...from a letter to a fellow pynchonoid today:

Not to boast, but it's a fact, I had the most books checked out on a library card in the history of the Camp Howze library (6 clicks along the MSR from Panmunjom, R.O.K., helping the mechanized infantry roll out on the frontier of freedom, land of the morning calm), stretching back to the '50s (I think, that's the factoid I recall anyway, this foggy Bay evening). Not that there were ever very many customers, so it wasn't much of a competition. It was the only place on base that was air conditioned, which made it a very attractive spot during the warm and humid months (there were many; I was there from early January until nearly Christmas 1973), but that was, apparently, a well-kept secret, or maybe nobody was interested, not hard to understand given that the standard barracks reading fare (Playboy, comic books) had no place in the library. The library was almost always empty, quiet and cool (and this was a base where it was generally pretty easy, and common, to sneak away from work and goof). I managed to get down there everyday, on the pretext of running some errand or other -- I was Company Clerk, plenty of reasons to be cruising around the base. I was a draftee, too, and therefore not expected to take things very seriously from the get-go.

I still kick myself for not stealing the copy of GR I found there. Crisp and new, it appeared on the shelf around mid-summer, late June or July, which meant it was more or less hot off the press, a first edition worth a lot of money now. But who knew? That was my first introduction to Pynchon . So I left it there when I came stateside again. For all I know, it may still be there. I haven't been back.

That summer -- in the heat, dodging mosquitos, flying on cheap weed and O.J.'s, Gravity's Rainbow spoke to me. I had the experience I've heard other Pynchon lovers describe, that peerless voice talking to me in a way that no other author had before (or since), in my time and place, about so many things that seemed real and vital to me. Part of what Pynchon does for me is to capture much of the particular experience of growing up early in the Boomer years, getting across in his books -- Gravity's Rainbow especially -- a lot of the feeling of the late 30s and especially the 40s (when he was a kid) that I got by osmosis ( listening to them talk and their music, and the movies they loved, etc.) with my parents (father born in '22, mother in '33) , then the '50s I know myself from when I was a kid (born in '52), but he puts it through a '60s kaleidoscope that really brings it home to me in a perspective that reverberates with some of my own coming-of-age experiences -- being in the military, especially, peacetime, more or less, Army, and ever-grateful that they stopped sending draftees to Vietnam about the time I was finishing boot camp at Fort Ord, Monterrey, California -- although the day I shipped out to Korea, a crew came through Oakland Army Base where we were waiting for the bus to Travis Air Force Base, looking for clerks, cooks, and carpenters to send to Vietnam that day, so I spent the day hiding in the bathrooms,one step ahead of getting shanghai'd...

...but, that's another story altogether...

Heard a thought-provoking (fleeting though the thoughts -- triggered by the notes of sadness and creative joy in Mda's voice as he talked about his work and its origins -- prove to have been, washed away in the flood of work on my own, far-less-interesting, unfortunately, book today) interview with Zakes Mda, author of the new novel, The Heart of Redness , on NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Echoes of Heart of Darkness, and Gravity's Rainbow.

Kekulé's nightmare:

A cobra bit a sleeping woman. She sank her teeth into it and threw it away. The snake went limp and died.

Of these cool Pynchon pix, I still like Pynchon the sailorman the best.

"Later on their bones were fished up again and made
into charcoal, and charcoal into ink, which Angelo,
having a dark sense of humor, used in all his subsequent
communications with Faggio, the present document
included"
The Crying of Lot 49


"In January, two investigators from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights had argued their way into the nearby Sheberghan prison. What they saw shocked them. More than 3,000 Taliban prisoners—who had surrendered to the victorious Northern Alliance forces at the fall of Konduz in late November—were crammed, sick and starving, into a facility with room for only 800. The Northern Alliance commander of the prison acknowledged the charnel-house conditions, but pleaded that he had no money. He begged the PHR to send food and supplies, and to ask the United Nations to dig a well so the prisoners could drink unpolluted water.

But stories of a deeper horror came from the prisoners themselves. However awful their conditions, they were the lucky ones. They were alive. Many hundreds of their comrades, they said, had been killed on the journey to Sheberghan from Konduz by being stuffed into sealed cargo containers and left to asphyxiate. Local aid workers and Afghan officials quietly confirmed that they had heard the same stories. They confirmed, too, persistent reports about the disposal of many of the dead in mass graves at Dasht-e Leili.

