with Pynchon on the Dark Side

Commencement Address
Cornell University
President Jeffrey S. Lehman
May 29, 2005

Members of the Class of 2005, candidates for advanced degrees, families and friends of the graduates, Chairman Meinig and other members of the Board of Trustees, honored guests.

On behalf of my colleagues on the faculty, it is my privilege to welcome you to Schoellkopf Field for this morning’s celebration of those students who are completing their degree requirements here at Cornell University. Twenty-eight years ago, I was sitting where today’s graduates are seated for my own Commencement ceremony. You cannot imagine how thrilling it is for me to be here today, as Cornell’s President, addressing today’s graduating students.

At the outset, I think it is important for us all to recognize that none of these graduates made it to this day alone. Others provided the emotional, intellectual, and financial support that was necessary to make their education possible. So let us take a moment to ask those who are not wearing caps and gowns — the parents, grandparents, spouses, partners, siblings, sponsors and friends, all of whom have sustained these graduates — to stand now so that we may acknowledge you and your contribution to their success.

Graduating students, I want you to appreciate just how carefully your beloved Cornell has prepared you to enjoy this moment. It is the moment of your commencement. And we have placed you on Schoellkopf Field, facing west.

West. The direction of the sun as it traverses the sky. By day it is the destination of the celestial body that energizes our planet. By night it is the destination of the other stars that illuminate our sky.

When we look out towards the western horizon, it is natural to ponder our own destinies as well. For the horizon marks the limit of our capacity to see, the boundary between what we know with confidence and what we can only imagine.

Your time at Cornell was always oriented towards the horizon of this graduation day. Today marks the boundary that separates your student life, a life which – at least by your final year – you more or less understood, from life after graduation, a life which lives in the domain of imagination, of aspiration, of hopes, and of dreams.

When we, your teachers, contemplate the boundary that you are now crossing, we know some important things. We know that during your time here at Cornell you have learned much. You have developed expertise in at least one field of study and gained comfortable familiarity with others. You have proven your ability to swim – at least a little. And you have nurtured qualities of mind and heart that transcend any particular body of knowledge or academic discipline. Members of the Class of 2005, the Force is strong with you.

It is clear that "special powers you have." You have the power to do good in the world. You have the power to create the magic that will make our lives better, to make constructive contributions to all humanity. We celebrate you and all that you can accomplish.

But we also know that at this moment you might also be feeling a wee bit anxious. You might be wondering, "What if I fail? What if I don’t live up to the expectations that others have for me, or that I hold for myself?"

Think of the Star Wars movies. We know that, just as the Force is strong with you, it was also strong with Anakin Skywalker.

He too had special powers. But he ended up as Darth Vader. How could that have happened?

So let me begin by reassuring you. None of you will become Darth Vader. Really.

But perhaps your anxiety might present itself in a slightly milder form: how can you be sure that you do not go over to the Dark Side?

And here I think that I can be of some service to you. This morning I will take a little bit of poetic license and extend the metaphor of the Dark Side to explore some of life’s moral complexities – the traps, if you will – that await you on the other side of graduation. These traps might not be so serious as to put you on the road to becoming Sith Lords, but they might nonetheless make it harder for you to realize your full potential.

Let me begin by discussing what I mean, and what I do not mean, by "the Dark Side."

First, when I speak of the Dark Side I am not talking about anything like “unwavering devotion to the cause of evil.” That narrow a view doesn’t work even in the world of George Lucas. Lucas takes great care to indicate that, as Anakin Skywalker turns into Darth Vader, he does not believe that he is embracing evil. He believes that the Jedi are the ones who have been corrupted; he is committed only to knowing the truth and to saving the life of someone he loves.

Nor can we say that the difference between the Sith and the Jedi is that one pursues its ends through intolerable means and the other restricts itself to benign means. Each side is equally willing to be violent to promote its cause.

The Dark Side I am interested in is more subtle. Think of it not as evil, but as good people run amok. Yielding to a certain kind of wholly understandable temptation, in a way that ends up being counterproductive for the individual or damaging to the larger community.

In your lives after graduation, what forms might that Dark Side take? How might they tempt you? How can you successfully resist them, so that your lives are maximally successful, fulfilling, and beneficial?

Rather than approaching those questions head-on, I would like to examine them indirectly, as they are refracted through the lens of fiction. To do so, I will make use of two different works by one of the great writers of our time, Thomas Pynchon.

Pynchon came to Cornell to study engineering physics in 1953. He was a talented science student, but he was also good in other subjects, and in his sophomore year he decided to major in English.

Pynchon had some wonderful teachers in the English department – people like M.H. Abrams, Baxter Hathaway, James McConkey, Arthur Mizener, and Walter Slatoff. They recognized his prodigious talent early on. One of them saw the potential in a paper that Pynchon wrote for class, entitled, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna." The literary journal Epoch was edited by Baxter Hathaway at the time, and he decided to publish "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" in the Spring 1959 issue, just before Pynchon graduated. According to a letter from Pynchon 25 years later, having that story published in Epoch was a major factor in his decision to try to make a living as a writer.

The story concerns a man named Cleanth Siegel who attends a party in Washington, D.C. Siegel finds himself cornered, one at a time, by two different members of an extended, interdependent social group, both of whom regale him with details of their lives, from the petty to the bizarre. As they drone on and on, Siegel feels himself getting fed up with them, and with the entire lot of partygoers. He comes to see himself as a kind of father-confessor to this self-styled “Group.” And then, oddly, he comes to see himself as their savior.

Late in the story, Siegel meets one of the newer, more marginal entrants into the Group, a man named Irving Loon. And Siegel develops a hunch that Loon suffers from a mental illness called Windigo psychosis. A person suffering from Windigo psychosis has a deep identification with the Windigo, a mythical Canadian ice monster that craves human flesh. This identification can often lead the psychotic to become homicidal as well. Pynchon writes, "[I]f this hunch were true, Siegel had the power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them a very tangible salvation."

Now the salvation that Siegel has in mind for them is horrifying. He goes up to Loon and says the word "Windigo," hoping that it might trigger a psychotic break and prompt him to violence. And it works. Loon flips out. While Siegel watches, Loon takes a Browning Automatic Rifle down from the wall, and loads it with ammunition. Siegel casually leaves the party and walks downstairs, whistling as he goes. He hears screams. He shrugs. And as the story ends he hears the first burst of gunfire.

All of us would say that Cleanth Siegel went over to the Dark Side. He would presumably argue that the damage he caused was in some sense necessary to promote a larger good, the overall good of his flock. But this is nothing more than the familiar claim of a fanatic.

Unfortunately, the daily news reminds us that fanatics remain all too present in our world today. In pursuit of what they consider a greater good, they do horrible things. Even murder feels warranted to them, they are so obsessed with achieving their objective.

But in speaking of what I will call the Windigo Dark Side I do not want to limit our attention to this kind of fanaticism. That feels too remote, too distant from our lives. I want to make the challenge more relevant, more difficult, by having the Windigo Dark Side also encompass fanaticism’s much milder cousin: tunnel vision.

People afflicted with moral tunnel vision recognize a good, something that carries a positive benefit for the world. They see a path to that good. And they become so committed to pursuing that path that they lose sight of the costs to other values that might be associated with going down that path. These are the kinds of blind spots that can undermine communal life and collective progress.

The temptations of moral tunnel vision are everywhere we look. Think, for example, of the soldiers who, in their efforts to defeat a dangerous enemy, are tempted to slip into torture. Think of the campaign workers who want to help their candidate, and are tempted to caricature the opponent unfairly. Think of the advocates for a cause who are tempted to use tactics that are disproportionate to the goal they champion. Think of the business leaders who are tempted to be stingy about workplace safety in order to improve their price position in a competitive marketplace. Think of the university leaders who are tempted to deform their institutions in hopes of rising in the magazine rankings.

In the world of action you will find that it is surprisingly easy to become convinced of the paramount importance of your cause. It is a short step to see those who oppose you as evil or immoral, or maybe just stupid or naive. And another short step to tell yourself that the harm you inflict on them is necessary to promote a greater good, or might even be, in some way, for their own good.

When you leave Cornell, I know that you will use your Jedi powers to promote noble ends. And I know that most of the time, you will not find it difficult to remain clear-eyed about the relationship between the goals you are pursuing and the means that are appropriate to them. But you should also be prepared to face the temptations of the Windigo Dark Side.

The second Pynchon work that I would like to discuss is his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965. It tells the story of Oedipa Maas and her struggle to make sense of a world in which nothing can be known with certainty.

The book begins when Maas receives a letter informing her that she has been named co-executor of the estate of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. Her efforts to sort out the estate lead her to meet a series of alienated young people, one of whom directs her to attend a play entitled, The Courier’s Tragedy. The play feels like a bad imitation of Shakespeare, a senseless mixture of sex, betrayal, torture, and killing. In Pynchon’s words, it is "like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse." Late in the performance, Maas is struck by an obscure reference to "Trystero."

