CACI International Inc., under scrutiny over whether it contributed to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, was awarded a $15 million extension of its work in Iraq, the U.S. Army said on Wednesday. The award allows CACI's work supporting interrogations and other intelligence operations to continue while competitive bids are sought on a new contract for these services, a senior Army contracting official said.Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105:
Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.
If the United States was in imminent danger of a terrorist attack and faraway financial institutions were supposed to be on high alert, there was no evidence of it at Franks Diner, a 78-year-old Kenosha institution where senators mix with regular folk and the prospect of another attack seemed just part of the background noise of daily life. "I don't know who on earth to believe anymore," said Michael Schumacher, a 54-year-old writer who was eating a bratwurst for breakfast. "You feel you're being manipulated all the time." Some version of that view was echoed at almost every table here as many patrons questioned whether the Bush administration was trying to manipulate the terrorist threat for political advantage.Gravity's Rainbow, p. 61:
Superior (incredulously): You? Never! Did the Kenosha Kid think ..."
Dave Gilbert helped form the Weather Underground. Without killing anyone, the Weather Underground bombed military and corporate targets, during the early 1970s....Dave Gilbert wrote, “any white movement worthy of the name ‘revolutionary’ had to take on the task of building an underground that could carry on armed struggle against this criminal government.” This is the writing of historical agency, but it is also writing from too long a stay in the wilderness. What is a revolutionary? What court could bring “this criminal government” to trial? What is a “white movement”? These questions were not answered, though they remain on the table. As for the meaning of “underground”, and “armed struggle,” the answers became clear.
What David did wrong happened in 1981 when Thatcher and Reagan were in power, and the prisons grew. In fact it was the year when the “golden gulag” was placed around the neck of the republic, as Ruth Gilmore shows. David Gilbert was arrested for his role as a driver in a notorious attempt to expropriate a Brinks money truck in Nyack, N.Y., in which two police officers and one Brinks guard were killed. As an accessory he is now serving a life sentence in the N.Y. state prison system, shunted about according to the whim and ways of the Department of Corrections - now Elmira, now Attica, presently Dannemora.
At the opening of his trial in September 1982 he said to the court which he and his co-defendants, Kuwasi Balagoon and Judy Clark, refused to recognize, “We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is precisely because of our love of life, because we revel in the human spirit, that we became freedom fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist system.”
AFH: When you use the word "hippie" are you referring to the ideology in songs like Joni Mitchell's, "They paved paradise and put in a parking lot," or Chrissie Hynde's, "I went back to my city"? Hynde is not a hippie, but those songs seem to relate to your work. Don’t you consider "hippie" a pejorative description for political art? It seems that label is often used to make relevant statements sound anachronistic or too extreme?Vineland, p. 28:
KG: I disagree. I think because I was born in the 70's and missed the 60's I idealize the word hippie. I admire hippies because I associate them with freedom, open-mindedness, experimentation, revolution, peace and an uncorrupted attitude towards money.
AFH: You must be referring to the original hippies. Don't you find there to be something distressingly naïve about current-day hippies since that aesthetic and those ideals have been so mocked and commercialized by subsequent eras?
KG: Well, I really like the Easy Rider "we can live off the land" idea of a hippie, but it's a little disheartening when the song "Revolution" refers to Nike. I'm pretty fascinated with the way the meaning of the 60's has evolved. I don't think the term hippie would be used now. There isn't really a specific hippie style anymore and attitudes have shifted and broadened due to hindsight. They've fractured into multiple groups like environmentalists, the health conscious, organic farmers, political activists, anarchists...etc.. even yuppies.
Caray, you sixties people, it's amazing. Ah love ya! Go anywhere, it don't matter -- hey, Mongolia! Go way out into smalltown Outer Mongolia, ese, there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin up, two fingers in a V, hollerin, 'What's yer sign, man?' or singing 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note.
Heicheng, the largest and best preserved ancient city site along the Silk Road that linked China with Central and Western Asia, is being devoured by flowing sand.from: Ancient city site in Inner Mongolia jeopardized by sand
The only Mahdi is the desert. Mohammed Ahmed, the Madhi of '83, was believed by some to be sleeping not dead in a cavern near Baghdad. And on the Last Day, when the prophet Christ re-establishes el-Islam as the religion of the world he will return to life to slay Dejal the antichrist at a church gate somewhere in Palestine. The Angel Asrafil will trumpet a blast to kill everything on earth, and another to awaken the dead. But the desert's angel had hidden all the trumpets beneath the sand. The desert was prophecy enough of the Last Day.
