"together they are a long skin interface"

New Technology to Use Human Body As Digital Transmission Path, PhysOrg.com, 22 February 2005:

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is pursuing research and development of an innovative Human Area Networking technology called RedTacton that safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body. Using a novel electro-optic sensor, NTT has already developed a small PCMCIA card-sized prototype RedTacton transceiver. RedTacton enables the first practical Human Area Network between body-centered electronic devices and PCs or other network devices embedded in the environment via a new generation of user interface based on totally natural human actions such as touching, holding, sitting, walking, or stepping on a particular spot.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 121

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

"I'd rather be a pig than a fascist"

Porco Rosso

Totoro and the culture of fear, Orcinus, 1 March 2005:

The past week or so, I've been enjoying the recent American releases of two of anime master Hayao Miyazaki's earlier films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso. Like all of his work, they're both wonders to watch. Nausicaa, his first film, is a worthy variation on Dune as a kind of biological fable, while Porco Rosso is an amazing piece of work for those (like me) who have a love of well-crafted flying sequences. It also has a line for the ages: "I'd rather be a pig than a fascist."

Gravity's Rainbow p. 555:

William must have 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.…

a sewer rat in love

Molls Who Have It Their Way With a Gang of New York by Janet Maslin, New York Times, 28 February 2005:

"Metropolis" follows an upward trajectory, literally rising from the sewers to the Brooklyn Bridge's towers. And it manages to be carnal and scatological at any height. "Generally, sewage runs thin and gray, not half as bad as you'd think," Ms. Gaffney explains, as the sewer system becomes central to a Whyo heist scheme. And as for Frank, an expert on these underground tunnels, after he is smitten by Beanie: "When he saw a rat in the sewer now, he thought of it as a happy rat, as a sewer rat in love."

V., p. 120, 124:

They were entering Fairing's Parish, named after a priest who'd lived topside years ago. During the Depression of the '30's, in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, he had decided that the rats were going, to take over after New York died. Lasting eighteen hours a day, his feat had covered the breadlines and missions, where he gave comfort, stitched up raggedy souls. He foresaw nothing but a city of starved corpses, covering the sidewalks and the grass of the parks, lying belly up in the fountains, hanging wrynecked from the streetlamps. The city - maybe America, his horizons didn't extend that far - would belong, to the rats before the year was out. This being the case, father Fairing thought it best for the rats to be given a head start - which meant conversion to the Roman Church. One night early in Roosevelt's first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship. The first thing he did according to his journals (discovered months after he died was to put an eternal blessing and a few exorcisms on the water flowing through the sewers between Lexington and the East River and between 86th and 79th Streets. This as the area which became Fairing's Parish. These benisons made sure of an adequate supply of holy water; also eliminated the trouble of individual baptisms when he finally converted all the rats in the parish. Too, he expected other rats to hear what was going on under the upper East Side, and come likewise to be converted. Before long he would be spiritual leader of the inheritors of the earth. He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them. [....] one of the apocrypha dealt with an unnatural relationship between the priest and this female rat, who was described as a kind of voluptuous Magdalen. From everything Profane had heard, Veronica was the only member of his flock Father Fairing felt to have a soul worth saving. She would come to him at night not as a succubus but seeking instruction, perhaps to carry back to her nest - wherever in the Parish it was - something of his desire to bring her to Christ: a scapular medal, a memorized verse from the New Testament, a partial indulgence, a penance.

Kirghiz Light

Ink helps drive democracy in Asia, BBC, 19 February 2005:

The Kyrgyz Republic, a small, mountainous state of the former Soviet republic, is using invisible ink and ultraviolet readers in the country's elections as part of a drive to prevent multiple voting.

....The ink is sprayed on a person's left thumb. It dries and is not visible under normal light. However, the presence of ultraviolet light (of the kind used to verify money) causes the ink to glow with a neon yellow light.

At the entrance to each polling station, one election official will scan voter's fingers with UV lamp before allowing them to enter, and every voter will have his/her left thumb sprayed with ink before receiving the ballot. If the ink shows under the UV light the voter will not be allowed to enter the polling station. Likewise, any voter who refuses to be inked will not receive the ballot.

....see "Kirghiz Light" in Gravity's Rainbow@ Amazon.com index

"this octopus was not in good mental health"

A huge octopus emerges from the ocean, wraps an oversized tentacle around the waist of a young woman, and proceeds to drag her into the sea. This memorable episode from Thomas Pynchon's vast and surreal novel, Gravity's Rainbow, has a happy ending, however, owing to the intervention of Mr. Tyrone Slothrop, who first unavailingly beats the molluscan monster over the head with an empty wine bottle. Then, in a stroke of zoologically informed genius, he offers the briny behemoth something even more alluring than a fair maiden: a crab. It works, suggesting that this particular octopus conforms, at least in its dietary preference, to the norm for its species. We learn, nonetheless, that "In their brief time together, Slothrop formed the impression that this octopus was not in good mental health."