Maas sets off to understand this reference. She traces the evolution of the play’s text through different publications, finding many changes associated with the Trystero line, but none that offer any realistic account of why the changes were made. Her odyssey leads her into an increasingly bizarre world. To take just one example, she encounters a man who claims to have built a machine incorporating Maxwell’s Demon. Those of you who, like Pynchon, studied physics, know that Maxwell’s Demon is an imaginary creature who was invented to get around the second law of thermodynamics. And part of Maas’s growing frustration in The Crying of Lot 49 derives from her inability to get the machine to work.

She comes to believe that a conspiracy has created an underground postal system in California, going by the acronym W.A.S.T.E., "We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire." As her obsession with the putative conspiracy deepens, Maas finds herself more and more isolated, cut off from her husband, from her psychiatrist, and even from the lawyer she thought was helping her.

Towards the end of the book, Maas is led to an obscure historical source which suggests that Tristero [sic] really existed – as a man who, in 1577, set up an underground postal system to challenge the existing postal monopoly in sixteenth century Europe.

And then, just when the reader is tempted to believe that the puzzle has been neatly sorted out, Pynchon shows how W.A.S.T.E. and the entire Tristero postal conspiracy might have been an elaborate hoax, constructed by Inverarity himself in order to torment his ex-girlfriend. But we really cannot be sure. Because this is, after all, a world in which nothing can be known with certainty.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon has again given us characters who do not feel quite like us. Cleanth Siegel was a fanatic. And Oedipa Maas seems to be a bit too easily drawn into the world of conspiracies.

But in speaking now of what I will call the Tristero Dark Side I again want to broaden our view. Rather than restricting our focus to conspiracy theorists, I would like to define the Tristero Dark Side by reference to a related but more familiar idea, the rush to judgment. This is the temptation to see too quickly a pattern emerging, to infer too soon an organizing principle, and then to become unable to assimilate contrary evidence into your worldview.

After you leave Cornell, you will have the opportunity to take positions of authority and responsibility. In those roles you will be required to act under conditions of uncertainty, to use your best judgment about what is going on when you have little information. These will be wonderful opportunities for you to do good in the world. They will invite you to draw on your very best qualities – your compassion, your intelligence, your intuition.

And at these moments you will also have the opportunity to negotiate the temptations of the Tristero Dark Side. It will be surprisingly easy to believe that you know more than you do, to see more order in the universe than is really there, to see less entropy, to see conspiracies where there is only coincidence. It will take hard work to remind yourself of the limits of your own knowledge, to stay receptive to new evidence, to keep an open mind, especially when you feel very real time pressures weighing on your decision.

Think, for example, of the national leaders who must assess the danger posed by other countries. The journalists who must decide how much credence to give an anonymous tip. The labor negotiators who must decide whether to trust the latest representations that management has made to them. In these contexts, people are naturally tempted to connect the dots. It is more satisfying to know the answer than to live with ambiguity. And often it is easiest to have that answer take the form of malevolence, or conspiracy. It is so tempting to rush to judgment.

And yet, you can defeat the temptations of the Windigo Dark Side and the Tristero Dark Side. You do not have to develop moral tunnel vision. You do not have to rush to judgment. I am happy to provide you with five strategies for staying true to your best selves. Think of them, if you will, as the five virtues of a Jedi Master: a love for complexity, a patient spirit, a will to communicate, a sense of humor, and an optimistic heart.

First, a love for complexity. Fanaticism is anchored in the belief that one has discovered The Truth, a master key that explains the world. That same kind of belief can generate both tunnel vision and a rush to judgment.

When you feel yourself developing that kind of certainty that you have access to a master key, push back. Use all of your intellectual and sympathetic powers to seek out multiple perspectives. See the world through your critics’ eyes. Feel your adversaries’ pain. When it seems as though you’ve got it all figured out, ask yourself whether Pierce Inverarity might have led you astray, and whether you might be missing something important.

Second, a patient spirit. When the stakes seem highest, it is natural to believe that only swift and decisive action will do. When you feel that impulse, wait. Take a walk around the block. Review in your mind the foreseeable consequences of your decision – the outcome you hope for and the collateral damage that might be avoidable. Remember how much you do not know. Then you will be able to act, and to do so in ways that enable you to keep on learning.

Third, a will to communicate. Pynchon’s writings are filled with the communicative failures of his protagonists. Characters have insights, but they fail to share them with others in a way that is intelligible, in a way that can be helpful. And those failures make it easy for the Dark Side to move in. In these circumstances your rule of thumb should be that responsibility lies with the speaker. It is up to the person with the insight to find a way to convey it so that the audience understands.

As you assume greater leadership roles, having acquired special learning, knowledge, or expertise, that rule of thumb will become more and more important. It is not enough to have such learning. And it is not enough to bombard your listeners with data. You must come to understand what the linguist George Lakoff has called "frames" – the ways in which your listeners structure their perceptions of the world. And you must help them to develop frames that will allow them to appreciate the importance of the learning you have to share.

Fourth, a sense of humor. Humor is the great enemy of the Dark Side, and the most powerful form of humor is self-deprecation. And here Thomas Pynchon has offered us a priceless example.

After graduating from Cornell, Pynchon emerged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. His five novels have each won wide acclaim. But he decided early on that he would not accept the celebrity that success can bring. He chose instead to do what he could to preserve normalcy in his life by preserving his privacy. In particular, he avoided cameras. He would not allow his photo to be taken. He declined to give interviews.

But then, to the shock and amusement of a literary world that had become somewhat obsessed with finding Thomas Pynchon, along came the January 25, 2004, episode of the television show, The Simpsons.

In that show, Marge Simpson writes her first novel, The Harpooned Heart. Eager to promote sales of the book, the publisher seeks blurbs from Thomas Pynchon and Tom Clancy.

So picture, in your mind, the following scene. Imagine a Simpsons character. A man wearing a paper bag over his head, with a question mark painted on the bag, above the eyes. He’s standing in front of a house, near a big neon sign that reads, "Thomas Pynchon’s House. Come On In." The Pynchon character makes a call on his cell phone to Marge’s publisher.

And here is what the Pynchon character says. (By the way, this really is the voice of Thomas Pynchon):

["Here’s your quote. Thomas Pynchon loved this book. Almost as much as he loves cameras." ]

The Pynchon character ends the call and hangs a big sign around his neck that says "Thomas Pynchon," with an arrow pointing at his head, still covered by a paper bag. He starts shouting at passing cars:

["Hey, over here. Have your picture taken with a reclusive author. Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph. But wait! There’s more!"]

A self-deprecating sense of humor will take you far indeed, perhaps all the way to the Simpsons.

And finally, an optimistic heart. When we reflect on Anakin’s fall, we recognize that the Dark Side’s greatest allies are fear and despair. Those are the emotions that fuel tunnel vision and a rush to judgment. To fight them you must arm yourself with realistic optimism. Not Panglossian denial of the problems in our world. But a kind of working faith that, on balance, over the long haul, things will work out, justice will be served, progress will occur, success will be achieved. That kind of attitude seems to be a predicate for most forms of collective achievement. Think of it, if you will, as the spirit that underlies Episode IV: A New Hope.

* * *

New graduates of Cornell University, as you face the western horizon of your lives, I ask you to think about this moment in the way that Pynchon had Oedipa Maas think of a critical moment in her own life. "She thought ... of a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west."

This is your sunrise. You are about to embark on lives of service to a society that desperately needs you. And as you go, let me conclude by sharing a few hopes that we, your teachers, hold for you:

May you enjoy the special pleasures of craft — the private satisfaction of doing a task as well as it can be done.

May you enjoy the special pleasures of profession — the added satisfaction of knowing that your efforts promote a larger public good.

May you be blessed with good luck, and also with the wisdom to appreciate when you have been lucky rather than skillful.

May you find ways to help others under circumstances where they cannot possibly know that you have done so.

May you be patient, and gentle, and tolerant, without becoming smug, self-satisfied, and arrogant.

May you know enough bad weather that you never take today's sunshine for granted, and enough good weather that your faith in the coming of spring is never shaken.

May you always be able to confess ignorance, doubt, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

May the Force be with you.

May you frequently travel beyond the places that are comfortable and familiar, the better to appreciate the miraculous diversity of life.

And may your steps lead you often back to Ithaca. Back to East Hill. For you will always be Cornellians. And we will always be happy to welcome you home.

Congratulations, one and all.

a one-shot flash-in-the-pan amateur?

Pynchon, for example, wrote in 1983 to apologize for not responding to Barthelme's invitation to a "Postmodernist Dinner"in New York. The notoriously reclusive author of Gravity's Rainbow said he couldn't have attended anyway, as he was "between coasts, Arkansas or Lubbock or someplace like 'at." (Doing what? one wonders.)

Pynchon also moans about suffering from writer's block and feeling "like a one-shot flash-in-the-pan amateur." He jokes that he thought he saw Barthelme in Greenwich Village but didn't approach him "on the off-chance it was Solzhenitsyn" ? a reference to Barthelme's distinctive facial hair. For a return address, Pynchon listed his literary agent.