In the early 20th century, for example, James Joyce's Ulysses was attacked as obscene. Often complaints focused on its frank depiction of a woman's nonmarital sexual desires (in Molly Bloom's famous monologue, combined with ruminations about her menstrual period, deflationary thoughts about the penis, and memories of love). Joyce believed that our disgust with our own bodily functions lay at the root of much social evil -- nationalism, fanaticism, misogyny. Like D.H. Lawrence, he held that a healthy society would be one that came to grips with its own mortal bodily nature. Joyce's novel, of course, is the opposite of disgusting to one who reads it as it asks to be read. It presents the body as an object of many emotions -- desire, humor, tender love, calm acceptance. But one emotion that is conspicuously absent from its invitation to readers is the emotion of disgust....
Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.
Fussell was vigorously opposed to last year's invasion of Iraq: "If you don't get angry about this war you don't deserve to be alive." Under no illusions about the cruelty of frontline troops (in Doing Battle he describes how his own platoon murdered weeping, surrendering German soldiers, and elsewhere reflects on the fashion among American troops in the Pacific for collecting Japanese skulls), he regards the torture of Iraqi prisoners as "absolutely predictable - it's usually practised by soldiers upon each other". Sadism, he says, is ordinary in war: "That's why it has to be so carefully guarded by rules - the Geneva convention and so on."
"The greatest irony," Fussell wrote at the end of The Great War, "is that it is only now [after the relaxation of censorship in the 60s], when those who remember the events are almost all dead, that the literary means for adequate remembering and interpreting are finally publicly accessible." In a close reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, he picked out Brigadier Pudding, tormented by the image of Passchendaele and its "shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions", for whom ritualised sexual humiliation becomes a compulsive means of remembering. When OUP asked Philip Larkin for a comment on Fussell's book, the poet called this final section "obscene nonsense". Fussell, who went further than most in his discussion of the profound damage, to minds as well as bodies, that could be the long-term effect of war, says: "It strikes me as almost cruel, to write about the last seconds of the lives of young people who are scared to death, as if war were a matter of battalions and staff organisations and so on. It's unimaginative, hopeless - it doesn't do any good."
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, coastal Northern California is a haunted land of dripping redwood forests and leftover hippie enclaves from the 1960s. The hippie enclaves have mostly been replaced by wineries, spas and expensive boutiques, but the forests are deep as ever. And western Sonoma County this weekend hosts one of the premier age-group long-course triathlons in North America.
Ooka, who is perhaps best known in the West for the novel Nobi (1951), translated by Ivan Morris as Fires on the Plain (1957), and the memoir Tsukamaru made (1948), epitomized the Japanese recruit of the latter days of the Pacific War; he was ill-trained, badly commanded, and largely abandoned by the central military bureaucracy. Conscripted in 1944 at the age of thirty-five, Ooka received three months of basic training and was subsequently sent to the front where he served as his battalion's communications man until his battalion was routed and numerous men killed. Captured in late January 1945, he was one of the few who survived, possibly because of his capture and ensuing imprisonment. Survival was very traumatic for Ooka, who was troubled that he, an unworthy soldier, had survived when so many others had not. Stahl's provocative book suggests that Ooka only began to process his guilt feelings in early, overtly autobiographical works, and that this process was actually the theme that grounded his postwar writing career. Stahl posits that writing became Ooka's survivor mission, allowing him first to process and then to come to terms with his own survival, by working through issues related to the collective Japanese war experience. ....through writing, Ooka served as a voice for the dead and those who could not speak and also as a moral conscience for the Japanese people in the process of remembering the war. In the process, Ooka also healed himself.Memory, Guilt, Mourning and Responsibility: A Writer's Pilgrimage
On moonless or overcast nights, Takeshi and Ichizo take off all their clothes and splash each other with Cypridina light, running and giggling under the palms.
Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon ends with the death of Charles Mason in 1786 and the decision of his two eldest children to stay in Philadelphia and "be Americans." As to what constitutes that nationality, however, Pychon remains silent, writes Olster. Here, she discusses the literary representation of America in relation to the colonial England in Pynchon's novel.