[...] How many are buried at Dasht-e Leili? Haglund won’t speculate. “The only thing we know is that it’s a very large site,” says a U.N. official privy to the investigation, and there was “a high density of bodies in the trial trench.” Other sources who have investigated the killings aren’t surprised. “I can say with confidence that more than a thousand people died in the containers,” says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh, director of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. NEWSWEEK’s extensive inquiries of prisoners, truckdrivers, Afghan militiamen and local villagers—including interviews with survivors who licked and chewed each other’s skin to stay alive—suggest also that many hundreds of people died.

[...] The killings illustrate the problems America will face if it opts to fight wars by proxy, as the United States did in Afghanistan, using small numbers of U.S. Special Forces calling in air power to support local fighters on the ground. It also raises questions about the responsibility Americans have for the conduct of allies who may have no —interest in applying protections of the Geneva Conventions. The benefit in fighting a proxy-style war in Afghanistan was victory on the cheap—cheap, at any rate, in American blood. The cost, NEWSWEEK’s investigation has established, is that American forces were working intimately with “allies” who committed what could well qualify as war crimes."

from:
The Death Convoy of Afghanistan, Newsweek magazine, 26 August 2002

"[...] I feel obliged to speak the truth to my
contemporaries and I feel ashamed if they take me to
be someone whom I am not. In their opinion, a person
who "had faith" is fortunate. They assume that as a
result of certain inner experiences he was able to
find an answer, while they know only questions. So how
can I make a profession of faith in the presence of my
fellow human beings? After all, I am one of them,
seeking, as they do, the laws of inheritance, and I am
just as confused. [...] But what of death? I would say
that it has made an especially spectacular appearance
in my century and that it is the real heroine of the
literature and art which is contemporary with my
lifetime. Death has always accompanied us, and word,
line, color, sound drew their raison d'Ítre from
opposition to it; it did not, however, always behave
with the same majesty. The danse macabre that appears
in late medieval painting signified the desire to
domesticate death or to become familiar with it
through its ubiquitous presence, a friendly
partnership, as it were. Death was familiar, well
known, took part in feasts, had the right to
citizenship in the citÈ. Scientific-technological
civilization has no place for death, which is such an
embarrassment that it spoils all our calculations, but
it turns out that this is not for the best. For death
intrudes itself into our thoughts the less we wish to
think about it. And so literature and art start
referring to it incessantly, transforming themselves
into an areligious meditation on death and conducting
"pre-casket somatism," to borrow a phrase from
contemporary Polish poetry.

Here, perhaps, is where I part ways with many people
with whom I would like to be in solidarity but cannot
be. To put it very simply and bluntly, I must ask if I
believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My
answer to this is: "Yes." So I believe in an
absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer
without any of those evasions and artful tricks
employed by theologians: "Yes or no?" I answer: "Yes,"
and by that response I nullify death's omnipotence. If
I am mistaken in my faith, I offer it as a challenge
to the Spirit of the Earth. He is a powerful enemy;
his field is the world as mathematical necessity, and
in the face of earthly powers how weak an act of faith
in the incarnate God seems†to†be.

I must add immediately that when thinking about my own
death or participating with my contemporaries in a
funeral ceremony, I am no different from them and my
imagination is rendered powerless just as theirs is:
it comes up against a blank wall. It is simply
impossible for me to form a spatial conception of
Heaven and Hell, and the images suggested by the world
of art or the poetry of Dante and Milton are of little
help. But the imagination can function only spatially;
without space the imagination is like a child who
wants to build a palace and has no blocks. So what
remains is the covenant, the Word, in which man
trusts. [...]

The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are
wise men somewhere who know the truth. That is the
source of the beauty and passion of intellectual
pursuits -- in philosophical and theological books, in
lecture halls. Various "initiations into mystery" were
also said to satisfy that need, be it through the
alchemist's workshop or acceptance into a lodge (let
us recall Mozart's Magic Flute). As we move from
youthful enthusiasms to the bitterness of maturity, it
becomes ever more difficult to anticipate that we will
discover the center of true wisdom, and then one day,
suddenly, we realize that others expect to hear
dazzling truths from us (literal or figurative)
graybeards. [...] "

from:
If Only This Could Be Said by Czeslaw Milosz

At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason.
Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white
faggot's-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes . . .
did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did you
want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bondage? Where
is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob of that nervous
imperial staff. . . .
Gravity's Rainbow p. 324

Blicero launching his love object in a blaze of glory
recalls Achilles as he sends his beloved Patroclus off
to die:

"Oh would to god--Father Zeus, Athena and lord Apollo--
not one of all these Trojans could flee his death, not one,
no Argive either, but we could stride from the slaughter
so we could bring Troy's hallowed crown of towers
topping down around us--you and I alone!"
-Iliad (16.115-19, translation by Robert Fagles)


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

"Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error - but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles."
New Scientist


"Well, it's a beginning," she says. "It floats like a Duck,-- it fools other Ducks, who are quite sophisticated in these matters, into believing it a Duck. It's a Basis. Complexity of Character might develop, in time...."
Mason & Dixon, p. 667

"[...] The crypto-fascist Philip Johnson famously dismissed Wright as the greatest architect of the 19th Century. [Perhaps, architects who build glass houses shouldn't throw stones.] There's a certain grain of truth about this, though not, certainly, in the sense that Johnson, who embodied the worst strains of modernism (and post-modernism), meant to convey.

Wright was a utopian, in the grand romantic tradition. He was grounded in Rousseau and often let slip that his favorite poets were Walt Whitman and the dreamy Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Along with fellow poet (and snitch) Robert Southey, Coleridge cooked up an idea for a utopian community in western Pennsylvania they called, somewhat clumsily for two poets capable of stunning lyricism, the Pantisocracy. They were going to pay for the land on the proceeds of a long poem chronicling the life and death of Robespierre. But the plan ultimately fell apart over violent disagreements between the two on sexual freedom (which Coleridge advocated) and slavery (which Coleridge abhorred). Interestingly, the Pantisocracy, charted out only on maps in Coleridge's house in Keswick, was to have been located not far from where Wright built his most famous house, Fallingwater. [...]

The early half of the 19th century was a time of incredible optimism and radicalism in the United States. In the 1840s, there were 100,000 people living in more than 150 socialist/utopian communities across the country. "Those towns stood for everything eccentric: for abolition, short skirts, whole-wheat bread, hypnotism, phonetic spelling, phrenology, free love and the common ownership of property,'' wrote the journalist Helen Beal Woodward in 1945 article on utopian communities. The Civil War largely put an end to all that, but the utopian spirit continued to thrive after the war, particularly in the prairie states, through the rise of the populist parties and the Wisconsin progressives. [...] the Jacobs House, and the dozens of Usonian designs that would follow, did more than that. It was truly one of the first environmentally-conscious designs, utilizing passive solar heating, natural cooling and lighting with his signature clerestory windows, native materials, radiant floor heating, and L-shaped floorplan that anchored the house around a garden terrace. [...] Why are we left only with the barest elements of the design, the cookie-cutter ranch houses that came to dominate the lots of suburban America?

There's no simple explanation. But one thing is clear. Wright's plans to revolutionize the American residential living space ran afoul of interests of the federal government. Think about this: in his 70-year career Wright didn't win one contract for a federal building. Not even during the heyday of the New Deal.

It all came down to politics. Wright's politics were vastly more complicated and honorable than that embodied by Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's self-serving portrait of Wright in her novel The Fountainhead. Sure there was a libertarian strain to Wright, which Rand seized on and distorted to her own perverse ends. But he also was drawn to the prairie populism espoused by the likes of the great Ignatius Donnelly. It's this version of Wright that makes an appearance in John dos Passos' USA trilogy.

Wright was a pacifist and his i outright opposition to war cost him government commissions, the great lifeline of the professional architect, especially during the Depression and World War II. [...] John Sergeant, in his excellent book on Wright's Usonian houses, argues that there's a mutual admiration between Wright and the noted anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. In 1899, Kropotkin moved to Chicago, living in the Hull House commune, set up by radical social reformer Jane Addams, where Wright often lectured, including a reading of his famous essay the Arts and Crafts Machine.

But, in those crucial decades of the 20s and 30s, Wright's political views seemed to align most snugly with Wisconsin progressives, as personified by the LaFollettes. In fact, Philip LaFollette served as Wright's attorney and sat on the board of Wright's corporation.

None of this escaped the attention of the authorities. From World War I to his final days, Wright found himself the subject of a campaign of surveillance, harassment and intimidation by the federal government. In 1941, 26 members of Wright's Taliesin fellowship signed a petition objecting to the draft and calling the war effort futile and immoral. The draft board sent the letter to the FBI, where it immediately came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who already loathed Wright.

Twice Hoover himself demanded that the Justice Department bring sedition charges against Wright. He was rebuffed both times by the attorney general, but, typically, that only drove Hoover to expand the surveillance and harassment by his goons.

But, as a review of Wright's FBI file reveals, the Fed's interest in the architect extended far beyond his pacifism. Hoover's men recorded his dalliances with the Wobblies, his continuing attempts to combat the US government's dehumanization of the Japanese during and after the war, his rabble-rousing speeches on college campuses, his work for international socialists and third world governments, including Iraq, and his rather unorthodox views on sexual relations (the Feds noted that Wright seemed to have a particular obsession with Marlene Dietrich). [...]

from:
Usonian Utopias: Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
by Jeffrey St. Clair

....Vineland echoes... not the WWW, the IWW....

"At least 30 al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba have tried to commit suicide,doctors at the detention centre say."

"The Falun Gong says about 500 members have died in police custody in the past three years and tens of thousands more have been thrown in prison or sent to labor camps."

Repeat after me: "Vineland is only fiction."

... on that world-as-text tip:

"We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies, genders, genealogies, (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annhilating effects. For words are pursuers. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance. Without the inherence of soul in words, speech would not move us, word would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths."

-James Hillman
Re-Visioning Psychology

"Finally somebody has begun to talk out loud about what must change, and what must be left behind, if we are to navigate the perilous turn of this millennium and survive."
--Thomas Pynchon
(in his support quote for We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura)

"a screaming comes across the sky"

"[...] Writing in The New York Times, just over a month
after the terrorist attack, Putnam found a nation
“achingly familiar” to the America that had been
stunned by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He
went on to depict the vast government-backed
grass-roots effort that “taught ‘the greatest
generation’ an enduring lesson in civic
involvement”—an effort that included everything from
the Civil Defense Corps to the Red Cross, from victory
gardens to Boy Scouts collecting scrap and selling war
stamps.

“All Americans felt they had to do their share,
thereby enhancing each American’s sense that her
commitment and contribution mattered,” he wrote. “As
one said later in an oral history of the home front:
‘You just felt that the stranger sitting next to you
in a restaurant, or someplace, felt the same way you
did about the basic issues.’”
Overall, Americans have kept on a remarkably even
keel, compared with what happened in past wars.

Dr. Putnam is no doubt well-meaning, but his
characterization of the home front in World War II is
also an object lesson in just how careful one has to
be in making the future over in the image of the past.
The war effort at home was undoubtedly one of the
proudest episodes—and possibly the most important
episode—in our history, perhaps even more vital than
the great sacrifices made by our men at the front. It
was U.S. production that sustained not only our own
forces but those of all our allies and that brought
victory around the world. This was not merely a
victory of quantity, either, but one accomplished
while preserving almost all the rights and privileges
of a free people. The war proved that a democracy
could triumph over any modern totalitarian ideology,
something that had seemed very much in doubt just a
few years earlier.

The triumph was incontrovertible, but it did not come
out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The America of the
Second World War was a turbulent and often frightening
place, characterized by immense social upheaval and
dislocation. It might well have been true that the
stranger sitting next to you in a restaurant felt the
same way about things—unless, that is, he or she
happened to be of a different race. Inasmuch as color
was the deepest fissure in American society, it is not
surprising that during the war we fractured most often
along this line.

The most infamous case, of course, was the forced
detention of some 110,000 Japanese-Americans in barren
desert camps while their property was sold off for a
pittance—and their sons formed some of the most
decorated fighting units of the war. But racial
hysteria was hardly restricted to Asian-Americans. In
1943 alone there were 242 race riots in 47 cities as
the war sparked an epic migration of both poor
Southern blacks and whites into urban ports and
industrial centers. The worst was in Detroit, in 1943,
where white mobs ended up roaming through the city’s
downtown, shouting, “Here’s some fresh meat!” while
they beat and shot any African-Americans they
found—often with the help of the local police. Before
it was all over, 34 people died, and pictures of the
riot were gleefully plastered across the pages of
Signal, Germany’s leading picture magazine, as proof
that a “mongrel” country could not win the war.