...from: University of Houston gives insight into writer Donald Barthelme through exhibition of his papers
By Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle, May 27, 2005

new book: Handbook of Narrative

...looks good:

HERMAN, Luc and Bart VERVAECK, Handbook of Narrative
Analysis, University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 232 p. ISBN: 0-8032-7349-5

The study of narrative has been a continuous concern from antiquity to the present day because stories are everywhere—from fiction across media to nation
building and personal identity. Handbook of Narrative Analysis sorts out both traditional and recent narrative theories, providing the necessary skills to interpret any story that comes along.

In addition to discussing classical theorists such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, Handbook of Narrative Analysis presents precursors (such as E. M. Forster), related theorists (Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn), and a large variety of
postclassical critics. Among the latter, particular attention is paid to the ethics of reading, gender theory, and "possible worlds."

Not content to consider theory as an end in itself, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck use two stories by contemporary authors as a touchstone to illustrate each narrative approach, thereby illuminating the practical implications of theoretical preferences and ideological leanings. Marginal glosses guide the reader through discussions of theoretical issues, and an extensive bibliography points readers to the most
current publications in the field. Written in an accessible style, this handbook combines a comprehensive treatment of its subject with a user-friendly format appropriate for specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Luc Herman is a professor of American literature and literary theory at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is a Pynchon specialist and the author of
Concepts of Realism. Bart Vervaeck is a professor of Dutch literature and literary theory at the Free University Brussels. He is the author of a study on postmodern Dutch literature.

cooking up the urban crocodile story

Croc hunters tracking a myth
by Ed O'Loughlin, 21 May 2005

The Yarkon and Ayalon rivers meet in Tel Aviv's concrete underworld of highway overpasses and grimy storm drains, and it is here that a strange drama is played out each night.

Outnumbered by journalists, two reluctant rangers from Israel's Nature and National Parks Protection Authority launch their small boat on to the toxic waters and putter upstream into the darkness, torch beams probing for eyes gleaming from the scum.

In recent days, Tel Aviv has been gripped by an outbreak of one of the world's most enduring mind viruses - the legend of the urban crocodile.

Despite its own scepticism, the parks authority says it feels obliged to ease public fears following a number of reported sightings in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.

Hillel Glaffman, head of stream monitoring, says Tel Aviv winters are too cold for crocodiles, "but we can't take any chances, so we have to go out and search the banks. I think if nothing is found in the next few days there will be no further searches."
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The Nile crocodile, its salt water cousin and the North American alligator are among the very few animals that will readily hunt people for food; little wonder that they haunt the imagination.

This urban crocodile story was cooked up by the elusive American author Thomas Pynchon (himself something of an urban legend) for his 1963 debut novel, V.

Despite having "fiction" stamped all over it, the story took a life of its own and has since been misapplied to scores of cities around the world.

In fact, there is nothing particularly far-fetched about the Tel Aviv sightings. Crocodiles lived wild in the region's coastal swamps as recently as a century ago and two years ago a large feral crocodile was pulled out of the River Jordan, where once they were plentiful.

Last year a number of hatchlings were stolen from a crocodile ranch and handed out as presents to Israel's thriving gangster fraternity; some of these young crocodiles have since turned up in streams.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

My Other Car is a Pynchon Novel

...is a bumper sticker (scroll down) from this comic strip:

reinserting "the biographical author Thomas Pynchon into the critical equation"

from Pynchon-l, where the notion encapsulated in the headline-quote above has, freqently, been castigated as sacrilege:

Abstract
Reading Pynchon Rewriting
Luc Herman

The canonization of Thomas Pynchon as the American postmodernist author of the 1960s and 70s has been partially enhanced by his perceived invisibility, which functioned as one of the main proofs of Foucault’s and Barthes’s suggestion that a writer was by no means in control of his own writing. While the paradoxical notion of perceived invisibility doesn’t mean at all that Pynchon is a total mystery—the author can be reached fairly easily through his wife, the literary agent Melanie Jackson, and a few years ago he even consented to a fax interview for a biography on one of his friends (Hajdu 2001)—he has been toying with this image up to the present day. In January 2004, he lent his voice to an episode of The Simpsons in which he appeared as a “famous reclusive author” with a brown paper bag over his head. However, Pynchon has definitely been quite serious in trying to cover up certain aspects of his personal and professional life. In the early 1990s, his lawyers managed to block access to an application he had submitted with the Ford Foundation in 1959 (Weisenburger 1991), and in 1998 they successfully took on the Pierpont Morgan Library, which had acquired a cache of letters to his former agent, Candida Donadio. It was hardly surprising then that genetic criticism on Pynchon, apart from two articles (Fowler 1984; Patteson 1984) about the transformation of his early short story, “Under the Rose” (1962) into chapter three of his first novel, V. (1963), did not amount to much. The typescript of V. acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas (Austin) in 2000 radically changed this critical impasse. The 685 page typescript is a first version of the novel and contains more than a 100 pages eventually removed from the text. Pynchon cannot prevent people from seeing this remarkable object since it is the property of the Ransom Center.

As a long-standing Pynchon critic I took a natural interest in this typescript and am currently working on a series of articles about it. My purpose in this paper is to take a step back from my own research practice so as to consider the politics of genetic criticism dealing with an author who has been eager to cover up all his traces apart from his publications. The typescript obviously reinserts the biographical author Thomas Pynchon into the critical equation. “Should” this lead to a more profound understanding of certain ideological issues related to his first novel, and allow us to “correct” already existing interpretations, or “should” it rather, in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of critical arrogance, be seen as merely one approach among many? In my answer to this question, I will focus on how the character of the black jazz musician in V., McClintic Sphere, is stripped in the novel’s final version of various characteristics indicative of Pynchon’s stand on race at the beginning of his literary career.

Thanks, Rich!

V. in the hotel lobby....(v.2)

GR pictures on the Web

Zak Smith:

My entire set of Gravity's Rainbow pictures is now up at this site:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm

it is, i believe, the largest piece of art on the web--in terms of the raw amount of visual information available--each of the 755 pictures is more than life size.
-z

"the loudest yelps for liberty"

Re: Samuel Johnson, this from the Times:

Slavery repelled him. He took a freed slave, Francis Barber, into his house, and bequeathed him the bulk of his estate. His opinion of Americans ("I am willing to love all mankind," he confessed, "except an American") stemmed partly from the colonists' doublethink about freedom and slavery: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

From Mason & Dixon, p. 696:

The Driver's Whip is an evil thing, an expression of ill feeling worse than any between Master and Slave,- the contempt of the monger of perishable goods for his Merchandise,-- in its tatter'd braiding, darken'd to its Lash-Tips with the sweat and blood of Drove after Drove of human targets, the metal Wires work'd in to each Lash, its purpose purely to express hate with, and Hate's Corollary,-- to beg for the same denial of Mercy, should, one day, the roles be revers'd. Gambling that they may not be, Or, that they may."

"clogged with belated thought"

Dave Monroe quoting the Guardian re the late, great Saul Bellow, @ pynchon-l:

And he was always concerned with the modern self, the American self. It is usual to give writers like DeLillo and Pynchon credit for what seems the essentially postmodern insight that we are colonised, mediated, and finally oppressed by modern forms of knowledge - by television, film, advertising, the newspapers - and that this mediation has the effect of making our own mental activity somewhat self-conscious. But Bellow believed that public life drives out private life, and that this pressure on the private was a unique contemporary invention. His modern heroes are clogged with belated thought - they arrive so late in history, when there is too much too know, too much to bear, and no one speaks the same language....

violent prose

via Heikki @pynchon-l:

"[...] Four years and a series of catastrophic world events later, the new production, Saturday, is here. It begins with its hero, the successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, gazing through the window of his house at what might well be another major calamity: A plane is flying over London, on fire. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow also famously opens with a burning projectile over London, and whether or not McEwan is alluding to it, the comparison is instructive. Pynchon: "A screaming comes across the sky." McEwan: "Above the usual deep and airy roar is a straining, choking, banshee sound growing in volume-both a scream and a sustained shout, an impure, dirty noise that suggests unsustainable mechanical effort," etc., etc. Pynchon's sentence contains no adjectives; McEwan's two clauses contain ten. The desired effect is vividness, proximity; the result is the opposite, with the adjectives muffling the screaming, so that it is no longer screaming but only screaming-that-is-being-written-about. Few contemporary writers are as fixated as McEwan on physical violence; yet no one's prose is less violent than his. [...]."

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/11521/index.html

"my Tithable"

From: George Washington’s Slave Child? by Ed Pompeian, History News Network, 21 March 2005:

“Volumes tell how he fathered a nation. Only iUniverse let me tell how he fathered a slave,” proclaimed a two-page advertisement that appeared in the New York Times Book Review, on Sunday, February 20. The advertisement promoted Linda Allen Bryant’s I Cannot Tell A Lie. Published in 2004, Bryant’s book tells the story of how George Washington, the nation’s first president, fathered his one and only child through a slave. The headline was certainly eye-catching, as intended. But was the claim off the wall?

According to Linda Allen Bryant, Washington initiated a sexual relationship with a female slave named Venus around 1784. Her claim is based on her family’s two hundred year old oral history and on conspicuous evidence showing that the Washington family afforded special treatment to West Ford. Bryant, a direct descendent of West Ford, points to correspondence between George and his brother, John Augustine, to argue that George Washington visited his brother’s plantation in 1784, and that a gap in Washington’s personal diary that year could account for a sexual liaison during this visit.

