the joy of reading Pynchon

"Kids that can't read don't ever get the opportunity to: (a) See subtitled Chow Yun-Fat movies, (b) Read their own Bazooka Joe comics, (c) Start but never finish a Thomas Pynchon novel and (d) Find out what happened between the randy tennis pro and the eager students in the July 1988 edition of Penthouse Forum," reports the Las Vegas Mercury. The newspaper urges readers to volunteer to help children learn to enjoy reading.

new article on Mason & Dixon

...from pynchon-l:

A Patch of England, at a three-thousand mile off-set"? Representing America in Mason & Dixon
by Stacey Olster, 1 July 2004, Modern Fiction Studies 283, Volume 50; Issue 2

Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon ends with the death of Charles Mason in 1786 and the decision of his two eldest children to stay in Philadelphia and "be Americans." As to what constitutes that nationality, however, Pychon remains silent, writes Olster. Here, she discusses the literary representation of America in relation to the colonial England in Pynchon's novel.

shooting electricity

A holy man in northern India says drugs don't cut it, he has to touch live electricity wires every day to get his fix, Ananova reports:

Sadhu Mangal Das alias 'Current Baba', touches a naked wire at least three times every day to become 'intoxicated'. It's reported he brushed against a live wire sometime ago and found the sensation to be so good he can no longer do without his daily dose. The man from Bahorisar in Uttar Pradesh said he tried the electricity wires because drugs failed to excite him, says The Hindustan Times. The 54-year-old also tried getting bitten by snakes and scorpions. He also tried drinking potions made from poisonous seeds. Dr Amit Chaturvedi of the Lalitpur Civil Hospital said: "The human body can absorb currents up to 12 volts. In this case however, repeated exposure to electricity seems to have built up his body's tolerance levels to as much as 16 volts."

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 698:

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

Mason & Dixon, p. 286:

"A childhood Misadventure with a Torpedo," Dixon, with a brief move of his toward Mason, confides,"--thus his Sensitivity at all References to the," -- whispering,-- "electrickal!"

V., p. 78:

Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was a miniature electric switch. Single-pole, double-throw. Waldetar recoiled and stood blinking. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve.
"You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is closed like this I act the way I do now. When it is thrown the other--"
"Papa!" the girl cried.
"Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean."

"Why did Bush knock down the towers?"

Jadakiss asks.

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low Find the last poor Pret'rite one...
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 760

Germany avoids Herero reparations

BBC NEWS:

Germany has rejected calls to pay compensation for the killing of thousands of Namibia's ethnic Hereros during the colonial era. The German ambassador to Botswana told a gathering of Hereros in northern Botswana that Germany deeply regretted what he called "this unfortunate past". However, he said it was not prepared to offer reparations.

Some 1,000 Hereros were there to mark the killing of their ancestors who rebelled against German rule in 1904. They used the meeting to renew demands for $4bn in compensation, to be paid by the German government and by companies who they say benefited from slavery and exploitation under German rule.

But Ambassador Hans-Dietrich von Bothmer said German development aid was intended to benefit all Namibians, not just one ethnic group. Correspondents say Mr von Bothmer's speech was virtually identical to one delivered by his counterpart in Namibia, Wolfgang Massing, at a previous ceremony in January.

Between 35,000 and 105,000 of the Hereros living in Namibia lost their lives in the 12 January 1904 massacre, while thousands of others fled to neighbouring Botswana.

the hacker we call God

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds, p. 560:

...Calvin had shared all that he had felt, or that for a moment their thoughts--and more--had liquified and flowed indivisibly, along with a trillion others. And that he understood perfectly what had happened, because in the moment of shared wisdom, all his questions had been answered.
"We were read weren't we? .... For a moment I think we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light."
"A computer," Calvin said...."That's what Hades is. A computer made out of nuclear matter, the mass of a star devoted to processing information, storing it. And this light is an aperture into it; a way to enter the computational matrix.