It isn't entirely clear where the creature's mental derangement lies. After all, it behaved with a reasonable degree of healthy, enlightened self-interest in seeking first to consume the young lady, and then forgoing her for the even more delectable crab. Yet nature writer David Quammen may have been onto something when he pointed out that octopi generally - not just Pynchon's fictional creation - might be especially vulnerable to mental disequilibrium, if only because one of their distinguishing characteristics is having immense brains. Mental strain is probably not unknown among animals, but there seems little doubt that it is particularly well-developed in the species Homo sapiens, whose brains - like Pynchon's octopus - are especially large, and whose strain, is correspondingly (and regrettably) great.

This essay will argue that one of the major themes of evolutionary biology - the conflict between individual selfishness and group altruism - is paralleled by a comparable theme in literature, and that each usefully illuminates the other.

The tension between individual and group may also shed light on another longstanding evolutionary conundrum: Why do people have such big brains, bigger even than our hungry octopus? There has been no shortage of possible answers, including the possibility that humanity's oversized intellect has evolved as a means of facilitating communication, tool use, making war on our enemies and/or defending our friends, attracting and keeping mates, or dealing with predators as well as prey. There is even the prospect that the human intellect might be a by-product of sexual selection, comparable to the peacock's flamboyant tail feathers. Here is yet another possibility, suggested by the self/group tension: Maybe human beings owe their mental adroitness to the peculiar pressures of keeping a very complex social life in adaptive equilibrium. This possibly hare-brained schema for explaining our human-brained selves has at least one virtue: It speaks to a long-standing question in ethics, which is also illuminated - at least in part - by evolutionary biology: How to navigate the conflicting demands of personal selfishness and social obligation?

Moreover, the question of individual versus group generates a useful way of looking at one of the most pervasive yet elusive themes in literature: the dilemma of self-assertion in a world that often calls for precisely the personal abnegation that our genes are generally primed to reject. This conflict between self and others, selfishness and altruism, the needs of the individual and those of society, has a long pedigree in the world of stories, as well as an equally potent basis in the world of life. Homo sapiens is a social creature. So, when people battle to make their way, as individuals, within a larger social group, they are doing something that all social species do (often in remarkably similar ways). Human beings are simply more aware of it than is the average prairie dog or pumpkinseed sunfish. And so, people not only live through these dilemmas, they write about them.

This essay, accordingly, suggests that when writers explore one of their favorite themes - the ever-present struggle between the individual and the larger group - they are recreating a parallel, and fundamental theme of biology.

As difficult as it must be for any creature to balance its various competing demands (to eat or sleep, attack or retreat, eat a damsel or a crab, etc.) such choices are probably most confusing in the social domain. For as hard as it may be to predict the vagaries of weather, for example, the vagaries of one's fellow creatures have to be even more complex, confusing, and stressful. And when it comes to negotiating a complicated and difficult social life, human beings are in a class by themselves. Clearly, our remarkably over-sized brains do not satisfy themselves with simply meeting the contingencies of daily life. Human neurons are obsessed with confronting all sorts of difficult issues, mostly of their own making. Small wonder that so many people, like Pynchon's octopus, are stressed.

And small wonder, as well, that so much fiction revolves around the conflicting demands of self versus group, selfishness versus altruism, callow youth versus responsible adulthood, individual needs versus society's expectation: it is a conflict that may well reside, literally, in our genes....

....read it all: Biology Lurks Beneath: Bioliterary Explorations of the Individual versus Society by David P. Barash, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.

L.S.D.

From Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies:

On Wednesday at 12 noon EST, MAPS offered its first live internet audio broadcast of our celebration of Albert Hofmann's 99th birthday. Dr. Rick Doblin, president of MAPS, and a panel of prominent scientists spoke to Albert live in Switzerland about the renewal of psychedelic research and their work....To listen to the conference call, go to: http://www.maps.org/conferences/ah99/ah99b.mp3

The Crying of Lot 49, p. 111:

There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we're finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges.

The structure of lysergic acid diethylamide. The diethylamide group is shown in red and the indole ring in blue.

oneirine lives

Gumpelmann. A Psychiatric Novel

Publisher's information

In this brilliant comic novel Karl Koehler paints a nightmarish picture of his former psychiatric colleagues and their drug studies.

Gumpelmann, an alter ego of the author, confronts an all-powerful psychiatric establishment intent on pushing through its agenda at all costs. In this instance it is the drug oneirine - first described in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—that psychiatrists believe holds the key to developing the ultimate paranoid mouse.