Mason & Dixon, p. 572:

"Eeh!" Washington grabbing Mason.
"Colonel, Sir," twitching away, "'twould be far preferable,- "
"That voice, Mason! 'tis my Tithable, Gershom!"

[photo source]

the war complex

...from a University of Chicago Press new book email alert:

The War Complex by Marianna Torgovnick

Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex--a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during
the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 645:

The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace.

red herring or highbrow beard?

But the joke's on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate for their absence. When his characters aren't listening to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as "advertising robots" at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in "Super Goat Man," the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics superhero from the Sixties who is reduced in the Eighties to teaching a college seminar on "Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975."

...read it all: Welcome to New Dork, by John Leonard, New York Review of Books, 7 April 2005

swans sacred for V

Swans were sacred to the goddess...because the V-formation of their flight was a female symbol, and because, at mid-summer, they flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king's soul with them.

"Tyche and Nemesis"
Robert Graves
The Greek Myths: 1, p. 126

Leda and the Swan (16th century)
Paolo Veronese [CORBIS/Bettman source]

the pig as technology transmission vector

The wild origins of the domestic pig:

The new findings show that domestication must have taken place in several different geographical regions in both Europe and Asia. Moreover, it is highly probable that domestication took place in many places within each respective region. This means that it was the technology for domesticating the wild boar that spread across the world, not domesticated wild boar as such.

The new study also clearly demonstrates that the DNA profile of European domesticated pigs is very similar to that found among today's European wild boar and is distinct from that found by scientists in Turkey and Iran. This contradicts earlier theories that the wild boar was never domesticated in Europe and that domestication took place in the Middle East.

V. | 16:

Yibble, yibble, Muslim pig.

that duck!

Vaucanson's Duck


Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers
by Donald MacLeod, Guardian, 8 March, 2005

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights" when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. "When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback," he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest - especially in Britain for some reason - but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Mason & Dixon, p. 374:374:

"Agreed, you must consider how best to defend yourself,-- wear clothing it cannot bite through, leather, or what's even more secure, chain-mail,-- its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite qable, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut.… One may cower within, but one cannot avoid,-- le Bec de la Mort, the…'Beak of Death.'"

"together they are a long skin interface"

New Technology to Use Human Body As Digital Transmission Path, PhysOrg.com, 22 February 2005:

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is pursuing research and development of an innovative Human Area Networking technology called RedTacton that safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body. Using a novel electro-optic sensor, NTT has already developed a small PCMCIA card-sized prototype RedTacton transceiver. RedTacton enables the first practical Human Area Network between body-centered electronic devices and PCs or other network devices embedded in the environment via a new generation of user interface based on totally natural human actions such as touching, holding, sitting, walking, or stepping on a particular spot.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 121

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

"I'd rather be a pig than a fascist"

Porco Rosso

Totoro and the culture of fear, Orcinus, 1 March 2005:

The past week or so, I've been enjoying the recent American releases of two of anime master Hayao Miyazaki's earlier films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso. Like all of his work, they're both wonders to watch. Nausicaa, his first film, is a worthy variation on Dune as a kind of biological fable, while Porco Rosso is an amazing piece of work for those (like me) who have a love of well-crafted flying sequences. It also has a line for the ages: "I'd rather be a pig than a fascist."

Gravity's Rainbow p. 555:

William must have 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.…

a sewer rat in love

Molls Who Have It Their Way With a Gang of New York by Janet Maslin, New York Times, 28 February 2005:

"Metropolis" follows an upward trajectory, literally rising from the sewers to the Brooklyn Bridge's towers. And it manages to be carnal and scatological at any height. "Generally, sewage runs thin and gray, not half as bad as you'd think," Ms. Gaffney explains, as the sewer system becomes central to a Whyo heist scheme. And as for Frank, an expert on these underground tunnels, after he is smitten by Beanie: "When he saw a rat in the sewer now, he thought of it as a happy rat, as a sewer rat in love."

V., p. 120, 124:

They were entering Fairing's Parish, named after a priest who'd lived topside years ago. During the Depression of the '30's, in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, he had decided that the rats were going, to take over after New York died. Lasting eighteen hours a day, his feat had covered the breadlines and missions, where he gave comfort, stitched up raggedy souls. He foresaw nothing but a city of starved corpses, covering the sidewalks and the grass of the parks, lying belly up in the fountains, hanging wrynecked from the streetlamps. The city - maybe America, his horizons didn't extend that far - would belong, to the rats before the year was out. This being the case, father Fairing thought it best for the rats to be given a head start - which meant conversion to the Roman Church. One night early in Roosevelt's first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship. The first thing he did according to his journals (discovered months after he died was to put an eternal blessing and a few exorcisms on the water flowing through the sewers between Lexington and the East River and between 86th and 79th Streets. This as the area which became Fairing's Parish. These benisons made sure of an adequate supply of holy water; also eliminated the trouble of individual baptisms when he finally converted all the rats in the parish. Too, he expected other rats to hear what was going on under the upper East Side, and come likewise to be converted. Before long he would be spiritual leader of the inheritors of the earth. He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them. [....] one of the apocrypha dealt with an unnatural relationship between the priest and this female rat, who was described as a kind of voluptuous Magdalen. From everything Profane had heard, Veronica was the only member of his flock Father Fairing felt to have a soul worth saving. She would come to him at night not as a succubus but seeking instruction, perhaps to carry back to her nest - wherever in the Parish it was - something of his desire to bring her to Christ: a scapular medal, a memorized verse from the New Testament, a partial indulgence, a penance.

Kirghiz Light

Ink helps drive democracy in Asia, BBC, 19 February 2005:

The Kyrgyz Republic, a small, mountainous state of the former Soviet republic, is using invisible ink and ultraviolet readers in the country's elections as part of a drive to prevent multiple voting.

....The ink is sprayed on a person's left thumb. It dries and is not visible under normal light. However, the presence of ultraviolet light (of the kind used to verify money) causes the ink to glow with a neon yellow light.

At the entrance to each polling station, one election official will scan voter's fingers with UV lamp before allowing them to enter, and every voter will have his/her left thumb sprayed with ink before receiving the ballot. If the ink shows under the UV light the voter will not be allowed to enter the polling station. Likewise, any voter who refuses to be inked will not receive the ballot.

....see "Kirghiz Light" in Gravity's Rainbow@ Amazon.com index

"this octopus was not in good mental health"

A huge octopus emerges from the ocean, wraps an oversized tentacle around the waist of a young woman, and proceeds to drag her into the sea. This memorable episode from Thomas Pynchon's vast and surreal novel, Gravity's Rainbow, has a happy ending, however, owing to the intervention of Mr. Tyrone Slothrop, who first unavailingly beats the molluscan monster over the head with an empty wine bottle. Then, in a stroke of zoologically informed genius, he offers the briny behemoth something even more alluring than a fair maiden: a crab. It works, suggesting that this particular octopus conforms, at least in its dietary preference, to the norm for its species. We learn, nonetheless, that "In their brief time together, Slothrop formed the impression that this octopus was not in good mental health."

It isn't entirely clear where the creature's mental derangement lies. After all, it behaved with a reasonable degree of healthy, enlightened self-interest in seeking first to consume the young lady, and then forgoing her for the even more delectable crab. Yet nature writer David Quammen may have been onto something when he pointed out that octopi generally - not just Pynchon's fictional creation - might be especially vulnerable to mental disequilibrium, if only because one of their distinguishing characteristics is having immense brains. Mental strain is probably not unknown among animals, but there seems little doubt that it is particularly well-developed in the species Homo sapiens, whose brains - like Pynchon's octopus - are especially large, and whose strain, is correspondingly (and regrettably) great.

This essay will argue that one of the major themes of evolutionary biology - the conflict between individual selfishness and group altruism - is paralleled by a comparable theme in literature, and that each usefully illuminates the other.

The tension between individual and group may also shed light on another longstanding evolutionary conundrum: Why do people have such big brains, bigger even than our hungry octopus? There has been no shortage of possible answers, including the possibility that humanity's oversized intellect has evolved as a means of facilitating communication, tool use, making war on our enemies and/or defending our friends, attracting and keeping mates, or dealing with predators as well as prey. There is even the prospect that the human intellect might be a by-product of sexual selection, comparable to the peacock's flamboyant tail feathers. Here is yet another possibility, suggested by the self/group tension: Maybe human beings owe their mental adroitness to the peculiar pressures of keeping a very complex social life in adaptive equilibrium. This possibly hare-brained schema for explaining our human-brained selves has at least one virtue: It speaks to a long-standing question in ethics, which is also illuminated - at least in part - by evolutionary biology: How to navigate the conflicting demands of personal selfishness and social obligation?

