onto field. Bat-boy runs out to
retrieve ralley monkey.

Pitcher looks in for the sign. Shakes it off.

Close-up of old lady spitting.

Close-up of ralley monkey spitting.

Throw to first. Runner is back in time.

First baseman jogs out for conference with the
pitcher. Jogs back to first.

Close-up of pitcher going to the resin bag.

Hitter adjusts his batting gloves.

Pitcher looks in for the sign. Shakes it off. Gets
another sign. Nods.

(Italics, please) 'And here's the pitch. It's fouled
off into the right-field stands. Count remains
two-and-two. That's pitching coach Pynchon Nabokov,
coming out to talk with Brunhilde ...' (end ital) "

Montreal Gazette, 14 October 2002

"Although [Amiri] Baraka is one of the nation's most reviled poets at the moment, he also is one of the most successful writers New Jersey has produced. He is on a par with poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg, both of whom became embroiled in their fair share of controversy. Baraka also is one of the foremost jazz essayists in American history and an important playwright who made a name in the vibrant world of off-Broadway theater in the 1960s. Baraka has been a Guggenheim Fellow and won a PEN/Faulkner award, an Obie, (the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony), the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been the subject of biographies, doctoral dissertations, and academic panels. 'As a contemporary American artist, Baraka must be ranked with the likes of John Coltrane, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon,' wrote literary critic William J. Harris."

....and he's about to lose his job as New Jersey poet laureate because of his politics.

NorthJersey.com, 14 October 2002

"Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity-- most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process."
Gravity's Rainbow p. 412

"I thought of it as dinosaur blood when it dripped on my hand this morning, and it made me wonder how the US war strategy would change if Saddam made a small recalibration in his business practices. Of course, the gasoline that spilled as I refilled my rental car this morning at the DFW airport – and the refined kerosene that will fuel the plane I’ll fly in today – is far more ancient than even the spectacular Tyrannosaurus Rex bones discovered north of here. They vanished around 65 million years ago, but the fossilized plants and bacteria that made my gasoline are 300 to 400 million years old. By the time dinosaurs ruled the Earth, pretty much all of the oil production of the planet was finished. Strange, when you consider it in those terms, that we’d base a nation’s foreign policy on a limited supply of fossils older than the dinosaurs. "
from:
The Dinosaur War – To Protect Corporate Profits


"[...] Perhaps the critics are too generous to suspect merely political gamesmanship or settling a score for dad, for the allies and enemies that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney choose are exactly those of the oil industry they still serve. Iraq crossed western oil corporations 30 years ago, and the oil executives have long memories. In 1972, Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party nationalized the oil holdings of the Iraq Petroleum Company, which actually was owned by a group of western oil companies including Royal Dutch and American and French firms. The U.S. and Britain launched an embargo of Iraq in an attempt to persuade Hussein to re-privatize oil -- a tactic that succeeded for the U.S. when it embargoed Iran in retaliation for nationalizing its oil industry in 1951. In that case the economic squeeze was topped off with a CIA-assisted coup and "regime change," which instituted the Shah as the new leader in 1953. Obediently, the Shah agreed to let British and American oil companies take over oil production again. But when the U.S. instigated an embargo against Iraq, Hussein simply found a new customer-- the Soviet
Union. [...]"
from:
Bush and Cheney Critics
May Be Too Generous

"The nationalization of the oil industry was considered by the BaÅth leaders to be their greatest achievement. Between 1969 and 1972 several agreements with foreign powers—the Soviet Union and others—were concluded to provide the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) with the capital and technical skills to exploit the oil fields. In 1972 the operation of the North Rumaylah field, rich in oil, started, and an Iraqi Oil Tankers Company was established to deliver oil to several foreign countries. Also in 1972 the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) was nationalized (with compensation), and a national company, the Iraqi Company for Oil Operations, was established to operate the fields. In 1973, when the fourth Arab-Israeli War broke out, Iraq nationalized U.S. and Dutch companies, and in 1975 it nationalized the remaining foreign interests in the Basra Petroleum Company."
"Iraq" Encyclopædia Britannica
[Accessed October 11, 2002].