Sadhu Mangal Das alias 'Current Baba', touches a naked wire at least three times every day to become 'intoxicated'. It's reported he brushed against a live wire sometime ago and found the sensation to be so good he can no longer do without his daily dose. The man from Bahorisar in Uttar Pradesh said he tried the electricity wires because drugs failed to excite him, says The Hindustan Times. The 54-year-old also tried getting bitten by snakes and scorpions. He also tried drinking potions made from poisonous seeds. Dr Amit Chaturvedi of the Lalitpur Civil Hospital said: "The human body can absorb currents up to 12 volts. In this case however, repeated exposure to electricity seems to have built up his body's tolerance levels to as much as 16 volts."Gravity's Rainbow, p. 698:
Son, been wondering about this, ah, "screwing in" you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha?Mason & Dixon, p. 286:
"A childhood Misadventure with a Torpedo," Dixon, with a brief move of his toward Mason, confides,"--thus his Sensitivity at all References to the," -- whispering,-- "electrickal!"V., p. 78:
Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was a miniature electric switch. Single-pole, double-throw. Waldetar recoiled and stood blinking. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve.
"You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is closed like this I act the way I do now. When it is thrown the other--"
"Papa!" the girl cried.
"Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean."
Germany has rejected calls to pay compensation for the killing of thousands of Namibia's ethnic Hereros during the colonial era. The German ambassador to Botswana told a gathering of Hereros in northern Botswana that Germany deeply regretted what he called "this unfortunate past". However, he said it was not prepared to offer reparations.
Some 1,000 Hereros were there to mark the killing of their ancestors who rebelled against German rule in 1904. They used the meeting to renew demands for $4bn in compensation, to be paid by the German government and by companies who they say benefited from slavery and exploitation under German rule.
But Ambassador Hans-Dietrich von Bothmer said German development aid was intended to benefit all Namibians, not just one ethnic group. Correspondents say Mr von Bothmer's speech was virtually identical to one delivered by his counterpart in Namibia, Wolfgang Massing, at a previous ceremony in January.
Between 35,000 and 105,000 of the Hereros living in Namibia lost their lives in the 12 January 1904 massacre, while thousands of others fled to neighbouring Botswana.
...Calvin had shared all that he had felt, or that for a moment their thoughts--and more--had liquified and flowed indivisibly, along with a trillion others. And that he understood perfectly what had happened, because in the moment of shared wisdom, all his questions had been answered.Vineland, pp. 90-91:
"We were read weren't we? .... For a moment I think we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light."
"A computer," Calvin said...."That's what Hades is. A computer made out of nuclear matter, the mass of a star devoted to processing information, storing it. And this light is an aperture into it; a way to enter the computational matrix.
If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least - an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name - its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune. And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 650-651:
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it's only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.
Earlier this month, for instance, CNN reported that police officers across the United States are carrying handheld wireless computers on which they can access private details from large commercial databases about anyone they encounter on their beat. Emboldened by a new post-Cold War role in the U.S.-led "war on terrorism," security and intelligence agencies are exploring new electronic technologies that will enhance the collection and dissemination of the private records of citizens across international borders. "It's all about data gathering and integration of databases, information sharing and risk assessment by computer generated profiling," says Roch Tassé, coordinator of the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), a coalition made up of NGOs, churches, unions, environmental and civil rights advocates and groups representing immigrant and refugee communities in Canada.Thomas Pynchon, 1997, Introduction to Stone Junction:
The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.
An elderly American tourist had to be rescued in Germany after he got lost while using a 90-year-old guide book. Hank Edwards, 79, ended up stuck in a German forest for two days after finding his way with a book bought by his father in 1914. Throughout the years he kept the book, practising the German words and studying the places mentioned in the copy of Beautiful Bayreuth. When he was finally able to make the trip, he got lost trying to find attractions that had long since disappeared.... "It's still very beautiful here even if it's not what he expected."Mason & Dixon, p. 141:
Occasionally Insanty roll'd a sly Eye-ball into the picture. Treatises on "parageography" arriv'd, with alternative Maps of the world superimpos'd upon the more familiar ones.Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner:
That old Baedeker trick again.
Posts
All Comments
