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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

information provided by Olaylar.

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

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

Diana Gabaldon is a fire hose.

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

You struggle to keep up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from:

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

Hundreds of pages?

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

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

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

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

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

Todorov re Pynchon:

'GOP' supporters actually Greens

[by] Kerana M. Todorov

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

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

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

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


The Union, 2 November 2002

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

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

Quote of the day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libertarian mag compares Beltway sniper to Pynchon

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

Reason Online, re the Beltway sniper hunt.

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

Close-up of coach spitting.

Close-up of player spitting.

Close-up of two players spitting sunflower seeds.

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

Batter steps back in.

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

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

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

Close-up of coach scratching his crotch.

Close-up of player scratching his crotch.

Pitcher throws to first. Runner is back in time.

Pitcher throws to first again. Runner is back again.

Close-up of manager pulling his ear.

Close-up of old couple in the stands.

Close-up of hitter adjusting his batting gloves.

Hitter steps out of the box.

Pitcher steps off the mound.

Pitcher back on the mound.

Hitter back in the box.

Throw to first. Runner is back in time.

Close-up of three players spitting sunflower seeds.

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

Pitcher looks in for the sign. Shakes it off.

Close-up of old lady spitting.

Close-up of ralley monkey spitting.

Throw to first. Runner is back in time.

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

Close-up of pitcher going to the resin bag.

Hitter adjusts his batting gloves.

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

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

Montreal Gazette, 14 October 2002

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

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

NorthJersey.com, 14 October 2002

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--What?

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

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

--You always did.

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

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

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