Who then could better describe the sexual humiliations and numerous forms of never-ending dependency originating in a clinic with an academic dog-eat-dog mentality primarily geared to doing the bidding of the drug companies than a psychiatric insider?

A funny, corrosive and entirely absorbing novel written in the subversive tradition of American postmodern literature, which could just as well have been entitled "Sex, Drugs and Doo Wop."

About the Author

Karl Koehler was born in Manhattan in 1935, grew up in the Bronx and, after studying at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, completed his medical studies in Innsbruck. After finishing his psychiatric residency in Cornell, Heidelberg and the State Hospital in Marburg, he became a Privatdozent in Heidelberg; later he accepted an appointment as head of Social Psychiatry at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Bonn. He is presently living in retirement with his wife in the Bonn-Cologne area.

Published in German. Thanks to p-list Otto for the heads-up.

Beethoven, Hansel & Gretel, V-2, paedophilia

Israeli opera signs up Buchenwald production:

ERFURT - The New Israeli Opera Tel Aviv will participate in the controversial staging of Beethoven's prison-based opera "Fidelio" at the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, German organisers of the production announced on Tuesday.

The 14-year-old opera company, under the general direction of Hanna Munitz, will provide musicians and singers for the production, scheduled for 2007 at the Nazi death camp site near Weimar in eastern Germany.

The controversial production is the brainchild of Giancarlo del Monaco, guest artistic director of the new Erfurt Opera House.

Del Monaco, 61, son of famed tenors Mario del Monaco, currently is embroiled in another controversy involving a production of German composer Engelbert Humperdinck's much-loved 1893 opera "Hansel And Gretel".

The Erfurt production, which premiere's next weekend, shifts the story from a fairy tale forest witch's cottage made of candy to a sinister metropolitan red-light district where children are abducted and held as sex slaves for paedophiles.

The sandman of the original libretto is transformed into a cocaine-sniffing procurer who hands over child abductees to the "witch" who, in del Monaco's production, is a seemingly respectable clergyman.

As he has with the "Fidelio" production, del Monaco has defended his "Hansel And Gretel" production, saying the original story by the Brothers Grimm was designed to make children wary of strangers promising them sweets.

"Underlying the libretto is a tacit comment on paedophilia, violence and sexual abuse of children," del Monaco said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"I am not attacking the church, but only attacking the church's continued denial that such things have gone on and continue to go on," he told dpa.

"Fidelio", Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, is a story of political repression, unjust imprisonment and eventual dramatic liberation.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 50:

How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use their innocence

see also:

Beethoven in Gravity's Rainbow @Amazon.com index

Hansel and Gretel in Gravity's Rainbow @Amazon.com index

deathmarch

The Gravity's Rainbow Deathmarch: Our First Few Steps..., a group reading of the novel, underway at cecil vortex. "All are welcome."

a madman dreams of space conquest

Download be damned, can't resist the Rocket. Image from Comic Book Bondage Cover of the Day, "the web's foremost reference site for bondage covers on mainstream comic books."

urban gorilla

Through the use of posters, stencils, stickers and apparel, we aim to rally skateboarders and artists alike to "Reclaim The Streets!"

... read it all: The Urban Guerilla Projekt - An Explanation, at the always-interesting Wooster Collective.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 368:

Well, what it is--is? what's "is"?--is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taqking a shit, right in the street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by--"Hey!" Slothrop wants to shout, "hey lookit that giant ape? or whatever it is. You guys? Hey . . ." But he doesn't, luckily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed in May.

Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

consider the miserable life of the pig, update

Consider Pig City:

Three years ago, Rotterdam-based architects bureau MVRDV imagined a pig city to change farming production and solve problems such as swine fever and foot and mouth disease. Their idea was to give more space to pigs, letting them live in huge and comfy skyscrapers. Balconies allow the animals to rummage around under trees, an abattoir is housed in the plinth, and animals for slaughter are moved in lifts. There's even a fish farm that supplies some of the food needed. If pigs are kept in stacked "apartments" in such a way that they enjoy better conditions, the meat tastes better, livestock transport becomes unnecessary, diseases are eliminated, and the Netherlands (European Union's leading exporter) acquires more space, according to the architects.

The We Make Money Not Art blog entry includes link to MVRDV's interesting pig movie.

Gravity's Rainbow p. 555:

William must have 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.…

top 10 war profiteers of 2004

1. AEGIS
2. BearingPoint
3. Bechtel
4. BKSH & Associates
5. CACI and Titan
6. Custer Battles
7. Halliburton
8. Lockheed Martin
9. Loral Satellite
10. Qualcomm

...gory details: War Profiteers: The Center for Corporate Policy's Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105:

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw masterial to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a pice of that pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

new year

One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4:

Love never goes away,
Never completely dies,
Always some souvenir
Takes us by sad surprise.