Moreover, the question of individual versus group generates a useful way of looking at one of the most pervasive yet elusive themes in literature: the dilemma of self-assertion in a world that often calls for precisely the personal abnegation that our genes are generally primed to reject. This conflict between self and others, selfishness and altruism, the needs of the individual and those of society, has a long pedigree in the world of stories, as well as an equally potent basis in the world of life. Homo sapiens is a social creature. So, when people battle to make their way, as individuals, within a larger social group, they are doing something that all social species do (often in remarkably similar ways). Human beings are simply more aware of it than is the average prairie dog or pumpkinseed sunfish. And so, people not only live through these dilemmas, they write about them.

This essay, accordingly, suggests that when writers explore one of their favorite themes - the ever-present struggle between the individual and the larger group - they are recreating a parallel, and fundamental theme of biology.

As difficult as it must be for any creature to balance its various competing demands (to eat or sleep, attack or retreat, eat a damsel or a crab, etc.) such choices are probably most confusing in the social domain. For as hard as it may be to predict the vagaries of weather, for example, the vagaries of one's fellow creatures have to be even more complex, confusing, and stressful. And when it comes to negotiating a complicated and difficult social life, human beings are in a class by themselves. Clearly, our remarkably over-sized brains do not satisfy themselves with simply meeting the contingencies of daily life. Human neurons are obsessed with confronting all sorts of difficult issues, mostly of their own making. Small wonder that so many people, like Pynchon's octopus, are stressed.

And small wonder, as well, that so much fiction revolves around the conflicting demands of self versus group, selfishness versus altruism, callow youth versus responsible adulthood, individual needs versus society's expectation: it is a conflict that may well reside, literally, in our genes....

....read it all: Biology Lurks Beneath: Bioliterary Explorations of the Individual versus Society by David P. Barash, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.

L.S.D.

From Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies:

On Wednesday at 12 noon EST, MAPS offered its first live internet audio broadcast of our celebration of Albert Hofmann's 99th birthday. Dr. Rick Doblin, president of MAPS, and a panel of prominent scientists spoke to Albert live in Switzerland about the renewal of psychedelic research and their work....To listen to the conference call, go to: http://www.maps.org/conferences/ah99/ah99b.mp3

The Crying of Lot 49, p. 111:

There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we're finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges.

The structure of lysergic acid diethylamide. The diethylamide group is shown in red and the indole ring in blue.

oneirine lives

Gumpelmann. A Psychiatric Novel

Publisher's information

In this brilliant comic novel Karl Koehler paints a nightmarish picture of his former psychiatric colleagues and their drug studies.

Gumpelmann, an alter ego of the author, confronts an all-powerful psychiatric establishment intent on pushing through its agenda at all costs. In this instance it is the drug oneirine - first described in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—that psychiatrists believe holds the key to developing the ultimate paranoid mouse.

Who then could better describe the sexual humiliations and numerous forms of never-ending dependency originating in a clinic with an academic dog-eat-dog mentality primarily geared to doing the bidding of the drug companies than a psychiatric insider?

A funny, corrosive and entirely absorbing novel written in the subversive tradition of American postmodern literature, which could just as well have been entitled "Sex, Drugs and Doo Wop."

About the Author

Karl Koehler was born in Manhattan in 1935, grew up in the Bronx and, after studying at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, completed his medical studies in Innsbruck. After finishing his psychiatric residency in Cornell, Heidelberg and the State Hospital in Marburg, he became a Privatdozent in Heidelberg; later he accepted an appointment as head of Social Psychiatry at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Bonn. He is presently living in retirement with his wife in the Bonn-Cologne area.

Published in German. Thanks to p-list Otto for the heads-up.

Beethoven, Hansel & Gretel, V-2, paedophilia

Israeli opera signs up Buchenwald production:

ERFURT - The New Israeli Opera Tel Aviv will participate in the controversial staging of Beethoven's prison-based opera "Fidelio" at the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, German organisers of the production announced on Tuesday.

The 14-year-old opera company, under the general direction of Hanna Munitz, will provide musicians and singers for the production, scheduled for 2007 at the Nazi death camp site near Weimar in eastern Germany.

The controversial production is the brainchild of Giancarlo del Monaco, guest artistic director of the new Erfurt Opera House.

Del Monaco, 61, son of famed tenors Mario del Monaco, currently is embroiled in another controversy involving a production of German composer Engelbert Humperdinck's much-loved 1893 opera "Hansel And Gretel".

The Erfurt production, which premiere's next weekend, shifts the story from a fairy tale forest witch's cottage made of candy to a sinister metropolitan red-light district where children are abducted and held as sex slaves for paedophiles.

The sandman of the original libretto is transformed into a cocaine-sniffing procurer who hands over child abductees to the "witch" who, in del Monaco's production, is a seemingly respectable clergyman.

As he has with the "Fidelio" production, del Monaco has defended his "Hansel And Gretel" production, saying the original story by the Brothers Grimm was designed to make children wary of strangers promising them sweets.

"Underlying the libretto is a tacit comment on paedophilia, violence and sexual abuse of children," del Monaco said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"I am not attacking the church, but only attacking the church's continued denial that such things have gone on and continue to go on," he told dpa.

"Fidelio", Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, is a story of political repression, unjust imprisonment and eventual dramatic liberation.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 50:

How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use their innocence

see also:

Beethoven in Gravity's Rainbow @Amazon.com index

Hansel and Gretel in Gravity's Rainbow @Amazon.com index

deathmarch

The Gravity's Rainbow Deathmarch: Our First Few Steps..., a group reading of the novel, underway at cecil vortex. "All are welcome."

a madman dreams of space conquest

Download be damned, can't resist the Rocket. Image from Comic Book Bondage Cover of the Day, "the web's foremost reference site for bondage covers on mainstream comic books."

urban gorilla

Through the use of posters, stencils, stickers and apparel, we aim to rally skateboarders and artists alike to "Reclaim The Streets!"

... read it all: The Urban Guerilla Projekt - An Explanation, at the always-interesting Wooster Collective.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 368:

Well, what it is--is? what's "is"?--is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taqking a shit, right in the street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by--"Hey!" Slothrop wants to shout, "hey lookit that giant ape? or whatever it is. You guys? Hey . . ." But he doesn't, luckily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed in May.

Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

consider the miserable life of the pig, update

Consider Pig City:

Three years ago, Rotterdam-based architects bureau MVRDV imagined a pig city to change farming production and solve problems such as swine fever and foot and mouth disease. Their idea was to give more space to pigs, letting them live in huge and comfy skyscrapers. Balconies allow the animals to rummage around under trees, an abattoir is housed in the plinth, and animals for slaughter are moved in lifts. There's even a fish farm that supplies some of the food needed. If pigs are kept in stacked "apartments" in such a way that they enjoy better conditions, the meat tastes better, livestock transport becomes unnecessary, diseases are eliminated, and the Netherlands (European Union's leading exporter) acquires more space, according to the architects.

The We Make Money Not Art blog entry includes link to MVRDV's interesting pig movie.

Gravity's Rainbow p. 555:

William must have 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.…

top 10 war profiteers of 2004

1. AEGIS
2. BearingPoint
3. Bechtel
4. BKSH & Associates
5. CACI and Titan
6. Custer Battles
7. Halliburton
8. Lockheed Martin
9. Loral Satellite
10. Qualcomm

...gory details: War Profiteers: The Center for Corporate Policy's Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105:

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw masterial to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a pice of that pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

new year

One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4:

Love never goes away,
Never completely dies,
Always some souvenir
Takes us by sad surprise.

You went away from me,
One rose was left behind--
Pressed in my Book of Hours,
This is the rose I find. . . .

Though it's another year,
Though it's another me,
Under the rose is a drying tear,
Under my linden tree. . . .

Love never goes away,
Not if it's really true,
It can return, by night, by day,
Tender and green and new
As the leaves from a linden tree, love,
that I left with you.

[Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 289-290]



my linden tree

A.Word.A.Day--pinguid

pinguid (PING-gwid) adjective

Fat; greasy; unctuous.

[From Latin pinguis (fat).]

"But after losing two stones, he (Andrew Roberts) has shucked off his old nickname of 'the pinguid Thatcherite historian'." Sholto Byrnes; Pandora; Independent (London, UK); Feb 12, 2003.

"Turner always said that the news had to be the star for CNN to flourish--though he had a curious loyalty to pinguid idolator Larry King." Phil Rosenthal; What the Bleep?; Chicago Sun-Times; Feb 10, 2003.

This week's theme: words to describe people.

See also: Peter Penguid in The Crying of Lot 49

thinking about Pynchon's next novel

thinking cap

'tis the season

Have a coprophilic Catalan Christmas

Obligatory Pudding reference.

round up the usual octopus quotes

It was a May-December romance that really had legs: Young Aurora, a female giant octopus and her aging cephalopod suitor J-1 were thrown together for a blind date seven months ago by aquarists who hoped the two would mate. By all appearances, their fling was a success, and Aurora began dribbling long strings of eggs down the sides of her tank the following month. Though her sweetheart died of old age in September, the pitter-patter of tiny tentacles seemed close at hand.

