Hey presto: Week 6!
Welcome back from the break. Thanks to so-called “Bill” for the suggestion — it just in time for me. I finally caught up last night — for the first time in, oh about 6 weeks. For anyone still a ways back, the good news is that the trail from around 200-278 has struck most folks as a tad easier on the brain than, the opening stretch. Though perhaps not easier on the stomach….
This is the spot for bookly comments. Here’s one tidbit to startcha off: “Mindless Pleasures” (a phrase found on page 270 (p) was once the book’s working title. True that.
Chat thread coming shortly….
Next week: Let’s meet up at page 329 (p/v) (Bantam page # coming in a bit), with the section that ends “Enzian is heading into the North….” See ya there, -CV
firesign theater’s “everything you know is wrong” came to mind when, at the end of book 2, we discover that pointsman’s thugs can’t seem to find any of tyrone’s ladies–not even darlene of the disgusting english candy drill! this is distressing to me, but i’m marching on in hopes of finding an answer, any answer….
Have been woefully slack as of late. Pardon the scattershot commentary, much of which is belated (all page references are for the Penguin edition):
–p. 204. Was delighted to encounter the line, “Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end.” Made me think, Has Thomas been secretly observing our deathmarch from the sidelines?
–p. 209, the whole life-within-a-rocket-trajectory thing. What’s up with that? At a simplistic level, I can see the parallels between a rocket’s “life” and that of a person–bursting onto the scene, arching upward, leveling off, descending, dying (exploding), etc., but certainly there’s something more. No?
–“Control”–Are these points of contact between the world of the living and that of the dead? Am curious to hear what others think.
–p. 272. Clinical truth vs. evidential truth. What’s the difference, really? Is it simply that the former is that observed within the confines of a lab, adhering to the principles of the scientific method? What then to make of Slothrop’s clinically induced hallucinations?
OK, all done.
rib–here are a few things to add to the mix…
re the rocket trajectory, there are other allusions here–sexual metaphor, tyrone and the rocket and sex, a trajectory that ends in le petit mort (“the little death” aka orgasm).
also, there’s the question of whether the rocket (and our) trajectories are predestined and somehow definable and calculable. there are some characters who seem to think so (slothrop asks why they are helping him to escape; the answer: “We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you’re in right now.”).
this is related to your question about clinical truth vs. evidential truth–maybe the difference appears to be about “control”–in the lab, you can control for different variables. but what impact do the questions asked have on the answers? (or, as quoted previously, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”)
going back to the trajectory–what about the uncertainty principle? “In the sharp formulation of the law of causality–‘If we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future’–it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise” (heisenberg). in other words, we start with an incorrect premise–belief that we know or can know the present–so it doesn’t matter if we could use the present to predict the future because we’ll never know the present.
is that why the white visitation is trying to cover so many bases–to hedge its bets, literally, with clinical experiments, statistical evidence, and paranormal investigations? do “they” believe that somewhere in the mingling of these approaches is a synthesis that will deliver a calculus of the future?
“A calculus of the future”, great line, e.!
A key quote for me in this section came at p. 230. Lab assistant & decidedly minor character Webley Silvernail (!) is speaking to Pointsman’s lab animals:
“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday, that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level, and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive.”
Whoa.
integrals vs. spooning, i’m waiting to meet a pregnant character.
Haven’t chimed in in, well… not sure if I’ve chimed in at all! (There’s been silent support for my fellow marchers. Honest.)
Just wanted to say a word or two about the Zone-Hereros that pop up in this week’s pages, who I thought were just fascinating. (Spoiler alert?) Their story showcases the whole rocket’s-arc metaphor as well as any we’ve seen, methinks. Let’s see. There’s
their historical rise and fall;
the sex-as-destructive element thing. Not just the arc standing in for the sex act, but actually using sex (‘deviant’ sex) to destroy your own people!? Crazy, backwards shit!;
the question of the predestined vs. the controlled–how just at the peak of their historical arc, the Hereros are seizing control and pointing her groundward. Like their subverting the whole trajectory idea, all around.
And then there’s the questions that someone (Rodney?) wisely posed way back, which is: What happens when the Hereros hit zero? What’s the explosion?
Anyway, there’s some rambling for you (we are reading Pyncheon, after all). The start of book 3 was as illuminating as anything we’ve read so far. And then all the “SS” stuff. Brilliant
Carry on my wayward marchers,
Y
Craven posting for credit: I’m 100 pages behind, but catching up this weekend with some flight time!!! I got really bogged down in the White Visitation ghost segment, but seem to be back in the daylight now. I wonder if some sections make more sense on second reading, with context more clear? Not sure I’m up for figuring that out…
For Other Dan: there was a comment about child births in London also following a Poisson (?) Distribution (like Slothrop’s map, said by the welsh guy at WV)
I’ve been deperately trying to catch up, and then keep up, so I’ve been glutting myself on situations rather than keeping them singly in my mind, referencing each wayward German comment through the websites or figuring out all of the ramifications of each individual name that we come across.
