reduce the entire convention floor to a quivering Saturnalia

Cloudbuster (photo from bop-c)


Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective:

Imagine the Republican delegates so consumed in fucking and sucking that they forget to nominate Bush.... On Thursday, September 2nd, for several hours prior to and during George Bush’s re-nomination ceremony, the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective (BOP-C) will be conducting Orgone operations with several of our Cloudbusters, attempting to suck the fascism from the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.  From an undisclosed location on the Brooklyn waterfront, we will be redirecting the flow of Life Energy above the deadly concentrations of hatred and greed accumulating in midtown Manhattan.  If indeed our theories prove correct, it may be possible to reduce the entire convention floor to a quivering Saturnalia.   The moans of Love shall ring out across the Land!

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 155:

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.

the A4s of Kapustin Yar

Googling for the intriguing piano music of Nikolai Kapustin, pynchonoid found 11 post-WWII A4 rocket launchings in Kapustin Yar, with photos (including these two) and a brief history, excerpted below.


road to Kapustin Yar


A4 at Kapustin Yar

Along with working on prospective designs during summer of 1947, NII-88 completed assembly of several A-4 rockets of the "T" series, in addition to "N" series assembled back in Germany. Both batches, along with auxiliary hardware from Germany were shipped to a newly founded test range in Kapustin Yar. On July 26, 1947, the Soviet of Ministers officially scheduled test launches of the A-4 missiles in Kapustin Yar during September-October 1947. (52)

One day, to the surprise of Gröttrup's family "half of the Ministry" (of Armaments) descended onto his house for a meeting at the conclusion of which, he had to gather his winter clothes and leave in the unknown direction. Gröttrup, joined all leading officials from NII-88 at Kapustin Yar.

According to Irmgard Gröttrup's memoirs, she followed her husband to Kapustin Yar several weeks later -- the claim vehemently denied by the veteran of the Russian space program Boris Chertok. Yet, discounting some confusion with dates and few misinterpreted technical details, Mrs. Gröttrup's descriptions of events and the atmosphere in Kapustin Yar can now be confirmed almost by the letter from Russian witness accounts published half a century later.

By the time, the NII-88's "rocket train" arrived to the range, soldiers were still erecting most essential infrastructure at the site. The construction of a special test stand out of hardware shipped from Germany was hardly completed, as the first rocket No. 02T was installed for the test.

After some troubles with fueling, the live firing of the A-4 engine was conducted on October 17, 1947 at 0:30 Moscow Time. Next morning, Russians and Germans started preparing another rocket for launch. At the end of the day, at 21:00 Moscow Time, the vehicle No. 010T was rolled out to the launch site.

The first launch of the A-4 rocket designated No. 010T, was preceded by a short delay caused by the failure of the ignition system. Three Russian technicians run to a fully loaded rocket and replaced pyrotechnic device initiating the launch. The vehicle blasted off on October 18, 1947 at 10:47 Moscow Time and after a short arc into the stratosphere impacted 206.7 kilometers from the launch site deviating around 30 kilometers to the left from the target. Absence of the large crater at the impact site showed that the rocket apparently disintegrated before crashing.

The second launch took place on October 20, 1947 at 11:14 Moscow Time and proceeded in the wrong direction due to control system failure. It fell 231 kilometers from the launch site. (170)

Search for the cause of the failure, forced Gröttrup to summon two of his compatriots from NII-88 to Kapustin Yar. During the flight to the range, the security policy officer, who escorted two men, tried to get them drank as a way of preventing Germans from figuring out the geographical location of the "secret" test site. In spite of such treatment, engineers set out to work immediately upon landing and soon were able to resolve the problem.

Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 272-273:

Here's a man running loose who knows everything it's possible to know--not only all about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the A4. Zurich teems with Soviet agents. What if they've already got Slothrop? They took Peenemunde in the spring, it appears now they will be given the central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings of Yalta. . . .

sins

The Seven Deadly Harveys

Nearer, my Couch, to Thee

(sez The Modern Word: In 1993, the NYTBR ran a series in which various authors were asked to write about one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Thomas Pynchon's subject was "Sloth.")

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.
Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

the kid knows it

Ripping open the Vietnam War scar - that's the effect of WWII generation Bob Dole's fatuous suggestion that Baby Boomer Kerry apologize for opposing a war that Kerry and and millions of other Americans, Vietnam veterans and others, in the US and around the world, rightly saw as criminal. This generational conflict poisons the heart of this election, as it did Clinton's, with Bush Jr. serving and continuing the belligerent foreign policy of Dole and the rest of Bush the Elder's generation: they are the ones who should should apologize for sending American forces into a criminal war and for the millions of people - Vietnamese, Americans, others, combattants and bystanders - they killed, injured, terrorized and otherwise hurt in that war. Then Bush and his backers should beg forgiveness of the families and loved ones of the victims of their butchery in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are the murderous fathers who hated their sons for opposing the war in Vietnam, the sons who dared to break the chain; they never have forgiven Baby Boomers for that implicit insult to the violence they suffered and inflicted in their own "great" wars, they will not stand by and see another Vietnam War protester elected President.

Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying, episode after episode, to kill his son. And the kid knows it. [GR 674]

Zwölfkinder?

1924 photo from the archive of the Canon City, Colorado library
(via Boing Boing)

"The Lonely, Bitter Hour"

...is Zak Smith's (known for his Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow) Internet radio show, in collaboration with Jeronimo Elespe.

contextualize, compare & contrast

Josh Marshall, reporting the latest in Alan Keyes' doomed effort to prevent Barack Obama from becoming Illinois' newest U.S. Senator:

...Keyes also claimed Obama advanced the genocide of the black race by supporting abortion rights. "We're the first people who have ever been pushed into genocide before our babies are born ... So the people who are supporting that position are actually supporting the systematic extermination of black America," he told a local radio station.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 317:

Revolutionaries of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904 rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide. They would finish what the Germans began in 1904.

codenamed Englandspiel

A recent release of Foreign Office files suggests "that more than 50 Dutch agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) may have been sacrificed as part of a complicated 'double double agent' game played against the Germans," according to today's Telegraph:

The agents, trained in Britain to carry out sabotage, were parachuted straight into the arms of the waiting enemy, which had penetrated the entire SOE network in Holland. Almost all were subsequently executed in concentration camps.

The agents were ensnared by the German operation codenamed Englandspiel (the English Game), which was regarded as one of the Third Reich's greatest counter-intelligence triumphs. It was also the greatest disaster suffered by SOE, which was created by Churchill in 1940 to wage war by sabotage.

The operation, which lasted from 1942 to 1944, involved the use of captured Dutch SOE radio operators and German operators using SOE codes to lure agents to their doom. It also resulted in the shooting down of several RAF aircraft during agent-dropping missions and the loss of vast quantities of weapons destined for the Dutch Resistance.

The official line on Englandspiel has remained unchanged for 60 years: that it was a first-class blunder resulting from the failure of British intelligence to heed warnings that the SOE network had been fatally compromised.

But previously secret files released recently at the National Archives suggest a chilling alternative: that SOE, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), or both, knew what was going on but were prepared to send men and women to their deaths in the interests of a bigger game.

The files suggest that the British were engaged in a complicated "double double agent" sting, in which they used their knowledge of the agents' capture to feed false information to the enemy and gain an insight into his thinking through analysis of false intelligence sent back to Britain.

Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 96-97:

It is she who, at some indefinite future moment, must push the Witch into the Oven intended for Gottfried. So the Captain must allow for the real chance she's a British spy, or member of the Dutch underground. Despite all German efforts, intelligence inputs still flow from Holland back to RAF Bomber Command in a steady torrent, telling of deploymenhts, supply routes, of which dark-green crumble of trees may hide an A4 emplacement--data changing hour-to-hour, so mobile are the rockets and their support equipment.

a screaming comes across the sky

Canadian Arrow is "essentially a modern version of the German V2 rocket."

R.I.P. Fay Wray

She died yesterday, at age 96.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 688-689:

Slothrop, who is wearing a blonde wig and the same flowing white cross-banded number Fay Wray wears in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong on the boat (considering his history in the Roseland toilet, Slothrop may have chosen this gown not only out of some repressed desire to be sodomized, unimaginably, by a gigantic black ape, but also because of an athletic innocence to Fay that he's never spoken of except to point and whisper, "Oh, look. . ." -- some honesty, pluck, a cleanness to the garment itself, its enormous sleeves so that wherever you pass is visibly where you've been. . .)

The "flowing white cross-banded number" may be this one. (Thanks to Otto Sell and Dave Monroe for the pynchon-l heads-up.)

tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature

from the ACLU's summary of its recent report, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex:

“Recruiting Individuals.”  Documents how individuals are being recruited to serve as “eyes and ears” for the authorities even after Congress rejected the infamous TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program that would have recruited workers like cable repairmen to spy on their customers.    

“Recruiting Companies.”  Examines how companies are pressured to voluntarily provide consumer information to the government; the many ways security agencies can force companies to turn over sensitive information under federal laws such as the Patriot Act; how the government is forcing companies to participate in watchlist programs and in systems for the automatic scrutiny of individuals’ financial transactions.    
 
“Mass Data Use, Public and Private.”  Focuses on the government’s use of private data on a mass scale, either through data mining programs like the MATRIX state information-sharing program, or the purchase of information from private-sector data aggregators.     

“Pro-Surveillance Lobbying.”  Looks at the flip side of the issue: how some companies are pushing the government to adopt surveillance technologies and programs based on private-sector data.

Thomas Pynchon, 1997, Introduction to Stone Junction:

The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?

Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.

tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature

from the ACLU's summary of its recent report, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex:

“Recruiting Individuals.”  Documents how individuals are being recruited to serve as “eyes and ears” for the authorities even after Congress rejected the infamous TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program that would have recruited workers like cable repairmen to spy on their customers.    