.... read it all: Octopus Doesn't Give Up on Motherhood

Random octopus graphic:

"Octopus - The River
from their mega-rare debut album, Restless Night, released in 1970"

See also: 14 references to octopus in Gravity's Rainbow and octopus porn.

the haunted mansion of an underground past

from: Growing Up in the Weather Underground: A Father and Son Tell Their Story Democracy Now!, 3 December 2004:

THAI JONES: Well it starts on a night that my parents were arrested. We were sitting around, it was World Series time, we had just had dinner and the telephone in the apartment rang and because we were underground, no one had that number. That phone had basically never rung in about the six months we had lived there. And Jeff picked it up and it was an F.B.I. Agent and he said, “We have the building surrounded. We have sharpshooters on the rooftops and in a few seconds, the F.B.I. Is going to knock on your door.” So Jeff turned to Eleanor and said, “We are busted.”

AMY GOODMAN: Eleanor is your mom?

THAI JONES: Eleanor is my mom. The next thing I knew, there was banging on the door. About 20 fully armored swat, F.B.I. And police officers with M16's and shotguns stormed you this the house. They took Jeff out into the hallway and made him crawl down the hallway. What I remember is that there was a moment in all this sort of craziness when people had forgotten about me and I went down to my little bedroom at the end of the hall and I was sort of looking through my belongings to see if I could find some way to help out. And I just had this feeling of, you know, I had like a cowboy hat, I had some stuffed animals, I had a little pair of child's safety scissors, so I just remember feeling helpless and I went back out and just stood with Jeff in the hallway. And I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea that our family was different. I mean I knew that we had had different names but I had never questioned that. And so this book is sort of about exploring how that came about.

Vineland, p. 114:

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost.

that duck

Vaucanson's Duck


From The Guitarist Is Metal. No, Not Heavy Metal by Michael Beckerman, New York Times, 30 November 2004:

GuitarBot claims its ancestor not in the golem - which, after all, has decidedly human characteristics - but in the ingenious automated machines of the last three centuries. In the mid-18th century, the Maillardet brothers created an astonishing writer-draftsman that could write poetry and do amazing drawings of ships and buildings. Around the same time, Jacques de Vaucanson created his famous defecating duck, which could eat, digest and all the rest. He also created a flute-playing android, which offered 12 tunes, perhaps an ancestor of the robot that recently conducted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Tokyo. While audiences may be titillated by the prospect of seeing such devices and their descendants do "human" things, Mr. Singer and Mr. Adamson have something else in mind. Mr. Adamson, in particular, is more concerned with technical issues and the ability of machines to do things that humans cannot accomplish.

Mason & Dixon, p. 374:

"Agreed, you must consider how best to defend yourself,-- wear clothing it cannot bite through, leather, or what's even more secure, chain-mail,-- its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite qable, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut.… One may cower within, but one cannot avoid,-- le Bec de la Mort, the…'Beak of Death.'"

black/white

From review of Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era by Clarence Lusane:

Lusane investigates Nazi policy towards blacks, the Nazi sterilization program directed at blacks, black captives of the Nazis, Nazi propaganda against blacks, the Nazi response to jazz, their reaction to black athletes, and blacks in the resistance movement. Several recurring themes inform these chapters. First, Lusane stresses the Nazis' differential treatment of differently situated black groups and individuals. Though many blacks tried to leave and some Africans and other expatriates succeeded, the Nazis confiscated Afro-Germans' passports, and the British prevented natives of Southwest Africa from returning because they had fought with Germany in World War I. However, blacks in Germany were never targeted for elimination or even systematic harassment. In general, Africans were better treated than Afro-Germans, since the Nazis foresaw they would need African assistance should Germany regain its colonies. The Nazis also employed Afro-Germans in the German film industry to portray Africans in colonial propaganda films made mostly between 1938 and 1943. Lusane can document the presence of blacks (imprisoned for other reasons) in concentration and labor camps as well as black GIs in POW camps. Otherwise, Afro-Germans were mobilized for the war effort like the rest of the German population. Some even belonged to the Hitler Youth and served in the German army--but were also compulsorily sterilized. Lusane declares, "the preference to address the problem by sterilization of some would be as coherent as the Nazi policies ever got regarding Afro-Germans and Africans" (p. 99). Since Nazi sterilization law, promulgated in 1934, did not allow sterilization based solely on race, the Nazis undertook the sterilizations in secret. At least 385 Rhineland children were sterilized between 1935 and 1937, a gradual strategy that, Lusane argues, nonetheless "sought to erase any future blackness on German soil" (p. 142).

[...] Hitler's failure to shake hands with victorious African American athletes, including Jesse Owens, in the 1936 Olympics was cited by the U.S. press as evidence of racial views that Americans should oppose (though, as the black press pointed out, the black athletes confronted similar racist views in the United States). Though, because they considered it both Jewish _and_ black, the Nazis opposed and prohibited jazz on principle, its popularity compelled various Nazi concessions, including unsuccessful attempts to create more acceptable German jazz and "swinging" German radio music. German swing movements and jazz clubs constituted a form of cultural, though rarely political, resistance to the Nazis. Lusane can also document that jazz was performed at Auschwitz, Flossenburg, and Theresienstadt as well as at some POW camps. Lusane has perused many black U.S. newspapers of the period and reveals the black press's attentiveness to developments in Germany, its concern about the rise of National Socialism, and its condemnation of Hitler's policies towards Jews and blacks.

Finally, Lusane seems committed to saving little-known figures of the black diaspora from historical oblivion by recounting their individual encounters with National Socialism. These figures range from Hans Massaquoi, son of the Liberian ambassador to Germany who survived the Nazi era to become an _Ebony_ editor, to the "enigmatic" (p. 122) Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, mixed-race U.S. writer, diplomat, and businessman, who seems to have admired Hitler, embraced anti-Semitism, and advocated for fascism. William Marcus Baarn, a black nightclub singer from Dutch Guinea, even served as a Nazi spy. Some blacks, like the composer Elmer Spyglass in Frankfurt (perhaps protected by his African American affiliation), lived comfortably in Germany throughout the Nazi period. Other blacks in Germany opposed the Nazis. Joseph Bile of Cameroon published a letter in a black U.S. newspaper pleading for black U.S. solidarity with blacks in Germany. Hilarius Gilgus was an Afro-German labor organizer and an early Nazi victim, killed by the SS in Düsseldorf at the age of twenty-four. Mohamed Husen from German East Africa served with the Germans in World War I, appeared in numerous colonial films, but was eventually convicted of _Rassenschande_ and sent to Sachsenhausen, where he died in 1943. Jean Johnny Voste from the Belgian Congo was active in the Belgian resistance movement and survived Dachau. Joseph Nassy from Surinam, a black Jew, was captured in Belgium and sent to an internment camp in Bavaria where he could teach art and also produce sketches, drawings, and paintings now in the holdings of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Johnny Williams, son of an Alsatian father and a mother from the Ivory Coast, discovered his "splendid voice" (p. 165) in the Neuengamme camp and went on to a successful singing career after the war. Johnny Nicholas, originally from Haiti, was captured as an Allied spy in France and sent to various camps, where he survived by working as a doctor. Lusane regrets he has little information about black women but does try to reconstruct the story of the jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow, who may have been interned in a Nazi camp in Denmark. It is not exactly clear what can be concluded from these disparate experiences, but Lusane has certainly successfully documented a black presence in Germany and Europe during the Nazi era and pointed the way towards many potentially fruitful research areas.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 62:

We want to talk some more about Boston today, Slothrop. You recall that last time we were talking about the Negroes, in Roxbury. Now we know it's not all that comfortable for you, but do try, won't you.

consider the miserable life of the pig

From A.Word.A.Day today:

There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. 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. -Michael Pollan, professor and writer (1955- )

Gravity's Rainbow p. 555:

William must have 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.…

the new temperance

This passage from The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, by David Wagner, quoted in a MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) email today, reminds me of the way certain reactionary elements on PYNCHON-L critique Vineland, demonizing the novel's portrayal of '60s counter-culture from the same Reagan Administration perspective that the novel undermines so thoroughly:

Demonizing the 1960s

It is not coincidental that advocates of the New Temperance have so strongly attacked behavior that they claim was at the heart of the "excesses" of the 1960s. The war on drugs and on many forms of sexuality has been fought as much for its symbolic value (i.e., as part of a strategy of eradicating the mythologized "60s") as for any of its more manifest purposes. Writing late in his life, Richard Nixon forcefully pointed us back to Woodstock as a symbolic reason for continuing the war on drugs: "Even today, when most of the prestige media have managed to crowd onto the anti-drug bandwagon, they could not help indulging in a revolting orgy of nostalgia during the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock. The smarmy retrospectives glossed over the fact that Woodstock's only significant legacy was the glorification of dangerous illegal drugs.... To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs."

Similarly, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of attacking the sexual doctrines of the 1960s, holding promiscuity and free love responsible for the AIDS epidemic and the widespread child sexual abuse reported during the 1980s: "We are reaping what was sown in the 1960s. The fashionable theories and permissiveness claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated."

The historical events of the "60s" (in actuality including much of the 1970s) have been repainted in dangerous and frightening hues. Consider this vitriolic comment by conservative historian Joseph Conlin regarding the "60s" lifestyle: " [L]ife in the New Age communes of the 1960s and 1970s . . . [was like living in] 'garbage dumps' and 'hells': children smeared in their own filth for days, hysterical under the LSD given to
pacify them.... [V]enereal infection, pneumonia, influenza, and the unprimitive affliction of hepatitis reached disastrous proportions."