I’d forgotten about the female disappearances, for example. Perhaps the comment made earlier about Slothrop trying to wipe out all traces of the females he runs across is somehow true, that he is in some cosmic way zeroing them out. (Or 00000ing them out). On the otherhand maybe Mrs. Quoad can spot a federale with a cantaloupe. But it was a big thing to throw into a throwaway segment.
As a Borges fan, I’m always glad to see him mentioned, and I don’t know whether the Argentines will reappear somewhere else. I did think about the Hereroes being a government in exile in Germany, with perhaps the Argentines being their doubles. Only rather than a North/South doubling such as Blicero imagines, but instead an East/West doubling.
And then Katje. I got real nervous about Slothy banging on her so steadily, and then expecting a rocket to land on her little tushie. Does she survive because she died inside to the rockets long ago? Was her personality wiped out by her time with Blicero? (Did anybody else think it was off quick work for her to be whisked away from Slothrop to be pooping in the Pudding alomst immediately? It sure seemed like Pudding and she had been playing this fantasy for a while.) One of the sites speculates that she’s a female double to Borges in Argentina. Personally I don’t see the connection. His work suffuses this book (Anybody read Lottery of Babylon?) especially with the labyrinthine paranoia, but Borges worked against Facism, Katje’s just another tool.
Hey, is it clear to anyone whether the Casino was on the riviera or on the channel? Just curious. I did like the idea of “Fuck You” as being a relatively potent, all-purpose spell. I use it myself all of the time to ward off evil republican mediajerks.
Another generic wondering: So Eventyr can contact the world of the dead. So far, so what? That whole batch of characters still seems pretty pointless to me. Anybody see anything useful in it yet, other than the connection to Franz Pokler?
Anywhy, see yaz next week. CM
Hey! Weird final thought. We’re about as far away in time from the writing of this book (30 years +/-) as the end of the war was (1945) to the time of the writing. I dunno about y’all, but I remember the 70s pretty well.
a few thoughts tonight:
* I’m really enjoying this recent wave of posts raising rapid fire questions that aren’t necessarily answered, at least not right away. Very in keeping with the tempo of the book, I think.
* I know the opener to the Zone promised Oz, but that whole drunken limerick scene around page 305 (p) felt so straight out of the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland — yo ho ho! Great, great, and more great.
* So-called Zoro had posted a few weeks back about how the book is still relevant — reflecting life with terrorism, for example. Was thinking the same thing tonight, with more another scene featuring Fairly Monstrous Americans as viewed by Tyrone playing the part of the frightened quasi-non-American. Not too surprising to get that perspective given when the book was written. But here we are again, with another unpopular war. And those images — the counterparts to our cartoons of Monstrous Germans , Japanese, Russians, and most recently Al Qaedians — hit a definite nerve. As in: Oh please…let us not really look and sound that way right now to the rest of the world.
* Lastly, good call Captain, re 30 years — I’ve been thinking a lot about what the world was like when Pynchon wrote this, but I hadn’t done the math on how much closer he was than we are to WWII.
A little behind in my reading (there’s a joke in there somewhere) and expecting to get more so in the next week. But then, with great confidence, I will storm back. (C.V. knows my secret, and so may have less confidence in me). Anyway, some random thoughts
1. Several folks have posted about pairs of opposites (everything being 0 or 1). Interesting that Slothrop finds these connections between enemies through the Shell corp. Nowadays we left-wingers would raise a shout about evil multinationals, but I think Pynchon is using this as a way to show that things that appear to be opposites are one and the same once we go beyond the surface of things. (Similar to Joseph Cambell’s ideas on religion and god.)
2. Really liked “e’s” reference to Firesign – especially considering F.T. was doing their thing around the same time the book was written. There are ceratianly similarities between the the book and F.T.’s records – at times T.P.’s narritive style reminds me of, say, F.T.’s “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.”
3. So far, I’m finding that Pynchon peppers the book with enough fun moments to keep me involved through some of the more dense ones. My favorite so far – going back some 50 pages – the zoot suit/party scene. Fun characters, funny slapstick, and cool clothes.
I think this is my last day to post to keep myself eligible for the exciting prizes–so I am doing so despite feeling completely scattered and incoherent. I have been sneaking in a few pages here and there while traveling, and find myself really enjoying this part of the book. It has way too many eerie resonances for me to go into here, and has coincided with a period of strange and fortuitous coincidences in my life. Has this been happening to anybody else?
The names are making my head spin. Imitrex for Imipolex, Zvengali for Zwingli, Matthau for Rathenau… I find the boundaries between book and world blurring. Not my personal world, but the wider (“other”) world of news, politics, culture. There are “strange and fortuitous coincidences” between my world and the wider, and between the wider and the book, but the algebra is not complete yet.
I think Pynchon would laugh at Joseph Campbell. The stuff of Campbell’s myths is the putty in Pynchon’s hands, the chemical soup that his scientists use against the duped believers.
I was blind for a day this weekend. Interestingly enough, it didn’t affect my ability to read and understand GR.
Although I’m still checking in on the discussion, I’m not crossing referencing to the text to see where you are. Have you gotten up to “Sold on Suicide” yet?
Dr Vitz