You went away from me,
One rose was left behind--
Pressed in my Book of Hours,
This is the rose I find. . . .

Though it's another year,
Though it's another me,
Under the rose is a drying tear,
Under my linden tree. . . .

Love never goes away,
Not if it's really true,
It can return, by night, by day,
Tender and green and new
As the leaves from a linden tree, love,
that I left with you.

[Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 289-290]



my linden tree

A.Word.A.Day--pinguid

pinguid (PING-gwid) adjective

Fat; greasy; unctuous.

[From Latin pinguis (fat).]

"But after losing two stones, he (Andrew Roberts) has shucked off his old nickname of 'the pinguid Thatcherite historian'." Sholto Byrnes; Pandora; Independent (London, UK); Feb 12, 2003.

"Turner always said that the news had to be the star for CNN to flourish--though he had a curious loyalty to pinguid idolator Larry King." Phil Rosenthal; What the Bleep?; Chicago Sun-Times; Feb 10, 2003.

This week's theme: words to describe people.

See also: Peter Penguid in The Crying of Lot 49

thinking about Pynchon's next novel

thinking cap

'tis the season

Have a coprophilic Catalan Christmas

Obligatory Pudding reference.

round up the usual octopus quotes

It was a May-December romance that really had legs: Young Aurora, a female giant octopus and her aging cephalopod suitor J-1 were thrown together for a blind date seven months ago by aquarists who hoped the two would mate. By all appearances, their fling was a success, and Aurora began dribbling long strings of eggs down the sides of her tank the following month. Though her sweetheart died of old age in September, the pitter-patter of tiny tentacles seemed close at hand.

.... read it all: Octopus Doesn't Give Up on Motherhood

Random octopus graphic:

"Octopus - The River
from their mega-rare debut album, Restless Night, released in 1970"

See also: 14 references to octopus in Gravity's Rainbow and octopus porn.

the haunted mansion of an underground past

from: Growing Up in the Weather Underground: A Father and Son Tell Their Story Democracy Now!, 3 December 2004:

THAI JONES: Well it starts on a night that my parents were arrested. We were sitting around, it was World Series time, we had just had dinner and the telephone in the apartment rang and because we were underground, no one had that number. That phone had basically never rung in about the six months we had lived there. And Jeff picked it up and it was an F.B.I. Agent and he said, “We have the building surrounded. We have sharpshooters on the rooftops and in a few seconds, the F.B.I. Is going to knock on your door.” So Jeff turned to Eleanor and said, “We are busted.”

AMY GOODMAN: Eleanor is your mom?

THAI JONES: Eleanor is my mom. The next thing I knew, there was banging on the door. About 20 fully armored swat, F.B.I. And police officers with M16's and shotguns stormed you this the house. They took Jeff out into the hallway and made him crawl down the hallway. What I remember is that there was a moment in all this sort of craziness when people had forgotten about me and I went down to my little bedroom at the end of the hall and I was sort of looking through my belongings to see if I could find some way to help out. And I just had this feeling of, you know, I had like a cowboy hat, I had some stuffed animals, I had a little pair of child's safety scissors, so I just remember feeling helpless and I went back out and just stood with Jeff in the hallway. And I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea that our family was different. I mean I knew that we had had different names but I had never questioned that. And so this book is sort of about exploring how that came about.

Vineland, p. 114:

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost.

that duck

Vaucanson's Duck


From The Guitarist Is Metal. No, Not Heavy Metal by Michael Beckerman, New York Times, 30 November 2004:

GuitarBot claims its ancestor not in the golem - which, after all, has decidedly human characteristics - but in the ingenious automated machines of the last three centuries. In the mid-18th century, the Maillardet brothers created an astonishing writer-draftsman that could write poetry and do amazing drawings of ships and buildings. Around the same time, Jacques de Vaucanson created his famous defecating duck, which could eat, digest and all the rest. He also created a flute-playing android, which offered 12 tunes, perhaps an ancestor of the robot that recently conducted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Tokyo. While audiences may be titillated by the prospect of seeing such devices and their descendants do "human" things, Mr. Singer and Mr. Adamson have something else in mind. Mr. Adamson, in particular, is more concerned with technical issues and the ability of machines to do things that humans cannot accomplish.

Mason & Dixon, p. 374:

"Agreed, you must consider how best to defend yourself,-- wear clothing it cannot bite through, leather, or what's even more secure, chain-mail,-- its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite qable, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut.… One may cower within, but one cannot avoid,-- le Bec de la Mort, the…'Beak of Death.'"