For many people alive at the time of the 1960s counterculture, this sinister and bizarre reconfiguration of history has a clear agenda of vilification. Of course, not everything that occurred in this (or any other) time period was positive or worth repeating. But the presence of a few dirty and sick children on a commune somewhere by no means sums up the reality of this period, any more than conservatives of the time were correct in summing up the French Revolution as primarily about terrorism
and guillotine practice. The popular movie Forest Gump similarly portrays 1960s "long-hair radicals" as violent and misogynist, and the movie hero must save his girlfriend from their abuse. Perhaps there were a few more people of this sort than I was ever aware of in the late 1960s, but it is still absurd to portray "60s"-style radicalism in this way. If anything, the image of the peaceful hippie flashing a peace sign would be closer to the mood of the times. In short, the retrospective portrayal of the "60s" has little to do with veracity. Rather, it is an attempt to take the essence of the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s and convert it to one primarily of sin and vice.

[...] I make no claim of originality in drawing a connection between the mandatory drug testing of the current period and the McCarthyism of the 1950s. As early as 1986 a leader of the Civil Liberties Union called drug testing a "form of social McCarthyism aimed at getting rid of people who won't buy the line. It's a step away from an authoritarian society." In addition, writer Ellen Willis has observed a link between the drug test and the loyalty oath: "The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: 'When I say pee, you pee."'

[...] The urine test - along with mandatory sentencing and other severe behavioral controls central to the drug war is a power strategy that mirrors the "personal is political" radicalism of the 1960s. It takes seriously the proposition that those who resist the dictates of power, whether or not such resistance is framed as "political" in the conventional sense, are enemies and are undermining production, public order, and rationality. Like the loyalty oath and the "naming of names," the policing of everyday lifewhich in schools, for example, focuses on behaviors such as smoking, speech, and sexuality requires Americans, from an early age on, to comply with the norms of the powerful without asking questions, and to accept the right of the state and corporate power to hold their bodies captive. Ultimately, it is not important whether drug testing finds traces of a drug in a student's urine or if locker searches turn up cigarettes or guns or pornographic literature. Rather, it is the policing itself that makes the point about who is in control.

Another key point about the role of the New Temperance in symbolically eradicating the "60s" is its constant use against members of the baby boom generation, particularly those who might be charged with having some relationship to the social movements of that period. It is not coincidental that Democratic Party politicians from Gary Hart to Bill Clinton have come under relentless questioning about their sexuality, prior drug use, and past participation in political demonstrations (although some Republicans such as former Supreme Court justice nominee Arthur Ginsburg have been caught in the net as well). Reminiscent of McCarthyism's "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" questions, political leaders (and many potential civic, corporate, and bureaucratic leaders) are now asked "Are you now or have you ever been a '60s'-style person?" That is, did you use drugs, engage in nonmarital sex, attend anti-war rallies, or burn a flag?

As in the ritualized hearings of the 1950s, most members of the 1960s generation either admit guilt and purge themselves of sin or minimize their past guilt ("I didn't inhale") and promise future clean living. To some extent, liberals and former leftists have been forced, far more than conservatives and moderate politicians born before the baby boom, to actively repudiate the 1960s. And like many liberals in the late 1940s and 1950s who dissociated themselves from communism, they have, for the most part, happily obliged. Some sociologists studying the drug war, for example, have observed that, in the election campaigns of 1986 and 1988, liberal Democrats hammered home the attack on drugs far more than Republicans did, and charged government leaders with being "soft on drugs."

The reason that Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gary Hart, George McGovern, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, and other leaders or public figures must constantly answer McCarthyite questions about the 1960s, and reveal their views on issues like drugs and sex, is that their opinions on these issues and their distance from the tradition of the 1960s are considered a measure of their respectability and readiness to accept political, corporate, and civic leadership. Conversely, there is little reason to question the Bob Doles and Dan Quayles whose loyalty to dominant norms has never been in doubt. But among those who have had any association with the dreaded "60s," only a repudiation of both the politics and the culture of the times is deemed acceptable by the media and political elites as a measure of their potential to serve as responsible leaders.

Novelist Sol Yurick captures the sense of this constant need to repress the 1960s: "[T]he 60s, like some compulsive recurrent nightmare[,] still persists in the consciousness of the ruling elites. They must exorcise and reexorcise it, demand acts of contrition, to ask of its adherents that they confess that they were possessed by the devil.... We are asked to admit, once and for all, . . . [that we] were wrong, to make
penance and obeisance, to hypostatize those sins into those devils now on trial."

Vineland, p. 313:

"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And they will."

werewolf

From Nazi Defendants Venting by William Grimes, New York Times, 26 November 2004, review of The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist's Conversations With the Defendants and Witnesses:

In 1946, Leon Goldensohn, an Army psychiatrist, was handed the assignment of a lifetime. Six weeks into the Nuremberg trials, he was put in charge of the 21 imprisoned defendants, responsible for assessing their mental health and determining, in the words of a colleague, "what made those Nazis tick." ....The evasive verbal maneuvers of Oswald Pohl, in particular, roused his blood. Pohl, who ran the concentration camp system, struggled mightily to explain that one could administer a system without actually being responsible for what occurred in it. "About the murder of the five million Jews, I had nothing whatever to do with it," he said. " The fact that I was in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany from 1942 until the end is beside the point."

"Blicero had grown on, into another animal . . . a werewolf . . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren't human." [Gravity's Rainbow, 486]

the ultimate rocket builder

Wernher von Braun with John Glenn, left (credit: NASA)

As part of the 35th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, NASA reprinted a small book titled Apollo: A Retrospective. It is a collection of documents relating to discussions and decisions made before and during the Apollo program, and serves as a reference to those who want more information about the thought processes of decision makers that led up to that day in July 1969. One document in particular, Wernher von Braun’s concluding remarks from an all-day meeting on June 7th, 1962, sheds light on an early, critical decision in the Apollo program: which method should America use to land humans on the Moon? The author captured the document in electronic format (the book version is typewritten with sections underlined by hand, and an Internet search did not reveal a copy on the Web. If there is one, don’t tell me), and it can be found here.

Imagine the scene: A smoke-filled room at Marshall Space Flight Center, with representatives of every specialty at Marshall present. Dr. Joseph Shea, the Deputy Director (Systems) of the Office of Manned Space Flight, has been hearing presentations for the last six hours. The American effort to reach the Moon has been scattered, with various centers pushing their own method of accomplishing President Kennedy’s goal, and the diffuse effort is hampering real progress towards that goal. Throughout the day, executives from Marshall present their ideas as to why Earth Orbit Rendezvous is the way to go to the Moon, despite a rising tide of opinion throughout NASA that there may be better, faster ways.

Wernher von Braun was a rocket builder. In many ways, he was the ultimate rocket builder.

Then, the time comes for Dr. von Braun to speak. Wernher von Braun, the German ex-patriot who ran the Nazi ballistic missile effort starting at 25 years of age. The man who, while always dreaming of building rockets and spacecraft for journeys to the Moon, put those dreams on hold while at the same time allowing them to come true as he worked to build the first large rocket, knowing that it would be used to rain terror on the people of London. After World War 2, seeing that exploration was not yet a priority, he stayed with military programs for the United States, building missiles to carry nuclear warheads for the next envisioned war in Europe. Once the US consolidated its peacetime space efforts under one agency, his goal came closer to reality.

Wernher von Braun was a rocket builder. In many ways, he was the ultimate rocket builder. When asked his opinion of how America should tackle the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, his plans involved building many rockets to assemble a craft in Earth orbit (a plan known as Earth Orbit Rendezvous, EOR) or to build a massive rocket and blast directly to the surface of the moon (Direct Ascent).

...read it all: Decision point by Tom Hill, The Space Review

...But no mention in that glorifying account (nor in the 1962 meeting, pynchonoid bets) of von Braun's knowledge that slave labor - individual people who suffered and died - built the V2:

Pokler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp: he could see--the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uniforms. [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 428]

flushing out Slothrop

While still under the influence of sodium amytal at PISCES, Slothrop imagines himself slithering down a toilet at the Roseland Ballroom in order to escape Malcolm X and a “dark gang of awful Negroes”[2] who are attempting to sodomize him.  However, while he avoids anal penetration at the hands of Malcolm X and his cohorts, Slothrop’s trip down the pipes forces him to face the byproducts of anal expulsion that fill the sewage lines.  Slothrop thus deflects the site of danger from his own “virgin asshole”[3] to the filth produced by the assholes of others—including his Harvard acquaintances and his African-American pursuers.  The racial images that pervade his dream indicate that Slothrop associates the proliferation of shit with the encroachment of social spaces he hopes to maintain as distinct.  However, the more Slothrop endeavors to avoid his drug-induced phantasms, the more he finds himself engulfed in excremental space.  He immerses himself in the realm of filth, and must contend with “toilet paper in his hair and a fuzzy thick dingleberry lodged up inside his right nostril.”[4]  His plunge generates both fears and desires:  the prospect of homosexual activity with the “awful Negroes” repulses and entices him, as we learn when the narrator muses that Slothrop’s vision in the sewage pipes may have arisen out of a latent wish “to be sodomized, unimaginably, by a gigantic black ape.”[5]  Furthermore, Pynchon portrays the blackness, disorder, and vulnerability that Slothrop discovers in the toilet as a potential site of refuge from the even more threatening triad of “Strength, Stability, and Whiteness”[6] that stands for the rocket cartel and its seemingly ubiquitous cohorts, who have initiated Slothrop’s psychological evaluation.  Shit opens a space of narrative chaos in GR that both overwhelms and beckons to Slothrop,[7]  who initially battles the excrementally-infused Other of his vision, and later locates in the chaotic world of blackness tentative possibilities for hope.