“Recruiting Companies.”  Examines how companies are pressured to voluntarily provide consumer information to the government; the many ways security agencies can force companies to turn over sensitive information under federal laws such as the Patriot Act; how the government is forcing companies to participate in watchlist programs and in systems for the automatic scrutiny of individuals’ financial transactions.    
 
“Mass Data Use, Public and Private.”  Focuses on the government’s use of private data on a mass scale, either through data mining programs like the MATRIX state information-sharing program, or the purchase of information from private-sector data aggregators.     

“Pro-Surveillance Lobbying.”  Looks at the flip side of the issue: how some companies are pushing the government to adopt surveillance technologies and programs based on private-sector data.

Thomas Pynchon, 1997, Introduction to Stone Junction:

The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?

Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.

residence in the injuring and corruptive world

The Guardian reports that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has sold the film rights to his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, for two to three million dollars after years of hounding by Hollywood producer Scot Steindorff, who hints that the author may also be persuaded to write the screenplay.

This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality -- youthful idiocy, to some -- may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, García Márquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even -- wild hope -- for somebody out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world.

from:
The Heart's Eternal Vow, review of Love in the Time of Cholera by Thomas Pynchon, 10 April 1988

what?

Today in History:
1974 - Richard M. Nixon resigns as President of the United States.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 617:

What?
-RICHARD M. NIXON

2 kinds of pynchon reader

Those who enjoy reading Lewis Carrol, and who will no doubt enjoy this Library of Congress online publication of his scrapbook, and those who don't.

I will shoot them.

From BBC, Germany to attend Herero ceremony

A German minister will, for the first time, attend ceremonies commemorating the massacre of Namibia's Herero people by German soldiers 100 years ago. Germany's development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, will take part in the event, scheduled to take place on 14 August at Okakarara. An estimated 65,000 Herero were killed there in 1904 during a rebellion against German colonial rule. It was one of the most significant battles between Germany and the Herero. The German military commander at the time, General von Trotha, ordered the Hereros to leave Namibia or be killed. "Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people. I will shoot them. This is my decision for the Herero people," he said. Following their defeat, Herero men, women and children were killed, their wells poisoned, their cattle slaughtered and the survivors driven into the desert to die. Thousands fled to neighbouring Botswana. A group of Herero has filed a case for compensation against Germany in the United States. They are demanding $4bn in compensation, to be paid by the German government and by companies who they say benefited from slavery and exploitation under German rule. Germany has expressed "regret" for the killings, but the German ambassador to Namibia has called for the case to be dropped.

in the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid

Secrets of ENIAC:

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was among the very first computers—some say it was the first, though there are competing claims. Built at Penn from 1942 to1946, its work was the most prosaic imaginable: calculating missile ballistics and later helping with the design of the hydrogen bomb....For someone who came of age in the second half of the computer revolution, the immediately surprising thing about ENIAC is its physicality. It is a machine in the most literal sense, built from huge metal boxes, massive cables, thick copper wires joined by gobs of solder, panels full of dials, bank upon bank of vacuum tubes. Looking again, the second surprise is the beauty and intricacy of its individual parts. A single tube, responsible for just one numeral in a decimal ring counter, contains a thicket of wires, planes, and baffles. If you peer very closely, a microcosm of strange and enigmatic scenes begins to unfold. These images of ENIAC express the wonder I felt when, as a child, I came to understand what a computer is: not just a calculating machine, but a tool for amplifying imagination, making it possible to weave structures of pure abstract symbols and see them rendered as concrete things, real places. This is pure magic.

V., p. 404:

In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signlas--sense-data, feelings, memories relocating--are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless sttate of signal zero.

"In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?"

rainbow vision

European Space Agency:

Envisat's rainbow vision detects ground moving at pace fingernails grow
 
Originally developed to pinpoint attacking aircraft during World War Two, today's advanced radar technology can detect a very different moving target: shifts of the Earth's crust that occur as slowly as the growth of your fingernails. Radar data from satellites such as ESA's Envisat are used to construct 'interferograms' that show millimetre-scale land movements. These rainbow-hued images provide scientists with new insights into tectonic motion, and an enhanced ability to calculate hazards arising when this slow motion speeds up, in the form of earthquakes or volcanic activity....

Mason & Dixon, p. 172:

"Look to the Earth," she instructs him. "Belonging to her as I do, I know she lives, and that here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the Forces within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you could never guess."

"the fireburst came roaring and sovereign"

Gravity's Rainbow p. 693:

... wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters

MB DRO
ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads 'n' triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky--it is also, perhaps, a Tree. . . .

See also:
Hiroshima Story and
In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender

neverending windfalls of the War that Never Ends

Post-War Contractors Ranked by Total Contract Value in Iraq and Afghanistan From 2002 through July 1, 2004. Impressive numbers indeed, and the blood money seems likely to continue to roll in no matter how badly the contractors behave over there, too. Reuters reports:

CACI International Inc., under scrutiny over whether it contributed to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, was awarded a $15 million extension of its work in Iraq, the U.S. Army said on Wednesday. The award allows CACI's work supporting interrogations and other intelligence operations to continue while competitive bids are sought on a new contract for these services, a senior Army contracting official said.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105:

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.