"The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark [....] Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that's being pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth's mind. . . ."
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 354

"For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4
and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their
world. Their struggle is not the only or even the
ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many other
struggles, but there are also spectators, watching,
as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them,
sitting around this dingy yellow amphitheatre [...]"
Gravity's Rainbow

[...] One final consideration that might come into
play in the foreign policy realm relates to Bush's
history relevant to his father. The Bush biography
reveals the story of a boy named for his father, sent
to the exclusive private school in the East where his
father's reputation as star athlete and later war hero
were still remembered. The younger George's
achievements were dwarfed in the school's memory of
his father. Athletically he could not achieve his
father's laurels, being smaller and perhaps less
strong. His drinking bouts and lack of intellectual
gifts held him back as well. He was popular and well
liked, however. His military record was mediocre as
compared to his father's as well. Bush entered the
Texas National Guard. What he did there remains
largely a mystery. There are reports of a lot of
barhopping during this period. It would be only
natural that Bush would want to prove himself today,
that he would feel somewhat uncomfortable following,
as before, in his father's footsteps. I mention these
things because when you follow his speeches, Bush
seems bent on a personal crusade. One motive is to
avenge his father. Another seems to be to prove
himself to his father. In fact, Bush seems to be
trying somehow to achieve what his father failed to do
- - to finish the job of the Gulf War, to get the
"evildoer" Saddam.

To summarize, George W. Bush manifests all the classic
patterns of what alcoholics in recovery call "the dry
drunk." His behavior is consistent with barely
noticeable but meaningful brain damage brought on by
years of heavy drinking and possible cocaine use. All
the classic patterns of addictive thinking that are
spelled out in my book are here:

-the tendency to go to extremes (leading America into a
massive 100 billion dollar strike-first war);

-a "kill or be killed mentality;" the tunnel vision;

-"I" as opposed to "we" thinking;

-the black and white polarized thought processes
(good versus evil, all or nothing thinking).

-His drive to finish his father's battles is of no
small significance, psychologically.

If the public (and politicians) could only see what
Fulbright noted as the pathology in the politics. One
day, sadly, they will. [...]

from:
October 11, 2002
Addiction, Brain Damage and the President
"Dry Drunk" Syndrome and George W. Bush
by Katherine vn Wormer

[...] Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned to inmates evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic of the Nazi era. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated U.S. census information in the late 19th century and founded the company that became IBM. Hollerith's name became synonymous with the machines and the Nazi "departments" that operated them.) In one case, records show, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in August 1943 and was assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The number was part of a custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in all Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed. [...] Central to the Nazi effort was a massive 500-man Hollerith Gruppe, installed in a looming brown building at 24 Murnerstrasse in Krakow, Poland. The Hollerith Gruppe of the Nazi Statistical Office crunched all the numbers of plunder and genocide that allowed the Nazis to systematically starve the Jews, meter them out of the ghettos, and then transport them to either work camps or death camps. The trains running to Auschwitz were tracked by a specially guarded IBM customer site facility at 22 Pawia in Krakow. The millions of punch cards the Nazis in Poland required were obtained exclusively from IBM, including from one company print shop at 6 Rymarska Street across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto. The entire Polish subsidiary was overseen by an IBM administrative facility at 24 Kreuz in Warsaw.

The exact addresses and equipment arrays of the key IBM offices and customer sites in Nazi-occupied Poland had already been uncovered. But no one had ever been able to determine whether there was an IBM facility at, or even near, Auschwitz—until now. Auschwitz chief archivist Piotr Setkiewicz finally pinpointed the first such IBM customer site.

[...[ The newly unearthed IBM customer site was a huge Hollerith Büro. It was situated in the I.G. Farben
factory complex, housed in Barracks 18, next to German Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometers from Monowitz. Archivists found the Büro only because it was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking for something else," recalls Auschwitz's Setkiewicz, "and there it was."

Many of the long-known paper prisoner forms stamped Hollerith Erfasst, or "registered by Hollerith," indicated the prisoners were from Monowitz. Now Auschwitz archivist Setkiewicz has discovered about 100 Hollerith machine summary printouts of Monowitz prisoner assignments and details generated by the I.G. Farben customer site. Comparison of the new printouts to other typical camp cards shows the Monowitz systems were customized for the specific coding Farben needed to process the thousands of slave workers who labored and died there. The machines were probably also used to manage and develop manufacturing processes and ordinary business applications. The machines almost certainly did not maintain extermination totals, which were calculated as "evacuations" by the Hollerith Gruppe in Krakow. "The Hollerith office at IG Farben in Monowitz used the IBM machines as a system of computerization of civil and slave labor resources," said Setkiewicz. "This gave Farben the opportunity to identify people with certain skills, primarily skills needed for the construction of certain buildings in Monowitz." At press time, the diverse Farben codes and range of machine uses were still being studied. [...]
Village Voice


"By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz."
Thomas Pynchon

He links John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X at one point in Gravity’s Rainbow, “Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered” (688). In another section of Rainbow he creates for us a realm of assassins, a resort, a resting place where they can reduce the terrible stress they live with daily. The characters in this place treat each other kindly, participating in exercises to rid themselves of the guilt, the shame, the self-loathing, the sense of personal responsibility that comes with their professional calling. To sugarcoat the brutality Pynchon uses humor. The resort of assassins is actually a quite funny scene, filled with applications to everyday bureaucratic life, the observations of a Thurberesque voyager in Dante’s Inferno. Pynchon writes:

“The worst part’s the shame,” Sir Stephen tells him. “Getting through that. Then your next step–well, I talk like an old hand, but that’s really only as far as I’ve come, up through the shame. At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do [. . . ]’ (541)
“Have I been assigned here?”
“Yes. Are you beginning to see why?”
“‘I’m afraid I am.’ With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each other […] ‘then I defected for nothing, didn’t I? I mean, if I haven’t really defected at all . . .’ (542)
“[…] No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history–and no one ever will.”
“Think of it as a handicap, Prentice, like any other, like missing a limb or having malaria . . . one can still live . . . one learns to get round it, it becomes part of the day– […]
“You don’t, you really don’t trust me?”
“Of course not […] Would you–really–trust any of us?” (543)

Under the black humor, under the parody of manners, Pynchon is evoking a genuine dread that there have been times in history, and the present seems to be one, when cadres of coordinated assassins act in the everyday scheme of things.

...from a must-read article on Pynchon, Pynchon’s Inferno, by Charles Hollander.

"Perhaps being an ex-delegate from the Committee of Idiopathic Archetypes, and a sucker for that pushing 30 line [463], my first thought was a Virgo from 1915. As if wanting to make matters too easy for me, I immediately noticed in the ephemeris an incredibly suitable chart for September 4, 1915, 6:51 a.m. EST: The Fool, Rocketman, Schwarzvater, avuncular Pig, the Hanged Man upside down etc.; they were all present in this chart. But no, it had to be discarded – too early to be an Infant in 1920 or a Harvard boy in 1939. Nice try, Tom – with that pushing 30 I mean . . . but it is a common colloquialism in the US to say “pushing” after passing the age of 25 (or 35, 45, 55 etc.).

"The second conclusion, September 8, 1919, 7:17 a.m. EWT, was even more difficult to discard – took me over two weeks to shred it. Oh, was it ever a remarkable chart: a bizarre Rocketman syndrome along the royalty/anarchy axis with willing women everywhere, in its overview the unusual sea-saw figure (the main astrological binary figure), Schwarzvater somewhat weakened but Übervater Laszlo Jamf looming hauntingly behind the scenes, drugs/jazz/movies/nature as a keynote, yet still the useless Hanged Man, Fool Tarot. In this chart Venus was also in the Twelfth House, retrograde in Virgo, a position which occurs only every eighth year, fully explaining his amorous ambiguities and inner search for grace!

"What finally caused me to put this chart aside were two major statements in Gravity’s Rainbow – the Roseland Ballroom scene in 1939, where, unless illegally, Slothrop could not have been vomiting beer in the Men’s Room as the drinking age in the US is 21, and in August 1945 those past Slothrops, ten thousand of them. Translated into time, ten thousand Slothrops equals 27 years, 4 months and 16 days! Counting backwards from August 1945, “say averaging one a day,” this would place his birthday around the Spring Equinox of 1918!! However, from his father’s statement [699], we are told Tyrone is a double Virgo and from the narrative that Wernher von Braun and Dr. Livingstone were born around this point – each on their own side of the Equinox, as a matter of fact. So I found myself caught up in just another one of those conjectural chronological confusions so typical in the works of Thomas Pynchon, and this intriguingly fascinating chart ended up in the wastepaper basket.

"After months of trail and error, comparing charts to dates, going through the process of elimination, and seriously hoping to avoid “the-mediocrity-in-the-lives-of-his-chroniclers‘” prophecy of Slothrop’s infamous Tarot [738], I have come to a professional astrological conclusion that Tyrone Slothrop was born on Saturday (the day of Destiny ), August 31, 1918, 7:15 a.m. EWT in Mingeborough, Berkshire County, MA., USA.

from:
The Nativity of Tyrone Slothrop , horoscope chart by fellow pynchonoid, Douglas Kløvedal Lannark. (Thanks to Otto Sell for bringing this to the attention of Pynchon-L and making it available on the Web.)

"Blanke found that electrically stimulating one brain region — the right angular gyrus — repeatedly triggers out-of-body experiences. Blanke and his team were using electrodes to excite the brain of a woman being treated for epilepsy. The right angular gyrus integrates visual information — the sight of your body — and information that creates the mind's representation of your body. This is based on balance and feedback from your limbs about their position in space. 'It makes perfect sense,' agrees Peter Brugger of University Hospital, Zurich, in Switzerland, who studies the phenomenon. 'We have representations of our entire body that can be dissociated from our real body,' he says. But this is an isolated case, he points out."
Electrodes trigger out-of-body experience, Nature, 19 September 2002

--Son, been wondering about this, ah, "screwing in" you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha ha?

--Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips!

--Yes, ah, waves. "Keying waves," right? ha-hah. Uh, tell me, son, what's it like? You know I've been something of a doper all m'life, a-and-

--Oh pop. Cripes. It isn't like dope at all.

--Well we got off on some pretty good "vacations" we called them, some pretty "weird" areas they got us into's a matter of fact-

--But you always came back, didn't you?

--What?

--I mean, it was always understood that this would still be here when you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right?

--Well ha-ha guess that's why we called 'em vacations, son! Cause you always do come back to old Realityland, don't you?

--You always did.

--Listen Tyrone, you don't know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back. Eh?

--Ho, ho! Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You're such an old fuddy duddy! A-and who sez it's a dream, huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld--

--Shit, that's what I get, havin' a double virgo for a son...
Gravity's Rainbow, 698-699

"....with great pleasure that the Ransom Center announces the acquisition of the corrected typescript to Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., originally published in 1963. Until now, Pynchon scholarship has largely been limited to critical analyses because of the paucity of primary sources available to scholars. Along with V., the Ransom Center has acquired eight typed letters dating from the early 1960s, from a young Pynchon to two close friends. The letters are witty, agonizing, insightful, imaginative, full of both doubt and bravado, and peppered with expletives. In short, they are a tremendous gauge of a young author's state of mind, and indicative of the brilliance that would follow in novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. One letter from Mexico in 1964 details the profound effects of the Kennedy assassination on Pynchon's mental state. A negative review of V. and his self-professed inability to plot have him questioning his worth as a writer, but rejection from Cal-Berkeley's math department tips the balance back in favor of writing. Pynchon also describes his role as best man at the wedding of fellow author Richard Farina, who would die tragically in a motorcycle accident two years later. Following the publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, which is dedicated to Farina, Pynchon published no new novel for sixteen years, before returning to the scene with Vineland in 1989 and Mason & Dixon in 1997. It is estimated that this early typescript of V. contains one hundred pages of scenes ultimately excised from the published novel, as well as a dozen pages reworked almost beyond recognition. The Pynchon material at the Ransom Center should prove of great scholarly value and is a welcome addition to a growing collection of later twentieth-century literary materials."

Thomas Pynchon - A Passion for Secrecy, Ransom News, Spring 2001.

"Dick Cheney vehemently denies that talk of war, just weeks before the midterm elections, is designed to divert attention from other matters. But in that case he won't object if I point out that the tide of corporate scandal is still rising, and lapping ever closer to his feet....An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal confirmed what some of us have long argued: market manipulation by energy companies — probably the same companies that wrote Mr. Cheney's energy plan, though he has defied a court order to release task force records — played a key role in California's electricity crisis. And new evidence indicates that Mr. Cheney's handpicked Army secretary was a corporate evildoer. Mr. Cheney supposedly chose Thomas White for his business expertise. But when it became apparent that the Enron division he ran was a money-losing fraud, the story changed. We were told that Mr. White was an amiable guy who had no idea what was actually going on, that his colleagues referred to him behind his back as 'Mr. Magoo.' Just the man to run the Army in a two-front Middle Eastern war, right? But he was no Magoo.... By maintaining the illusion of success, insiders like Mr. White were able to sell their stock at good prices to naïve victims...."
New York Times
17 September 2002

"the Grid's big function in this System is iceboxery, freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness"
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 678

"It would be an oversimplification to label the contrast between Line and Mound a contrast between modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast would be between heaven-centered vs. earth-centered forms of knowledge, both ancient and modern. The "star-dictated" (601) absolutes of Mason's astronomy or Zarpazo's Jesuit theology, which thrive on neat geometries and stable hierarchies, are juxtaposed with what Zhang and Dixon call the ambiguities and "inner shapes" of earthly realities, including the sheer difficulty Mason and Dixon have making perfect celestial or magnetic measurements in the field and the myriad ways in which mortal human lives and understandings conflict with truths that science and theology claim are universal. Zhang associates these latter forces with "the true inner shape, or Dragon [Shan], of the Land," while for Dixon they represent Tellurick or earth-centered forces, especially magnetism. In the Indian Mound these forces find their most powerful centering, their most direct contact and conflict with the different energies embodied by the measuring of the Line. For Pynchon, the Indian Mound and the Dragon Shan represent not only ancient world views antithetical to Enlightenment science, but are prophetic of how that same science already contained within it anomalies that could only be resolved with the invention in the twentieth century of quantum physics, fractals, and the sciences of chaos and "complex systems" combining both linear and non-linear iterations. Hence we are meant to see in the Mound's Vortex not a unique or exceptional occurrence but an emblem for the infinite number of narrative Vortices or alternative universes already present in any Linear rendering of either space or time. "
Line, Vortex, and Mound: On First Reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon
by Peter Schmidt.