Discrimination remained routine in all industries,
with blacks making less money than whites for the same
jobs, and with whites frequently refusing to work with
them anyway. The great black labor leader A. Philip
Randolph had to threaten to lead a massive protest
march in Washington, D.C., before the Roosevelt
administration would commit to equal pay for equal
work on war projects.

Elsewhere, protests were not so availing. Mob assaults
on black civilians and even soldiers continued
throughout the Deep South, and the sad fact remains
that the greatest generation was also the last
lynching generation. [...]

The business of the war was sometimes just as sordid.
Harry Truman’s Senate committee turned up one case
after another of war profiteering, and at least 20
percent of Americans surveyed admitted that they
viewed the black market as a legitimate means of
procuring consumer goods.[...] "


continues at:
September 11 vs. December 7 Did Americans behave better back then? by Kevin Baker

Vineland echo...

"Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps
for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants"
has moved him from merely being a political
embarrassment to being a constitutional menace.

"Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little
publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite
incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip
them of their constitutional rights and access to the
courts by declaring them enemy combatants.

"The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate
congressional hearings and reconsideration of
Ashcroft's fitness for this important office. Whereas
Al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens,
Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our
liberties.

"The camp plan was forged at an optimistic time for
Ashcroft's small inner circle, which has been
carefully watching two test cases to see whether this
vision could become a reality. The cases of Jose
Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi will determine whether
U.S. citizens can be held without charges and subject
to the arbitrary and unchecked authority of the
government. [...] "

...continues at
Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision
Attorney general shows himself as a menace to liberty. by Jonathan Turley
(originally published on Wednesday, August 14, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times)

...World-as-Text, OK, so let's inscribe a Line on the
world, lots of Lines, divide it up, measure
everything, experiment, slice and dice, analyze,
control, oops, "Control" turns out to be an illusion,
the world resists, the green resurrection miraculously
prevails until vertical Lines (drilling through
horizontal strata to suck out the beyond-the-zero Thanatoid
ghost life of dead dinosaurs; "they paved Paradise and
they put up a parking lot" -- the Mall that follows
the Line as history converges to Italian opera --
quoting a 60's songwriter Pynchon is said to have quoted
in an early draft of GR) suck the very life out of
the living Earth, until the final light flashes as we
bring the Towers and everything else crashing down
around us, in that last delta-t of the World-Is-Text
ex/im/ploding, that carefully-calculated atom bomb
coming back to bite us on the ass bigger and badder
than any Frankenstein's monster, but that Duck can
continue to cut through glowing clouds, impervious,
faithfully following the Line, its world shrunk down
to a single inscribed Line, billing and cooing with
Werner von Braun on the other side where nothing ever
really dies...


...and now for something not quite completely different, thanks to Dave Monroe:

http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/histsem/anglo/html_2001/Finzsch%20Themen02.htm
http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/histsem/anglo/html_2001/BibliographieDixon.htmr
http://uk-online.uni-koeln.de/cgi-bin/show.pl/comment?uni=1&sem=ss02&vid=245&i_nr=13&f_nr=4

"The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. [...] What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail. In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these -- all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds, after all? What are the odds, indeed? For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence -- unexpected connections that are both riveting and rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an exercise in eliminating the taint of coincidence; police work is often a feint and parry between those trying to prove coincidence and those trying to prove complicity."
New York Times, 11 August 2002

"Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination--not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. . . ."
(Gravity's Rainbow, 703)

"Unbeknownst to Riefenstahl, she had acquired a very special fan. Enchanted by her dance by the sea in The Sacred Mountain, the avid cinephile Adolf Hitler brushed aside the objections of his jealous propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and commissioned the 32-year-old actress to make a film record of the annual Nazi party congress at Nuremberg. The documentary she delivered was like nothing seen before, or since. Repellent and riveting, a study in pagan kitsch and industrial-strength totalitarianism, Triumph of the Will bequeathed the iconic images of Nazi Germany: Hitler, soaring above the medieval city and swooping down from the heavens like an eagle, haloed by sunlight as adoring crowds bathe in his divine aura; solemn brownshirts marching in geometric precision; montages of virile German youth in roughneck, homoerotic play; and everywhere, rolling seas of swirling banners and fluttering flags emblazoned with the talismanic swastika. "It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history," Riefenstahl later claimed. "It is therefore a documentary, not a propaganda film." [...]

"Far and away the most devastating critique of Riefenstahl's oeuvre -- and to the director the most infuriating -- was launched by the critic Susan Sontag in her oft-cited essay "Fascinating Fascism," originally published in The New York Times Book Review in 1975. Looking over Riefenstahl's photography book The Last of the Nuba (1973), Sontag interpreted the color portraits of sinewy Sudanese tribesmen as of a piece with her earlier work, a continuum of a fascist aesthetic built on the cult of the body beautiful. "Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films," Sontag observed. "Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl's portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical." Sontag added, "To cast Riefenstahl in the role of the individualist-artist, defying philistine bureaucrats and censorship by the patron state ... should seem like nonsense to anyone who has seen Triumph of the Will." [...]

"A long-rumored Hollywood biopic is perennially in development, with Madonna and Jodie Foster reportedly interested in the plum role. "

from: Leni Riefenstahl: Ethics of an Auteur by Thomas Doherty, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, issue of August 9, 2002.


". . . yes, bitch--yes, little bitch--poor helpless bitch you're coming can't stop yourself now I'll whip you again whip till you bleed. . . . Thus Pokler's whole front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight's image of the delicious victim bound on her dungeon rack, filling the movie screen--close-ups of her twisting face, niles under the silk grown amazingly erect, making lies of her announcements of pain--bitch! she loves it . . . and Leni no longer solemn wife, embittered source of strength, but Margherita Erdmann underneath him" (Gravity's Rainbow, 397)

"The Hamzanama is a popular collection of dramatic stories based loosely on the exploits of Hamza, uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who traveled the world spreading the teachings of Islam. Neither historical nor doctrinal in substance, the stories were born of the tradition of Persian oral literature that entertained audiences around nomadic campfires and in urban coffee houses with elaborate tales of fantastic derring-do.

"The huge paintings that together compose Akbar's Hamzanama were apparently held up to illustrate dramatic oral presentations by court storytellers. The stories describe heroes bravely confronting a host of formidable and menacing giants, sorcerers, demons and dragons, while other characters were depicted using more guile than force to rescue princes or maneuver their hapless foes into comical predicaments. Painted on cotton, the manuscript originally contained 1,400 roughly 2-foot-high unbound illustrations and accompanying text." -- Smithsonian Institution


"The characters in his books are all cartoon characters. He writes in frames just like a comic strip. He’s writing cartoons instead of drawing them. They’re not two dimensional but holograms. They’re real people who go in and out of being cartoons. They go back and forth between the real world and the cartoon world."
--attributed to former Pynchon companion, Christine Wexler in Lineland:
Mortality and Mercy on the Internet's Pynchon-L@Waste.Org Discussion List by Jules Siegel, Christine Wexler, et al.

"The New York Times wrote recently about Russia getting
a new 'Western-style' legal code: 'The code enshrines
the fundamental concept of presumption of innocence
and gives new responsibilities--and, in theory,
independence--to judges, while it will gradually strip
prosecutors of the enormous powers they have wielded
over almost every step of any prosecution, from arrest
to trial. Defense lawyers will have the right to
challenge the admissibility of evidence, throwing out,
among other things, evidence collected by wiretaps
without a warrant.' The Times writes without a sense of irony. None of
these constitutional protections exist anymore in the
U.S. [...]
The First 21st Century Police State, August 7, 2002


"Brock [...] leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that
decorate fascist architecture." (Vineland, p. 287)

"In a development bordering on what the American Civil Liberties Union called 'surreal,' the on-line magazine Salon.com today revealed that the Department of Justice is forwarding incoming Operation TIPS calls to the Fox-owned "America's Most Wanted" television series."

"Madre de Dios!" an oddly panicked, high-pitched Hector was up and running for the kitchen -- luckily, Zoyd noted, having left a twenty on the table -- now with a platoon of folks come crashing in after him, what was this, all wearing identical camo jumpsuits and crash helmets with the word NEVER stenciled on. Two stayed by the door, two more went over to check the bowling alley, the rest went running on after Hector into the kitchen, where there was already a lot of screaming and clanging. [...] National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation [...] "A dryin'-out place for Tubefreeks? "

--Vineland, 32-33

MB DRO
ROSHI

(GR 693)


"No incumbent U.S. president has ever visited
Hiroshima during his tenure."


"a date which will live in infamy"