...read it all: Scatology and the Postmodern Subject: Tyrone Slothrop's Excremental Encounters in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. (Thanks to Dave Monroe for posting the link to PYNCHON-L.)

going native

A search for "Pynchon" in a test-drive of the new Google Scholar service pulled up this interesting-looking article: "Going Native: Representations of Egypt in Thomas Pynchon's 'Under the Rose'" by Keita Hatooka. You can download a .pdf of the article, too. Many, many pages of "Pynchon" search results at the new site.

aping the anonymous Pynchon

From What writer today can ape Pynchon and make a virtue of anonymity? by Cristina Odone, in the Guardian:

Yet which writer today can afford to ape J D Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who have made a virtue of anonymity? When Jonathan Franzen refused to play the marketing media game and go on Oprah to sell his The Corrections, he was accused of intellectual snobbery and derided for his antiquated values. In a way his critics are right. Who would content themselves with reaching an elite few when, by playing the game, they can get their message across to the multitudes? From Simon Schama to David Starkey, contemporary intellectuals have enthusiastically embraced the challenge of reaching the widest possible audience - even while knowing that in so doing they compromise their academic integrity. The days when a clutch of intellectuals sat around the Academy and listened only to one another have long gone. Surely that makes it worth compressing your book into a 90-second plug?

Zappa & Pynchon

photo credit: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis

Camille Paglia's review, 'Zappa': Freak Out! of Barry Miles' new book, Zappa: A Biography in today's New York Times, highlights some possible intersections of the two artists.

According to Paglia's review, Zappa shares at least one musical interest with Pynchon (he has written about the "cheerfully deranged world" of Jones' music) :

Zappa was interested in sound for its own sake -- as in the cowbells and car horns of Spike Jones's recordings.

It would be interesting to know if Pynchon crossed paths with Zappa or any of these folks while he was in Lower California. Chances are if he had, somebody would have kissed and told by now. (The Amazon.com page for Miles' biography doesn't yet include the "Search Inside This Book" tool that would let a browser search for references to Pynchon in the text, or in the index, unfortunately.)

As Miles chronicles Zappa's serendipitous progress toward his first recordings, we get a fascinating panorama of the 1960's counterculture in Southern California, where folk music was cross-fertilizing with hard rock. The cast of characters includes the Byrds and the Doors as well as Grace Slick, Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon and Mick Jagger, who drop by or hang out to jam in the cabins and cottages in the overgrown canyons outside Los Angeles. Miles's description of the bizarre scene, with its squatters, transients and hordes of eager groupies, vividly captures that magic creative moment.

Like Pynchon in his early writings (as he admits in the introduction to his story collection, Slow Learner , Zappa apparently had his challenges when it came to the way he treated women:

Miles, who knew Zappa, often seems ambivalent about him. There is a gap between the ''juvenile and prurient'' Zappa he describes and the one we see in the book's sensational photographs, which show a man of burning magnetism and piercing intellect. Miles calls Zappa a ''cold nihilist'' who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ''cynicism and misanthropy,'' he detects Catholic guilt and ''deep-seated problems with women.'' Zappa was ''stuck in a 50's time warp'' -- yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.

Then there's that S&M thread:

Whatever the meaning of the S-and-M and fetish imagery in his songs (a theme that makes Miles squirm), the picture painted here of Zappa's family life is troubling. When not touring (which he loved to do -- Miles calls him a ''road rat''), Zappa spent 10 to 18 hours a day holed up in his cavernous basement studio in his Tudor mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He was a born tinkerer and a groundbreaker in early digital production.

Pynchon and Zappa don't seem to share the same opinion re drugs, and Zappa doesn't seem to have enjoyed the same kind of relationship with his children that Pynchon is said to enjoy with his:

Addicted to black coffee and cigarettes (he was fiercely antidrugs), he slept during the day and saw little of his family. His second wife, Gail, said, ''Frank did not do love.'' When she was 13, Moon Unit slipped a note under the studio door to ''introduce'' herself and her ideas. The result was the hit song ''Valley Girl,'' a phenomenon when it was released in 1982. Because he thought formal education a waste of time, Zappa took his children out of school at 15 and refused to pay for college.

Link to First Chapter: Zappa: A Biography

don't miss the spectacular Toiletship exhibit!

7 November to 19 November 2004 - World Toilet Summit 2004

THE WORLD OF TOILETS CONGREGATE IN BEIJING, CHINA

The World Toilet Summit will be held in Beijing, China from 17th Nov. to 19th Nov. 2004. The theme of this Summit is: Human, Environment & Living. Centered on this theme, workshops will be organized on such hot topics as: humanized toilet, the popularization of the environmental toilet, toilet management and hygiene, toilet designing and energy-saving measures and so on. Visitors will be arranged to see the achievements of the toilet constructions in Beijing in recent years. We warmly welcome the participation of organizations, groups, individuals from various countries and regions of the world, who are dedicated themselves to the development of the world toilets. And discuss the trend of the world toilet development and show to the world the latest toilet technology. [...]

A Preview on World Toilet Summit 2004

Summit Highlights:

A Global Perspective - Relationship between Toilets & Quality of Human Life

World Class Tourism & Toilets

Entrepreneurship: Social & Economic Returns on Investments

Maintenance - Good Toilets Improve Heartland Community Living

Design - The Challenges and Considerations in Establishing the Code of Practice for Toilets.

Catering to the diversity of Culture - toilets for different cultures

Water Conservation: The Cost Effective Use of a Valuable Resource, Water

Toilet - The Past, Present and Future of Public Toilets in Beijing

Many more….

Wide ranging toilet-related topics covered by the Experts!

Benefit from an interesting mix of plenary sessions covering in-depth situational studies and invaluable experiences from not less than 25 international and
local speakers on Tourism, Design, Maintenance, Water Conservation, and Challenges and Considerations of the Toilet Code of Practice!

Network, exchange and share ideas, knowledge and skills with industry experts and your peers from around the world

Celebrate World Toilet Day on 19 November 2004!

In-depth situational studies?

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 448:

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes in the higher of the bulkheads (the Rücksichtslos here lists at a permanent angle of 23# 27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows. You'll find all the older, less glamorous, un-Teutonic-looking women in the enlisted men's machines. The real stacked and more racially golden tomatoes go to the officers, natürlich. This is some of that Nazi fanaticism.

The Rücksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing. "If the house is organic," argued the crafty early Toiletship advocates, "family lives in the house, family's organic, house is outward-and-visible sign, you see," behind their smoked glasses and under their gray crewcuts not believing a word of it, Machiavellian and youthful, not quite ripe yet for paranoia, "and if the bathroom's part of the house house-is-organic! ha-hah," singing, chiding, pointing out the broad blond-faced engineer, hair parted in the middle and slicked back, actually blushing and looking at his knees among the good-natured smiling teeth of his fellow technologists because he'd been about to forget that point (Albert Speer, himself, in a gray suit with a smudge of chalk on the sleeve, all the way in the back leaning akimbo the wall and looking remarkably like American cowboy actor Henry Fonda, has already forgotten about the house being organic, and nobody points at him, RHIP). "Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarine as the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we all know that, ha-hah!" [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] The Rücksichtslos was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navy over to the A4 rocket program.

octopus porn

Japanese octopus porn....

....14 references to octopus in Gravity's Rainbow.

(Thanks, Boing Boing!)

he helped write the jokes

Sez the Orlando Sentinel, regarding the new season for The Simpsons:

For the Nov. 14 episode, the show repeats a coup from last season. It again has landed Thomas Pynchon, the secretive author of Gravity's Rainbow. '"We depict him with a bag on his head," Jean said. "He helped write the jokes. One reason he did the show is he has a son who's a fan."

no problemo!

New Yorker, November 8, 2004

TRP is the subject of a cartoon by Roz Chast in the current issue of The New Yorker. Under the banner "Thomas Pynchon’s Evil Twin," a writer talks on the phone: "Mudwrestle on national TV in my underwear while holding up a copy of my new book? NO PROBLEMO!" Rich on Pynchon-L says his coffee cup says world’s greatest writer, but pynchonoid couldn't resolve that level of detail looking at the cartoon on the computer screen.

Boing Boing reports:

First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word-bananaphone interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing. Next, who knows -- some enterprising soul might just transform this file into spoken-word-Bananaphone ringtones. Or better yet, an extended hard trance remix.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 5:

Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts.