What if?

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

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

Tim Ware's fabulous ThomasPynchon.com:

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

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 556:

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

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

It's "V period"

In case you're in this Kentucky neighborhood:

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

Tendrils alert

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

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

Thomas Pynchon, intro to Slow Learner:

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

"New York NY 10001"

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

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

Vineland, pp. 90-91:

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

Nazis, Pynchon, and queers, oh my!

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

Gravity's Rainbow [665-666]:

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

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

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

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

The Crying of Lot 444

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

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

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

UPDATE: "it's all theatre"

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

What happens when you mistake the map for the territory?

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

Mason & Dixon, p. 141:

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

What if the United States returned sovereignty to Native Americans?

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

"it's all theatre"

United Press International:

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

BBC News Online:

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

Associated Press:

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

Gravity's Rainbow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It means this War was never political at all, the
politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people
distracted ... secretly, it was being dictated instead
by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy between
human beings and techniques, by something that needed
the energy--burst of war, crying, 'Money be damned,
the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,'
but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need
my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more,
more.... The real crises were crises of allocation and
priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look
that way--but among the different Technologies,
Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which
are understood only by the ruling elite ..." (GR, Pt.
III, p. 521)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
Zak Smith, 2004

From PYNCHON-L:

Page proof.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
397 Words
22 June 2004
Artforum International
16
ISSN: 1086-7058; Volume 42; Issue 10
English
(c) 2004 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.

To the Editor:

There's an error concerning my piece Pictures of What Happens on Each Page
of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow in David Joselit's review of the
Whitney Biennial, "Apocalypse Not" [May 2004]. Joselit writes: "Like its
literary model, Smith's work adopts an episodic structure through its
arrangement of 755 page-size drawings in a grid, but the connection to
Pynchon is largely metaphorical. While adopting different visual idioms
ranging from cartoons to modernist abstraction, Smith's subject is
apparently his own private milieu."

The connection to Pynchon's text is by no means "largely metaphorical"; it
is in fact meticulous, exact, and quite literal. As the title states, the
images correspond, in the order presented on the wall, to each page of the
novel--the first Viking edition, to be precise. (See, for instance, in the
detail reproduced in Artforum, the image in the bottom row, far right, which
corresponds to page 536: "He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors
spiking out from his head.") The images required hours of historical
research and are as true to the descriptions in the text as possible. If
there's a B-52 in the fiftieth drawing, it's because there's one on page 50.

While I can only guess what insights Mr. Joselit may have into my
(admittedly rather limited) "private milieu," I assume I will be believed
when I report that it is utterly devoid of V-2 rocket strikes, sentient
light-bulbs, and paranoid men in pig costumes. All of these do, however,
appear in Pynchon's book.

- --Zak Smith, New York

David Joselit responds:

I am sorry for any inaccuracy in my characterization of Zak Smith's work.
However, I remain convinced that the relation among his motifs, his formal
realization of them, and the profusion of pages that constitute the piece
place the viewer in doubt over how systematic the project is. It seems to me
that, like Gravity's Rainbow, this artwork is meant to embody a system in
the process of its own undoing. To my taste--and I'm afraid I can't cite any
higher power than taste--Smith's network of text/image somehow needed to
read more forcefully qua network in relation to its literary analogue.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

....more about Zak's art (which pynchonoid enjoyed tremendously at the Whitney in March): http://www.fredericksfreisergallery.com/artists/smith_04.htm