Vineland, pp. 90-91:

If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least - an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name - its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune. And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 650-651:

Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it's only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.

TRP returns to The Simpsons

That's what Fox says. (Thanks to Rich of PYNCHON-L for the heads-up.)

"tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control"

From a Paul Weinberg column about the impact on civil liberties that US Homeland Security actions are having on Canadian citizens:

Earlier this month, for instance, CNN reported that police officers across the United States are carrying handheld wireless computers on which they can access private details from large commercial databases about anyone they encounter on their beat. Emboldened by a new post-Cold War role in the U.S.-led "war on terrorism," security and intelligence agencies are exploring new electronic technologies that will enhance the collection and dissemination of the private records of citizens across international borders. "It's all about data gathering and integration of databases, information sharing and risk assessment by computer generated profiling," says Roch Tassé, coordinator of the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), a coalition made up of NGOs, churches, unions, environmental and civil rights advocates and groups representing immigrant and refugee communities in Canada.

Thomas Pynchon, 1997, Introduction to Stone Junction:

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? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.

Map v. territory

Tourist got lost following 1914 guide book:

An elderly American tourist had to be rescued in Germany after he got lost while using a 90-year-old guide book. Hank Edwards, 79, ended up stuck in a German forest for two days after finding his way with a book bought by his father in 1914. Throughout the years he kept the book, practising the German words and studying the places mentioned in the copy of Beautiful Bayreuth. When he was finally able to make the trip, he got lost trying to find attractions that had long since disappeared.... "It's still very beautiful here even if it's not what he expected."

Mason & Dixon, p. 141:

Occasionally Insanty roll'd a sly Eye-ball into the picture. Treatises on "parageography" arriv'd, with alternative Maps of the world superimpos'd upon the more familiar ones.

Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner:

That old Baedeker trick again.

A screaming comes across the sky....

Under Fire, in collaboration with a group called V2:

a year-long project that explores the organization and representation of contemporary armed conflict. The project consists of a series of organized discussions that will occur online and in Rotterdam, throughout the year 2004. The discussions will involve participation from individuals working in politics, theory, criticism, the arts, and journalism from both the West and the Middle East. A series of publications will be released during the course of the year.

Thanks to NEWSgrist for the heads-up.

....It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now....

Strength through Joy

...from a review of Shelley Baranowski's Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich:

.... the Nazis' popular leisure organization, "Strength through Joy" (_Kraft durch Freude_, or KdF) .... in many ways reinforcing the recent historiographic emphasis on popular consent to Nazi rule, yet also complicating the picture through its focus on a variety of deep-seated, overlapping tensions--between individual desires and collective welfare, between sacrifice and pleasure--that so strongly molded "racially valuable" Germans' experiences of the regime.... Rejecting both the Marxist vision of collective entitlement and the "Fordist" model of standardized production and high wages, the Nazis attempted to construct a distinctly "German" model of consumption free from the rampant individualism and shallow materialism associated with America, yet willing to reward individual talent and performance so long as it served the interests of the "racial community." ....As by far the most popular aspect of the Nazi regime, and as nothing less than its answer to the conundrum of "guns or butter," KdF mushroomed into a sprawling network of package tours, theater tickets, cruise ships and film discounts, gradually occupying the vast bureaucratic space that opened up between the concrete imperatives of rearmament and the overarching aim of reducing class conflict and the appeal of Marxism. Yet as the third chapter demonstrates, the development of KdF was not all fun and games. Its "Beauty of Labor" (_Schönheit der Arbeit_) program clearly reflected the Nazi adherence to a productivist vision of leisure as inseparable from work....Although the outbreak of the war in 1939 severely curtailed KdF's tourism offerings, the organization nonetheless served the war effort by providing entertainment for troops and civilians alike.... KdF contributed significantly, if indirectly, to the rapacious and racist mentality that so characterized the Nazi occupation of Europe, encouraging territorial expansionism, furnishing both motive and alibi for plunder, and eventually abetting mass murder.

...from Gravity's Rainbow, p. 419:

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwolfkinder. [...] From Peenemunde they had come 280 kilometers, which was to be, coincidentally, the operational range of the A4.

Baseball the pynchonoid way

As the pennant races begin to heat up, pynchonoid loves knowing that several current major league managers played minor league games at a place called...here it comes... Pynchon Park. Reports The Republican sports writer, Garry Brown:

The list is led by Felipe Alou, revered manager of the San Francisco Giants. In 1957, his second season as a professional, he played for the Eastern League's Springfield Giants at Pynchon Park. Two others played at Pynchon as visitors: Tony LaRussa of the Cardinals, with Binghamton in 1962; and Lou Piniella of Tampa Bay, with Elmira in 1965 (the last year of professional baseball in Springfield).

Headline writer reveals pynchonoid tendencies

VINELAND
A tale of two Pichons
Winemakers do battle on the same estate

....You can read the rest of William Campbell's article in Japan Times.

What if?

...from "Might the Mayflower Not Have Sailed?" by Theodore K. Rabb, in What Ifs of American History: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been pp. 1-16:

....what if one of the circumstances had not fallen into place and she had not planted a 'godly' community at Plymouth? That question leads us to the crucial moment for the long-term success of the colony: the arrival from England in 1630 of John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, with a fleet of eleven ships carrying some seven hundred colonists. Would they have come if the Mayflower had not preceded them can be argued that they would not.... Without the beacon planted at Plymouth to reassure them, these staid, comfortable, and conservative creators of a 'Bible Commonwealth' would scarcely have risked their families and their possessions on so hazardous an enterprise. Again one must say that without the Mayflower, there could have been no Massachusetts Bay. " .... It was thus a combination of belief and circumstances that enabled the Puritans to inject into American culture an expectation of religious faith, a commitment to self-reliance and daily toil as morally worthy, and a stern regard for the virtuous life that have given their country a quite distinctive coloration among the modern nations of the West.... We may now take for granted the role of these traditions--the force of religion, the equation of work with virtue, the focus on the individual, and the insistent devoutness alongside the tolerance--in detrmining the course of American history. But there is little doubt that they might well have died in infancy if the Mayflower had not set sail...."

Tim Ware's fabulous ThomasPynchon.com:

William Pynchon is Thomas' colonial descendant, born in Springfield, Essex, England on 11 October 1590. He married Anne Agnes Andrew about 1623. The family emigrated to New England on Winthrop's fleet of 1630, Anne dying soon after their arrival. A few years later, William married Frances Sanford of Dorchester. William was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts and one of the Bay Colony's leaders until his publication of a book about justification and redemption, The Meritorious Price of our Redemption (1650).

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 556:

"Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropian heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper. Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?"

(Thanks to Dave Monroe, for posting a slightly different version of this at Pynchon-l).

It's "V period"

In case you're in this Kentucky neighborhood:

The Second Monday Book Club will discuss V by Thomas Pynchon at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Madison County Public Library in Berea, 319 East Chestnut Street.

Tendrils alert

Daniel Albright, in Modernism and Music, quoting Arnold Whittal, Schoenberg Chamber Music:

When a hostile critic said of the young Schoenberg's sextet Verklarte Nacht (1899) that "it sounds as if somehone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet," he provided a clever description for the Jugenstil (or art nouveau) way in which Schoenberg's melodies seem to curl themselves in continuous tendrils, instead of pausing on harmonically significant notes.

Thomas Pynchon, intro to Slow Learner:

I will spare everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. I think I took the word from T.S. Eliot. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse of the word is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time and energy on words alone.

"New York NY 10001"

One pynchon-l participant asked about the current address for Melanie Jackson's literary agency, and received the following reply (links added):

Curious, I tapped her up on anywho.com, and see that she no longer lists a street address, just "New York NY 10001" That zip code is, of course, the main post office opposite Mad Sq Gdn. It is a gargantuan classical building by McKim Mead & White, and it sports the text frieze "Neither rain nor sleet nor snow stays these couriers" etc etc *and* ... wait for it ... the names Thurn und Taxis. Its a shame, but it seems we've driven Melanie, Tom and Jackson even further underground. Contact her through W.A.S.T.E.

Vineland, pp. 90-91:

If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least - an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name - its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune. And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Nazis, Pynchon, and queers, oh my!

Nazis killed thousands of gay people in death camps and mistreated many more, but "Many of the leading European fascists of the past thirty years have been gay," reports self-described gay progressive activist Johann Hari in a recent article, The strange, unexplored overlap between homosexuality and fascism .

Gravity's Rainbow [665-666]:

They are 175s--homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz's notion of paradise, except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora--Dora was home, and they are homesick. Their "liberation" was a banishment. So here in a new locationa they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of command--no longer restricted to what Destiny alloted then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi playmates

...from "Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner", by Mark Hawthorne:

In the stories collected in Slow Learner (1984) and in the uncollected "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" (1958), Thomas Pynchon deconstructs expectations of dominant male sex roles. He contrasts these expectations to fictional worlds where male protagonists consistently retreat from expected heterosexual responsibilities. Like Sal Paradise in Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Gnossos Pappadopoulis in Richard Farina's Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me (1969), these protagonists retreat from women and social responsibilities by seeking the safety of intense male bonding. Though none of these authors directly suggests that the bonding may become genital (leaving that theme to Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs), each constructs texts that call for decoding even while they insist that the subtextual eroticism is illusory. Balanced between desire and the desire to hide desire, the texts close in on themselves and create worlds of escape that deny their own foundations and thereby remain threatened by the rea l world that wants to collapse them.

Hawthorne's article, "Hi! My Name Is Arnold Snarb!': Homosexuality in The Crying of Lot 49", in Pynchon Notes 44-45, is also worth reading, but doesn't appear to be online.

The Crying of Lot 444

A first edition of V. signed by the author sold at auction (link includes pix) for $10,200 last month. Regarding the inscription, Sotheby's notes:

"9/29/63 To my friend Bart, whether he reads it or not—Tom." Bart, the father of the present consignor, worked with Pynchon at Boeing in the early 1960s. Although thirty first editions of V., including advance reading copies, are recorded in American Book Prices Current, only one of those was signed by the notoriously reclusive Pynchon.

pynchonoid notes that Sotheby's characterization, "notoriously reclusive," is one with which Pynchon would likely disagree, based on his past public statement re the r-word. Thanks to a pynchon-l participant for the heads-up.

UPDATE: "it's all theatre"

Updating the earlier "it's all theatre" post, Robert Fisk reports on the U.S. effort to censor
Saddam's day in court.

What happens when you mistake the map for the territory?

Some British road-line painters found out the hard way. (Look at the picture in a different version of this story and decide if you believe they painted the lines that way on purpose, all the while pondering the postmodern ambiguity of it all.)

Mason & Dixon, p. 141:

Occasionally Insanty roll'd a sly Eye-ball into the picture. Treatises on "parageography" arriv'd, with alternative Maps of the world superimpos'd upon the more familiar ones.

What if the United States returned sovereignty to Native Americans?

pynchonoid was thinking of Mason & Dixon and its alternative ending when he encountered Fark.com's page of Photoshopped answers to this timely 4th of July weekend query.

"it's all theatre"

United Press International:

....after quotes from the proceedings began to be read by Arabic language news services, the paranoia turned to pride as it was apparent that Saddam was arguing with his captors. Then after only a small portion of audio was released, the mood changed back to conspiracy. "Saddam will never really be tried for he knows all the secrets of Bush and America," one said. "He will tell the world about them and they can't let that happen."

BBC News Online:

Mr Berg - who has previously blamed the Bush administration for his son's death - said he had always held anti-war views and his opinions had not changed. He said he was "doing what I have always done. I'm a retired person who protests the war whenever given the opportunity." Ironically, "the opportunities given to me since my son was murdered have grown tremendously. I feel an obligation to take advantage of them. I don't feel at all ashamed for doing it," he said. But Mr Berg complained that the US media "won't let me give my story".... In an interview with one US network, he alleged, he had been cut off when he tried to express his political views after describing the personal horror of his experience. He said he had been asked to remove a T-shirt reading Bring the Troops Home Now before going on air. When he refused, Mr Berg alleged, producers deliberately limited camera angles to a headshot to avoid publicising his anti-war stance.

Associated Press:

A defiant Saddam Hussein rejected charges of war crimes and genocide against him in a court appearance Thursday, telling a judge "this is all theater, the real criminal is Bush."

Gravity's Rainbow:

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre.

The offhand and fragmentary Memos show one more thing about Charles Ives. In the old days, in music and in prose he had done rough sketches like most artists, then fleshed out and connected and shaped them. By 1932 he had lost the energy or ability to connect and shape, to follow through. His writings of latger years are letters, memos, isolated pages of poetry and rant. That is why though he still had musical ideas he could no longer compose; nothing pulled together any more. The centrifugal elements of his nature had lost their coherence, his pen its directing consciousness. Paradox was no longer part of his message but part of his problem. As the Memos reveal, Ives had fallen into dissenting fragments.

This passage, in Jan Swafford's engaging biography of American musical genius, Charles Ives, Charles Ives: A Life With Music, reminded me of Slothrop's disintegration in Gravity's Rainbow (page numbers, in brackets, from the 1973 Viking and 1987 Penguin editions):

....by now--early Virgo--he has become one plucked albatross [...] Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the converntial sense of "positively identified and detained." [712]

He's [Bodine] looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept--"It's just got too remote" 's what they usually say. [740]

Another Ives/Pynchon parallel, also from Swafford's biography: Ives refused to accept a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, reminiscent of Pynchon's refusal of the Howells Medal.

As pynchonoid nears the end of Swafford's book - stretching out the reading the better to savor it - yet another parallel:

The Pulitzer Prize [1947] set off one more period of discovery. Ives was all for attention to the music but steadily fought off publicity about his person. A press photographer practically broke into the Redding house, but was kept at bay by a fresh-painted floor and ejected.

This echoes a myth about Pynchon - who, like Ives, protects his privacy - that appears to have been shattered by fellow pynchonoid, Richard Lane, as revealed in a Pynchon-l post in May. Sorry, but Pynchon apparently did not jump out a window to avoid a photographer in Mexico.

...from: New Disney film takes different view of U.S.: America's Heart and Soul a contrast to Fahrenheit 9/11 in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

In an irony even Mickey Mouse would find hard to miss, America is about to weigh two wildly contrasting versions of itself in theaters this weekend as the Walt Disney Co. debuts its own foray into documentary filmmaking right alongside Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- which the studio refused to release. [...] In contrast to its scathing critique of Bush foreign policy, the messages in "America's Heart and Soul" -- which will begin playing on 100 screens Friday -- are more thematic, general and affirming. Besides their espoused patriotism, Puritan work ethic and shared can-do-it-ness, Disney's mini- profile subjects give voice to no particular political philosophy. Message detection may prove a more nuanced, subjective exercise -- a bit like deconstructing "Up With People" or a Super Bowl halftime show.

....from Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 134-135

Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so styling and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Ducess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, luck piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell--what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any.

[Insert headline and url of news story re: Iraq or other current War]

"It means this War was never political at all, the
politics was all theatre, 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 ..." (GR, Pt.
III, p. 521)

....More than one outsider I corresponded with compared the meeting to a support group. I was struck more by its religious overtones. The transhumanists have their sacred texts, The Engines of Creation and Mind Children among them. They have communal gatherings, which usually occur online. They have a set of beliefs about resurrection and the afterlife, couched in the language of cryonics and computers. They divide the world into believers and infidels (the “bio-Luddites”), and they call on one another to evangelize—or, as they often put it, “spread our memes.” Many transhumanists believe that we’re approaching an apocalyptic end-time they call “The Singularity,” a convergence of technological developments that will push the rate of change so dramatically that the world could be transformed beyond recognition. The WTA states that if The Singularity comes, it will probably be caused by the creation of self-enhancing, superintelligent beings.

If the religious elements also sound like science fiction, there’s a good reason. The concept of The Singularity comes from Vernon Vinge’s novel Marooned in Realtime (1986). Arthur Clarke wrote about mind uploading in The City and the Stars, first published in 1956. Robert Ettinger got the idea for cryonics from a story called “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones, published in a 1931 issue of the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories. In that story, a man specifies in his will that, when he dies, his body is to be shot into space, where it will be frozen and preserved. Millions of years later, he’s thawed out by robots and given a mechanical body so that he can live forever.

...not to mention the cyborg elements in V. that Carl Elliott doesn't mention in his interesting Wilson Quarterly article, Humanity 2.0.

pynchonoid gives Mr. Pynchon the parting shot, from his 1984 essay, Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?:

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come -- you heard it here first -- when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.

"Would it surprise you to know that all the major combatants involved in World War II used pornography as part of their psychological operations (PSYOP) strategy?" asks PSYOPS vet Sergeant Major Herbert A. Friedman (ret.) at Sex and Psychological Operations, a site that offers examples of WWII porn PSYOPS flyers.

Pirate Prentice was surprised to find himself the target of such a operation - not, pynchonoid suspects, because he was unaware of such PSYOPS tactics, but because his own government was using such tactics against him...with a nasty, paranoia-inducing twist:

Like every young man growing up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty . . . . how else would They know? [GR, 71-72]

An often-obnoxious p-list writer dredges up an old interview with David Bowie that mentions Herbert Stencil of V.

pynchonoid believes those who believe that The Wizard of Oz, the movie, substantially influenced Pynchon, but TRP's consistently anti-fascist, anti-genocide writings undercut the racism that Thomas St. John finds in the original novel by L. Frank Baum. St. John addresses Baum's genocidal views in a recent Counterpunch article, Indian-Hating in The Wizard of Oz. St. John notes the influence of the traditional "Indian captivity narrative" on Dorothry's story, especially her kidnapping by the Wicked Witch of the West - an influence that appears in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, in the parts of that novel concerned with the Captive's Tale.

Maybe Tyrone Slothrop's ancestors weren't so uptight after all. A San Francisco Chronicle review of The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America by Edmund S. Morgan notes that under the covers the Puritans were a randy lot:

.... most Puritans believed in a woman's right to "that pang of pleasure" associated with intercourse. The laws of New Haven -- one of the strictest and most conservative Puritan enclaves -- allowed wives to summarily divorce impotent or underperforming husbands on that score alone....Puritan households exercised great permissiveness when it came to premarital sex. During the late colonial period it was not unknown for pious fathers to encourage "the young men courting their daughters to spend the whole night at it under their own roofs. After the old folks retired the couple slept together unattended....

In the Zone, the Green one, Pig Bodine may have been spotted:

....Roubicek is sitting in his room on the third floor of the Sheraton, drinking red wine and getting high on Afghan hash. You can buy excellent hash in Iraq. It's one of the perks of reconstruction. Before the war, getting high was punishable by a long stint in one of Saddam Hussein's jails. Now you can send an e-mail order and have hash delivered right to your hotel room. Roubicek's dealer is a cigarette salesman in the compound....

...read it all in Rolling Stone:
The Baghdad Follies: Hunkered down with the press corps in Iraq

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.